Mussolini, A Classic Top?

[Marxist]

I just read a review of a new book about Il Duce called Mussolini by R.J.B. Bosworth. The reviewer says this about Mussolini:

The best way to sum up the Mussolini catastrophe is probably with a sexual metaphor. Il Duce was, like the more recently impeached American president, capable of inspiring the sexually charged affections of women a fraction of his age and of maintaining a busy extramarital sex life. Early on in the Mussolini administration, the international press described his foreign policy as "virile." He was muscular and athletic, dwarfing the Italian king; he fought his duels with a sword, fenced with a saber, and made it known he eschewed effete pajamas in order to sleep in his underwear. Did Il Duce wear boxers or briefs? Italy between the wars was all too eager to find out. In psychosexual terms, he was a classic top, and geographically, economically and politically, post-World War I Italy was a bottom badly in need of one.

2 questions:

Does it cheapen the select and guarded language of the BDSM community when terms are co-opted to describe a fascist dictator?

Was Mussolini a "top?"

 

[Quint]

I could have just as easily (and accurately) said that Mussolini was the classic male--he seemed to have ODed a little on the testosterone. Is this the whole story? Hell no! Perfectly incomplete and misleading. In college, this would have been a "C" essay for only addressing the issues that agreed with the thesis.

This tirade is the property of all Quint-shaped people. o)

 

[MzChrista]

Classic top my ass. I had dozens of guys like that sucking my boot heel when I was a ProDom.

 

[cymbidia]

This is another example of the co-opting of our lifestyle terms into mainstream culture. (See monster's recent thread entitled "Christmas, Commercialism and BDSM", http://www.literotica.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=95818, for more on this.)

There is good and bad to being so co-opted.

It makes us safer from the lawbooks and pitchforks crowd while it dilutes and weakens us a community.

Personally, i dislike the intimations of BDSM "roles" in international politics, especially with respect to reviled historical figures but whomever wrote this didn't ask me for my opinon, nor, i imagine, did they ask anyone else in the lifestyle.

IMO, yes, it cheapens our language to be used in such a manner. And Mussolini was a power-mad dictator, not a classic Top at all.