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

Carter writes: “The affair enchants me. It has the completeness andlucidity of a script by Brecht. A woman of the third estate, abeggar, the poorest of the poor, turns the very vices of the rich intoweapons to wound them w ith. ” 19 Her flight of fancy nearly matchesthat of Hayman, who warns:Again we should not take it for granted that Sade wasenjoying himself. Was he even doing what he felt he wanted todo? As Gide said: “One can never know to what extent onefeels and to what extent one plays at feeling. This ambivalenceconstitutes the feeling. ” 20But it is Roland Barthes who most callously robs Rose Keller of herreal life in order to sustain Sade’s legend in pretty, if meaningless,prose:In the total disengagement from value produced by the pleasureof the Text, what I get from Sade’s life is not the spectacle,albeit grandiose, of a man oppressed by an entire societybecause of his passion, it is not the solemn contemplation of afate, it is, inter alia, that Provencal way in which Sade says“milli” (mademoiselle) Rousset, or milli Henriette, or milliLepinai, it is his white m uff when he accosts Rose Keller. . . 2ISade’s white muff matters.All of the girls and women hurt by Sade are treated bybiographers and intellectuals with this same endemic contempt. Anexchange of money, male to female, especially wipes away crime,negates harm—whether the commentator is a pedestrian biographeror a grand literary critic. T he use of money to buy women isapparently mesmerizing. It magically licenses any crime againstwomen. Once a woman has been paid, crime is expiated. T hat noreal harm was done, no matter what actually was done, is aparticularly important theme. This point is echoed in the KinseyInstitute’s study of sex offenders (see pages 188-198) and in a vastbody of contemporary social analyses that, explicitly or implicitly,define sexual freedom as men doing what they want without foolish