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

3The Marquis de Sade ( 1 7 4 0 —1 8 1 4 )As flics to wanton boys are we to the gods;They kill us for their sport.Shakespeare, King LearDonatien-Alphonse-Fran^ois de Sade—known as the Marquis deSade, known to his ardent admirers who are legion as The DivineMarquis—is the world’s foremost pornographer. As such he bothembodies and defines male sexual values. In him, one finds rapistand writer twisted into one scurvy knot. His life and writing wereof a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imaginedand real. In his life he tortured and raped women. He was batterer,rapist, kidnapper, and child abuser. In his work he relentlesslycelebrated brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture,and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous. His workand legend have survived nearly two centuries because literary,artistic, and intellectual men adore him and political thinkers on theLeft claim him as an avatar of freedom. Sainte-Beuve named Sadeand Byron as the two most significant sources of inspiration for theoriginal and great male writers who followed them. Baudelaire,Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautreamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, andApollinaire among others found in Sade what Paul Tillich, anotherdevotee of pornography, might have called “the courage to be. ”Simone de Beauvoir published a long apologia for Sade. Camus,who unlike Sade had an aversion to murder, romanticized Sade asone who had mounted “the great offensive against a hostile heaven” 1and was possibly “the first theoretician of absolute rebellion. ” 2Roland Barthes wallowed in the tiniest details of Sade’s crimes,