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

Sade himself, in a footnote to Juliette, claimed an authenticity forJuliette based on his conviction that women are more malevolentthan men:. . the more sensitive an individual, the more sharplythis atrocious Nature will bend him into conformance with evil’sirresistible laws; whence it is that women surrender to it moreheatedly and perform it with greater artistry than men. ”40 Themessage that women are evil and must be punished permeatesSade’s work, whether the female figures in question are supposed torepresent good or evil. The vileness of women and an intense hatredof female genitalia are major themes in every Sadean opus. Bothmale and female characters evince a deep aversion to and loathing ofthe vagina. Anal penetration is not only preferred; often the vaginamust be hidden for the male to be aroused at all. Sade’s femalelibertines are eloquent on the inferiority of the vagina to the rectum.While boys and men are used in Sade’s lust murders, women areexcoriated for all the characteristics that distinguish them frommen. In Sade’s scheme of things, women are aggressively slaughteredbecause women are repulsive as both biological and emotionalbeings. The arrogance of women in claiming any rights over theirown bodies is particularly offensive to Sade. Any uppity pretense tobodily integrity on a woman’s part must be fiercely and horriblypunished. Even where Sade, in one or two places, insists onwomen’s right to abort pregnancies at will, his sustained celebrationof abortion as erotically charged murder places abortion squarelywithin the context of his own utterly and unredeemably male valuesystem: in this system, women have no bodily rights.A religious scholar, John T . Noonan, Jr., names Sade as “thefirst in Western Europe to praise abortion. . . ”41 Citing Noonan,Linda Bird Francke, in The Ambivalence of Abortion, claims thatSade’s advocacy of abortion was instrumental in the papal decisionthat abortion must be prohibited from gestation on. CharacterizingSade’s work as part of the proabortion movement, she asserts thatSade “actually extolled the values of abortion. ”42 Sade extolled thesexual value of murder and he saw abortion as a form of murder.For Sade, abortion was a sexual act, an act of lust. In his system,pregnancy always demanded murder, usually the murder* of the