O FOREVER
When I was in seminary in Chicago about 1980, my practise was to go to the most wealthy suburb's shopping mall to buy small things I needed, like an alarm clock or socks. Shoppers there were not trapped in poverty and they had a strong sense of value. On one of these expeditions I spotted a BOOKSTORE!! A BOOKSTORE!!! And it wasn't a chain. Nor was it one of the arcane and fascinating Hyde Park bookstores. It was feminist. I hardly knew what that meant.
Inside was a huge section of "erotica." Forbidden books. One was "The Story of O." I bought it, of course, and at a stoplight, while waiting, I flipped it open and read a few sentences. The next thing was horns honking behind me as I sat reading, gaping, growing wet.
Now "feminists" write articles -- openly, and analyze the author, who is no longer anonymous. What was forbidden porn has become intriguing anthropology. We called God into question, then "man", and now sex. What remains is not seen, but it will be there when we learn how to look.
"The surrealism of everyday life is astounding to me. People and their expressions of power and identity are a type of performance art that runs through everyday life, whether we acknowledge it or not."
The link below is about art inspired by the book.
The artist says: "I hope my work, this body of drawings as well as my past ten years of work, provokes the viewer to question and examine our constructions of gender and identity, sexuality, and hierarchies of power. Consent is foremost." She claims that "The style was a parody of pornography." I didn't get "get" that. Maybe I hadn't read enough "real" porn, but now that I have, I still don't get it.
Franks says, "I was drawn to Grimm’s because there were markers of everyday life in the 19th century that resonate in the present: wolves (however they may come); cannibalism (we devour our own); rape and murder. Realities of the cruelty of life. O takes these cruelties and perverts them for her own edification."
What Franks seems to leave out is the glamour of the story, the fabulous gowns contrasted with being chained to a stone wall and whipped, the elegant upper-class entitlement of the men as they used the women, the whole predetermined protocol as patterned as "Downton Abbey", the mingling of pain and pleasure, the secret transgression of wearing no panties and letting one's skirt ride up while sitting in a limousine. The movie called "Kink" was enlightening. I don't recall any feminist talking about female on female violence.
When one whole category of human experience is marked off so that admission becomes distinction, then it becomes ever more alluring, more desired, more potent. Excellent material for addiction.
The real author of the book says: "Who I am finally, if not the long silent part of someone, the secret and nocturnal part which has never betrayed itself in public by any thought, word, or deed, but communicates through subterranean depths of the imaginary with dreams as old as the world itself?"
As a journalist, she is entitled to go anywhere. She is not pornographer so much as anthropologist. It is a similar license to that of clergy who take their entitlement into the world of sin, but not objectively and not avoiding harm. Like a therapist who is a little too curious.
Anthropology taught us that sin is produced by culture which seeks to protect its edges while exploiting them as the production of commodities. This was much easier to see when the world was a composition of many ways of being. Now that media takes us all everywhere, the steep differences between Peoples that were so seductive have paled and diminished. Even the communities of sexual variation (there are many) are invaded by sensation-seekers. They unmask Margaret Mead and Gauguin, contradicting their reports of innocent nakedness and freedom.
It turns out that the VICE article, which names the author as Aury is still deceived. The author's more real name is Anne Cécile Desclos who was consciously writing like the Marquis de Sade because he was admired by Desclos' lover and employer, Jean Paulhan, who wrote the preface and published the book. It was a deep entwining of sex and profit, quite consciously so. The profit was increased when the book was accused of obscenity. Her identity was easy to hide since she presented as a quiet, modest, hard-working woman loyal to her employer. This anonymity supported books, films, articles -- so the profit continues.
My experience with the book would be hard to duplicate because the Eighties have come and gone, an edge, an evening, an opening and closing at the same time. My kind of woman is probably also scarce because the time made me. For a while more recently I set out to explore the world of such subjects and quickly discovered my limits. However, the new free book from the University of Chicago, "Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist, edited by Jeremy Mulderig" is inaccessible to me not because he is obscene, but because I can't manage the technicalities of the platform. I have read stories by Sparrow, who was contemporary and present in Chicago in my undergrad years. They aren't very pornographic but mildly entertaining. None of us knew Sparrow or got a tattoo.
I also read the porn novels by Val McDermid that are the source for the English murder mysteries featuring Robson Green as a befuddled but intuitive shrink. The novels are quite horrid and not at all -- to me -- arousing. Porn based on the transgression of hygiene rules are the most repellant. McDermid is into violation of the flesh and not imaginary either. If I had found McDermid before O, I would not have been stalled out at a stop light in order the read the next sentences.
The balancing of sex with love, the secret transgressions requiring minds that can walk the shadows, the mix with politics and wealth -- those are stories I can cherish.
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