Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

So sexual philosopher Georges Bataille, in Death and Sensuality,can write without embarrassment (or, until the women’s movement,without fear of contradiction): “In his life de Sade took otherpeople into account, but his conception of fulfilment worked overand over in his lonely cell led him to deny outright [in writing] theclaim? of other people. ”4 Sade, of course, had denied outright theclaims of other people since his youth, but the “other people” wereprimarily women, real women, and so are of no significance toBataille.In the same way, Donald Thomas, one of Sade’s recent biographers,can claim: “T he cruelties of his fiction are quite at variancewith almost all Sade’s conduct. . . ” 5 Thomas also insists thatSade’s sexual desires were “indulged largely in his fiction. ” 6 T heabused bodies of women, piled up in heaps through a cruel andconscienceless life, are dismissed by facile distortion or completedenial. N ot above writing false history to trivialize Sade’s brutalitiesagainst women, Thomas, with this intellectual sleight ofhand, makes the victim disappear into thin air:T he Marquis de Sade’s true difficulty was not that he had aninclination for beating some of the girls [sic] whom he hired orthat he submitted them to unorthodox sexual acts, but that hedid this in the middle of the eighteenth century when they weremore likely to complain and be heard. 7It is fair to point out that the feudal system rather effectivelydiscouraged whores from going to the police with complaintsagainst noblemen.Simone de Beauvoir, in an essay entitled “Must We Burn Sade? ”first published in the early fifties, also manages to make the crimeand the victims nearly invisible: “Actually, whipping a few girls[sic] (for a consideration agreed upon in advance) is rather a pettyfeat; that Sade set so much store on it is enough to cast suspicion onhim . ” 0T he rights of women as persons are entirely, if disingenuously,denied by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, Sade’s translatorsinto English, in their foreword to a collection of Sade’s work: