Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade—known as the Marquis de Sade, known to his ardent admirers who are legion as The Divine Marquis—is the world's foremost pornographer. As such he both embodies and defines male sexual values. In him, one finds rapist and writer twisted into one scurvy knot. His life and writing were of a piece, a whole cloth soaked in the blood of women imagined and real. In his life he tortured and raped women. He was batterer, rapist, kidnapper, and child abuser. In his work he relentlessly celebrated brutality as the essence of eroticism; fucking, torture, and killing were fused; violence and sex, synonymous. His work and legend have survived nearly two centuries because literary, artistic, and intellectual men adore him and political thinkers on the Left claim him as an avatar of freedom. Sainte-Beuve named Sade and Byron as the two most significant sources of inspiration for the original and great male writers who followed them. Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautreamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire among others found in Sade what Paul Tillich, another devotee 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 as one who had mounted "the great offensive against a hostile heaven" and was possibly "the first theoretician of absolute rebellion." Roland Barthes wallowed in the tiniest details of Sade's crimes, those committed in life as well as on paper. Sade is precursor to Artaud's theater of cruelty, Nietzsche's will to power, and the rapist frenzy of William Burroughs. In England in 1966, a twelve-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl were tortured and murdered by a self-proclaimed disciple of Sade. The crimes were photographed and tape-recorded by the murderer, who played them back for pleasure. In 1975 in the United States, organized crime reportedly sold "snuff" films to private collectors of pornography. In these films, women actually were maimed, sliced into pieces, fucked, and killed—the perfect Sadean synthesis. Magazines and films depicting the mutilation of women for the sake of sexual pleasure now abound. A major translator into English of Sade's thousands of pages of butchery and the one primarily responsible for the publication of Sade's work in accessible mass-market editions in the United States is Richard Seaver, a respected figure in establishment publishing. Seaver, instrumental in the propagation of Sade's work and legend, has reportedly written a film of Sade's life that will be made by Alain Resnais. Sade's cultural influence on all levels is pervasive. His ethic—the absolute right of men to rape and brutalize any "object of desire" at will—resonates in every sphere.

Sade was born into a noble French family closely related to the reigning monarch. Sade was raised with the prince, four years his senior, during his earliest years. When Sade was four, his mother left the Court and he was sent to live with his grandmother. At the age of five, he was sent to live with his uncle, the Abbe de Sade, a clergyman known for his sensual indulgences. Sade's father, a diplomat and soldier, was absent during Sade's formative years. Inevitably, biographers trace Sade's character to his mother's personality, behavior, and alleged sexual repression, despite the fact that very little is known about her. What is known, but not sufficiently noted, is that Sade was raised among the male mighty. He wrote in later years of having been humiliated and controlled by them.…

Camus captured the essence of Sade's legend when he wrote: "His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude …" Throughout the literature on him, with some small qualifying asides, Sade is viewed as one whose voracious appetite was for freedom; this appetite was cruelly punished by an unjust and repressive society. The notion is that Sade, called by Apollinaire "that freest of spirits to have lived so far," was a monster as the word used to be defined: something unnaturally marvelous. Sade's violation of sexual and social boundaries, in his writings and in his life, is seen as inherently revolutionary. The antisocial character of his sexuality is seen as a radical challenge to a society deadly in its repressive sexual conventions. Sade is seen as an outlaw in the mythic sense, a grand figure of rebellion in action and in literature whose sexual hunger, like a terrorist's bomb, threatened to blow apart the established order. The imprisonment of Sade is seen to demonstrate the despotism of a system that must contain, control, and manipulate sexuality, not allow it to run free toward anarchic self-fulfillment. Sade is seen as the victim of that cruel system, as one who was punished because of the bravery of his antagonism to it. The legend of Sade is particularly vitalized by the false claim, widely believed, that he rotted in prison for most of his life as punishment for obscene writings. Sade's story is generally thought to be this: he was a genius whose mind was too big for the petty puritans around him; he was locked up for his sexual abandonment, especially in writing; he was kept in jail because nothing less could defuse the danger he presented to the established order; he was victimized, unjustly imprisoned, persecuted, for daring to express radical sexual values in his life and in his writing; as "that freest of spirits to have lived so far," his very being was an insult to a system that demanded conformity. It was left to Erica Jong to insist in an article in Playboy ("You Have to Be Liberated to Laugh") that Sade was jailed for his sense of humor.

Writers on Sade are fascinated by both his life and his work, and it is impossible to know whether Sade's legend could have been sustained if one had existed without the other. Edmund Wilson, repelled by Sade's work, is fascinated by his life. Simone de Beauvoir, repelled by Sade's life, is fascinated by his work. Most of the writers on Sade advocate rather than analyze him, are infatuated with him as a subject precisely because his sexual obsessions are both forbidden and common. The books and essays on Sade are crusading, romanticizing, mystifying in the literal sense (that is, intentionally perplexing to the mind). Infused with a missionary passion, they boil down to this: Sade died for you—for all the sexual crimes you have committed, for all the sexual crimes you want to commit, for every sexual crime you can imagine committing. Sade suffered because he did what you want to do; he was imprisoned as you might be imprisoned. The "you" is masculine. The freedom Sade is credited with demanding is freedom as men conceive it. Sade's suffering or victimization, whatever its cause or degree, is authentic because a man experienced it (Sade in being imprisoned, the writers in morbid contemplation of a man brought down). No woman's life has ever been so adored; no woman's suffering has ever been so mourned; no woman's ethic, action, or obsession has been so hallowed in the male search for the meaning of freedom.

The essential content of Sade's legend was created by Sade himself, especially in his prison letters and in the rambling philosophical discourses that permeate his fiction. Maurice Heine, a Left libertarian, and his disciple Gilbert L6ly, the first so-called Sade scholars, rewrote Sade's elaborate self-justifications, in the process transmuting them into accepted fact. Sade wrote his own legend; Heine and Lely resurrected it; subsequent writers paraphrased, defended, and embellished it.

In the letters, Sade is militant, with the pride of one martyred in righteousness: "Misfortune will never debase me …," he wrote to Renee-Pelagie from Vincennes in 1781. "Nor will I ever take a slave's heart. Were these wretched chains to lead me to the grave, you will always see me the same. I have the misfortune to have received from Heaven a resolute soul which has never been able to yield and will never do so. I have absolutely no fear of offending anyone."

It was Sade who painted the picture of Madame de Montreuil that his biographers now turn out, without the master's touch, by the dozens. As Sade wrote: "This terrible torture is not enough according to this horrible creature: it has to be increased further by everything her imagination can devise to redouble its horror. You will admit there is only one monster capable of taking vengeance to such a point."

Sade's defense of everything he ever did is very simple: he never did anything wrong. This defense has two distinct parts. First, he did not do anything he was accused of doing that might warrant imprisonment, because no one could prove that he did, including eyewitnesses whose word could never match his own: "A child's testimony? But this was a servant; thus, in his capacity as a child and as a servant he cannot be believed." Second, everything he had done was common practice. These two contradictory strains of self-defense often fuse to reveal the Sade obscured by his mesmerized apologists. Here he defends himself, again to his wife, vis-à-vis his abuse of the five fifteen-year-old girls originally procured by Nanon, who later bore his child:

I go off with them; I use them. Six months later, some parents come along to demand their return. I give them back [he did not], and suddenly a charge of abduction and rape is brought against me. It is a monstrous injustice. The law on this point is…as follows: it is expressly forbidden in France for any procuress to supply virgin maidens, and if the girl supplied is a virgin and lodges a complaint, it is not the man who is charged but the procuress who is punished severely on the spot. But even if the male offender has requested a virgin he is not liable to punishment: he is merely doing what all men do. It is, I repeat, the procuress who provided him with the girl and who is perfectly aware that she is expressly forbidden to do so, who is guilty. Therefore this first charge against me in Lyon of abduction and rape was entirely illegal: I have committed no offence. It is the procuress to whom I have applied who is liable to punishment—not I.

The use of women, as far as Sade was concerned, was an absolute right, one that could not fairly be limited or abrogated under any circumstances. His outrage at being punished for his assaults on females never abated. His claim to innocence rested finally on a simple assertion: "I am guilty of nothing more than simple libertinage such as it is practised by all men more or less according to their natural temperaments or tendencies." Sade's fraternal ties were apparent only when he used the crimes of other men to justify his own.

Sade designated "libertinage" as the main theme of his work. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse, in a foreword to a collection of Sade's work, point out with grave emphasis that "libertine" comes from the Latin liber, which means "free." In fact, originally a libertine was a manumitted slave. Sade's use of the word contradicts its early meaning, despite the claim of his sycophantic translators. For Sade, libertinage was the cruel use of others for one's own sexual pleasure. Sade's libertinage demanded slavery; sexual despotism misnamed "freedom" is Sade's most enduring legacy.

Sade's work is nearly indescribable. In sheer quantity of horror, it is unparalleled in the history of writing. In its fanatical and fully realized commitment to depicting and reveling in torture and murder to gratify lust, it raises the question so central to pornography as a genre: why? why did someone do (make) this? In Sade's case, the motive most often named is revenge against a society that persecuted him. This explanation does not take into account the fact that Sade was a sexual predator and that the pornography he created was part of that predation.

It is not adequate to describe Sade's ethic as rapist. For Sade, rape was a modest, not fully gratifying mode of violation. In Sade's work, rape is foreplay, preparation for the main event, which is maiming unto death. Rape is an essential dimension because force is fundamental to Sade's conception of sexual action. But over time, with repetition, it pales, becomes boring, a stupendous waste of energy unless accompanied by the torture, and often the murder, of the victim. Sade is the consummate literary snuff artist: orgasm eventually requires murder. Victims are sliced up, impaled on stakes, burned alive, roasted slowly on spits, eaten, decapitated, flayed until they die. Women's vaginas and rectums are sewn up to be torn through. Women are used as tables on which burning food is served, on which candles are burned. One would require the thousands of pages Sade himself used to list the atrocities he described. Nevertheless, some themes emerge.

In Sade's fiction, men, women, boys and girls are used, violated, destroyed. At the top, in control, are the libertines, mostly old men, aristocrats, powerful by virtue of gender, wealth, position, and cruelty. Sade describes the sexuality of these men essentially as addiction: each sex act contributes to the development of a tolerance; that is, arousal requires more cruelty each time, orgasm requires more cruelty each time; victims must increase in abjectness and numbers both. Everyone inferior to the aristocrats on top in wealth, in social status, or in her or his capacity for cruelty becomes sexual fodder. Wives, daughters, and mothers are particularly singled out for ridicule, humiliation, and contempt. Servants of both sexes and female prostitutes are the main population of the abused, dismembered, executed. Lesbian acts decorate the slaughter; they are imagined by a man for men; they are so male-imagined that the divine fuck imbued with murder is their only possible resolution.

In the bulk of Sade's work, female victims greatly outnumber male victims, but his cruelty is all-inclusive. He manifests a pansexual dominance—the male who knows no boundaries but still hates women more.

While the aristocrats on top are never maimed, they are, at their own command, whipped and sodomized. They remain entirely in control even when whipped or sodomized. Everything done to them or by them is for the purpose of bringing them to orgasm on their own terms. Sade established impotence as a characteristic of the aging libertine: viler and viler crimes are necessary to achieve erection and ejaculation. George Steiner, perhaps to his credit, fails to appreciate the significance of the progression of lust in Sade's work, especially in The 120 Days of Sodom: "In short: given the physiological and nervous complexion of the human body, the numbers of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse are fundamentally finite. The mathematics of sex stop somewhere in the region of soixante-neuf; there are no transcendental series." Displaying his own brand of misogyny, Steiner goes on to say that "things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman." But Sade is saying precisely that men become sated too soon with what they have had, whatever it is, especially woman, also goat.

In Sade's fiction, the men on top exchange and share victims in an attempt to forge a community based on a common, if carnivorous, sexuality. The shared victim results in the shared orgasm, a bond among the male characters and between the author and his male readers.

The men on top also share the shit of the victims. They control elimination and physical cleanliness, a strategem that suggests the Nazi death camps. They eat turds and control the diets of their victims to control the quality of the turds. While Freudian values apply here—the anal being indicative of greed, of obsession with material wealth—excrement, like blood, like flesh itself, is ingested because these men have gone beyond vampirism toward a sexuality that is entirely cannibalistic.

Much is made of the fact that two of Sade's main characters, Justine and Juliette, are women. Juliette especially is cited as an emancipated woman because she takes to maiming and murder with all the spectacular ease of Sade's male characters; she is the one who knows how to take pleasure, how to transform pain into pleasure, slavery into freedom. It is, Sade's literary friends claim, a matter of attitude: here we have Justine, raped, tortured, violated, and she hates it, so she is a victim; here we have Juliette, raped, tortured, violated, and she loves it, so she is free. As expressed by Roland Barthes [in Sade, Fourier, Loyola]:

The scream is the victim's mark; she makes herself a victim because she chooses to scream; if, under the same vexation she were to ejaculate [sic], she would cease to be a victim, would be transformed into a libertine: to scream/to discharge, this paradigm is the beginning of choice, i. e. Sadian meaning.

"Sadian meaning," then, reduces to the more familiar preachment: if you can't do anything about it (and I will see to it that you cannot), lie back and enjoy it. In the critical writings on Sade's pornography, rape in the criminal sense exists mainly as a subjective value judgment of the one who was used, to whom hysteria is always attributed. Women, according to Sade, Barthes, and their ilk, can and should choose to experience the rape of women as men experience it: as pleasure.

Sade's view of women was hailed by Apollinaire as prophetic: "Justine is woman as she has been hitherto, enslaved, miserable and less than human; her opposite, Juliette, represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a figure of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is arising out of mankind, who shall have wings, and who shall renew the world."

Justine and Juliette are the two prototypical female figures in male pornography of all types. Both are wax dolls into which things are stuck. One suffers and is provocative in her suffering. The more she suffers, the more she provokes men to make her suffer. Her suffering is arousing; the more she suffers, the more aroused her torturers become. She, then, becomes responsible for her suffering, since she invites it by suffering. The other revels in all that men do to her; she is the woman who likes it, no matter what the "it." In Sade, the "attitude" (to use Barthes's word) on which one's status as victim or master depends is an attitude toward male power. The victim actually refuses to ally herself with male power, to take on its values as her own. She screams, she refuses. Men conceptualize this resistance as conformity to ridiculous feminine notions about purity and goodness; whereas in fact the victim refuses to ally herself with those who demand her complicity in her own degradation. Degradation is implicit in inhabiting a predetermined universe in which one cannot choose what one does, only one's attitude (to scream, to discharge) toward what is done to one. Unable to manifest her resistance as power, the woman who suffers manifests it as passivity, except for the scream.

The so-called libertine re-creates herself in the image of the cruelest (most powerful) man she can find and in her alliance with him takes on some of his power over others. The female libertines in Sade's work are always subordinate to their male counterparts, always dependent on them for wealth and continued good health. They have female anatomies by fiat; that is, Sade says so. In every other respect—values, behaviors, tastes, even in such a symptomatic detail as ejaculating sperm, which they all do—Sade's libertine women are men. They are, in fact, literary transvestites.

Sade himself, in a footnote to Juliette, claimed an authenticity for Juliette based on his conviction that women are more malevolent than men: "… the more sensitive an individual, the more sharply this atrocious Nature will bend him into conformance with evil's irresistible laws; whence it is that women surrender to it more heatedly and perform it with greater artistry than men." The message that women are evil and must be punished permeates Sade's work, whether the female figures in question are supposed to represent good or evil. The vileness of women and an intense hatred of female genitalia are major themes in every Sadean opus. Both male and female characters evince a deep aversion to and loathing of the vagina. Anal penetration is not only preferred; often the vagina must be hidden for the male to be aroused at all. Sade's female libertines are eloquent on the inferiority of the vagina to the rectum. While boys and men are used in Sade's lust murders, women are excoriated for all the characteristics that distinguish them from men. In Sade's scheme of things, women are aggressively slaughtered because women are repulsive as both biological and emotional beings. The arrogance of women in claiming any rights over their own bodies is particularly offensive to Sade. Any uppity pretense to bodily integrity on a woman's part must be fiercely and horribly punished. Even where Sade, in one or two places, insists on women's right to abort pregnancies at will, his sustained celebration of abortion as erotically charged murder places abortion squarely within the context of his own utterly and unredeemably male value system: in this system, women have no bodily rights.

A religious scholar, John T. Noonan, Jr., names Sade as "the first in Western Europe to praise abortion …" Citing Noonan, Linda Bird Francke, in The Ambivalence of Abortion, claims that Sade's advocacy of abortion was instrumental in the papal decision that abortion must be prohibited from gestation on. Characterizing Sade's work as part of the proabortion movement, she asserts that Sade "actually extolled the values of abortion." Sade extolled the sexual 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 pregnant woman, rendered more exciting if she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Nothing could be calculated to please Sade more than the horrible deaths of women butchered in illegal abortion. This is Sade's sexuality realized.

In Sade's work, both male and female children are maimed, raped, tortured, killed. Men especially go after their daughters, sometimes raising them specifically to become paramours, most often abusing them and then passing them on to close male friends to be used and killed. Sade's obsession with sexual violence against children of both sexes is transformed by his literary lackeys, true to form, into another demonstration of Sade's progressive sexual radicalism. As Geoffrey Gorer wrote: "According to de Sade, very young children are shameless, sexually inquisitive and endowed with strong sexual feelings. Children are naturally polymorphous perverts." Actually, according to Sade, adult men find it particularly gratifying to kidnap, rape, torture, and kill children.

Sade is concerned too with the violation of the mother—not only as wife to her husband but also as victim of her children. A constant conceit throughout Sade's fiction is that fathers are wondrous sexual beings, mothers stupid and repressed prudes who would be better off as whores (or as the whores they really are). As a philosopher, Sade maintains consistently that one owes nothing to one's mother, for the father is the source of human life:

… Be unafraid, Eugénie [the heroine], and adopt these same sentiments; they are natural: uniquely formed of our sires' blood, we owe absolutely nothing to our mothers. What, furthermore, did they do but co-operate in the act which our fathers, on the contrary, solicited? Thus, it was the father who desired our birth, whereas the mother merely consented thereto.

Contempt for the mother is an integral part of Sade's discourse:

It is madness to suppose one owes something to one's mother. And upon what, then, would gratitude be based? Is one to be thankful that she discharged [sic] when someone once fucked her?

A daughter's turning on her mother, forcing her mother to submit to rape and torture, defaming and debasing her mother, and finally luxuriating in the killing of her mother is a crucial Sadean scenario.

Sade's ideas on women and sexual freedom are explicated throughout his work. He has few ideas about women and sexual freedom and no fear of repetition. Women are meant to be prostitutes: "… your sex never serves Nature better than when it prostitutes itself to ours; that 'tis, in a word, to be fucked that you were born …" In rape a man exercises his natural rights over women:

If then it becomes incontestable that we have received from Nature the right indiscriminately to express our wishes to all women, it likewise becomes incontestable that we have the right to compel their submission, not exclusively, for I should then be contradicting myself, but temporarily [the doctrine of "nonpossessiveness"]. It cannot be denied that we have the right to decree laws that compel woman to yield to the flames of him who would have her; violence itself being one of that right's effects, we can employ it lawfully.

Sade pioneered what became the ethos of the male-dominated sexual revolution: collective ownership of women by men, no woman ever justified in refusal. Sade took these ideas to their logical conclusion: state brothels in which all females would be forced to serve from childhood on. The idea of unrestricted access to an absolutely available female population, there to be raped, to which one could do anything, has gripped the male imagination, especially on the Left, and has been translated into the euphemistic demand for "free sex, free women." The belief that this urge toward unrestrained use of women is revolutionary brings into bitter focus the meaning of "sexual freedom" in leftist sexual theory and practice. Sade says: use women because women exist to be used by men; do what you want to them for your own pleasure, no matter what the cost to them. Following leftist tradition, Peter Weiss, in the play known as Marat/Sade, paraphrased Sade in this happily disingenuous way: "And what's the point of a revolution / without general copulation."

In a variation of leftist theme, Christopher Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, sees Sade not as the originator of a new ethic of sexual collectivity, but as one who foresaw the fall of the bourgeois family with its "sentimental cult of womanhood" and the fall of capitalism itself. According to Lasch, Sade anticipated a "defense of woman's [sic] sexual rights—their rights to dispose of their own bodies, as feminists would put it today … He perceived, more clearly than the feminists, that all freedoms under capitalism come in the end to the same thing, the same universal obligation to enjoy and be enjoyed." Lasch's particular, and peculiar, interpretation of Sade appears to derive from his stubborn misunderstanding of sexual integrity as feminists envision it. In Sade's universe, the obligation to enjoy is extended to women as the obligation to enjoy being enjoyed—failing which, sex remains what it was, as it was: a forced passage to death. The notion that Sade presages feminist demands for women's sexual rights is rivaled in self-serving absurdity only by the opinion of Gerald and Caroline Greene, in S-M: The Last Taboo, that "[i]f there was one thing de Sade was not, it was a sexist."

De Beauvoir had understood that "[t]he fact is that the original intuition which lies at the basis of Sade's entire sexuality, and hence his ethic, is the fundamental identity of coition and cruelty." Camus had understood that "[t]wo centuries ahead of time and on a reduced scale [compared to Stalinists and Nazis], Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom …"Neither they nor Sade's less conscientious critics perceived that Sade's valuation of women has been the one constant in history—imagined and enacted—having as its consequence the destruction of real lives; that Sade's advocacy and celebration of rape and battery have been history's sustaining themes. Sade's spectacular endurance as a cultural force has been because of, not despite, the virulence of the 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 Sade's work in exciting the imaginations of men is lost. Nothing in Sade's work takes place outside the realm of common male belief. In story and discourse, Sade's conception of romance is this: "I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure." Sade's conception of sexuality is this:

… there is no more selfish passion than lust; none that is severer in its demands; smitten stiff by desire, 'tis with yourself you must be solely concerned, and as for the object that serves you, it must always be considered as some sort of victim, destined to that passion's fury. Do not all passions require victims?

These convictions are ordinary, expressed often in less grand language, upheld in their rightness by the application of male-supremacist law especially in the areas of rape, battery, and reproduction; they are fully consonant with the practices (if not the preachments) of ordinary men with ordinary women. Had Sade's work—boring, repetitive, ugly as it is—not embodied these common values, it would long ago have been forgotten. Had Sade himself—a sexual terrorist, a sexual tyrant—not embodied in his life these same values, he would not have excited the twisted, self-righteous admiration of those who have portrayed him as revolutionary, hero, martyr (or, in the banal prose of Richard Gilman, "the first compelling enunciator in modern times of the desire to be other than what society determined, to act otherwise than existing moral structures coerced one into doing").

Sade's importance, finally, is not as dissident or deviant: it is as Everyman, a designation the power-crazed aristocrat would have found repugnant but one that women, on examination, will find true. In Sade, the authentic equation is revealed: the power of the pornographer is the power of the rapist/batterer is the power of the man.