In Sex, Madonna has her wits, if not her clothes, about her. The scandal of Sex is the scandal of S/M: the provocative confession that the edicts of power are reversible. So the critics bay for her blood: a woman who takes sex and money into her own hands must-sooner or later-bare her breast to the knife. But with the utmost artifice and levity, Madonna refuses to imitate tragedy. Taking sex into the street, and money into the bedroom, she flagrantly violates the sacramental edicts of private and public, and stages sexual commerce as a theater of transformation. Madonna's erotic photo album is filled with the theatrical paraphernalia of S/M: boots, chains, leather, whips, masks, costumes, and scripts. Andrew Neil, editor of the Sunday Times, warns ominously that it thus runs the risk of unleashing "the dark side" of human nature, "with particular danger for women."1 But the outrage of Sex is its insight into consensual S/M as high theater.2 Demonizing S/M confuses the distinction between unbridled sadism and the social subculture of consensual fetishism.3 To argue that in consensual S/M the "dominant" has power, and the slave has not, is to read theater for reality; it is to play the world forward. The economy of S/M is the economy of conversion: slave to master, adult to baby, pain to pleasure, man to woman, and back again. S/M, as Foucault puts it, "is not a name given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart."4 Consensual S/M "plays the world backwards."5 In Sex, as in S/M, roles are swiftly swapped. At the Vault, New York's amiable S/M dungeon, the domina Madonna archly flicks her whip across the glistening leather hips of a female "slave." The domina's breasts are bare; the slave is armored. Contrary to popular stigma, S/M theatrically flouts the edict that manhood is synonymous with mastery, and submission a female fate. Further into the album, a man genuflects at Madonna's feet, neck bound in a collar, the lash at his back. But the domina's foot is also bound, and the leash straps her hand to his neck. The bondage fetish performs identity and power as twined in interdependence, and rebuts the Enlightenment vision of the solitary and self-generating individual. The lesbian with the knife is also the lover; scenes of bondage are stapled to scenes of abandon, and Sex makes no pretense at romantic profundity but flaunts S/M as a theater of scene and surface.