Extracts from The Sadeian Woman (2)

"A male-dominated society produces a pornography of universal female aquiescence. Or, most delicious titillation, of compensatory but spurious female dominance. Miss Stern with her rods and whips, Our Lady of Pain in her leather visor and her boots with sharp, castratory heels, is a true fantasy, a distorted version of the old saying ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.’ This whip hand rocks the cradle in which her customer dreams but it does nothing else. Miss Stern’s dominance exists only in the bedroom. She may utilise apparatus that invokes heaven, hell and purgatory for her client, she may utterly ravage his body, martyrise him, shit on him, piss on him, but her cruelty is only the manifestation of the victim or patient’s guilt before the fact of his own sexuality, of which he is ashamed. She is not truel for her own sake, or for her own gratification. She is most truly subservient when most apparently dominant; Miss Stern and her pretended victim have established a mutually degrading pact between them and she in her weird garb is mutilated more savagely by the erotic violence she perpetrates than he by the pain he undergoes, since his pain is in the nature of a holiday from his life, and her cruelty an economic fact of her real life, so much hard work. You can describe their complicity in a pornographic novel but to relate it to her mortgage, her maid’s salary and her laundry bills is to use the propaganda technique of pornography to express a view of the world, which deviates from the notion that all this takes place in a kindergarten of soiled in cence. A kindergarten? Only small children, in our society do not need to work."


"Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and 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 and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation. Sade became a terrorist of the imagination in this way, turning the unacknowledged truths of the encounters of sexuality into a cruel festival at which women are the prime sacrificial victims when they are not the ritual murderesses themselves, the eve lamb and Miss Stern together, alike only in that they always remain under the constant surveillance of the other half of mankind."


"[Sade] is uncommon amongst pornographers in that he rarely, if ever, makes sexual activity seem immediately attractive as such. Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging. For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields."


"Sade describes the condition of women in the genre of the pornography of sexual violence but believed it would only be through the medium of sexual violence that women might heal themselves of their socially inflicted scars, in a praxis of destruction and sacrilege: He cites the flesh as existential verification in itself, in a rewriting of the Cartesian cogito: ‘I fuck therefore I am’. From this axiom, he constructs a diabolical lyricism of fuckery, since the acting-out of a total sexuality in a repressive society turns all eroticism into violence, makes of sexuality itself a permanent negation. Fucking, says Sade, is the basis of all human relationships but the activity parodies all human relations because of the nature of the society that creates and maintains those relationships."


"Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-done over, undone. Whatever else he says or does not say, Sade declares himself unequivocally for the right of to fuck - as if the period in which women fuck aggressively, tyrannously and cruelly will be a necessary stage in the development of a general human consciousness of the nature of flicking; that if it is not egalitarian, it is unjust. Sade does not suggest this process as such; but he urges women to fuck as actively as they are able, so that powered by their enormous and hitherto untapped sexual they will then be able to fuck their way into history doing so, change it.

One of Sade’s singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality."


"[Sade] took a box of aniseed balls flavoured with cantharides with him to a brothel in Marseilles and fed the girls with them, to make them fart, which he enjoyed. There was a good deal of whipping and his valet, who accompanied him, buggered him but the girls, cannily, refused to be buggered because they knew they could get into trouble for it. Later that day, the girls who had eaten the sweets began to vomit. One girl, Marguerite Coste, thought she had been poisoned and went to the magistrate. The public prosecutor issued warrants for the arrest of the Marquis and his valet, Latour, but they had fled from Avignon. They were tried in absentia and found guilty of ‘poisoning and sodomy’, although the girls were all quite well by now. In absentia, both men were burned in effigy at Aix-en-Provence. Sodomy was at that time a capital crime in France."

--- The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History / Angela Carter