The Sadeian Woman Quotes

“If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciliatory mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case.
To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed.
This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The piety, the gentleness, the honesty, the sensitivity, all the qualities she has learned to admire in herself, are invitations to violence; all her life, she has been groomed for the slaughterhouse. And though she is virtuous, she does not know how to do good.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by the presence within her of the embryo she brought to term. Her unthinking ability to reproduce, which is her pride, is, since it is beyond choice, not a specific virtue of her own.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“In his diabolic solitude, only the possibility of love could awake the libertine to perfect, immaculate terror. It is in this holy terror of love that we find, in both men and women themselves, the source of all opposition to the emancipation of women.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“For Sade, all tenderness is false, a deceit, a trap; all pleasure contains within itself the seeds of atrocities; all beds are minefields.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“She learns her lesson at once; to escape slavery, she must embrace tyranny.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster. Her freedom will be a condition of personal privilege that deprives those on which she exercises it of her own freedom. The most extreme kind of this deprivation is murder. These women murder.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The real value of a sexually attractive woman in a world which regards good looks as a commodity depends on the degree to which she puts her looks to work for her.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“We do not go to bed in single pairs;
even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies / all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“She is obscene to the extent to which she is beautiful. Her beauty, her submissiveness and the false expectations that these qualities will do her some good are what make her obscene.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“What are the butcherly delights of meat? These are not sensual but analytical. The satisfaction of scientific curiosity in dissection. A clinical pleasure in the precision with which the process of reducing the living, moving, vivid object to the dead status of thing is accomplished. The pleasure of watching the spectacle of the slaughter that derives from the knowledge one is disassociated from the spectacle; the bloody excitation of the audience in the abattoir, who watch the dramatic transformation act, from living flesh to dead meat, derives from the knowledge they are safe from the knife themselves. There is the technical pleasure of carving and the anticipatory pleasure of the prospect of eating the meat, of the assimilation of the dead stuff, after which it will be humanly transformed into flesh.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The rich can afford to be virtuous, the poor must shift as best they can.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“In a world where women are commodities, a woman who refuses to sell herself will have the thing she refuses to sell taken away from her by force.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Repression is Justine's whole being - repression of sex, of anger and of her own violence; the repressions demanded of Christian virtue, in fact.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there is none, it turns out, in her virtue itself; it does nobody any good, least of all herself.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Indeed, pornography is basically propaganda for fucking, an activity, one would have thought, that did not need much advertising in itself, because most people want to do it as soon as they know how.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“One of Sade's singularities is that he offers an absolutely sexualised view of the world, a sexualisation that permeates everything, much as his atheism does and, since he is not a religious man but a political man, he treats the facts of female sexuality not as a moral dilemma but as a political reality.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Nothing exercises such power over the imagination as the nature of sexual relationships, and the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations, to reinstitute sexuality as a primary mode of being rather than a specialised area of vacation from being and to show that the everyday meetings in the marriage bed are parodies of their own pretensions, that the freest unions may contain the seeds of the worst exploitation.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction directly back to the black and white ethical world of fairy tale and fable; it is in conflict with his frequently expounded general theory of moral relativity, that good and evil are not the same thing at all times and in all places.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Therefore pornography must always have the false simplicity of fable; the abstraction of the flesh involves the mystification of the flesh. As it reduces the actors in the sexual drama to instruments of pure function, so the pursuit of pleasure becomes in itself a metaphysical quest. The pornographer, in spite of himself, becomes a metaphysician when he states that the friction of penis in orifice is the supreme matter of the world, for which the world is well lost; as he says so, the world vanishes.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

“Then, if I am lucky enough to be taken with such poetic pseudo-seriousness, my nether mouth may be acknowledged as one capable of speech – were there not, of old, divinatory priestesses, female oracles and so forth? Was there not Cassandra, who always spoke the truth, although admittedly in such a way that nobody ever believed her? And that, in mythic terms, is the hell of it. Since that female, oracular mouth is located so near the beastly backside, my vagina might indeed be patronisingly regarded as a speaking mouth, but never one that issues the voice of reason. In this most insulting mythic redefinition of myself, that of occult priestess, I am indeed allowed to speak but only of things that male society does not take seriously. I can hint at dreams, I can even personify the imagination; but that is only because I am not rational enough to cope with reality.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History

“The heart’s egoism sees itself suffering when it sees another suffering and so it learns sympathy, because it can put itself into another’s place; then the heart comes a little way out of its egoism and tentatively encounters the world. But, before the prospect of its own suffering, the heart melts completely and retreats into egoism, again, to protect itself.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“One of Sade's cruellest lessons is that tyranny is implicit in all privilege. My freedom makes you more unfree, if it does not acknowledge your freedom, also.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“Justine is a good woman in a man's world. She is a good woman according to the rules for women laid down by men and her reward is rape, humiliation and incessant beatings. Her life is that of a woman martyrised by the circumstances of her life as a woman.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“He is on the point of becoming a revolutionary pornographer, but he, finally, lacks the courage.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography

“The Sadeian woman, then, subverts only her own socially conditioned role in the world of god, the king and the law. She does not subvert her society, except incidentally, as a storm trooper of the individual consciousness. She remains in the area of privilege created by her class, just as Sade remains in the philosophical framework of his time.”
― Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography