The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

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public Wi-Fi - this extends to the majority of our public spaces including the Reading Rooms, as well as our study desks and galleries at St Pancras (you won't require a login) It’s almost as if Juliette herself is the moral pornographer, the most appropriate vehicle for "the total demystification of the flesh." 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." Indeed, if partial emancipation is to become a complete and true emancipation of woman, it will have to do away with the ridiculous notion that to be loved, to be a sweetheart and mother, is synonymous with being slave or subordinate.

Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to one of Sade’s books: "Justine", "Juliette" and "Philosophy in the Bourdoir". Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”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". She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.”– Saints and Strangers

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 will have to do away with the absurd notion of the dualism of the sexes, or that man and woman represent two antagonistic worlds… Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this "infinitely complex organization, my self." He was a lovely man in many ways. But he kept on insisting on forgiving me when there was nothing to forgive.” Orgasm has possessed the libertine; during the irreducible timelessness of the moment of orgasm, the hole in the world through which we fall, he has been as a god, but this state is as fearful as it is pleasurable and, besides, is lost as soon as it is attained.

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Conservatives opposed it, however defined, because it was sexually explicit. Feminists opposed it because women might have been the implicit target of the work. Right and Left therefore united in opposition. There was little subtlety or endeavour to define an acceptable middle ground (apart from the traditional legal defence of artistic or literary merit). 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”

You can also still join BIPC events and webinars and access one-to-one support. See what's available at the British Library in St Pancras or online and in person via BIPCs in libraries across London. 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: urn:oclc:493608311 Republisher_date 20120305024526 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120303011558 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Worldcat (source edition) It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space. 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."The above analysis occurs in the first chapter called "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women". If the goal of feminism is to remove the discrepancies and prejudices between the sexes, why not name the philosophy after the goal instead of the conflict? 'Humanism' always sounded good to me. A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”