THE SADEIAN WOMAN

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The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.” The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman urn:lcp:sadeianwoman00ange_0:epub:f5e42faf-20f7-40d7-b3d5-38089ae902bd Extramarc Columbia University Libraries Foldoutcount 0 Identifier sadeianwoman00ange_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t6tx4dc51 Isbn 0860680541

The flipside of the outlaw status of the libertine is that the pleasure he gets is bound up with criminality. In fact, the pleasure is greater, precisely because the sexual act is criminal:It allows a male to imagine a substitute activity, which is not what he is immediately reading about, nor is it real life sexual activity. It’s an act of the reader’s imagination.

Justine is the holy virgin; Juliette is the profane whore…Juliette is of the world, worldly..her sexual affairs are engaged in either for profit or for fun; she is contemptuous, embarrassed by professions of love.And maybe he was all that. People are complicated. But the reason why Justine (the "Madonna" character who got punished, tortured and killed for her virtue) and Juliette (the "Whore" character who got her cake, ate it, killed her children and got rich lol) are the way they are isn't because of some deep beliefs Sade held. Juliette is a version of Faust written by a man who believed that, if man exists, we do not need to invent the devil." The reduction of woman to universalized flesh distracts a woman from the far more important recognition that "my anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self." In De Sade’s 1791 novel Justine ou les Malheurs de la Vertu (“Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue”), Justine, the titular character, is repeatedly subjected to violent rapes and humiliations. Her sister, Juliette, the heroine of the accompanying book Histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice (“Juliette, or The Prosperities of Vice”), portrays the obverse of this tale of suffering femininity.

Still, for all the focus on flesh, it’s abstracted or sublimated into words. It works in the mind. It creates and caters to a "cerebral insatiability". I don’t recall any point at which she says that Sade is an unreserved moral pornographer, in the sense that the whole of his work has this moral purpose. Instead, she says: Sade’s heroines, those who become libertines, accept damnation…exile from human life, as a necessary fact of life…So Sade creates a museum of woman-monsters."in the character of Justine Sade contrived to isolate the dilemma of an emergent type of woman. Justine, daughter of a banker, becomes the prototype of two centuries of women who find the world was not, as they had been promised, made for them and who do not have, because they have not been given, the existential tools to remake the world for themselves. These self-consciously blameless ones suffer and suffer until it becomes second nature; Justine marks the start of a kind of self-regarding female masochism, a woman with no place in the world, no status, the core of whose resistance has been eaten away by self-pity. Justine’s virtue is not the continuous exercise of a moral faculty. It is a sentimental response to the world in which she always hopes her good behavior will procure her some reward, some respite from the bleak and intransigent reality which surrounds her and to which she cannot accommodate herself. The virtuous, the interesting Justine, with her incompetence, her gullibility, her whining, her frigidity, her reluctance to take control of her own life, is a perfect woman. She always does what she is told. She is at the mercy of any master, because that is the nature of her own definition of goodness. urn:oclc:493608311 Republisher_date 20120305024526 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120303011558 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) Looking for ways in which the tiger and the lamb or the tiger and lamb parts of the psyche can reach some sort of accommodation" (Atwood, P:120)

To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case—that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.” For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff’s pillow—we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it’s been fun or it’s been not. So all cats have a politician’s air; we smile and smile and so they think we’re villains”

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Let’s assume that she is referring to sexually explicit literature. It extends to both erotica and erotic violence. The focus of this work is literary pornography. It’s not really concerned with visual or graphic erotica. It’s about words. The issue is with what can be conveyed by words and imagination alone. But after reading through this exhausting non fiction that sees Freudian archetypes in every single female character portrayed and then dissects de Sade's spiritual feelings on them (and why he's afraid of a certain type of woman, yadayada), I will say something that some people apparently need to hear: Pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh…it reduces the actors in the drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest."