I Wonder . . . .
© by Kemander
A masquerade ball by the Marquis de Sade … Would that be a Masque de Sade ball? Sorry. I can’t help where my mind goes. It ain’t right, but it ain’t left yet, either.
I mean, I guess overall I don’t get it. Why exactly do we call sadism after him? He liked to sodomize women servants and prostitutes, oh yeah, and one male servant we know of. So he was imprisoned for his “perversity”, which really wasn’t uncommon amongst the aristocracy back in his time. Yet it was he who was made an example of. But come on; sodomy hasn’t ever been the pinnacle of what sadism entails, and he was no Vlad Dracula the Impaler, for whom estimates for the number of his victims ranges from 40,000 to 100,000 who died from being impaled on a tall pointed stake through the anus while gravity sank each victim on the stake until it’s point exited through their mouth. Vlad was so much more elegant about it, also. Dining as he watched and listened to the impaled scream. He was even nice enough to oil the stakes for easy passage! Isn’t that where we got the modern day idea for anal lube?
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While in prison, Donatien Alphonse François, best known to us all as Marquis de Sade, wrote incessantly, producing 15 manuscripts in all, including the infamous, Justine and 120 Days of Sodom. When the French Revolution broke out, de Sade convinced members of the new regime that he had been a victim of the old aristocracy. They released him from prison and welcomed him into the new government. During the French Revolution de Sade was an elected delegate to the National Convention. But during his lifetime he committed no acts of torture even resembling the horrible atrocities the Catholic Church and it’s infamous heavy hitters of the Spanish Inquisition imposed on a fearful populace. The Church accrued some approximate 3000 death sentences. With an estimation of a total of millions of arrests, investigations and even lengthy tortures, usually ending in death to extract confessions of guilt being proposed by some historians.
So what, I ask, did our dear Marquis de Sade do exactly, that was so bad as to earn the distinction of having sadism named after him by R. F. von Krafft-Ebing, a psychological condition for sexual arousal from inflicting pain and humiliation, hmmm? From what I can tell after reading his work, he was a rapist, so why not name rape after him? It’s far more damaging than any consensual sadism I’ve witnessed.
“Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom… Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.”
Marquis de Sade
