The Sadeian woman as a feminist exercise

A Feminist Exercise

"The Sadeian Woman" is a major cultural exercise for many reasons. Here are just four.

First, it tries to understand and explain pornography from a woman’s point of view (as at 1979).

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

Third, it implicitly questions, like Simone de Beauvoir, "Must We Burn Sade?"

Lastly, if only in its title, it seeks to define or promote the concept of a "Sadeian Woman".

Porn Defined

In 1979, the definition of pornography was still problematical and divisive.

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 focus of this work is literary pornography. It’s not really concerned with visual or graphic
erotica. It’s about words. The issue is with what can be conveyed by words and imagination
alone.

Carter doesn’t really define pornography in terms of what is or isn’t porn.

Let’s assume that she is referring to sexually explicit literature. It extends to both erotica and
erotic violence.

Porn characterized

What Carter is great at, though, is defining the characteristics of porn. It’s not really art for art’s
sake. It has a job to do.

She believes it has two main functions: it can work as an instruction manual; and/or it can be
designed to arouse the reader.

It starts with a "libidinous fantasy" and it transforms it into text. It turns flesh into words. These
words, for men, become "mental masturbatory objects".
Still, for all the focus on flesh, it’s abstracted or sublimated into words. It works in the mind. It
creates and caters to a "cerebral insatiability".

It works in the private space of the reader, yet it allows the reader’s own desires to invade his
own private space.

In Carter’s words, it leaves a hole or a gap that the male reader is able to fill with his penis.
Later, she says of Sade that the hole is big enough to fit his whip.

It allows a male to imagine a substitute activity, which is not what he is immediately reading
about, nor is it real life sexual activity. It’s an act of the reader’s imagination.

Porn universalised

At the same time, porn strips away extraneous detail, it reduces the sexual performance to pure
functionality, to the interaction of penis and vagina, to erect probe and fringed hole. It strips
away all of the complexity of real life and mythologises it:

"Pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves
the mystification of the flesh…it reduces the actors in the drama to instruments of pure function,
so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest."

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.

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 anonymity of the lovers, whom the act transforms from me and you into they, precludes the
expression of ourselves. So the act is taken away from us even as we perform it. We become
voyeurs upon our own caresses.

"The act does not acknowledge the participation of the individual, bringing to it a whole new life
of which the act is only a part. The man and woman, in their particularity, their being, are absent
from these representations of themselves as male and female.

"These tableaux of falsification remove our sexual life from the world, from tactile experience
itself. The lovers are lost to themselves in a privacy that does not transcend but deny reality. So
the act can never satisfy them, because it does not affect their lives. It occurs in the mythic
dream-time of religious ritual.”
In effect, the tableax of falsification alienate us from sexuality.

Carter argues with and against this whole process of universalisation and de-particularisation. It
blinds us to the real, to the particular, to ourselves, and to our selves. She wants to retrieve the
de-universalising facts of real life.

Universalisation is not just anathema to humanity, it’s the enemy of women in particular:

"The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a
universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick. Pornography, like marriage and
the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalizing."

The reduction of woman to universalized flesh distracts a woman from the far more important
recognition that ​"my anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organization, my self."

Thus, it alienates women from body, sex and self.

The Moral Pornographer

Importantly, Carter doesn’t totally reject literary pornography as a genre.

Instead, she posits a moral pornography that would work differently from customary porn:

"…the pornographer’s more usual business is to assert that the function of flesh is pure
pleasure."

Pleasure, like flesh or the body, is more complicated than porn portrays it. It too is part of this
"infinitely complex organization, my self."

Carter then defines the alternative:

"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 licence for all the genders, and projects a
model of the way such a world might work.

"A moral photographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the
sexes.

"His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation,
through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.

"Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to
penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered
the realms of true obscenity as he describe it.”