The Sadeian Woman (5)

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." - Samuel Johnson

***

This is the final instalment of the series.


"Belmore, the immolator of small boys, suggests to his good friend, Juliette, Justine’s sister, in the sequel to Justine that the origin of the unnatural reverence for women which finds its expression in the forms of romantic love derives from the professions of witchcraft and prophecy that women exercised in the antique past. To a man freed from ignorant superstion, says Belmore, women are no more than sexual receptacles, pieces of plumbing. All mystification stripped from her, Celia does not only shit; she becomes herself a commode."

"Theft represents the morality of the outlaw. Duval, the master thief, lectures the girls: ‘If you trace the right of property back to its source, you always arrive at usurpation.’ Theft, therefore, is a moral imperative; it is a means of redistributing property. Theft, deceit and cunning are the revenges of the weak upon the strong, of the poor upon the rich. One of Juliette's colleagues encourages her to steal for the sake of the principle of human equality; where equality has not been established by chance or fate, it is up to the poor to ensure it by their ingenuity."

"She meets a man of power, the statesman, Noirceuil, who teaches her how Nature made the weak to be the slaves of the strong. She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny. All living creatures are born and die in isolation, says Noirceuil; in the cultivation and practice of egoism and self-interest alone may be found true happiness. Juliette is immediately drawn to this credo of bourgeois individualism.

When Noirceuil tells Juliette that he murdered her father, she declares that she loves him and is soon installed in his house as his mistress, with special instructions to torment his wife, whom he designates as a ‘mere pleasure machine’. Noirceuil has also instructed her in the rare pleasures of avarice. She returns to Duvergier’s brothel, to earn more money in her spare time, for the richer she becomes, the more money she must have."


"The nature of production-consumption relation of shit in Sade is illuminated by a psychoanalytic interpretation. The faeces are the child’s first gift. He can give them or withhold them at whim; utilising his excremental production, he can cause his mother delight or distress since, by producing them, he expresses active compliance with his environment and, by retaining them, disaffection. With his shit, he expresses obedience or disobedience. Before he can speak, his excretions are the child’s means of expression - shit and tears; in this, he is just like the victims in the castle. He is, however, more in control of his shit than he is of his weepings. Excretion is his first concrete production and, through it, the child gains his first experience of labour relations. He may reserve the right to go on excremental strike or to engage in a form of faecal offensive. The excremental faculty is a manipulative device and to be baulked of the free control of it is to be deprived of the first, most elementary, expression of autonomy."


"The coprophagic passions of the libertines reflect their exhaustive greed. The anal Juliette has an appropriately anal passion for capital accumulation. There is more to coprophagy than a particularly exotic perversion that requires an extraordinary degree of mastery of disgust to be able to indulge in it; the coprophage’s taste asserts the function of flesh as a pure means of production in itself. His economic sense, alert even in the grip of passion, insists that even the waste products of the flesh must not be wasted. All must be consumed."


"Juliette’s second acquaintance in Rome is the Pope himself. This Pope, like many of his predecessors, is a profligate atheist. His coprophilia is a statement of his apostasy: ‘I worship shit.’ Juliette participates in an orgy at the altar of St Peter’s, a venue of, simultaneously, privilege and sacrilege. There are further murderous orgies in the Sistine Chapel; these are the most fitting shrines for crime, opines Sade."


"Clairwil, the man-hater, can exhaust the combined pricks of all the inhabitants of the monastery of the Carmelites, since this insatiability has in itself a castratory function. Male sexuality exhausts itself in its exertion; Clairwil unmans men by fucking them and then retires to the inexhaustible arms of her female lovers."


"Men long for it and fear it; the womb, that comfortably elastic organ, is a fleshly link between past and future, the physical location of an everlasting present tense that can usefully serve as a symbol of eternity, a concept that has always presented some difficulties in visualisation. The hypothetical dream-time of the foetus seems to be the best that we can do.

For men, to fuck is to have some arcane commerce with this place of ultimate privilege, where, during his lengthy but unremembered stay, he was nourished, protected, lulled to sleep by the beating of his mother’s heart and not expected to do a stroke of work, a repose, of course, not unlike that of a corpse, except that a foetus’s future lies before it. And the curious resemblance between the womb and the grave lies at the roots of all human ambivalence towards both the womb and its bearer; we mediate our experience through imagination and dream but sometimes the dream gets in the way of the experience, and obscures it completely — the womb is the First and Last Place, earth, the greatest mother of them all, from whom we come, to whom we go...

The womb is the earth and also the grave of being; it is the warm, moist, dark, inward, secret, forbidden, fleshly core of the unknowable labyrinth of our experience. Curiously, it is the same for both men and women, because the foetus is either male or female, though sometimes both; but only men are supposed to feel a holy dread before its hairy portals. Only men are privileged to return, even if only partially and intermittently, to this place of fleshly extinction; and that is why they have a better grasp of eternity and abstract concepts than we do.

They want it for themselves, of course. But not, of course, a real one, with all the mess and inconvenience that goes with it. The womb is an imaginative locale and has an imaginative location far away from my belly, beyond my flesh, beyond my house, beyond this city, this society, his economic structure — it lies in an area of psychic metaphysiology suggesting such an anterior primacy of the womb that our poor dissecting tools of reason blunt on its magnitude before they can even start on the job. This inner space must have been there before any of the outer places; in the beginning was the womb and its periodic and haphazard bleedings are so many signs that it has a life of its own, unknowab1e to us. This is the most sacred of all places. Women are sacred because they possess it. That, as Justine would have known if she had thought about it, is why they are treated so badly for nothing can defile the sacred."


"As Dolmancé penetrates her anally while she inflicts the artificial penis with which he has equipped her upon her mother, Eugénie cries: ‘Here I am, at one stroke incestuous, adultress, sodomite and all that in a girl who has only lost her virginity today!’ The act of profanation and sacrilege she has performed, a fugue of sexual and familial misconduct, is a Sadeian rite de passage into complete sexual being. The violence of Eugénie’s reaction is some indication of the degree of repression from which she has suffered. It is also a characteristic piece of Sadeian black humour.

Then the libertines invalidate Madame de Mistival’s long- cherished and hypocritical chastity by introducing into the gathering a syphilitic who inoculates her with the pox in both orifices, forcing her to suffer the very punishment specially reserved by natural justice for the pleasures she has always denied herself. Finally, Eugénie seizes needle and thread and sews her securely up...

Eugénie’s delirious transgression has ensured her own sexual freedom at the cost of the violent cessation of the possibility of her mother’s own sexual life. Her triumph over her mother is complete."


"In the Freudian orchestration, now father enters the nursery and interposes his phallic presence between his daughter and her mother; his arrival in the psychic theatre, bearing his irreplaceable prick before him like a wand of office, a conductor’s baton, a sword of severance, signifies the end of the mother’s role as seducer and as beloved. ‘The turning away from the mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate,’ hypothesises Freud in his essay on femininity in the New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis. The primary passion was in capable of the consummation of a child. The girl now turns to the father in the expectation he will give her the object that he possesses which she lacks, the phallus that is a substitute child and also makes children, that weapon which is a symbol of authority, of power, and will pierce the opacity of the world. Freud’s account of this process has such extraordinary poetic force that, however false it might be, it remains important as an account of what seemed, at one point in history, a possible progression. It retains a cultural importance analagous, though less far-reaching, to the myth of the crime of Eve in the Old Testament."


I think the line "Freud’s account of this process has such extraordinary poetic force that, however false it might be, it remains important as an account of what seemed, at one point in history, a possible progression" is very telling.

Extracts from The Sadeian Woman (4)

"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." - George Santayana

***

"The victim is always morally superior to the master; that is the victim’s ambivalent triumph. That is why there have been so few notoriously wicked women in comparison to the number of notoriously wicked men; our victim status ensures that we rarely have the opportunity. Virtue is thrust upon us. If that is nothing, in itself, to be proud of, at least it is nothing of which to be ashamed."


"Mae West’s sexuality, the most overt in the history of the cinema, could only be tolerated on the screen because she did not arrive in Hollywood until she had reached the age associated with menopause. This allowed her some of the anarchic freedom of the female impersonator, pantomime dame, who is licensed to make sexual innuendos because his masctilinity renders them a form of male aggression upon the women he personates.

Mae West's joke upon her audience was, however, a superior kind of double bluff. She was in reality a sexually free woman, economically independent, who wrote her own starring vehicles in her early days in the theatre and subsquently exercised an iron hand on her own Hollywood career... Age did not wither her but only increased her self-confidence until she could actually pretend to be a female impersonator, aided, not desexualised, by the maturity which frees women of the fecundity which is the most troubling aspect of their sexuality...

Garbo and Dietrich... often appeared in drag, which is often reassuring to men, since a woman who pretends to be a man has also cancelled out her reproductive system, like the post-menopausal woman, and may also freely function as a safety valve for homo-erotic fantasy."


"Mailer approvingly quotes Diana Trilling:

None but Marilyn Monroe could suggest such a purity of sexual delight. The boldness with which she could parade herself and yet never be gross, her sexual flamboyance and bravado which yet breathed an air of mystery and reticence, her voice which carried such ripe overtones of erotic excitement and yet was the voice of a tiny child - these complications were integral to her gift. And they described a young woman trapped in some never-never land of unawareness.

... Marilyn’s lonely death by barbiturates, nude, in bed, a death adored and longed for by all necrophiles, is the contemporary death-by-lightning of the sweet, dumb blonde, the blue-eyed lamb with the golden fleece led to slaughter on the altar of the world. You can even see real scar-tissue (from a gall-bladder opetation; the female interior bearing the marks of the intimate, cruel excavation of the scalpel) in the nude pictures Bert Stern took of her the summer before her death. Since a child, she had been steeped in the doctrines of Christian Science...

Monroe was not born but became a blonde; blondeness is a state of ambivalent grace, to which anyone who wants it badly enough may aspire... Fatherless already through illegitimacy, she, heart-struck by the poignancy of her situation, invented for herself a true orphan’s biography of hardship, a childhood spent in orphanages where she scrubbed floors, was beaten, accused of theft, bedded down in windowless cupboards and, inevitably, raped.

These misfortunes add the irresistible dew of suffering to ripeness. ‘I see your suffering,’ says the hero of Arthur Miller’s play, After the Fall, to a woman with a scandalous resemblance to Monroe. A visible capacity for suffering evokes further suffering. She is a past master at inspiring rage and at deflecting it from herself on to her entire sex; is she not a sex symbol, and hence the symbolic personification of her entire sex? After Some Like It Hot was finished, the director, Billy Wilder, told an interviewer that it had been many weeks before he ‘could look at my wife without wanting to hit her because she is a woman’...

The blonde’s physical fragility is, of course, only apparent. She must have a robust constitution to survive the arrows life deals her. Her fragility is almost the conscious disguise of masochism and masochism necessitates an infinite resilience. Nevertheless, the victim proclaims her vulnerability in every gesture, every word, every act; defining herself in the third person...

Monroe, in her major movies, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to The Misfits, is a Good Bad Girl. The theory of the sentimental image of the Good Bad Girl is that she has all the appearance of a tart and an air of continuous availability but, when the chips are down, she would never stoop to sell herself. Less reprehensibly, indeed, almost commendably - and for a moment we are allowed to admire her misguided generosity - she gives it away for free. But her affairs always end badly, her generosity is always abused, she does not realise her flesh is sacred because it is as good as money. In short, she is the most risible and pathetic figure, the unsuccessful prostitute, living proof that crime does not pay and the wages of sin will be too small to pay the rent. Her poor show as a prostitute, as a business woman, is proof in itself that her heart is made of gold..

It is part of Saint Justine’s baleful bequest that blonde Bad Good Girls always come to bad ends; brunettes and even redheads... have acquired the toughness of Juliette and put their bodies to work actively for them...

The mythic role of the Good Bad Girl is, however, directly at variance with the real facts of her life, as all mythic roles are apt to be. She pretends to be an unsuccessful prostitute but, in fact, she is a very successful prostitute indeed and, what is more, one who does not have to deliver the goods. She sells, not the reality of flesh, but its image and so she makes her living, a successful but imaginary prostitute... She sells a perpetually unfulfilled promise of which the unfulfillment is a consolation rather than a regret. The reality of her could never live up to her publicity. So she retains her theoretical virginity, even if she is raped by a thousand eyes twice nightly."

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

Extracts from The Sadeian Woman (3)

"I never know how much of what I say is true." - Bette Midler

***

"Sade had said he would gladly be a martyr for atheism, if any were needed; to be a martyr for pornography may have struck him as a less glorious fate."


"The question of her virtue is itself an interesting one. As the brigand, Coeur-de-Fer, says to her: why does such an intelligent girl so persistently locate virtue in the region of her genitals?

For Justine’s conception of virtue is a specifically feminine one in that sexual abstinence plays a large part in it. In common speech, a ‘bad boy’ may be a thief, or a drunkard, or a liar, and not necessarily just a womaniser. But a ‘bad girl’ always contains the meaning of a sexually active girl and Justine knows she is good because she does not fuck. When, against her will, she is fucked, she knows she remains good because she does not feel pleasure. She implores La Dubois’ brigands to spare her honour, that is, to refrain from deflowering her; a woman’s honour, in the eighteenth century, is always a matter of her sexual reputation. Obeying the letter if not the spirit of her request, they strip her, sexually abuse her and ejaculate upon her body. ‘They respected my honour, if not my modesty,’ she congratulates herself. Her virginity has a metaphysical importance to her. Her unruptured hymen is a visible sign of her purity, even if her breasts and belly have been deluged in spunk.

Later, her virginity gone, she will tell herself that she has nothing to reproach herself with but a rape and, since that was involuntary, it was not a sin. She is less scrupulous than her literary progenitor, Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, the first great suffering virgin in the history of literature, who, though she had been drugged into unconsciousness while the act took place, still believed herself in complicity with a rape of which she had known nothing. Justine is less scrupulous because her virtue is a female ruse that denies her own sexuality; nevertheless, though she may deplore the sexuality of incontinent men who think of rape the moment they see her, as all men do with Justine, she is sufficiently pragmatic to have deduced, from the fact that rape has patently not changed her, that Coeur-de-Fer was right and virtue does not depend exclusively on the state of her hymen. She concludes her virtue depends on her own reluctance.

Her sexual abstinence, her denial of her own sexuality, is what makes her important to herself. Her passionately held conviction that her morality is intimately connected with her genitalia makes it become so. Her honour does indeed reside in her vagina because she honestly believes it does so. She has seized on the only area she is certain of as a means of nourishing her own self-respect, even if it involves the cruellest repressions and a good deal of physical distress.

Repression is Justine’s whole being — repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact. She cannot conceive of any pleasure at all in the responses of her own body to sexual activity, and so automatically precludes the possibility of accidentally experiencing pleasure...

Now she is no longer a virgin, her chastity can still exist in the form of frigidity. She seems almost a monster of the fear of sexuality. Since she herself denies the violence of her own desires, all her sexual encounters become for her a form of violence because she is not free to judge them. The fluids of her orgasm are the tears that are an implicit invitation to further rapes. For she does fear rape at all; it is over in a moment and implies no relation with the aggressor. The violent but brief mastery of rape leaves her sense of self inviolate. A rape may be performed in the singular and denies the notion of consent. It is not rape but seduction she fears, and the loss of self in participating in her own seduction, for one must be willing or deluded, or, at least, willing to be deluded, in order to be seduced...

She cannot envisage a benign sexuality and, though her strength lies in her refusal to do so, nevertheless, the limitations of her sexuality are the limitations of her life. She sees herself only as the object of lust. She does not act, she is. She is the object of a thousand different passions, some of them very strange, but she is the subject of not a single one. She can indulge in her infatuation for the homosexual de Bressac because she knows in advance he will be indifferent to her. Later, she accepts Dubreuil’s proposal of marriage solely because he has made it to her; it is not the exercise of a choice and, besides, her own sexual response does not enter into the contractual obligations of marriage...

She is not in control of her life; her poverty and her femininity conspire to rob her of autonomy. She is always the dupe of an experience that she never experiences as experience; her innocence invalidates experience and turns it into events, things that happen to her but do not change her. This is the common experience of most women’s lives, conducted always in the invisible presence of others who extract the meaning of her experience for themselves and thereby diminish all meaning, so that a seduction, or a birth, or a marriage, the central events in the lives of most women, the stages of a life, are marginal occurrences in the life of the seducer, the father or the husband."

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

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

Extracts from The Sadeian Woman (1)

"In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning." - George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"

***

After the part that rings true, here begins a series of the rest of the extracts from a book that is most fun to read.

Even if most of it is baseless rubbish, I can understand why people like to believe in well-written nonsense that resonates with their convictions and beliefs (this also explains why Freud is so popular despite an almost total lack of evidence)


"Our flesh arrives to us out of history, like everything else does. We may believe we fuck stripped of social artifice; in bed, we even feel we touch the bedrock of human nature itself. But we are deceived. Flesh is not an irreducible human universal. Although the erotic relationship may seem to exist freely, on its own terms, among the distorted social relationships of a bourgeois society, it is, in fact, the most self-conscious of all human relationships, a direct confrontation of two beings whose actions in the bed are wholly determined by their acts when they are out of it. If one sexual partner is economically dependent on the other, then the question of sexual coercion, of contractual obligation, raises its ugly head in the very abode of love and inevitably colours the nature of the sexual expression of affection. The marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives of necessity fuck by contract. Prostitutes are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability, but their services are suffering a decline in demand now that other women have invaded their territory in their own search for a newly acknowledged sexual pleasure. In this period, promiscuous abandon may seem the only type of free exchange.

But no bed, however unexpected, no matter how apparently gratuitous, is free from the de-universalising facts of real life. We do not go to bed in simple pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies - all the bits and pieces of our unique existences. These considerations have limited our choice of partners before we have even got them into the bedroom"


"Women experience sexuality and reproduction quite differently than men do; rich women are more in control of the sequence than poor women and so may ac tually enjoy flicking and childbirth, when poor women might find them both atrocious simply because they are poor and cannot afford comfort, privacy and paid help.

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick."

"The function of plot in a pornograhic narrativ is always the same. It exists purely to provide as many opportunities as possible for the sexual act to take place. There is no room here for tension or the unexpected. We know what is going to happen; that is why we are reading the book. Characterisation is necessarily limited by the formal necessity for the actors to fuck as frequently and as ingeniously as possible. But they do not do so because they are continually consumed by desire; the free expression of desire is as alien to pornography as it is to marriage. In pornography, both men and women fuck because to fuck is their raison d'etre. It is their life work."


"Pornogaphy can only allow its phantoms to exist in the moment of sexual excitation; they cannot engage in the wide range of activity in the real world in which sexual performance is not the supeme business of all people at all times... pornogrphy is basically propaganda for fucking, an activity, one would have thought, that did not need much advertising in itself, because most people want to do it as soon as they know how.

The denial of the social fact of sexuality in pornography is made explicit in its audience. Produced in the main by men for an all-male cliente1 suggesting certain analogies with a male brothel, access to pornography is usually denied to women at any any level, often on the specious grounds that women do not find descriptions of the seual act erotically stimulating. Yet if pornograpby is produced by men for a male audience, it is exclusively concerned with relations between the sexes and even the specialised area of homosexual pornography divides its actors into sexual types who might roughtly be defined as 'masculine' and 'feminine'. So all pornography suffers the methodological defects of a manual of navigation written by and for land-lubbers.

Many pornographic novels are written in the first person as if by a woman, or use a woman as the focus of the narrative; but this device only reinforces the male orientation of the fiction. John Cleland’s Fanny Hill and the anonymous The Story of O, both classics of the genre, appear in this way to describe a woman’s mind through the fiction of her sexuality. This technique ensures that the gap left in the text is of just the right size for the reader to insert his prick into, the exact dimensions, in fact, of Fanny’s vagina or of O’s anus."

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

The whore is despised by the hypocritical world...

"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception." - Groucho Marx

***

The truest passage in the book:

"The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her. The lovely Justine, the sacred woman, denies her value in this world by refusing to sell herself on any terms and even refusing to accept the notion of the morality of contract. But her body is by far the most valuable thing she has to sell. She will never make a living out of the sale of her labour power, alone.

However, in a world organised by contractual obligations, the whore represents the only possible type of honest woman. If the world in its present state is indeed a brothel - and the moral difference between selling one’s sexual labour and one’s manual labour is, in these terms, though never in Justine’s terms, an academic one — then every attempt the individual makes to escape the conditions of sale will only bring a girl back to the crib, again, in some form or another. At least the girl who sells herself with her eyes open is not a hypocrite and, in a world with a cash-sale ideology, that is a positive, even a heroic virtue.

The whore has made of herself her own capital investment. Her product — her sexual activity, her fictitious response — is worth precisely what the customer is willing to pay for it, no more and no less, but that is only what is true of all products. But the whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder. She sells herself; but she is a fair tradesman and her explicit acceptance of contractual obligation implicit in all sexual relations mocks the fraud of the 'honest' woman who will give nothing at all in return for goods and money except the intangible and hence unassessable perfume of her presence. The honest whore is assured of her own immediate value, not only in her own valuation but in the valuation of her customers. So she can afford to ignore the opinion of the rest of the world but she will not be respected for her integrity although, if she is successful enough, and her business prospers, she may ‘ruin’ men, like any other successful entrepreneur."

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

(other extracts will follow at a later date, though in the main they are more hilarious than illuminating)


Addendum: Aka: Extracts from The Sadeian Woman (0)