THE SADEIAN WOMAN

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Torr tells of how the writer’s 1978 polemic The Sadeian Woman allowed her to reconcile the different aspects of her life: her position of subjugation in the office, her desire to be a performer recognised for her skills, and her nightly transformation into the object of male sexual desire. As Torr states: Juliette is a version of Faust written by a man who believed that, if man exists, we do not need to invent the devil." Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!” But then the second part actually critiques the sex acts themselves, and tries to uncover what is wrong with the character that they would want to, for instance, force someone else to eat their excrement, or eat their sex partner after they are finished with them. And, I have to say, the two critiques seemed fundamentally at odds. Either it's a political satire, and therefore "what is wrong with this character" is that he represents the greed of the aristocracy, or it's a critique of perverted sex acts, and these particular characters are broken at some fundamental level, and their own neuroses and psychoses are playing out in their criminal acts. I mean, I guess you can say the guy that represents the aristocracy is damaged by the same system that creates an aristocracy that cannot conceive of the lower classes as equals, or even human. But isn't that unnecessarily convoluted? He represents what is wrong with society's class distinctions; he is corrupted by society's class distinctions to such a point that we can sympathize with his POV because he couldn't have learned any better; he is playing out the actual class distinctions on a grand scale that corrupted him on a personal scale?

The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow—we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains” Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.”

It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space. In De Sade’s 1791 novel Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu (“Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue”), Justine, the titular character, is repeatedly subjected to violent rapes and humiliations. Her sister, Juliette, the heroine of the accompanying book Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice (“Juliette, or The Prosperities of Vice”), portrays the obverse of this tale of suffering femininity. By the time I had finished your book, I was really transformed – not exactly a Juliette, but I knew how to sell my body & at the same time how to maintain a sense of my own subjective reality within each strange place I would travel to.

By the time I had finished your book, I was really transformed – not exactly a Juliette, but I knew how to sell my body & at the same time how to maintain a sense of my own subjective reality within each strange place I would travel to. Pornography and the feminist movement Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.” I have been composing letters to you in my head since I first read your book The Sadeian Woman 2 years ago but now I really have to do it as I leave for England in a week & I was hoping to maybe have the opportunity to meet you. [sic]

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She uses sex as an instrument of terror…she lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand grenade." Second, it examines the work of Sade and advances the proposition that he might be a "moral pornographer". Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it."

The last chapter hones in on the actual relationship between man and woman, libertine and victim, debaucher and debauchee. For most of human history, ‘literature,’ both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written—heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.” Justine’s virtue is not the continuous exercise of a moral faculty. It is a sentimental response to the world in which she always hopes her good behavior will procure her some reward, some respite from the bleak and intransigent reality which surrounds her and to which she cannot accommodate herself. The virtuous, the interesting Justine, with her incompetence, her gullibility, her whining, her frigidity, her reluctance to take control of her own life, is a perfect woman. She always does what she is told. She is at the mercy of any master, because that is the nature of her own definition of goodness.Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this "infinitely complex organization, my self." And maybe he was all that. People are complicated. But the reason why Justine (the "Madonna" character who got punished, tortured and killed for her virtue) and Juliette (the "Whore" character who got her cake, ate it, killed her children and got rich lol) are the way they are isn't because of some deep beliefs Sade held.