THE SADEIAN WOMAN

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He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”

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. Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to one of Sade’s books: "Justine", "Juliette" and "Philosophy in the Bourdoir". Justine is the holy virgin; Juliette is the profane whore…Juliette is of the world, worldly..her sexual affairs are engaged in either for profit or for fun; she is contemptuous, embarrassed by professions of love. She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.” Sayings & Quotes from Other Works It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh."Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.” Nights at the Circus She uses sex as an instrument of terror…she lobs her sex at men and women as if it were a hand grenade." Sade’s heroines, those who become libertines, accept damnation…exile from human life, as a necessary fact of life…So Sade creates a museum of woman-monsters."

I have struggled for some time in trying to review this book, simply because it is still beyond me how anyone could be smart and talented enough to propose something so outlandish, and then to make it seem the most natural thing in the world. Like Simone de Beauvoir’s essay before it, the analysis is couched in the Hegelian terminology of Master and Slave. The pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being..." 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.”Still, there is a sense in which a terrorist of the imagination can be a friend of women, an ally in the battle for feminist causes:

In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.” Wise Children It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space.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