The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

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Our Family Station in St Pancras is open from 10.00-12.00 every Friday and we're continuing to welcome schools, as well as families and adult learners to our courses and access events. All our in-person and livestreamed events are going ahead. Other services I have been composing letters to you in my head since I first read your book The Sadeian Woman 2 years ago but now I really have to do it as I leave for England in a week & I was hoping to maybe have the opportunity to meet you. [sic]

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: Each of the next three chapters is dedicated to one of Sade’s books: "Justine", "Juliette" and "Philosophy in the Bourdoir".She was no malleable, since frigid, substance upon which desires might be executed; she was not a true prostitute for she was the object on which men prostituted themselves.” Sayings & Quotes from Other Works

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.” 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” 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."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) His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. [...] Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women’

It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his own private space. 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." 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 Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.” Nights at the Circus

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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 tortures and murders Justine because he thinks she's boring and the only form of entertainment he will get from her is torturing her and then killing her. Sade was probably fed up with virginal holier-than-thou heroines and I doubt it actually runs any deeper than that.