Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

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: I don’t recall any point at which she says that Sade is an unreserved moral pornographer, in the sense that the whole of his work has this moral purpose. Instead, she says: How can a movement seek to move beyond mere gender definition and call itself 'feminism'? Would we call a movement to erase the delineation between rich and poor 'povertism'?It allows a male to imagine a substitute activity, which is not what he is immediately reading about, nor is it real life sexual activity. It’s an act of the reader’s imagination.

She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”– Saints and Strangers 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: The anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become voyeurs upon our own caresses. She also suggests that many commonly accepted aspects of feminism are not only narrow-minded, but counterproductive. For instance: she presents how the popular 'mother goddess' figure is just another way to entrap women into the role of 'baby factory'--even making them proud of their one-dimensional existence. Of course, she says it better than I. He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.”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..."

It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh." Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this "infinitely complex organization, my self." 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? He has burst into the Utopia of desire, in which only the self exists; he has not negotiated the terms of his arrival there, as gentle lovers do, but taken Utopia by force. See, the conquering hero comes. And, just as immediately, he has been expelled from it, a fall like Lucifer’s from heaven to hell." It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds…The last chapter hones in on the actual relationship between man and woman, libertine and victim, debaucher and debauchee. The mythologisation of the sex act universalizes it (and vice versa). "At the first touch or sigh he, she, is subsumed immediately into a universal." It is no longer a real, particularized, palpable, tactile experience. It becomes a "fantasy love-play of the archetypes":

is reviewed between 08.30 to 16.30 Monday to Friday. We're experiencing a high volume of enquiries so it may take usBut after reading through this exhausting non fiction that sees Freudian archetypes in every single female character portrayed and then dissects de Sade's spiritual feelings on them (and why he's afraid of a certain type of woman, yadayada), I will say something that some people apparently need to hear: Second, it examines the work of Sade and advances the proposition that he might be a "moral pornographer". It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space. 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] The above analysis occurs in the first chapter called "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women".