o f men and women?
Literary pornography is the cultural scenario o f
male/female. It is the collective scenario o f master/
slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown
now out o f the fairy-tale landscape into the castles o f
erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit,
her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult
and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her
end annihilation —death or complete submission.
Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It
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is the structure of male and female mind, the content
o f our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and
mile o f our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the
real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and
how can we bear it?
C H A P T E R 3
Woman as Victim:
Story of O
T h e Story of O, by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along
with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion o f children’s fairy tales. T h e female as a figure o f innocence and evil enters the adult w orld—the brutal world o f genitalia.
T h e female manifests in her adult fo rm —cunt. She
emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition, Story o f O is more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is,
what she needs, her processes o f thinking and feeling,
her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic
dance o f some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion o f O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmic principle which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.
Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I
once believed it to be what its defenders claim — the
mystical revelation o f the true, eternal, and sacral
destiny o f women. T h e book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the Newsweek reviewer who
wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere
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perversity is its movement toward the transcendence
o f the self through a gift of the self. . . to give the body,
to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love. ” 1 Any clear-headed appraisal
of O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.
This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover
Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked,
sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a
regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to
be an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after being
properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her
lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she is
fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for
Roissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to be
branded with Sir Stephen’s mark and to have rings with
his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic
model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is
infatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked as
an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered,
despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is
nothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her,
fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permis-
Woman as Victim: Story of O
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sion to kill herself and receives it. Q . E. D., pornography
is never big on plot.
O f course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities o f cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains,
or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by
minor characters in the book, or the varieties o f whips
used, or described her clothing or the different kinds o f
nipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained,
or the shapes and colors o f the welts on her body.
From the course o f O ’s story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one o f complete
passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that
she transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only
the hole between her legs is left to define her, and the
symbol o f that hole must surely be O. Much, however,
even in the rarefied environs o f pornography, necessarily interferes with the attainment o f utter passivity.
Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makes
demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal
history which is a sequence o f likes, dislikes, skills,
opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the very
least as positive space. And since in addition as a woman
one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins o f
Eve and Pandora, the wickedness o f Jezebel and Lucre-
tia Borgia, O ’s transcendence o f the species is truly
phenomenal.
T h e thesis o f O is simple. Woman is cunt, lustful,
wanton. She must be punished, tamed, debased. She
gives the gift o f herself, her body, her well-being,
her life, to her lover. This is as it should be —natural
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and good. It ends necessarily in her annihilation, which
is also natural and good, as well as beautiful, because
she fulfills her destiny:
As long as I am beaten and ravished on your behalf, I
am naught but the thought of you, the desire of you,
the obsession of you. That, I believe, is what you
wanted. Well, I love you, and that is what I want too. 2
Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated
herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen
for the self-control he was displaying. She wanted him
to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him
to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and