Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

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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Woman Haling

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-