Do you enjoy giving and receiving a touch of pain during sex? You’re not alone. In fact, you’re among many millions of happy and willing BDSM participants around the world. All cultures, all sexual orientations and all religions have their adherents. But one man, in particular, achieved a legendary reputation for it. And that reputation has outlived him for over 200 years…
Many modern feminists denounce him as a violent misogynist. Napoleon Bonaparte called him an author of “abominable” books and accused him of having a “depraved imagination.” His rabid, erotic writing, which eventually landed him in jail, inspired the term “sadism” for sexual cruelty.
The stranger than fiction truth is that Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade, spent most of his life behind bars. His taste for sexual cruelty and his fictional accounts of wild orgies led many to presume he was criminally-deranged. Yet he was among the bestselling authors of his day.
His books Justine (1791) and Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), among others, were smash hits. Through history, he has earned fans like Flaubert and Baudelaire. But censors of his day shuddered at his accounts of rape and incest, as well as his acerbic atheism. Angry mobs destroyed thousands of his books.
A Scandalous Reputation
Some modern experts argue that Sade’s fiction was by no means a reflection of his real-life experiences. After all, he wrote most of his books while locked-up in jail cells and insane asylums. But historical records appear to contradict this argument, at least in part.
To be sure, no formal charges were ever brought against Sade. But French society had found the marquis guilty of a number of scandalous antics during his lifetime.
Sade lived an openly libertine existence and often procured young prostitutes as his employees in his castle in Lacoste. In 1763, the 23-year-old marquis locked a young prostitute in a room and began stomping on a crucifix. Screaming blasphemies, the marquis then demanded that the terrified woman whip him with a cat-o’-nine-tails.
Five years later, in the village of Arcueil, he whipped a woman and dripped hot wax on her back. She fled and contacted the police, but was paid off to drop charges. He had also been accused of poisoning five prostitutes with the aphrodisiac, Spanish fly, at around the same time.
BDSM – An Ancient Preoccupation
True, the Marquis may have gained historic notoriety from it, but he was hardly the first to find delight in the intersection between pleasure and pain. People have been hurting each other for pleasure since ancient times.
One of the first known records of sexual violence comes from ancient Mesopotamia. The records span all the way back to 3100 BC – around the time that humans first began to write. And one of the first things they ever wrote about was how people often whipped themselves into a sexual frenzy.
The Mesopotamian stories describe the first suggestions of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission (BDSM). Most of them involve the worship of the goddess Inanna, who flailed her constituents into pure and wild sexual ecstasy.
Flagellation was ritualistic in Ancient Greece, as well, and it was extremely common. There was even a Tomb of Whipping near Tarquinia, Lazio, is what is now Italy. The tomb is decorated with images of two men flogging a woman. Each year, vast crowds of ancient Greeks undertook a pilgrimage to the tomb to be punished for pleasure.
“Hurt So Good”
Modern theories of behavior have tried to determine what, exactly, makes some people find pleasure in pain. In her book, “Hurt So Good,” Leigh Cowart, a science journalist, suggests a chemical explanation. She maintains that one of the most immediate rewards of pain is physical pleasure.
Cowart says that when the brain senses that the body is imperiled, its endogenous morphine system creates an organic painkiller. To get a dose, all you have to do is to convince your body that it is in danger. The resulting euphoria is akin to what is called “the runner’s high.”
Cowart is a former ballet dancer and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist.” She suffered from eating disorders and self-mutilation during adolescence. She recalls ballet as being both rewarding and abusive. “It was years spent cowering and starving, eternally at war with my poor, battered body,” she writes.
The Legend of the Lost Skull
Sade died at Charenton, an insane asylum, at age 74. Before he died, he’d had a sexual relationship with 14-year-old Madeleine LeClerc, daughter of an employee at Charenton. The affair lasted until his death in 1814. Unrepentant to the end, he was given a religious service against his last wishes.
Even in death, the marquis was the subject of scorn, fear, and derision. His son had all his remaining unpublished manuscripts burned. And, for a long time, his works were relegated to the forbidden Enfer, or Hell, section of the National Library in Paris.
But there were those who were sympathetic to his cause. Soon after Sade died, a young doctor exhumed his corpse and removed the cranium. The doctor was Sade’s dear friend, L.J. Ramon. The doctor said he intended to make phrenological studies of Sade’s troubled creative spirit. (Phrenologists believed that the shape of a skull revealed traits such as criminality and artistic genius.)
Ramon found the cranium to reveal “no ferocity” or “aggressive drives,” and “no excess in erotic impulses.” He then lent the skull to a German colleague, who disappeared with it!
The relic was lost, but legend has long held that Ramon had made a cast of the skull before it vanished. The alleged plaster copy of the cranium survives today. It sits inside a drawer in the vaults of France’s Phrenology Museum, along with some 18,000 other historical craniums.
Do You Want a Better Sex Life?
Have you ever wanted to find sexual fulfillment in pain? Research shows that some 84 percent of adults have tried BDSM. This could well be a good thing. Why? Well, because, according to a more recent study, people who are into BDSM have better sex lives!
Still, broaching the idea of bedtime whips and straps to a partner who is unfamiliar with BDSM might require tact.
Perhaps leaving a tempting copy of one of Sade’s books on the bedside table would help? Better yet, why not browse our Playroom to see what might tittalate your lover’s curiousity?
