(STUDY 1: SADE THE FATHER)
What we will call an extremely normal and typical, prosaic, clichéd sexual episode involves a male whose prerogative is to overpower and ejaculate into or onto a desired sexual object, who is a female, whose role is to feign resistance, offering up an interval of coy struggle sufficient to whet the Man’s primal aggressive instincts before she surrenders, in a paroxysm of acquiescence, to the onslaught of His lust, cheerfully receiving into or onto her person the suitor’s ejaculate. In less wholly conventional arrangements (e.g., same-sex pairings), the roles are not necessarily hitched to genital configuration and a female will play at being the Man, or a male will take on the Woman’s role, but the underlying erotic dynamic of dominance and submission, conquest-virility and paralysis-passivity, does not erode with the shifting of roles. Normative sexuality actualizes in the bodies of its participants the patriarchal ideology of masculine dominance and feminine submission. The woman (feminine) is on the bottom. The man (masculine) mounts her. He’s on top. He holds her down. Stifled she silences, such a sweetheart. Accordingly it is typical for women to be sexually attracted to men whose physical features imply their capacity for force, “strong hands” being especially coveted. Men, meanwhile, are typically drawn to females who appear in some way physically vulnerable (e.g., young, waifish, tottering in heels), i.e. feminized, therefore readily subdued for coital access. Rape fantasies are a staple of both the female and male sexual imaginary: men fantasize about raping, women about being raped. Every fifth woman will be raped before she dies. A man will rape her. This is all very typical to the point of triteness.
As a respite from the bland “vanilla” sexuality of patriarchally determined masculine domination and feminine capitulation, our eager-to-please culture affords us the intriguing option of bondage//discipline, dominance//submission, sadism//masochism, or BDSM. In a BDSM-flavored sexual encounter, the partner in the Man’s role is the master, the other, in the Woman’s role, is His slave; as in the standard patriarchal-orthodox model these roles can be reversed, but the asymmetry of power that structures the relation between partners remains steadfast. Inequity itself is the erotic engine of BDSM, embodied carnally through acts of violence and degradation performed by the Man-master, for the sake of his sexual pleasure, upon his Woman-Slave, whose correlative pleasure lies in enduring pain and humiliation imposed by someone more powerful than herself, to whom she is bound: her Master. The essential asymmetry is accentuated by means of various accessories: whips, chains, gags, dog collars, dog masks, yokes and harnesses, blindfolds, handcuffs, nipple clamps, paddles, black leather, red vinyl, spikes, racks, cages—whatever trimmings will dramatize the submissive partner’s debasement and the bitter absoluteness of the dominant partner’s authority, and the inherent hostility of sexual interaction. Sex acts in the BDSM canon include slapping, spanking, verbal abuse, biting, burning, choking, piercing (“needle play”), hogtying, fisting, breast and genital and anal mutilation, all of which are extolled as “good pain,” mutually stimulating for the torturing and the tortured parties. In BDSM, archetypal Man finds Woman, his complementary opposite. He possesses a phallus, she is a hole. A match made in heaven, there is no need for Man and Woman to waste time with maudlin displays of reciprocal care and affection, tenderness, concern for the other’s well-being, et cetera; instead, the lucky couple can eschew the quaint pleasantries of foreplay and plunge directly into fulfilling their innermost sexual urges: his to experience his masculine-phallic power through acting out total domination over a prostrated inferior, hers to be physically and psychologically dominated and possessed, to be silenced, to be deprived of dignity, to suffer for her sins (chiefly: being born female), to be destroyed and in annihilation experience unadulterated her femininity. Ah, consensual catharsis! In BDSM, Man’s brutality and Woman’s self-negation are intensified, glorified, physically realized thus ossified via ritualized enactments of eroticized violence and eroticized subjugation. The lesson of BDSM is that those in power are violent because power is achieved + maintained through violence, and as a privilege of power violence itself is gratifying, while the powerless are content to be where they are, on the bottom, even ecstatic to be there crawling along in the lowest gutters, as it is embedded in their biological make-up as born subordinates to derive pleasure from abuse. The sexualized violence and oppression of BDSM is lauded as a departure from the humdrum, repressive sexual standard of aggro-phallic penetration of coerced//denigrated female bodies, despite the fact that BDSM sexuality is defined by masculine dominance//force//power and feminine submission//frailty//powerlessness, therefore modeled after status quo heterosexuality and the ideology of sexual dualism: the BDSM dualist-opposition of sadist-against-masochist is a direct extension of the patriarchal dualist-opposition of male-against-female. BDSM’s male supremacist routines are precisely the male supremacist routines of mainstream sexuality, replicated and distilled to their purest malignity. No inversion nor subversion occurs; the relationship between BDSM and standard sex is one of mirroring, elaboration, inflammation, exaggeration. BDSM is standard sex on steroids. Yet, hyped as a deviation from rather than a distillation of the standard, BDSM is embraced as sub- or even countercultural, a system of sexual transgression by which the strictures of an authoritarian and repressed, repressive, oppressive and prudishly anti-erotic society can be thrown off.
As outlaw-sex, BDSM has proven particularly seductive to artists, who, being predominantly male, generally arrogant, self-aggrandizing, and contemptuous as a rule, are inclined to disinherit with outspoken abhorrence whatever they perceive to be conventional, average, or “normal,” embracing instead a pose of rebellious living at the margins of social acceptability. They call themselves radicals, ride motorcycles, dress in black, fantasize they’re disenfranchised, indulge in a profound sense of alienation. These artists’ contemptuous masculinity also predisposes them to a vigorous disidentification with women, making BDSM the obvious choice for “artistic” sexual expression, a deliciously creative carnal deviancy delivering the bright deserving few from boredom onto true liberation. Whatever parallels exist between free//passionate BDSM and repressed//tepid vanilla sex are indiscernible to BDSM’s artistic adherents, because exceptional as they know themselves to be they’re certain they could never be enticed into anything quotidian, and also due to their (socially not biologically) programmed masculinity carrying with it a convenient inability to be self-critical, meaning that whatever these brilliant individuals desire to do they trust to be the rightest course of action and doggedly pursue. Thus sadomasochistic eroticism has ascended to vogue as a darling trope of the avant-garde, invoked as an emblem of renegade BAD BOY individualism and sophisticated yet elemental, tameless virility (a signifier akin to leather gloves, a glassy stare, self-induced stick-n-pokes), so that those of us attentive to “the arts” presently find ourselves flooded under a profusion of artistic renderings of women – and, less often, feminized men – tied up or in chains, gagged, swinging from ceilings, et cetera, on concert flyers, in the pages of “exciting new candid” poetry collections, on cassette tape covers, and on the gleaming white walls of New York’s most stylish galleries. Reminiscent depictions of women tortured for the sake of sexual pleasure are similarly abundant in pornography and in best-selling romantic novels and films. However, simply because a certain theme is pervasive in every sphere of society, resonates everywhere and cannot be avoided almost anywhere, does that make it conventional and mainstream and therefore not especially transgressive? Being a simple girl, my gut feeling is that yes, that’s the case: what is ubiquitous is by default not transgressive. The Bad Boys in their infinite incendiary wisdom disagree. But perhaps they’ve yet to hear of 50 Shades of Grey, being too consumed in reading, re-reading, ruminating on and savoring whilst panting hot-n-heavily over the leatherbound complete works of their best-loved literary forebear, that singularly free-spirited luminary of lust whose name has become shorthand for remorseless debauchery…
ST. SADE // THE DIVINE MARQUIS
Donatien Alphonse Francoise de Sade (1740-1840), or the Marquis de Sade if we are to address him by his title, was a French aristocrat famous as the eponym of “sadism” and the author of a number of scandalous supposedly erotic novels wherein women and girls and boys and non-aristocratic men are tormented, humiliated, fucked, dismembered and murdered, in luxurious baroque castle-dungeon-boudoir settings, across thousands of pages, between lengthy interludes of banquet and philosophical rumination, by wealthy “libertine” aristocrats with inexhaustible carnal imaginations and even more exuberant phalluses (some cute names granted the male genital in Sade’s work: “this despotic cock,” “this superb deity”). His novels include Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and the tome regarded by Sade’s “more thoughtful readers”1 as his masterpiece, 120 Days of Sodom, which he penned whilst imprisoned in the Bastille. The Marquis de Sade spent much of his adult life in and out of prison, which he considered to be a monstrous injustice. So too do his admirers, who are myriad. Notable celebrants of Sade include Charles Baudelaire, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Yukio Mishima, and Ted Bundy. Guillaume Apollinaire declared Sade “the freest spirit that has ever lived”2; the surrealists saw in Sade’s work “an absolute vision of liberty”3 and revered him as an ancestral comrade in their crusade against the bourgeoisie. Simone de Beauvoir found Sade too interesting of a figure to categorically reject, choosing instead to write about him at length. So did Albert Camus. Gilles Deleuze, too. Although the Divine Marquis has had his naysayers – Camus, for example, understood totalitarianism to be the heart of Sade’s eroticism, and de Beauvoir despite identifying “immense merit” in Sade’s “ethic of authenticity”4 does take issue with solipsistic murderousness as a solution to hypocritical morality – overwhelmingly, Sade has been idolized by the intellectual and artistic elite as an “avatar of freedom”5. The legend manufactured to canonize Sade and his sprawling treatises on sexual terrorism poses the aristocrat as the premier radical prophet of sexual liberation, a rebel-martyr whose unrepentant rebellion against sapless, smothering societal conventions landed him languishing in captivity, locked away and crucified for his passions. The victim of an oppressive culture, Sade was wronged.
The life of the Marquis de Sade was an incredible series of misfortunes, and what is perhaps most incredible of all was his capacity to withstand them. (…) Adversity or, more exactly, the cruel privations of confinement made Sade a writer in the first place…Upon the prisoner’s fare of eternal anxiety his genius thrived…1
This transfiguration of Sade into countercultural superstar is the effluence of a progression of mass delusions delineable as follows:
I
DELUSION: Sade was persecuted for the extremity of his writings—the sexual license they promoted, their apotheosis of sensual desire and its satiation, the wild caprices of Sade’s “dissolute imagination,” for the boldness of his claim to free expression and his call for the obliteration of all obstructions to absolute autonomy, preeminently the insipid etiquette of “virtue,” or goodness.
DEMYSTIFICATION: In 1801 Sade was arrested for authoring Justine and Juliette. The novels were published in 1797 and declared obscene, inciting Sade to fervently deny any role in their creation. Indeed, he publicly reviled Justine as a piece of filth. He was 60 at the time; he’d spent years in jail before and was less than eager to return. However, none of his previous adventures in incarceration were the result of his literary endeavors. Sade’s first arrest occurred in 1763, when Jeanne Testard, a poor woman he’d solicited for sexual service, reported to the police that after she arrived at Sade’s home, the aristocrat had locked her in a room, made her watch him masturbate onto a crucifix, threatened her life with various weapons (two pistols, a sword), and held her captive overnight while he requested various sexual favors, which she refused: whip me, let me beat you, let me sodomize you, let me give you an enema so you’ll shit on this crucifix, and so forth. As Testard’s claims were backed up by previous reports of Sade’s abusiveness made by numerous other prostituted women, the 23-year-old Marquis spent two months in prison at Vincennes. When he was released, he immediately returned to purchasing and maltreating women, so viciously now that the police were compelled to display uncharacteristic concern for females by warning local brothel proprietresses not to peddle their wares to Sade.
In 1768 Sade was arrested a second time, this time for bringing Rose Keller, a woman he met begging on the street, to his chateau under the pretenses of hiring her as a housekeeper and locking her in a room, ripping off her clothes, tying her facedown on a settee in order to whip her and slash her body with a knife, pouring hot wax into the wounds. He said he would kill her. She thought she would die. Instead, Sade showed some mercy by merely beating her, after which diversion he untied her, demanded she wash herself in front of him, and slathered her with an ointment he’d invented to hasten the healing of wounds and wanted to test out. After a wearying evening of rubbing wax into knife wounds and beating Rose and emolliating her with ointment, Sade took his leave, locking the seriously injured woman once more in the room where he’d tossed her upon her arrival to his home. Left alone, Keller managed to force open the window and climbed out using a rope she made from the bedsheets, in spite of her injuries, thereby escaping the chateau. Although she was later badgered into accepting a large sum of money to withdraw all charges, Sade nonetheless spent most of a year in prison for what has been cheekily minimized as the “Rose Keller incident.”
In 1772, Sade and his valet were arrested for another “incident,” wherein Sade had poisoned five prostituted women by feeding them drugged candies, leading to several of the women becoming violently ill and vomiting blood. Sade also whipped the women, and beat them, and threatened them with death, as per his favored lovemaking routine. Having learned prison life didn’t suit him from his previous two stays, this time Sade took advantage of his considerable economic resources and fled with his valet to Italy.
In 1778 Sade was once again imprisoned at Vincennes, the jail of his youth, for the unresolved poisoning charges and a new set of charges associated with the brutal treatment of five fifteen-year-old girls Sade had purchased and held hostage as servants//sex slaves at his country chateau at Lacoste. One of the girls was so severely hurt that after nine months spent convalescing at Sade’s uncle’s estate, where she was stowed away so her condition could not be used to incriminate Sade, she had not recovered and required hospitalization. Another girl died.
Sade spent six years at Vincennes, until he was transferred to the Bastille in 1784. In 1789, in the days before the revolution, after attempting to exploit the atmosphere of upsurge outside by calling out his window for the people below to charge the prison – one of his most esteemed revolutionary acts, inspired i’m sure by sympathy with the people and not by a hope of escaping in the ensuing tumult – Sade was sent off to the Charenton insane asylum. Within a year of the revolution Sade and all other prisoners of the “old regime” institutionalized at Charenton were released.
Three years later Sade got himself into trouble again by volunteering to serve the king, resulting in an arrest for antirevolutionary activity. He claimed he’d been confused at the time about whose regiment exactly he was volunteering to serve. This lame excuse failed to convince his accusers; Sade was sentenced to death in 1794 but evaded execution in the general post-revolution confusion. Two months later he was released.
Although the publication of Justine and Juliette in 1797 may have provided the impetus for the final phase of his imprisonment – as a lunatic//retiree at Charenton, where he lived comfortably with his mistress until his death, directing lavish theatrical productions and in his spare moments molesting a thirteen-year-old girl – for the most part the Marquis de Sade was “maliciously persecuted” not for artistic dissidence but for crimes of sexual abuse and battery and cruelty he perpetrated against women and girls. It is true enough that he never spent as many consecutive years in prison for raping or beating or poisoning women as he did for “obscenity.” That he was more harshly penalized for his writings than his assaults points to a laissez-faire attitude regarding violence against women, the persistence of which is evidenced in the current proclivity for overlooking Sade’s non-literary crimes. It does not negate the reality that Sade’s criminal career was spent primarily as a sexual predator.
Sade’s defenders are as committed to trivializing their hero’s actual crimes as they are to sopping up the bloodiness of his narratives. This they accomplish by insisting that Sade should be read as a philosopher and theoretician, who through his works of fiction (“it’s fiction! it’s fantasy!” the Bad Boys will not stop shouting) traversed bravely, at great risk to himself, the darkest corridors of human nature. His aim obviously was to illuminate the harrowing situation of human existence. The violence in his works is symbolic, metaphorical, a means to illustrate the philosophical insights he gained whilst submersed in the squalid night of the soul; whatever bodies he destroyed were dismembered in the realm of pure thought, the corpses that piled up were contained only in Sade’s skull, without any material correlative. While Sade’s mind may have been bloody, his hands were not. It was Sade’s ideas and not his attacks on women – crimes any thinking person would recognize as too petty, too silly after all to have warranted the heinous treatment Sade suffered – for which the long-suffering Marquis was vilified. The subtext is that since Sade wrote fiction (fantasy!) and philosophy, his province was in idea-production, and since people cannot be harmed by ideas but only by actions, so goes the theory, Sade and his fictions, no matter how unpleasant they may strike the squeamish or sentimental reader, must be regarded as harmless. To view him in any other way (i.e., as a sexual predator, an genuine villain, or generally scummy human) indicates an incapacity or unwillingness to engage with complex ideas. That Sade acted out his fantasies, or tested out his “theories,” upon the bodies of women whenever he was granted the opportunity, harming scores of women in the process – Rose Keller’s wounds were not in Sade’s mind but carved into her sensate flesh, which bled onto the floor not of Sade’s skull but his chateau – does not contradict his devotees’ assertion that the Divine Marquis hurt no one. It’s common sense: since a woman is a nonentity it follows that, if she is hurt, no one is hurt. Brutalizing women is innately harmless, a neutral pursuit, and furthermore Sade’s crimes against women can be discounted as victimless, because women cannot be victims; a woman cannot be abused because she exists to be used however men see fit to use her; and no use by a man can be called abuse because it is a man’s birthright to use any woman he chooses however he pleases, for whatever purposes. That many of Sade’s victims were paid for their trouble further exonerates him—more so than even the average for-use female, a prostituted woman cannot really be a victim because it is her job to endure men’s violence, whatever form that might take. Jean Paulhan expressed concisely the sort of intellectual acumen devoted to the dismissal of Sade’s crimes against women when he wrote, “It seems established that Sade gave a spanking to a whore in Paris: does that fit with a year in jail?”6 Thus masculinist contempt for women is a prerequisite for sweeping under the boudoir carpet Sade’s documented violent tendencies so as to recast him as a “harmless” literary criminal. A resolute conviction that women do not matter thus whatever happens to women is of no significance will also serve you well if your aim is to engage with the content of Sade’s work as the delineation of “ideas,” according to the high-minded mandate, since the author’s ideas are largely illustrated via a tedious, repetitive, ugly, stupid, clumsy and basically unreadable cataloging of men’s acts of violence against females. Of course, the texts are only mind-numbing masturbatorial porno-horrorshows on the surface, to the shallow reader. Concern for women, as well as even the vaguest notion of women as potentially real beings with conscious bodies which are not necessarily curvaceous clots of inert substance extant for men’s amusement, will inevitably inhibit a deep reading of any Sadean epic. It takes a penetrating and rigorously woman-hating intellectual sensibility to tap the rich vein of insights at the core of Sade’s work, evident in the philosophical complexity of such passages as the following I’ve excerpted from the “document of singular value”7 that is 120 Days of Sodom:
He works exclusively with girls of fifteen, and he flogs them with stinging nettles and holly until they are bleeding; his taste in asses is highly developed, he is not easy to please. (593)
…with prodigious strength he needed only one hand to violate a girl… (207)
Colombe’s ass is plumbed by the society that evening, and Messieurs pretend to cut off her head. They are accomplished actors. (610)
He likes to trample upon a pregnant woman until she aborts. Prior to this he whips her. (614)
He introduces an enema of almost boiling water into her bowels, then amuses himself observing her writhe, and discharges upon her ass. (589)
He strikes her violently in the face until the blows of his fist bring blood from her nose, and he continues yet a while longer, the blood notwithstanding; he discharges and mixes his fuck with the blood she has lost. (613)
In 120 Days of Sodom, Sade writes of women having their feet amputated, their ears and fingers and nipples and hands and arms and legs and tongues amputated, their legs broken with crowbars, their fingers broken, their eyes gouged out, their teeth extracted and replaced with “red hot” nails; bullets are shot into girls’ anuses, holes are bored into women’s flesh so that boiling pitch and molten lead can be poured in; women are fistulated then beaten and stomped on until they miscarry, giving birth (to dead babies) through their anuses; stallions are brought in to breed women to death; girls are buried waist-deep in the manor garden until their lower halves decompose; women are cooked in “blazing fires” until the fat melts from their bodies, or they are hurled into furnaces instead to be “consumed at once”; women are fed to flies and rats, women are sliced to slivers with scissors, women are impaled with spears stuck into their genitals, women’s intestines are torn from their bellies, women are dropped naked into latrine trenches to drown in squalor as men look on, seated in “comfortable armchairs,” masturbating. When Sade’s sage commentaries on the human condition are clouded beyond cogency in the haze of female bleeding and dying and libertine ejaculate, the Sade evangelist takes an alternate tact to consecrating his idol’s literature: it’s comedy! As a comic, Sade is commended for the gross-out playfulness of his depravity, his “frolicsome kinkiness,”8 his irrepressible inventiveness and the brash flamboyance of his literary style; through this framing Sade is positioned beyond reproach, just as he was as a philosopher, since anyone who would criticize the carefree systematic butchery of women (and girls, and boys, and low-status men) so delightfully chronicled in Sade’s work obviously has no sense of humor. If you take issue with Sade’s novels, you are either too stupid to comprehend the subtleties of his thought, or you’re a humorless moralist who can’t take a joke. Either way, you’re boring, probably bourgeois, probably female, too, aren’t you?—prepare to be dismissed.
The flock of artistic elites that encircles Sade, defending him from unsophisticated simpletons who would defame his character or his literature by suggesting a link between either and actual atrocity, droning on eternally that their idol’s crimes were scarcely crimes at all, and that his novels present important ideas owed our rumination, or serve as examples of artistic extremity worthy of examination as works stretching the limits of creative expression. To these defenders of Sade, it would seem, reality is a rather remote, abstract concept. Living in an ivory tower tends to have that effect on a person. The Bad Boys are apparently unaware of the considerable correlation between the content of Sade’s “imaginatively bizarre” fictions//fantasies//disquisitions//comedies and the facts of material reality. As comfortable as it might be to ignore these facts, some of us who, without the luxury of a chateau in which to cloister ourselves, are forced into frequent contact with reality throughout the course of our unsophisticated simpleton lives. Thus we’ve acquired a certain knowledge of the real world, as it is, as it has been, that the elite lack. With this knowledge weighing heavily on our simpleton minds, we see that there are several germane parallels to be drawn between Sadean fantasy and contemporary sadistic reality.
EXHIBIT: In 120 Days of Sodom, a notable majority of Sade’s protagonists’ female victims are stated to be 15 years old. It is apparent that there is something particularly delectable about a girl of this age that makes her an excellent candidate for rape, torture, and murder. This is as true today as it was for Sade’s libertines: a study conducted by the United States Department of Justice in 2000 determined that a female is at greatest risk of being sexually assaulted between her fourteenth and fifteenth year.9
EXHIBIT: Rape is the favored explicitly carnal act among Sade’s libertines, who apply their imaginations to making rape all the more titillating through supplementary acts of violence (e.g., battery, bondage, mutilation). Non-fictional rapists have similar habits. 80% of women who visit the hospital after being raped present with black eyes and orbital swelling, which suggests they were beaten, while a quarter of them have bites, burns or scald-marks, or injuries from physical restraints//bindings. Almost 20% of rape victims suffer internal injuries; a similar number lose consciousness during the assault. Broken bones or teeth are not uncommon, and 2% of raped women bear knife or gunshot wounds.10
EXHIBIT: Sade extols the virtues of the flesh of a girl’s bottom as the best human meat a man can sample. He does not mean this metaphorically; the sexual pleasure he is referencing here is not cunnilingus but cannibalism. The serial child molester and murderer Albert Fish would likely agree, having written in a letter to a victim’s parents: “I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven.”11
EXHIBIT: Sade describes how one of his libertines, who formerly got his kicks watching little girls be sodomized, eventually advanced to the more exquisite pleasure of impaling a girl with a spear in her anus, then leaving her to die while he “studied her contortions.” During the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, a common method of femicide was to spear a woman in her genitals and leave her to die in a ditch. One can assume the genocidaires occasionally indulged in studying their victims’ contortions as well.
To compile a comprehensive list of every real-world reflection of Sadean “fantasy” would fill at least as many pages as Sade’s texts themselves, because in current reality male violence against women is endemic. Sade’s voracity for violating women and humiliating and killing them, which we see exemplified in both his writings and his personal life, in his crimes against Jeanne Testard and countless prostituted women, and Rose Keller, and the five teenage girls he held hostage at Lacoste, cannot be credited as inventive – since sexual violence is omnipresent one need not be overly imaginative to set upon it as a practice or artistic theme – nor transgressive, since the decimation of women en masse through sexual violence is culturally sanctioned, if not encouraged outright. It is a revision of history to eulogize Sade as a literary criminal who courted trouble with his wild imagination, seditious philosophies and uncompromising individualism. In actuality his so-called//oft-mourned persecution was the result of his repeated violent offenses against women. The Marquis de Sade was not an “idea man” who penned disquisitions on violence to expose man’s interior darkness, nor did he indulge his taste for violence in writing because he had some vestiges of social conscience that alerted him to the inadvisability of destroying others for the sake of one’s own entertainment. His violence materialized mainly as prose, rather than action, because he was sometimes in prison, a state of affairs that sorely limited his access to potential victims. When he was free, he took measures to ensure he had what he had desired all along: “a harem on whom to feast.”
A rapist is a rapist only to the ‘square’: to the superior perceptions of Hip, rape is ‘part of life,’ and should be assessed by a subtle critical method based on whether the act possesses ‘artistry’ or ‘real desire.’ (KATE MILLETT, SEXUAL POLITICS)
II
DELUSION: Sade was a revolutionary who repulsed the constraints imposed upon him by society, a rejection inhering a challenge to convention that made him a threat to the social order. To preserve itself against such a momentous menace, society had no choice but to neutralize the threat by confining Sade to prison.
DEMYSTIFICATION: The Marquis de Sade was an aristocrat who capitalized on his financial and social privilege within the feudal estate system of pre-Revolutionary France to exploit those born into circumstances less fortunate than his own. Through tyrannizing the lower class bodies of prostituted women and his servants Sade was able to savor unalloyed the benefits of his aristocratic status. He believed that the poor were a lesser species – “that vile low life known as the people,” Sade writes – whose purpose on Earth was to serve and sate the aristocracy. Himself a more evolved creature, Sade was entitled to make use of the poor as he saw fit, with impunity. Regardless of how they were used, the poor were without recourse: they had no right to complain, because they had no right to their bodies, which as commodities rightfully belonged to the rich along with the land and everything else. As a member of the nobility who discounted the lives and the dignity of his social inferiors (“commoners”) and degraded these persons to luxuriate in his dominion over them, Sade demonstrated his loyalty to the social order.
Sade was also a man who exercised the privileges allotted him by virtue of his manhood to violate, victimize and enslave females, in fact and in fiction, and who declared it the universal right of males to enjoy unconditional access to all women, to whom men can do anything. In Philosophy in the Boudoir Sade wrote, “It appears beyond contradiction that nature has given us the right to carry out our wishes upon all women indifferently; it appears equally that we have the right to force her to submit to our wishes.” As use by the higher classes was a criterion for the existence of the poor, so was use by males the basis for female existence, an estimation representative of general consensus, not some startling revelation arrived at by Sade in a bout of liberated thinking. Sade did what he desired to do with women, as was his prerogative – the prerogative of all men – in a male supremacist society. Having incorporated seamlessly into his consciousness the values of his culture, Sade’s sexuality was driven by a lust not for sensual pleasure but for the pleasures of male power, of controlling a woman and reducing her to an object for male gratification. In pursuit of these pleasures Sade, in fact and in fiction, tied women up to incapacitate them, terrorized them, targeted the most vulnerable members of our female class – children, the poor – and tortured and wounded them. To take a being’s life is the ultimate expression of a mastery over that being; in Sade’s writing, femicide is relished as the ultimate sexual climax. This is not “perversion,” nor the “strange tastes”12 of a salacious eccentric. It is male power carried to its logical conclusion. Sade’s sexuality of amusing terror and arousing murder was not an original development on Sade’s part but a panegyric in practice to plain & simple male supremacy, the most basic convention of the society in which he lived, and of our society in its current iteration. Even self-righteous as he was in laying his claim to incomparable deviance, Sade saw little remarkable in his treatment of women: “I am guilty of nothing but simple libertinage such as it is practiced by all men more or less according to their natural temperaments and tendencies.”13
By exploiting the poor, Sade upheld the social hierarchy of the aristocracy over the peasants.
By sexually victimizing women, Sade upheld the more deeply rooted hierarchy of males over females, the prototype for all hierarchical structures.
It is unclear to me how an aristocrat embodying the values of his class by disdainfully razing the lives of the poor and a man endorsing the ethic of his masculinity by dominating then degrading then decimating women stood to rupture the social order.
So, what was Sade challenging? The Bad Boys cry out: HUMAN DECENCY! MORALITY! VIRTUE! But human decency was a charade long before Sade, morality already a sodden faded thing, defiled, and virtue an archaic bauble. These did not place any real, relevant restrictions on Sade’s freedoms.
[ if Sade revolted against anything, it was God and the Church that bore the burden of his inarticulate rue, but what else is a man’s atheistic thrashing about than a temper tantrum against control in the abstract, signifying how little material oppression he has experienced in his life, as a man? men face so few material constraints they have to make them up in order to have something to righteously oppose. blasphemy is brat-stuff. pedestrian child’s play, as de Beauvoir noted: “His harangues against religion are open to reproach because of the tedious monotony with which they repeat timeworn commonplaces…”4 ]
By envisaging a utopia wherein men would possess unlimited power to use for whatever purposes persons whom they had previously rendered powerless, Sade prophesized reality. His reality, when he was not in prison. Our reality as we are living it. The paradise for which he yearned was a hell on earth for everyone but Sade and his fellow libertines, i.e. privileged males. To achieve such a paradise does not require that the social order be ruptured, because it is in the image of the world as it is, as men like Sade and Sade’s predecessors and Sade’s phallic-sophisticate cult of elite would-be heirs have made it and are making it, remaking it, day after day and will continue to make it until there is an authentic revolution launched to stop them.
If Sade threatened society in any way, it was because in his tumescent fervor for male power, woman-hating, sexual terror, solipsism, and alienation he exposed the society of which he was an agent as a system of intensively structured inequality, a social ecology richly nutritive to every form of hatred and violence and fascism and cruelty. Giddily, overeager, Sade tore away the veil and revealed how lushly horror could thrive in a Man’s World. But the machinations of male supremacy are meant to proceed covertly, so that no questions will arise; some modicum of concealment is necessary in the conservation of the status quo. Without precautionary obfuscation the corrosive oppressiveness of the male regime would be too sorrowful a condition to bear. Women might resist. Because Sade in his porno opuses depicted with unremitting acid clarity the raw dynamic of sexual relations between men & women, the male supremacist state was forced to renounce its shameless wunderkind, to protect the privilege of men in general to carry on discreetly beating their wives and purchasing women as playthings, or raping them when pocket cash was running low; and more crucially in order that the sexual, reproductive, and domestic subservience of women (the cessation of which would bring a crisis) be maintained. A gentleman does not kiss and tell. Nor does he fuck-unto-death and grandiosely lyricize. To do so is in poor taste as it places one’s peers, plus also the entire patriarchal operation, at risk of insurrection. Therefore it was vital that the state condemn Sade as obscene and insane, to obscure the grave normalcy of his vision. An artificial distance was created where there was none in an effort to protect everyday cruelties. Sade was never a rebel.
Nor are those who worship him rebels. Nothing in Sade’s life or work edges outside the bounds of the “realm of common male belief”5. Sade believed that women existed in service of his pleasure, and that sexual pleasure was naturally, necessarily violent. He delighted in domination and in terrorizing the powerless, as a means to experience his own power, his privilege as a rich man. He considered compassion weakness, and selfishness strength. He promoted rape, the sexual abuse of children, and incest as foreplay, torture as coitus, murder as orgasm. Obsessively he demanded freedom—for himself, the noble libertine. When he waxed grotesque over the freedom of the individual he meant the MAN, and men who read him have always known what he meant; they agree that they should be free, as men, and their standard of freedom is unlimited sexual expression without concern for the “object of desire,” that lumpish meaningless body-thing you play with until you’re bored, or it’s dead. Men desire this type of freedom. Anxiously. Desperately. Thus in Sade they find a hero, something like a Christ figure in a blood-moist ruffled blouse and powdered wig smelling of semen who suffered endlessly in defense of the brutal fuck. His writing titillates because, like Sade himself, his readers have been socialized to believe sex and violence synonymous. The scenes of sexualized female bleeding sexualized female dying sexualized female falling-into-pits sexualized female eating shit that populate Sade’s novels excite the imagination because a central tenet of male eroticism is that women are sexiest whilst in agony (sequela of a classic theme: “a good woman is a dead woman”). Only in terms of density and transparency were Sade’s pornographic efforts ever aberrant. Please consider: if Sadean sexuality were authentically an affront to the mainstream, would Playboy subscribers have had the pleasure of flipping through a Sade-themed pictorial in commemoration of the 1969 release of “De Sade,” a romanticized biopic about the “great writer and sadist”? Would that 1969 film have been produced at all? Would a similarly fawning movie have been released in 2000, featuring bright-‘n’-shiny Hollywood stars Joaquin Phoenix and Kate Winslet14? That Sade remains conspicuous in our culture as a sexual celebrity two centuries after his death is testimony to the timeless popular appeal of Sadean eroticism.
There is no way to put a finer point on it than Andrea has, so I’ll quote her: “Sade’s importance, finally, is not as dissident or deviant: it is as Everyman, a designation the power-crazed aristocrat would have found repugnant but one that women, on examination, will find true.”5
III
DELUSION: In liberating sexuality by claiming sensual pleasure as the sole valid goal of the human organism, Sade left as his legacy a roadmap to release from sexual repression.
DEMYSTIFICATION: Sade’s proposed sexuality is presumed liberated because it evinces a stringent carelessness for the “sexual object.” No one can stop a Sadean libertine from flagellating a woman until her skin is shredded and then masturbating into her open sores—not God, not the bourgeoisie (though the bourgeoisie are unlikely to care about her either + God cannot care because God does not exist) least of all the woman herself. What the Bad Boys teach us in all of their rambling infinitely prolix over Sade’s “vision of freedom” is that, for privileged men, freedom can be best defined as an intransgient selfishness. Liberty means not having to think of anyone else, not having to do anything for anyone or in service of any cause other than one’s own immediate interests. This selfishness is the content of Sade’s “sensual pleasure,” the ecstasy of a sexuality that is in essence an elaborate series of masturbatory rituals. What the libertine experiences in erotic contact with the “object of his desire” is therefore not in fact sensual, as in related to the physical senses, but psychological: the satiation of his ego’s craving to rise to eminence remote from every other being, as an absolute sovereign, self-made and self-contained. Sexuality becomes a sphere for men to experience themselves and experiment with their subjectivity, gaining “existential” knowledge of themselves and grasping at what they say is “freedom,” more accurately termed disaffection, from other beings and from nature itself, both of which inhibit the male subject’s ability to direct every facet of his existence. Nature will kill him and he cannot control that. It’s incredibly unfair, you know. Nature’s mortal sway is horrific to men and their writings indicate they have yet to recover from the shock of being bodies vulnerable to death. The male subject can, however, control his relations with others. The sexual sphere is an especially fertile space for asserting interpersonal control, precisely because of the vulnerability inherent in sexual relations. Recognizing a sexual partner as an equivalent being (or a being at all), feeling empathy for her, affection or tenderness, the man might find himself compelled to be kind to her, which would be for her benefit, not his; this coercion would represent a lapse in absolute self-determination, hence it is unacceptable. He will not be forced to care. So the sexual partner who is customarily a woman, though not always, cannot be another subject but must be an object. Hence, in the sexual encounter the male subject reassures himself of the sanctity of his selfhood by engaging with the objectified-feminized other exclusively as an apparatus to be manipulated in pursuit of orgasmic release. To experience himself, the male subject must purge the sexual partner of her identity as a conscious sensate individual. To experience freedom, he must detain her as his prisoner. To experience pleasure, he must render her wretched. She must suffer. To experience the vibratory whir of his own aliveness, inevitably he will murder her. He has no other means to access freedom nor pleasure nor aliveness but through use, and ultimately destruction, of the desired object.
SADE WRITES:
….’tis with yourself you must be solely concerned, and as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort of victim, destined to that passion’s fury. Do not all passions require victims?
(JULIETTE)
SADE WRITES:
…the voluptuousness I sense and which is the result of this sweet comparison of their condition with mine, would cease to exist were I to succor them: by extricating them from a state of wretchedness, I should cause them to taste an instant’s happiness, thus destroying the distinction between them and myself, thus destroying all the pleasure afforded by comparison.
(120 DAYS OF SODOM)
To accept a victim-requisite eroticism, wherein one’s pleasure can exist only in comparison to another’s pain, as a course to liberation connotes a profound contempt for women, since the only individual liberated through the sex act is the male subject. Rightfully so, the Bad Boys say, because they are quite sure that women are objects by nature and not by male supremacist design. As their male freedom relies on this concept, naturally they are very attached to it. The idea that a woman’s experience of a man’s sexual use of her might have any bearing on the liberatory quality of sexual relations is rejected as an inanity. The woman//victim’s experience is irrelevant; whether or not she is even capable of “experience” is open to debate. It does not matter if, while a man is liberating himself scaling to his ego’s crescendo through the desecration of a woman’s body, the woman may be experiencing enslavement, scathing terror and pain; this is only natural, since what the woman-object-orifice-doll can do which is sensual – what she does best – is die. Whimper a little, begging for her life. Drool blood. Concede. Convulse. Vomit. Death may not be experienced as sensual by the woman-object-orifice-doll herself, of course; for her, it may feel exactly like dying. This does not diminish the liberatory potential of the sex act nor its sensuality because the fuck belongs to men and when the woman dies a slave at his feet the male subject feels his freedom and aliveness swell in synchronicity and it is extremely “sensual” indeed.
To celebrate as liberated the urgent need (“desire”) to grow hardened and to hurt to create division, a hierarchy between the abusive and the abused body, as if to inflict pain or to suffer it were our only options, to reduce and annihilate another being as the sole available means of experiencing one’s own subjectivity as a positive condition is, in addition to being innately antiwoman, a putrid swindling of the potentialities latent in the word liberation. An authentic freedom exists which is not experienced through placing someone in a cage at the base of a pit and staring down watching her rot there. Authentic freedom demands no victim because it is a feeling in itself—when we are free we will know it, in our bodies, in the soft heat of touch, our free bodies close to the free bodies of others. We will know that freedom is not creating an enemy and trampling her into extinction so we can stand on her corpse and feel a few inches taller. When we are free we will know that to be free is not to have turned against every other creature. Freed we will no longer be afraid, weak with the fear forcibly instilled in us over a lifetime ruled by a hateful Fatherhood & we will realize it was this Fathers’ fear with which we were poisoned that drove us to perceive the lives and needs of others as a threat. Fear is the crux of opposition which is the crux of oppression, and it is fear – not empathy – that enfetters us. Fear of the other, and the selfishness it feeds to fatten like a carapace enclosing us against the world, is enforced by the Fatherhood whose aim is squelching us, withering us, dulling us, denying us freedom, since when we are afraid and alienated from one another we can be manipulated into carrying out the cruelties that transmute us into agents of our own vitiation. Men in Power profit off our fear; they must maintain it thus we are taught: FEAR IS FREEDOM. Hatred is freedom. Violence is freedom. Isolation is freedom. But the Fathers have never spoken truth to us and it is precisely because fervent, fierce, fearless intimacy in communion with the living substance of the world as expressed in the fragile form of the loved one and in ourselves and in every creature is the lifeblood of true freedom that the Fathers have schemed up as substitute their swill-freedom of detachment – so we will not be close – and callousness, so we will not love one another enough to protect each other from the forces of oppression. There is no revolutionary potential in the selfish freedom we’ve been force-fed, the sterile, hackneyed freedom of the murderous sovereign. Sade was too much a Man – confident in his own undying rightness – to recognize as a con the freedom of solipsism, self-indulgence and relative, victim-requisite liberty, and his maleness and his wealth predestined him to sufficient access to “freedom” – definition: absence of subjection to exogenous domination – that he lacked cause to challenge the definition of freedom itself; the standard male-subject-centric conception of freedom suited Sade just fine, because he would never be made the victim whose blood spilled served as freedom’s proof. Thus Sade strove through savagery to be a Free Man, in the classic sense. The insensate sensuality of the Sadean libertine is a product of the repressive regime, crafted of its materials, in support of its aims, shattering nothing but the bodies of its victims. Those of us born victims desire, and we demand, a different form of freedom.
[ foremost we would like the freedom to live ]
[ & when you touch me i long not to feel afraid—]
Sadean sexuality further reveals its nature as repressed//repressive rather than resistant through its antagonism toward the body itself. As previously noted, Sadean sensuality is not especially sensual; it is more psychological than carnal. Many of the “passions” described in 120 Days of Sodom are acts of simple meanness//dominance, arousing to the libertines but without actual physical sexual contact, e.g., a man cuts off a woman’s hair, she cries: the man achieves erection. The pleasure the Sadean libertine gets off on most is his own power, the most potent embodiment of which is a whipped and dismembered woman at his feet, her wails, her wounds and her squirming as he wounds her. Sidestepping the physical-sensual element of eroticism, Sadean sexual gratification situates itself within the mind of the male subject, not his body. The body involved in the sexual equation is the female body, and it is an object of derision, disgust, horror, and revilement. The body is female, and it is an object, and it is wretched. What an unfamiliar concept, and how freeing! The freedom Sade imagines is a freedom not of the body but from the body, therefore nature, which to the classic male subject represents death, lack of control, the disintegration of autonomy. He is outraged and disgusted his body will betray him and die. Because the sexual enterprise is an interaction between bodies, the male subject’s low opinion of bodies as fetid masses of doomed substance decaying out of control surfaces and distorts the sexual realm into a cesspool. As regards this cesspool, the male subject has two options: he can reject and flee from it to preserve his impermeable self-contained masculine good hygiene or, alternatively, he can wallow around in the septic filth, reveling in the debasement of the (female) body. Sade promotes wallowing revelry as the braver, more liberated option (what kind of man runs from a stinking bitch?), and additionally as a marvelous opportunity to take masculinist revenge upon the Body, symbolized by any available female or feminizied body, by way of violent attacks against it. When the Man destroys the Body, he is victorious. For a moment, he can forget he will die. Set out upon this intrepid course, the male subject (or “Sadean libertine,” since, let’s face it: the terms are interchangeable) develops an erotic schema orbiting around somatophobia and reactionary anti-body violence. Sex becomes squalor, sex becomes death, sex becomes putrefaction; sex attains its erotic zenith when it’s ugly when it’s filthy when it hurts. Sexuality is an excremental territory, a war zone and a tomb. The most tantalizing sexual object to the unrepressed carnal sophisticate is a half-dead piece of garbage. As Sade writes:
It has, moreover, been proved that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing; ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.
(120 DAYS OF SODOM)
Although Sade and his acolytes are convinced that in slandering and mangling the (female) body they have discovered a fun and easy route to countercultural liberation, it is my sense that hatred of the female body is pretty much par for the course, as a primary principle of the male supremacist mentality responsible for the present personality of our society, the same society which Sadean Bad Boys dismiss as drab and repressive. In our society, female genitals are scorned as disgusting and fish-smelling. Throughout history the sexualized female body has been associated with death, dirt, apocalypse—a nightmare. Men act out their hatred and horror of our bodies by policing our appearance, forcing us to mutilate ourselves in accordance to an image they’ve created as an attempt to control the uncontrollable Body, punishing us with marginalization and murder when we fail to keep our female bodies properly in check. Actually they murder us no matter how smoothly well-shaven we’ve depilated ourselves, because our bodies are inexorably unclean. These are mainstream cultural beliefs and behaviors, premised in the mainstream mythos. Somatophobic misogyny is not transgressive, not creative nor artistic and certainly not anti-repressive, since it is hatred of the body, and the hatred of women as symbols of the loathed body, that is the pith of sexual repression. Fact: we are sexually repressed because we are made to hate our bodies. We are afraid of them, we do not want to touch the bodies of others, we do not want our own ugly awful slime-sack bodies to be touched or even seen by anyone else, what a horrible disgraceful unbearable reality! To be a body. In an attempt to evade this reality, Men in Power have displaced the duty of being The Body onto all women. As scapegoats, we are punished for The Body’s sins. Sexualized violence against female bodies is symptomatic of sexual repression.
In the compulsive linkage between the sexual act and fetor, death, debasement, shame and despair that seethes through his novels, Sade exposes his horror of the body, his hatred of it and of the women he understood to be its emissaries. Sade embraced the morbid attitude toward sexuality that defines sexual repression and amplified the ghastliness repression attaches to sex, making what had been previously deemed dirty dirtier in the name of freedom. The trap he fell into was a common one: believing that whatever is “taboo” is liberatory, since in performance of the taboo a rule is broken. How naughty. Sade’s line of thinking went something like: since sex is filthy and forbidden, if I have sex, and if the sex I have is hyper-filthy, I will have risen above the law, and as a filthy criminal I will be free. What he could not recognize, because he did not bother to challenge any social phenomena that didn’t overtly intrude upon his pursuits, is that the notion of the body as disgusting is a manmade one. Bodies are not innately foul. To believe that the freest sex is the filthiest sex inheres a conviction reliant on the repressed ideology that bodies//sexuality are in fact disgusting. Liberated sexuality cannot appropriate its premises from the ideology of the repressed society it aims to undermine. The free body does not despise itself. Authentic sexual liberation does not lean on dualistic hierarchies, power dynamics, dread of the body as squalor//excremental//decay, despisal of women as human garbage, self-preservative numbness, reactionary cruelty and murder to create its erotic appeal. These are the core principles of the somatophobic male supremacist mainstream, not the revolution. More specifically, sexual liberation is not masturbation using dead and dying bodies as set-pieces, which is what the sensualism of the Sadean libertine reduces to under examination. Recognizing body-loathing and woman-hating as hallmarks of standard sexuality, a transgressive eroticism would repudiate the negativization of the body, replacing enmity for the body with enmity for the systems and structures of power + control that endeavor to dispossess us of our bodies to weaken us, conditioning us against them, therefore against ourselves and against one another. The project of a revolutionary, liberatory, transgressive sexuality would be to reclaim, to re-consecrate the body so that we might experience the reality of physical embodiment not as a pathological condition but as a state of grace, ecstatic in the fact of our vitality, the purifying thrum of flesh and nerves and blood attuned to currents of flux, creatural connectivity, union, heat, vision, redemption, restoration. Empathy wedded to sensuality, a desire for one’s body pulsing vivid in fluid continuity with the body of another, the bodies of others, the sprawl of all physical substance—this would be transgressive; it would be freeing to live our bodies as something kinder than scum and mire. Fucking a woman you hate then throwing her in a pit of excrement – Sade’s liberatory M.O. – is neither transgressive nor freeing. It is not freeing for the fucker, because he’s constrained to operating within a framework of self-abhorrence and self-dread, and therefore, poor little Bad Boy, no matter how much leather he wears he will never be free, he will always sense himself imprisoned within his own body//self; and it is definitively not freeing for the woman, because she’s decomposing in a sewer.
The Marquis de Sade was a privileged man, a sexual predator, an antisocial egoist, and a self-indulgent, largely incompetent writer of pornographic nihilism. He was not a great liberator of sexuality whose “perversions” merit ongoing study as sage glimpses into how one might disburden oneself of the spiritual despotism of a repressed//repressive, oppressive culture. He was not a dissident, not a revolutionary, not a rebel. Sade was not “the freest spirit” but merely another male warped by socialization into being a Man, whose conduct and fantasies were in sync with the standard mores of manhood. Sade was committed to nothing if not his own male supremacy. Throughout his every terrorizing tract and treatise and criminal act against women the dream Sade quested after was the culmination of his masculinity – the grandest climax, power imbibed in its sharpest distillate – which was not a perverse masculinity but a perfectly typical one. It is in the normalcy of this libertine-masculinity, its lived and literary expressions, that Sade offers us insight of any kind: from Sade, and likewise from the shrilling legion of allegiants who’ve arisen to canonize him, we learn how little men have to teach us about transgression, about freedom, and about sexuality. So we can officially stop listening to them. Men like Sade and his flock of rebel-sophisticates are born into possession of male power, the predominant oppressive force responsible for the degradation of life on this planet, and they accept this power, because it is theirs. As they do not challenge their own power, they offer no opposition to the male supremacist structures and ideologies and institutions that are at the root of every creature’s captivity. Their transgressions and liberatory adventures are therefore superficial at best, ranging from entirely meaningless to actively counterrevolutionary, as the aim of these undertakings is often to further liberate male power so that it can manifest itself more explicitly, entrench itself more deeply. The expansion of male freedoms is in service of male supremacy is in service of the continuation of exploitation, cruelty, oppression, violence, misogyny, alienation—the putrefaction of human society. In the theory of sadomasochistic sexual liberation we find a consummate example of male supremacist regressive-rebellion; from Sade’s era to our own sadomasochistic sexual liberation has sought only greater freedom for already quite free men, mining its core thrills from the power dynamics of sexual dualism and somatophobic prurience of status quo sexuality, granting men ever freer latitude to act out their loathing of women and the body. Reflecting on Sade as its patron saint, beloved forefather, we see clearly that sadomasochism from its origins has been as stifling and as stupid as the standard it reinforces.
To delve further into just how stifling, stupid and standard all of this Bad Boy sexual transgression-liberation can be, in the next installment we’ll be attending to the S&M musings of Georges Bataille, a Sadean heir and philosophe of masculinist eroticism, who once wrote in what must have been a moment of extreme liberation: “The body is a thing; vile, slavish, servile…”15
NOTES:
1. Seaver, R. & Wainhouse, A. Foreword, 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
2. Apollinaire, “The Divine Marquis.” (cited by Shattuck, R., 1997).
3. Éluard, P. (cited by Steintrager, J.A., 2005).
4. de Beauvoir, S. “Must We Burn Sade?” trans. Annette Michelson, in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. Sade, trans. Seaver & Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
5. Dworkin, A. “The Marquis de Sade.” Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigree Books, 1981.
6. Paulhan, J. “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” in Justine; Philosophy in the Bedroom; Eugenie de Franval, and Other Writings. Sade, trans Seaver & Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1966.
7. Heine, M. (cited by Seaver, R. & Wainhouse, A., 1967).
8. Steintrager, J.A. “Liberating Sade.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, 18.2. (2005): 351-379.
9. Snyder, H.N., Sexual assault of young children as reported to law enforcement: Victim, incident and offender characteristics, in A NIBRS Statistical Report. 2000, U.S. Department of Justice: Washington, D.C.
10. Marchbanks, P.J., Lui, K.J., & Mercy, J.A. “Risk of Injury from resisting rape.” American Journal of Epidemiology, 132.3. (1990): 540-549.
11. http://murderpedia.org/male.F/f/fish-albert.htm
12. Seaver, R. & Wainhouse, A. Foreword, in Justine; Philosophy in the Bedroom; Eugenie de Franval, and Other Writings. Sade, trans. Seaver & Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1966.
13. Sade, Selected Letters, ed. Margaret Crosland, trans. W.J. Strachan. New York: October House, 1966. (cited by Dworkin, 1981).
14. “Quills”: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180073/
15. Bataille, G. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962.
* Shattuck, R. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New York: Mariner Books, 1997.
* Klossowski, P. “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. Sade, trans. Seaver & Wainhouse. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
