It could be argued that the age of the sex crime begins in the year 1791, with the publication of a novel called Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, by The Marquis de Sade, who is the patron saint of pornography and sex crime. Contrary to the general impression, Sade never killed anyone; his most reprehensible exploit was making small cuts on a prostituteās skin and pouring hot wax into them. For a number of similar misdemeanours, he was thrown into prison at the age of thirty-seven and stayed there for thirteen years, until the time of the French Revolution. For a man of Sadeās imperious temperament, prison must have been an unimaginable torment. For three years he was plunged into transports of despair and self-pity. Then he began to recover and direct his hatred and resentment into literacy channels. Resentment mingled with frustrated eroticism to produce works of almost insane cruelty. His favourite fantasy was of some virtuous, innocent girl who falls into the hands of a wicked libertine and is flogged, raped, and tortured.
His most characteristic work is a huge novel called The 120 Days of Sodom, a long sexual daydream about four libertines - including a bishop and a Lord Chief Justice - who retire to a chateau to set out and indulge every possible kind of sexual perversion. Brothel madams tell stories about their most debauched clients, stimulating the libertines to rape, flog, and torture a small band of young men and women who have been procured for their pleasure. Yet, oddly enough, Sade is never pornographic in the modern sense of the word; there are no gloating descriptions of sexual acts. His real desire is to scream defiance at the Church and State; he loves to show judges abusing their authority, and monks and nuns engaged in debauchery and corrupting children. His descriptions of torture are anything but sexually stimulating; even devotees of pornography find them nauseating.
Sade was far more than an advocate of torture and murder; he regarded himself as the first truly honest philosopher in the history of human thought. The so-called āgreat philosophersā he regarded as liars. All animals, he says, seek pleasure as the greatest good; the body was obviously made for pleasure. Then why do we not spend our lives seeking pleasure? Because it would not suit our rulers. They try to persuade us that unselfishness, hard work and self-sacrifice are virtues, and that there is a god in heaven who will judge us for our misdeeds. This is untrue; there is no God, and if we were not such slaves we would throw off our shackles and devote our lives to the pursuit of ecstasy. Would this not lead us into doing harm to others? Of course it would, says Sade. Why not? Animals devour one another; that is the law of nature. The only true honest attitude to human existence is one of total selfishness. The truly courageous man chooses crime rather than virtue, for he knows thatās virtues was invented by our rules to keep us in subjugation. Kings and popes know better; they spend their lives in every kind of debauchery.
Sade was released from prison in 1788, and for a time scraped a living as a playwright. Then he was arrested again for publishing books, and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, where he died in 1816.
kianamaiart
blakekathryn
stormborns
2087
