THE SADEIAN WOMAN

Product Information

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. How can a movement seek to move beyond mere gender definition and call itself 'feminism'? Would we call a movement to erase the delineation between rich and poor 'povertism'? This coming to an end, this expulsion is an un-selfing. For all of the pleasure, it too is alienating.

Torr tells of how the writer’s 1978 polemic The Sadeian Woman allowed her to reconcile the different aspects of her life: her position of subjugation in the office, her desire to be a performer recognised for her skills, and her nightly transformation into the object of male sexual desire. As Torr states: A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh."

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

Paper of the Day

The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role in the world of God, the King and the Law. She does not subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness." The above analysis occurs in the first chapter called "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women". 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.

Like Simone de Beauvoir’s essay before it, the analysis is couched in the Hegelian terminology of Master and Slave. This book's primary thesis is that the Marquis De Sade is the father of modern feminism. For the uninitiated, De Sade's works are infamous for their depictions of sexual humiliation and cruelty. We get the term 'sadism' from the sex practices he fearlessly explored.This book was roundly and vehemently criticized by high-ranking feminists when it was published. They could see no way that their plight could possibly be illuminated in the works of any man, let alone a man possessed of a perverse and dehumanizing sexuality. Torr tells of how the writer’s 1978 polemic The Sadeian Woman allowed her to reconcile the different aspects of her life: her position of subjugation in the office, her desire to be a performer recognised for her skills, and her nightly transformation into the object of male sexual desire. As Torr states: The Library's buildings remain fully open but some services are limited, including access to collection items. We're

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with.” Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.” 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". 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)It will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds… By the time I had finished your book, I was really transformed – not exactly a Juliette, but I knew how to sell my body & at the same time how to maintain a sense of my own subjective reality within each strange place I would travel to. Pornography and the feminist movement At the same time, porn strips away extraneous detail, it reduces the sexual performance to pure functionality, to the interaction of penis and vagina, to erect probe and fringed hole. It strips away all of the complexity of real life and mythologises it: She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”– Saints and Strangers