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

imprisonment, because no one could prove that he did, includingeyewitnesses whose word could never match his own: “A child’stestimony? But this was a servant; thus, in his capacity as a childand as a servant he cannot be believed. ” 31 Second, everything hehad done was common practice. These two contradictory strains ofself-defense often fuse to reveal the Sade obscured by his mesmerizedapologists. Here he defends himself, again to his wife, visa-vishis abuse of the five fifteen-year-old girls originally procuredby Nanon, who later bore his child:I go off with them; I use them. Six months later, some parentscome along to demand their return. I give them back [he didnot], and suddenly a charge of abduction and rape is broughtagainst me. It is a monstrous injustice. T he law on this point is. . . as follows: it is expressly forbidden in France for anyprocuress to supply virgin maidens, and if the girl supplied is avirgin and lodges a complaint, it is not the man who is chargedbut the procuress who is punished severely on the spot. Buteven if the male offender has requested a virgin he is not liableto punishment: he is merely doing what all men do. It is, Irepeat, the procuress who provided him with the girl and whois perfectly aware that she is expressly forbidden to do so, whois guilty. Therefore this first charge against me in Lyon ofabduction and rape was entirely illegal: I have committed nooffence. It is the procuress to whom I have applied who is liableto punishment—not I. 34T he use of women, as far as Sade was concerned, was an absoluteright, one that could not fairly be limited or abrogated under anycircumstances. His outrage at being punished for his assaults onfemales never abated. His claim to innocence rested finally on asimple assertion: “I am guilty of nothing more than simplelibertinage such as it is practised by all men more or less accordingto their natural temperaments or tendencies. ” 35 Sade’s fraternal tieswere apparent only when he used the crimes of other men to justifyhis own.Sade designated “libertinage” as the main theme of his work.Richard Seaver and Austryn W ainhouse, in a foreword to a