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

disingenuous way: “And what’s the point of a revolution/withoutgeneral copulation. ” 48In a variation of leftist theme, Christopher Lasch, in The Cultureof Narcissism, sees Sade not as the originator of a new ethic of sexualcollectivity, but as one who foresaw the fall of the bourgeois familywith its “sentimental cult of womanhood” 49 and the fall of capitalismitself. According to Lasch, Sade anticipated a “defense ofwoman’s [sic] sexual rights— their rights to dispose of their ownbodies, as feminists would put it today. . . He perceived, moreclearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism comein the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoyand be enjoyed. ” 50 Lasch’s particular, and peculiar, interpretationof Sade appears to derive from his stubborn misunderstanding ofsexual integrity as feminists envision it. In Sade’s universe, theobligation to enjoy is extended to women as the obligation to enjoybeing enjoyed— failing which, sex remains what it was, as it was: aforced passage to death. T he notion that Sade presages feministdemands for women’s sexual rights is rivaled in self-servingabsurdity only by the opinion of Gerald and Caroline Greene, inS-M: The Last Taboo, that “[i]f there was one thing de Sade was not,it was a sexist. ” 51De Beauvoir had understood that “[t]he fact is that the originalintuition which lies at the basis of Sade’s entire sexuality, and hencehis ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty. ” 52Camus had understood that “[t]wo centuries ahead of time and on areduced scale [compared to Stalinists and Nazis], Sade extolledtotalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom. . . ” 53N either they nor Sade’s less conscientious critics perceived thatSade’s valuation of women has been the one constant in history—imagined and enacted—having as its consequence the destruction ofreal lives; that Sade’s advocacy and celebration of rape and batteryhave been history’s sustaining themes. Sade’s spectacular enduranceas a cultural force has been because of, not despite, the virulence ofthe sexual violence toward women in both his work and his life.Sade’s work embodies the common values and desires of men.Described in terms of its “excesses, ” as it often is, the power of