Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

63

other through O is made clear by the fact that Sir

Stephen uses O anally most o f the time. T h e consequences o f misdirecting sexual energy are awesome indeed.

But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is

the mind-boggling literary style o f Pauline Reage, its

author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yet

kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white.

Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite. That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for the compelling irrationality

o f Story of O. For those women who are convinced yet

doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for

self-protection: the double-double think that the author

engages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that we

only have to double-double unthink it.

T o sum up, Story of O is a story o f psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles o f the universe — the

survival o f one dependent on the absolute destruction

o f the other. It asks, like many stories, who is the most

powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s

dead bodies.

C H A P T E R 4

Woman as Victim:

The Image

The Image, by Jean de Berg, is a love story, a Christian

love story and also a story of Christian love. No book

makes more clear the Christian experience of woman

after the fall, as we know her, Eve’s unfortunate descendant. The Image, like the catechism, is a handbook of Christianity in action. In addition, The Image is an

almost clinical dissection of role-playing and its sex-

relatedness, of duality as the structural basis of male-

female violence.

It would be an exaggeration of some substance to

call the following a summary of plot, but what happens

in The Image is this: Jean de Berg, the auteur of The

Image, meets Claire, whom he has known casually for

many years, at a party; he has always been interested in

her, but her coldness, aloofness, and perfect beauty

made her lack the necessary vulnerability which would

have made her, in the veni, vidi, vici tradition, a desirable

conquest; Claire introduces him to Anne, Innocent

Young Girl Dressed In White, who, it turns out, is

Claire’s slave; they go to a bar where Anne is offered to

Jean de Berg; they go to a rose garden where Anne

sticks a rose by its thorns into the flesh of her cunt;

64

Woman as Victim: The Image