Story of O (original 1954; edition 1994)

This story was written in 1954... I cannot even begin to imagine the outrage this novel must have caused.

Taken at face value it’s a strange, odd, and confusing tale of female submission. The main character, known as O, is brought to the château of Roissy where she is taught to be constantly ‘available’ to the men who belong to that ‘elite group’. Like I said, awkward. You’re not given much background story at all so you don’t quite understand the O and why she’s allowing this to happen when she doesn’t even appear to be enjoying this (regardless of the fact that she actually gives her permission frequently for them to do such things to her).

After reading more about Anne Desclos (The Story of O being written under the pen name Pauline Réage) the story begins to make a bit more sense. It wasn’t originally intended to be a novel; however, it was written as a series of love letters to her lover Jean Paulhan. Her lover had been a fan of the work of Marquis de Sade and had once said that a woman could not write anything such as that. Taking it as a dare, she set out to accomplish it. So it probably wasn’t meant to make sense, her lover may have been into stuff like that and she was trying to … pacify him. Either way it was quite the difficult read and wasn’t exactly enjoyable. ( )

Deşi este interesantă şi cartea mai interesantă mi s-a părut povestea din spatele cărţii. ( )

The original ending of this book was suppressed because it supposedly objectified women. However, I think the book is very empowering for women. It makes very clear the difference between being submissive as a person and being submissive as a sexual preference. O is a successful career woman who gets her freak on as a sexual slave. We are all hedonists at heart! The prudish, Protestant roots of society plus the pc attitudes for which feminism is responsible in part, make this a very shocking book now. But not as much as in the past for its pornographic content,no now it is seen as the choices its protagonist makes that are shocking. I would recommend the book to loads of people if only because it's fabulously well-written, a real literary classic and of course, it's hot, really hot. How many classics can you say are that? ( )

I never had any intention of reading [b:Story of O|40483|Story of O|Pauline Réage|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169436577s/40483.jpg|2462307] until I was recently asked to review it. I knew I wouldn't like it, that it is not the kind of erotica I usually waste my Sunday afternoons with, so rather than purchasing the whole thing, I instead decided to read the Amazon Kindle sample. That, I'm afraid, was way more than enough. I'm not sure whether the sample starts at the beginning of the story or not, the first chapter felt a little out of place, but then none of what I read really followed the format of a regular novel.

The sample starts as it means to go on:

"Get in," he says. She gets in.

I laughed at this. Perhaps I shouldn't have. Perhaps I shouldn't laugh at the fact that O allows herself to be objectified and used sexually, perhaps I should pity her for feeling that it's okay to be ordered around in this way. Oh well, I'm just a firm believer that if someone tells you to jump off a cliff and you jump off said cliff, then it's your fault for being a cliff-jumping moron. Just sayin'...

Anyway, as far as your regular run-of-the-mill sex goes, there's hardly any description. It's all entering and plunging and then it's all over. The whipping, however, gets a lot more attention than the sex does, the whole sample doesn't actually feel like erotica unless you're the kind to masturbate while Crimewatch is on. This is a story of violence, not sex. Because sex is a two (or more) way thing regardless of whether it is BDSM or straight-up (lol, pun!) vanilla. If all the participants aren't invested in the sexual activities and aren't getting pleasure out of it then it isn't sex, it's rape.

Okay, okay, before I get carried away with that idea, it's kinda important to point out that it wasn't clear as to whether O was giving consent to what the people were doing to her. She screams and she cries, which to me is something negative, but I'm no expert on how people behave during this kind of sexual encounter. We are not treated to O's thoughts, only her actions and the actions of the people around her. She doesn't express regret, sadness or even pain inwardly.

The only thing that is clear to me (and makes me feel sick) is that the men who are doing all this stuff to her are not concerned with her pleasure. Which, as I said in my review of [b:Fifty Shades of Grey|10818853|Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1)|E.L. James|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1300842729s/10818853.jpg|15732562], is important because all parties are supposed to get something out of it. In BDSM relationships, submission is something that a person chooses to do and wants to do because they enjoy what it gives them and what it gives the dom. It is not forced out of someone. The psychological aspect of BDSM is a lot like how it is (or should be) with regular sex. You give pleasure, you get pleasure. However:

"If you do tie her up from time to time, or whip her just a little, and she begins to like it, that's no good either. You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears."

These men are evidently trying to break O. They rejoice when she is in pain, when she is distressed, and when she screams or cries. For me, trying to hurt someone for the sake of hurting them - not to give them what they want - is no different from rape. It is sick. This is sick:

The gag stifles all screams and eliminates all but the most violent moans, while allowing tears to flow without restraint. There was no question of using it that night. On the contrary, they wanted to hear her scream; and the sooner the better.

You could argue with me that O actually wants all of this to happen, so I have no point. We are not told what O is thinking, she never speaks to say whether she wants it or not, but I cannot be the only one thinking that this is not the sign of a woman enjoying herself:

Then one of the men, holding her with both hands on her hips, plunged into her belly. He yielded to a second. The third wanted to force his way into the narrower passage and, driving hard, made her scream. When he let her go, sobbing and befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to feel someone's knees against her face, and she realized that her mouth was not to be spared.

Though, personally, I think her mouth is the least of O's problems if he's shagging her belly. What's that all about? For you clever dicks out there, I'd just like to point out that yes, I do realise that he is actually talking about her vagina.

So, has [b:Story of O|40483|Story of O|Pauline Réage|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169436577s/40483.jpg|2462307] changed my opinion about BDSM erotica and whether it is dehumanizing/sexist/etc.? Nope. But I'm learning more and more that people automatically categorize books that combine pain and sex as BDSM, even though they're not, or it's questionable. In BDSM, both the dom and the sub have got to want what's happening, or else it's simply abuse. Though O is hard to understand, there are about twenty quotes from the sample alone that suggest she isn't enjoying being tied up and hurt. And that's why this story is not erotic, but merely fucked up. ( )

Perhaps this is a classic of erotica -- and I admit to having read it twice -- but in the end it's just a story of hatred clothed in anti-erotic sex. Hatred of self, hatred of women, hatred of men -- no one escapes. Not a scrap of redemption possible. The first read left me questioning, the second read confirmed what I suspected. I do not find hatred erotic. ( )