THE SADEIAN WOMAN

Product Information

Second, it examines the work of Sade and advances the proposition that he might be a "moral pornographer".

Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.” Looking for ways in which the tiger and the lamb or the tiger and lamb parts of the psyche can reach some sort of accommodation" (Atwood, P:120) Torr tells of how the writer’s 1978 polemic The Sadeian Woman allowed her to reconcile the different aspects of her life: her position of subjugation in the office, her desire to be a performer recognised for her skills, and her nightly transformation into the object of male sexual desire. As Torr states: It simplifies it down to fundamental metaphysical concepts like positive and negative, the male exclamation mark and the female zero, the active and the passive, the vivid and the inert, the tiger and the lamb, the carnivore and the herbivore. Conservatives opposed it, however defined, because it was sexually explicit. Feminists opposed it because women might have been the implicit target of the work. Right and Left therefore united in opposition. There was little subtlety or endeavour to define an acceptable middle ground (apart from the traditional legal defence of artistic or literary merit).The mythologisation of the sex act universalizes it (and vice versa). "At the first touch or sigh he, she, is subsumed immediately into a universal." It is no longer a real, particularized, palpable, tactile experience. It becomes a "fantasy love-play of the archetypes": The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. [...] Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women’ The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role in the world of God, the King and the Law. She does not subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness." All upcoming public events are going ahead as planned and you can find more information on our events blog

She also suggests that many commonly accepted aspects of feminism are not only narrow-minded, but counterproductive. For instance: she presents how the popular 'mother goddess' figure is just another way to entrap women into the role of 'baby factory'--even making them proud of their one-dimensional existence. Of course, she says it better than I.

Justine" is not a cautionary tale. It's not moralistic. Sade isn't teaching his audience stuff. It's porn.