Thankfully Nye isn't a neorealist, thereby sparing us the sordid details of Peter's self-help system. The unipolar moment, indeed.

I do wish these nerd types would stay away from stuff they can't do. We already suffered the sex kitten crap from Gingrich, which was bad enough. But this guy feels his feet sinking into quicksand? Eww. Only a man could possibly write something quite so gross and be quite so oblivious to the really horrible concepts it raises. I won't go there. But followed by a torrent of passion? What? He's now stomping up and down or something? Oh, yick. God made some of us academics for understandable reasons, and we should pay close attention.

Ugh ewwww bleurgh

Dan, you rock. When will you start using passwords and adding links that read "$3.95 a month - PayPal/ Visa/ Mastercard accepted" ?

In grad. school, some friends and I published an article in the student journal analyzing the LA/NYC rap wars of the early 90s through hegomonic stability theory. Is wasn't till Puffy - then "Puff Daddy" emerged as a benevolent hegemon did things settle down and were able to graced with such wonderful music as Mase's "Mo Money, Mo Problems"

Dan, That was the funniest dirty book I have ever read.

"I can't believe Ana Marie Cox hasn't taken this excerpt and done unspeakable things to it yet."

That would be redundant, though, wouldn't it?

Then there was the Indian woman who described sex with white people as "inscribing the post-colonial narrative." She was a humanities type, natch.

You should see the horrible things a couple of friends of mine (drunk with cheap beer and Mearsheimer) did in analyzing an attempt to pick up a girl at bar night.

...Of course my current roommates' extended sports metaphors are not much better.

Dan, beyond the initial nausea, your special talents do show thru.

If you could find the time to reword that text using "micro-organic decomposition" speak, I would be ever so grateful.

Dan,

Now I'm looking forward to your second book ...

Dan,

I suggest that if you a looking for vulgar sexual references by notable scholars, you stick to academic articles rather than novels. Luckily, as Eugene Volokh notes, "Google Scholar" is a new handy-dandy method of searching for such sexual references in academic articles.

Have fun!

(BTW - next time your wife asks you what you're doing, and you answer "reading the new Joseph Nye book", don't be surprised if she looks at you funny.)

It strikes me a lot of wonks tend to do exactly that... add a lot of complexity for the sake of it... even to such things as a sexual encounter. Perhaps why Beltway long-timers have a tendency to fare so badly in the heartland, in interpersonal situations, even including the one-nighter.

Or as my coach used to say, when presented with an insanely complex play..."these people could F%$* up a wet dream"...

Unlike the first time I made love to Alexa, when the ecstasy had been eroded by a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, I was sucked into this moment as quickly and completely as if I had placed my feet in quicksand.

Note that this is the perfect policy-wonk sentence. Two nested antecedent clauses hedge and protect the act of assertion before it actually occurs. Any sense of contact with reality is obscured by conventional foreign-policy similes (Quicksand? Why not just say quagmire and be done with it!)

Most absurdly, the act of assertion (i.e. insertion) is rendered in passive voice, as something that happens to the helpless man. To which this gay man joins straight women worldwide in responding: Ick!

What the other commenters don't realize is that last bit is an actual section from Dan's new book, which is one IR sex joke after another.

I should add: note that Dan's book post was titled "Oh my, that does feel good." Coincidence?

Hmm. I thought Diane always had longed to FREERIDE on Jack...

Simply masterful!

Joseph Nye should definitely have outsourced his sex-scene writing to you, Dan.

There's still a long way to go before you even approach matching Eugene Volokh's old vibrator obsession, Dan.

Nye's passage just proves yet again that -- to quote someone (I can't remember who) -- "There are two things that cannot be described in writing. One of them is a sunset."

You definitely don't want to read this column, which quotes from former DNC chair Joe Andrew's The Disciples....

Actually, the real icing on the cake of Nye's description is the last sentence -- in which he describes the whole experience from an impersonal, dryly descriptive THIRD PERSON point of view, of the sort one usually sees in science journal articles.