S&M for the Ivory Tower

My parents and grandfather have a comfortable routine at home where they eat dinner, do dishes, watch one episode of a television show on a rented DVD, and head down to bed. It's very homey and companionable.

The only difficulty is in finding a television show that all three of them can watch. My grandfather is a little more deaf than he likes to admit, so it has to either have English subtitles or be blasted at "oh, the poor neighbors"-level volume (usually, both). It can't have any sex in it or it offends my mother and grandfather's sensibilities. A certain level of violence is acceptable, but anything graphic or upsetting is too much for my mother.

One of the sort-of compromises we occasionally watch is Law and Order, and in a recent episode, I found a surprising cultural reference.

Detective Whatever-His-Name was investigating a neuroscientist who became obsessed with a serial killer she was studying, and he searched her apartment for evidence that she was in a sadomasochistic, submissive relationship with him. The evidence he found?

A Yukio Mishima novel, which he called "domination porno for intellectuals."


I love that not only did mainstream American popular culture make a Japanese literature reference, they got it totally right.