I know I will regret this..................

Sadean Studies Continued.......

I have been looking for obscure prose and essays by de Sade and have found several interesting articles . I am still trying to obtain a copy of Lacan's Kant with Sade which I beleive examines how much influence the work of de Sade has on modern day Psychology. This may not come as a revelation to some here, I can assure you outside of a strictly 'BDSM context' it has been to me. Live and learn........smiles

Anyhooooo.........here is an essay to get your intellectual teeth into for the interim.

@}-}rebecca-----




In 1998, Francine du Plessix Gray, prolific author of novels, biographies, sociological studies and frequent contributions to The New Yorker, published her most acclaimed work to date: At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life. A Pulizer Prize finalist that has already appeared in multiple English-language editions as well as translated ones, Du Plessix Gray’s biography has met with crowning achievement and recognition on all fronts. Accolades have accumulated from the most acclaimed of eighteenth-century luminaries, such as Robert Darnton, in a lengthy review in The New York Review of Books that compares her biography with Laurence Bongie’s Sade: A Biographical Essay, to the list of scholars whom she thanks in her acknowledgements for having read the manuscript: Lynn Hunt, Lucienne Frappier-Mazur, and Marie-Hélène Huët. 2 Surely, any scholar can appreciate the vast amount of research that undergirds Du Plessix Gray’s narrative, and indeed, she takes great pains to meticulously inform the reader who might care to look at her sources and read her acknowledgements that she has done her homework and knows every inch of the scholarly terrain.3 Du PlessixGray wisely begins her acknowledgements with a debt of gratitude to Maurice Lever’s studies, which rest on years of archival research.
1 Francine Du Plessix Gray, “I Write for Revenge Against Reality,” The Writer's Presence: A Pool of Essays, Donald McQuade, and Atwan, Robert, eds. Boston: Bedford, 1994.
2 Robert Darnton, The Real Marquis, a review of Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Simon and Schuster, 491 pp., $27.50 and Sade: A Biographical Essay, University of Chicago Press, 336;;., $29.00. January 14, 1999, The New York Review of Books..
3 See Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Simon and Schuster: New York, 1998. See the Notes, Bibliography, and Acknowledgements sections, p. 425-464. 1
However, what really frames Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography is not so much the “fin du dix huitième siècle” but the “fin du vingtième siècle” and the “reality” material from Sade’s life that made it possible to represent the Marquis, his sons, his wife, mother-in-law, father-in-law, and uncle as so many of the people who populate the running narrative of criminals, deadbeat dads, incestuous relatives, date-raping playboys, and battered women that fill soap operas, day-time talk, women’s magazines, talk radio, and the tabloids. This paper, then, explores Sade’s biography not as a narrative of (the Marquis de Sade’s) his life, but as a narrative that pleases today’s reader because it serves up a voyeur’s view of (in) his “dysfunctional” family life “at home” that we are all too familiar with. This becomes abundantly apparent when du Plessix-Gray’s rendering of the Marquis and the Marquise’s lives are superimposed over the récit of lives that we read about all the time in the popular press and observe in television soaps and other series. Ultimately, we are interested in what such a reading, writing and representation of Sade’s life does to Sade’s persona and status, both in the world of letters, but more importantly, in the world at large. Finally, this paper will address the ways in which the Marquis de Sade and his “family” provided Francine with the ideal subject upon which to continue her own self-fashioning, a project whose roots can be discerned in her first work, the 1967 novel Lovers and Tyrants and continuing on through her 2001 biography Simone Weil, the disturbing portrait of another figure wracked by contradiction and excess.4 This brief perusal of her previous work establishes a provocative background against which to judge the author’s selection of Sade and to analyze how he and the family, especially Renée Pélagie, the Marquise de Sade, stack up against the subjects she has previously probed in her writing.
Although the biography is purportedly to focus mostly on two women in the Marquis de Sade’s life, namely his wife Pélagie and his mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil, du Plessix Gray starts with the Marquis, stating in her forward that she was initially attracted to Sade, the figure behind his mixed epithets: Sade, who for Apollinaire was “the freest spirit who ever lived” or Michelet’s characterization of Sade as “a Professoor Emeritus of Crime,” or “The most lucid hero of Western thought” as Lely found him to be” or Soulié’s assessment, of Sade as “a frenetic and abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities,” or Aldous Huxley’s characterization of Sade as “the one completely consistent and thorough-going revolutionary of history.” Instead, when she began reading the Marquis’ correspondences, she became “entranced by the more modest, familial motifs of his saga,” realizing, “that few writers’ destinies have been so powerfully shaped by women, that few lives provide a more eloquent allegory on women’s ability to tame man’s nomadic sexual energies, to enforce civilization and its attendant discontents.”5
From this assessment, an unnamed source and discipline emerges as part and parcel of her inspiration—evolutionary biology, popularized by Jared Diamond’s study The Third chimpanzee, in which conjugal life is portrayed as the universal struggle between the wandering, philandering male and the more stabilizing female force in nature,
4 Francine du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil, Penguin, New York : 2001.
5 Francine du Plessix Gray, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Simon and Schuster, Forward, Penguin Books, p. 11-13. 2
biologically incapable of fully participating in and understanding the Sadean agenda as he sees it. It is important to pinpoint this early moment in the text, as it belies the dynamic of the entire narrative: Pélagie’s mother and the Marquis’ mother-in-law, the Présidente de Montreuil, represent woman in her biological destiny to tame and domesticate. Du Plessix Gray’s need to address this topic determines both the choice of Sade’s family romance and the narrative structure of the biography, which alternates between paraphrased bits of the family correspondences, with multiple direct quotes, from the letters themselves, and du Plessix Gray’s interwoven authorial interventions, whose intent it is to direct the reader’s judgment to her own point of view about the nature of things. Extracted from their place in the narrative and read together, these authorial interventions function as a discrete philosophical text on the lot of women throughout the centuries in their relationships with certain kinds of men.
Rénée Pélagie and her mother offer a study in female contrasts, both examples of the different female strategies employed in taming the male of the species and ultimately, liberating oneself from this task to live life on one’s own terms.
We first meet the Marquis de Sade’s bride to be as the ideal bourgeoise match for the Marquis as selected for him by his father, the Conte de Sade. Du Plessix Gray greets this mixing of the bourgeois/aristocratic blood lines and money lines, new plus old, with great enthusiasm. But while technically this match carries great promise, the reader awaits with dread in anticipation of the entrance of the real Marquise de Sade into the narration, because we understand there is virtually no woman who will ever be able to match the Marquis in any of his sublime attributes and characteristics.
Rénée Pélagie is plain in every way, and she is not particularly brilliant intellectually. Her salt of the earth portrait presents her to us attired in mended clothes and resoled shoes; devoted to husband and household, and for many years, the Marquis’ primary accomplice in the procurement of suitable subjects for his pleasure. Any reader of advice columns or popular psychology books can immediately identify the uneducated, unattractive and abused Pélagie as the perfect match with the profile of the abused woman, whose future redemption will be found in her strength of character and her ability to eventually see through falseness.
“What Rénée Pélagie lacked in beauty and polish she redeemed by strength of character and sterling independence. She was a resolute, homespun young woman, totally uninterested in the machinations of social life” (53-54)
As the narrative progresses and the Marquis and the new Marquise set up their household, the newly-wed bride is quickly recruited to aid and abet her husband in the procurement of his pleasure, the recounting of the abused wife syndrome begins. Du Plessix Gray describes Pélagie’s complicity in the hiring of a new household staff that would necessarily result in the « Little Girls Episode. » Du Plessix Gray contends that Pélagie both watched and participated in the Marquis’ well-orchestrated orgies. Du Plessix Gray articulates the questions that have been planted in the reader’s mind:
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“Many of us would have a lot of tough questions to ask Pélagie: How did she manage to suspend her moral judgment, her ethical scruples, the entirety of her conscience? Did she miss the sacrament of confession and the solace it has often brought to downtrodden women?…Was she ever able to transcend her individual plight and marvel at the atrocities women can commit, or allow themselves to suffer, in order to retain their men’s love?” (p. 159)
Du Plessix Gray continues with an explanation that also emerges from the profile of the battered women—the attempt to arrive at intimacy through sex, and the ensuing neglect of children. Gray now develops this new aspect of the battered woman’s profile. She reflects on Pélagie’s certain anguish at being separated from her three children, who are away being raised in Paris by her mother, the Présidente of Monteuil, by collapsing any distance that might exist between today’s battered women and Renée-Pélagie:
“Many women in different phases of their lives, must make the bitter choice between wifehood and motherhood and spread some years sacrificing their offspring to their men. The renunciation of motherhood Pélagie endured throughout the 1770s helps to explain the outburst of maternal guilt and commitment that would consume her a decade later.” (p. 160)
Pelagie the Enabler
Du Plessix Gray has written Pélagie as a classic case study taken from the annals of the psychology of battered women, as can be seen by a comparison with the document “Common Characteristics of Battered Women” that appears at Aardvarc.org’s Abuse Rape and Domestic Violence Aid and resource Collection is the relflection of Pélagie:
1. have low self esteem
2. believe all the myths about battering relationships
3. be a traditionalist about the home, may strongly believe in family unity and the prescribed feminine sex-role stereotype
4. accept responsibility for the batterer’s actions
5. suffer from guilt, yet deny the terror and anger she feels
6. have severe stress reactions with psychophysiological complaints.
7. use sex as a way to establish intimacy.
8. believe that no one wiil be able to help her resoleve her predicament.
Pélagie’s first visit to the imprisoned Marquis after four and a half years in jail provides fodder for yet the next step in the battered wife syndrome—the rage of the jealous husband. The Marquis becomes enraged when he sees his wife dressed up for the visit and complains that she “looks like a whore.” Here Gray is particularly heavy handed in guiding her readers:
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“Consider the careful cosmetic preparations any wife would make for such a reunion, planning the costume, the coiffure, especially if she was the Marquise de Sade, especially if she was as insecure as Pélagie and as filled with passion for her husband.
Think, too, of the prisoner’s thoughts when he sees his wife for the first time in four and a half years, dressed to kill in a décolleté white dress, her hair curled in the latest style. While I’m here, as good as dead, he might well think, she’s out there enjoying the world a world filled with potential rivals. I find her desirable, thus they find her desirable, thus she is/is about to be/ already has been unfaithful to me.” (240)
Though we are told that there is no account of the meeting, problematic if we consider Gray’s most definitive reading, we do know that the Marquis refers to it in a letter, displaying a jealousy so violent, that the destitute Pélagie promises to go live in a convent. Little did the Marquis realize that this was the first step toward Pélagie’s subsequent separation from her husband, the equivalent of the battered women’s home shelter today. Eventually, Pélagie gives up her room in the Marais and moves into the convent on a permanent basis. This second move to the convent prompts Gray to provide a historical digression about how women have had to form their own communities as a form of protection.
“Since the early Middle Ages, many thousands of wellborn women who were forced to live alone—spinsters and widows, abandoned wives, women who like the marquis’s own mother disliked family life or who like Pélagie were just poor—had chosen to rent lodgings in Parisian convents.” (244)
In a chapter entitled “Liberation,” the Marquis is released along with all other prisoners jailed on lettres de cachet. The year was 1790, this being a belated result of the revolution. However, the true liberation is that of Pélagie, who refuses to see her husband when he comes by her convent. “Pélagie refused to appear. She sent down a message informing her husband that she never wished to see him again.” (300)
At this juncture, du Plessix Gray makes her battered woman reading abundantly clear. Again, Pélagie is collapsed into “every battered woman” happily assuming, once more, her simple, plodding nature, relieved from trying to appease her husband’s sublime, yet tyrannical ramblings.
“For years this woman of limited learning but great shrewdness had been transformed by an exalted passion, had been impelled, as her mother once put it, to love “beyond all limits.” Like innumerable wives of our own time who have suffered through years of psychic battering, she had been led to a breaking point by an accumulation of griefs—her husband’s repeated threats and insults, the painful acknowledgement of her own blundering dedication. Her infatuation waning, her illusions about her
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husband dissolving, she had returned to her natural gravity, to being the conformist, prosaic creature she had been as a girl.” (301)
What a sad, flat, anticlimactic end to Pélagie, then. Du Plessix Gray reconsiders this end and visits it again to try to infuse some meaning into the plain, bloated figure who, in the absence of any relationship with her ex-husband, has now been sucked of all life and for the author who has just liberated her, of all interest. Du Plessix Gray almost seems surprised herself by Pélagie’s erasure once the separation becomes real. She returns a few pages later to write Pélagie’s epitaph:
“For the time being, we must take leave of Pélagie as a central character of the Sadeian epic….Her marriage had been her work of art: for good or for worse, it was solely through Pélagie’s love and dedication that the Marquis de Sade’s talents were able to flower and become part of the Western heritage. There lies the principal legacy of this potentially intrepid soul, whose saga leads us once more to marvel at (or to deplore) the phenomenon of female malleability.” (p. 309-310)
As riveting as du Plessix Gray’s book is, the case for Pélagie is clearly overstated. Try as she might, the irrepressible Marquis steps front and center yet one more time in the final chapters of the book, even without his wife. In 2001, Francine du Plessix Gray was still trying to figure out what to do with him in a talk she gave at Vassar College, whose title “What should we do with the Marquis de Sade” carries the same condescending sonority as the Mother Superior’s lament in The Sound of Music, “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” In the Vassar publicity piece for the talk, Francine du Plessix Gray cuts a romantic figure, with long, flowing hair, and a slim body dressed in flowery clothing. Although she has “liberated” Pélagie, she does not identify with the Marquis’ prosaic spouse. Indeed, she is drawn to the Marquis, his ability to remain torn “by the conflict between his actual impotence and his dreams of omnipotence.” This is the writer’s profile, the performer’s profile, one that is much closer to the author than it is to Pélagie. The autobiographic dimensions to Francine du Plessix Gray’s literary biography paradoxically lead back to Sade, from whom there is no liberation. Her 1967 novel, Lovers and Tyrants, eerily echos the need of the non-prosaic type to continually remove that which keeps coming back:
“… every woman’s life is a series of exorcisms from the spells of different oppressors; nurses, lovers, husbands, gurus, parents, children, myths of the good life, the most tyrannical despots can be the ones who love us the most.” 6
It is surprising in the numerous reviews in several languages that can be consulted on Francine du Plessix Gray’s take on Sade that no one has tried to link her interest in the Marquis to her own life and psychological profile. Sade appears early in her writing career in Lovers and Tyrants, the author’s woefully inadequate attempt to write the novel of orgasmic liberation that only an Erica Jong would be able to pull off with Fear of
6 Francine du Plessix-Gray, Lovers and Tyrants, Simon and Schuster, 1967, p.
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Flying six years later in 1973.7 While Jong succeeds in empowering women through forms of autobiography and historical fiction that portray the female of the species as fully cognoscente of their highly complex potential as mothers, lovers and savants and equipped with the savvy to negotiate the inherent drawbacks of the slow-to-evolve social context, du Plessix Gray, instead, loves female victims, such as Pélagie, for whom she either perennially slays the dragon to extinguish his fire, or fans the burning embers to rapturously worship his full blaze.
Du Plessix Gray’s ambivalence about tyrannical figures and the challenge they pose naggingly returns throughout her ever-growing body of prose-genre works. Her personal fascination with Sade as lover in Lovers and Tyrants and depravity as the quintessentially sought-after quality in the male of the species will be thoroughly explored more than thirty years later in At Home with the Marquis de Sade. In her first novel she contemptuously refers to her lover as a “Sade raté” for his uninspiring sexual performance, which is merely a symptom of a greater lacking: “the passion for human liberty.” For Francine du Plessix Gray, political and the sexual dimensions always go hand in hand. The attractive man appears in all of his “revolutionary splendor,” his hero status established by his need “to seek prurience.” The lover she describes in her autobiographical novel is woefully inadequate:
“He keeps reciting voluminous passages from Sade, Verlaine, Baudelaire. But how could he have the revolutionary splendor of men who are truly depraved, since he is unable to shed centuries of family precepts? Lacking that passion for human liberty which led his heroes to seek prurience, he is a Sade raté, a real failure as a pervert. His playing at evil is but another role to hide his monumental fear of freedom; of choosing himself; of shedding the carapace of prejudices history has encrusted him with.”8
In “The Marquis de Sade at La Coste.” an essay written in 2000, two years after the publication of her life of the Marquis de Sade, Francine du Plessix Gray returns once more to -- La Coste, “The writer's idyllic estate in Provence was where he created some of his most shocking work,” as the subtitle of the essay explains. Read following Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography of Sade, the article on La Coste provides considerable insight. Here the author cuts to the chase. At the outset of the article where she describes the beauty of what was formerly a 10th-century fortress against the Saracens, du Plessix Gray offers a taste of the kind of domestic details of Sade’s life that fill page after page of the biography. However, she immediately expresses reservations about the domestic approach, reminding us that he is a batterer of women:
“There's a potential danger to this kind of domestic approach to the Marquis de Sade. Such domestic ironies, such pleasant trivia of Sade's life as his love of baked apples might defang him, and turn this borderline
7 For a taste of Du Plessix Gray’s attempts at portraying a blithe, happy-go-lucky attitude toward sex, the following is sufficient: “Orgasms, orgasms, I never know what to make of them.” Lovers and tyrants, p. 108.
8 Francine du Plessix Gray, Lovers and Tyrants, p. 109
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psychopath and woman-batterer into a pleasant fellow. It should not be forgotten that one of the most terrifying features of Sade's persona, as with many batterers of women, is the vast range of his behavior -- his occasional capacity for great tenderness and integrity, his considerably more frequent manipulativeness and brazen authoritarianism. Sade was a power freak if there ever was one. His tyrannical streak, in fact, is very tied in to his cult of La Coste, and there is a link between his passion for this feudal village and his political ideology.” 9
The irony here is that she herself is the one who has concocted this mode of presenting the Marquis. Indeed, it’s the only method that allows her to present him in the full bipolar profile of the “lover and tyrant” that has always fascinated her. In fact, after the disclaimer her domestic approach in the biography, and again in the briefer space of the article, du Plessix Gray gives free rein to her descriptions of the Marquis’ sexual encounters, featuring her favorite, the orgy at Marseilles, where he plied his young partners with exorbitant amounts of Spanish fly.
Du Plessix Gray has banalized Sade, made him a good read for the liberated woman, and in the process, she’s flattened him for us by trying to exorcize herself from the spell of his persona and prose.
I personally prefer Chantal Thomas’ Sade. She preserves the writer by refusing to represent his oeuvre, by letting it stand alone:
« Il est vrai aussi, et je l’ai compris progressivement, qu’au fond toute tentative de represénter l’oeuvre de Sade m’est pénible. Elle détruit la marge de silence et de secret –de peur aussi (peur de soi, peur de l’énigme qu’on est à soi-meme)—qui double nécessairement sa lecture. Elle fait voler en éclats le transparent et voluptueux enfermement inhérent à toute lecture, mais plus spécifiquement à celle de Sade.»10
While the up front intent of the book is to look at the Marquis de Sade through his wife, the “lover” and his mother-in-law the “tyrant,” the true function of the book is to look at the Marquis de Sade through the prism of Francine du Plessix Gray’s psyche in order to dominate, exorcise, and control him. Indeed, the overwhelming popularity of the book may have everything to do with the fact that the biographer’s psyche is more reflective of that of the majority of women than is that of Chantal Thomas. As du Plessix Gray’s career continues at full tilt, injected with new vigor subsequent to her biography on Sade, she has been spending more of her time writing about writing and the undeniable affinity between the factual writer and the facts. Always a topic she has dabbled in, her reflections on this aspect of her career in an essay she wrote some ten years prior to publishing At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, confirm the ways in which Sade has been and remains a “fixation,” a “secret lust,” and an “unadmitted fault and grief”:
9 Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Marquis de Sade at La Coste.: the writer's idyllic estate in Provence was where he created some of his most shocking work,” salon.com, “Sex”
10 Chantal Thomas, Sade, la dissertation et l’orgie, p. 11-12. 8
“On of the many myths which distort our views of literature is the notion that the writing of factual prose is a process more calculated and objective, less intimately personal than the writing of fiction. In fact, the practice of journalism or the essay form can be inspired by sources quite as Orphic, subconscious, intense as those that fuel the writing of novels or short stories; the choice of a subject to report on feeds just as much on our childhood hang-ups and their resulting fixations, on our most secret lusts, our most unadmitted faults and griefs.”11
In the gallery of women who have worked on the Marquis de Sade and the oeuvre that was his life, Francine du Plessix Gray occupies a position somewhere in between that of Simone de Beauvoir’s condemnation and Chantal Thomas’ acceptance. Francine du Plessix Gray’s Sade satisfies both post feminist and politically correct exigencies of contemporary society. While that might be what it takes to keep him alive in our antiseptic age, and certainly every generation writes its own Sade, the problem with this domesticated Sade surfaces not so much because, as feared, we might not recognize the woman batterer, but because once we really read Sade, we won’t recognize him at all.
As a personal coda, I should like to relay what happened during a course I taught a few years ago. I had assigned Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir at the end of a course on eighteenth-century literature, and as a way of steeping the students quickly into this new reading, they read du Plessix Gray’s biography before reading Sade himself. The students found the womanizing, woman-persecuting scoundrel they encountered in her account deliciously wicked, but nothing to lose sleep over. In fact they found him remarkably similar to Max Factor fortune heir Andrew Stuart Luster, 36-year old father of two, who was at large and wanted for having seduced three women to whom he had given a variety of home-made aphrodisiacs, or in current parlance, “date-rape drugs.” The following Associated Press account of the charges and the perpetrator could have been lifted from the Marquis de Sade’s biography:
“An heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune was charged with 40 sex, drug and weapons counts for allegedly slipping date-rape drugs to three women and sexually assaulting them at his beach house. A judge on Wednesday ordered Andrew Stuart Luster, 36, held on $10 million bail after a third woman came forward and prosecutors added 19 new counts to the 21 he already faced. Previously, bail had been set at $1 million. "There is no question Mr. Luster is a clear and present danger to women," Superior Court Judge Art Gutierrez said. "I am satisfied the defendant is a threat." He remained jailed Thursday. Prosecutors have said that Luster, a great-grandson of makeup company founder Max Factor, videotaped his victims. Among the items seized during a search of his home last week were photographs and homemade videos, plus 13 guns, including an illegal AK-
11 Francine Du Plessix, “The Ultra-Resistance,” Adam & Eve and the City : Selected Nonfiction, Simon and Schuster, New York: 1987, p. 15.
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47 assault rifle, several small bottles of an unknown liquid, and cocaine, authorities said. "We believe the defendant presents a very serious and credible threat," Deputy District Attorney Becky Day said in court. 12
In other words, the students were merely reading another account of crime of the type they were all too familiar with thanks to news stories such as these and the proliferation of television programs with reenactments of crimes. However, when confronted with the real Sade in the Philosophie dans le boudoir, his most enlightened anti-enlightenment work, these same students cried foul and ran scared. Having scoped the periphery of Sade’s world in a journalistic discourse that was familiar to them, nothing had prepared them for the disorienting nature of Sade’s prose. The contrast between “The Real Marquis” and Francine du Plessix Gray’s Sade was too great. They never were able to move beyond the biographical Sade to grapple with his essence.
This classroom experience has taught me a profound lesson, one that I hope I can stay true to for the rest of my career. Continue to teach the original works of literature rather than works about them, at all costs. And resist the temptation when writing about literature to write about your own secret lusts as Francine du Plessix Gray has, unless you have the power of a figure like Sade to filter them through and make them worth reading. Otherwise, no one will be interested.
12 “Max Factor Heir in Date Rape Bust,” CBS News.com
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for Sister Rebecca when she gets up

Shankara20 said:

for Sister Rebecca when she gets up

http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g38/nbright1969/Coffee/coffeecup.gif​

Click to expand...

Ohhhhhhhhh Sir Shank I slept in and mmmmmmmyum perfect timing I see.........thank you

alternate billboards............

those damn Australians........

Pervy Politician Busted for Female Fanny Photo Fetish
Fox News

Lots of guys like a lady with a little junk in the trunk, but one pervy Australian politician took his devotion to the derriere to a whole new level.

Steven Reghenzani, fanny fan extraordinaire, was fined $550 and put on a 12-month good behavior bond for stalking in Melbourne after admitting to authorities that he was a pervert with a fetish for women’s rear ends, Australia’s Herald Sun reports.

Reghenzani got busted when perplexed photo lab employees reported receiving two rolls of film almost exclusively featuring photos of female fannies doing all sorts of everyday things.

When cops raided the butt-lover’s home, they found 150 posterior pictures on display, as well as folders with hundreds of glossy bottoms cut from magazines.

"Mr. Reghenzani didn't have a sinister purpose … he merely saw something he liked, akin to a tourist taking a photograph of Ayres Rock,” Reghenzani’s lawyer told the court.

"There has been no impact on the victims. They are not aware of it."

His extensive collection featured images of a 60-year-old woman’s behind, women runners bending over a starting block and a lady wearing Lycra bike shorts before a run, to name a few.

Conspicuously absent from his collection of tushies? Ladies in denim.

Rehgenzani told cops that he did not like women in jeans.

And though his lawyer insists the heinie shrine was harmless (if not humorous), authorities were less than amused.

"These are focusing on a specific area of a woman. They are photographs of the bottom," Sen-Constable Martin said. "It is serious. It is serious enough that the person from the photographic studio contacted police."

@}-}rebecca---- said:

Wrong Reasons To Do S/M

Column by Fetish Diva Midori

Are you a kinkster? Are you a part of the S/M community? Do you identify yourself as a leather person? Do you know why you’re a member of this community? Has it fed your needs? Has it made you happier? Has it brought you more inner peace? Have you found intimate and harmonious connections with people whom you might not have otherwise met.
If so, I congratulate you. You’ve found a corner of the complex social network of humans that’s right for you.
If, however, you haven’t found these things, perhaps you’re trying to quench your thirst in the wrong watering hole. You may be seeking bliss through the wrong pilgrimage.
Recently I’ve encountered a few situations where I’ve asked or wondered if a person’s need to belong to the kink community was positive and/or healthy. I’m not talking about the rare egregious nutcase murderers who prey on the on-line BDSM players and stuff them into 55-gallon drums. I’m talking about everyday people who find themselves in search of something within the leather world and constantly feel unhappy or unfulfilled. I’ve met such people in casual conversations at leather events, in submissive applicants, in tutorial students, and within circles of friends.
Perhaps we’ve mistakenly made the S/M life seem like a panacea for personal and erotic problems.
I know of a person who thought that being a house boy/servant/sex slave would be a great way to get laid, live comfortably, and have a place to live. I know of another person who uses the premise of TPE (Total Power Exchange) to deprive his sub from having contact with her friends and family. I also know of an individual who doesn’t like any S/M play but wanted the seeming tenderness of after-care; in turn, that person would put up with acts that were rather distasteful to them. I know of bottoms who guilt and cudgel their tops into serving their needs. I know people who feel worthless, have intensely low-self esteem issues, and believe that D/s justifies their broken self image. I know of doms who force their boys into high-risk sex in the name of obedience.
Why so much of this lately?
During the past several years there’s been a great effort to give positive PR to the S/M life. That’s fine. I’m all for reducing the stigma against alternative sexual practices between consenting adults. But in the rush to show the joy of kink, perhaps we’ve done too good of a job. Perhaps we’ve mistakenly made the S/M life seem like an Eden of sexual adventurousness and panacea for personal and erotic problems. We’ve also put stock in our reputation as a community that welcomes with open arms all adults, regardless of their proclivities, perversions, and/or dysfunction. We talk about the joys, physical highs, spiritual paths, honored commitments, deep bonds, tenderness, primal joys, enlightened communications, etc., etc.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
The spin job by the enthusiastic disciples of pervyness has done its work. In some quarters. (Although hardly enough in the realms of legal defense, employment protection, and mental health authorities.) Understandably, this is what enthusiasts do. They are thrilled, delighted, and only wish to be understood. With such wonderful earnest cheerleading (especially in the world of the Internet, where no one can be held accountable for their words), people have been coming out of the woodwork to find S/M Munches, clubs, play-parties, and play-mates.
What we, the believers, haven’t mentioned are the mundane details, the downsides, the realities:

If you are broken, S/M will not fix you.
Your domme may play your mommy or daddy, but you still have adult responsibilities to the world.
Poor social skills cannot be disguised as dominance.
Poor social skills cannot be disguised as submission.
You can’t get a date just because you bought a whip or a collar.
Only you can make yourself worthless.
Only you can choose to be powerful.
Consensual slavery or D/s is not a meal ticket with room and board.
Total Power Exchange isn’t.
Total Power Exchange can’t protect you from a restraining order.
Empty rituals will not lead to love.
Controlling another’s life doesn’t mean that you have control over yours.
Consent is a moment to moment experience and does exist permanently.

Sometimes we don’t even recognize the broken people when they’re looking at us in the mirror.
Our community ideology states that S/M isn’t abuse and there’s no place for abuse in good S/M. But here’s the reality: Abuse in our community does happen and we don’t always talk about it. It may be the abuse of others or the abuse of self. I’ve no idea of what the incidence of abuse in the S/M community might be. I’ve no idea as to whether it’s greater, lesser, or at par with the general population. But it definitely is there. Sometimes we aren’t certain if an interaction within a couple is abusive or consensual behavior. When the dom silences the sub, is that the textbook definition of abuse or is it acceptable protocol in their household? We can’t always be certain looking at the external parts of the relationship; whether the sub maintains agency of their life and consent, or if a sense of powerlessness is pervasive to the point of helplessness and subjugation. We aren’t always certain from the outside whether the domme is enjoying a newfound sexual confidence or is actually a reluctant, domineered Venus in furs to a selfish Severin.
Yes, many people start out in S/M feeling uncertain, even insecure and lacking in confidence. Such is to be expected in any new adventure. I’m not talking about the uncertainly of entering a new world. I’m concerned about people who are broken and enter S/M to put on a Band-Aid or hide their emotional cracks.
You can’t always know who the broken people are. Sometimes we don’t even recognize them when they’re looking at ourselves in the mirror. Many of the broken have fully internalized the dogma, catch phrases, party line, and slogans of the S/M communities. They sound great on paper ... or on their Internet profile. They sound great during the interview or negotiation process. We may believe this is the only place we belong. Yet perhaps such broken individuals do, in fact, mistake acceptance for happiness, for a sense of belonging.
Here’s one thing to look for: Does the S/M or D/s in which they partake really turn them on? Does it make them hard or wet? Do they have erotic fantasies about kink? Are they really happier for being a part of the community?
Along with genuine arousal, are they able to empathize with other people? Do they have friends of quality? Do they have a sense of self worth and self esteem balanced with a healthy sense of humility? Are they able to interact properly within and outside of the S/M community? Has it fed their needs? Has it made them happier? Have they found intimacy and harmonious connections with people by way of S/M explorations? Has S/M brought them more internal peace?

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For those like myself who may have missed it, this is an article worth a read.

@}-}rebecca---- said:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/masochist.jpg​

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LMFAO!!!!

Fury

Shankara20 said:

Fetish Diva Midori

From my not-so-private collection of Midori memorabilia
http://i52.photobucket.com/albums/g38/nbright1969/people/sdg_japan.jpg​

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Ohhhhh Morning Sir Shank and thank you so much its a wonderful picture of her and a Goedde as well I note ...........smiles

@}-}rebecca---- said:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/yayme.gif
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/thankyouSS.gif​

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they tell me they were impressed with your dedication to the subject matter, that you were relentless in pursuing the material and meticulous in presenting your findings.

they sincerely hope you will do post-grad work...

Shankara20 said:

they tell me they were impressed with your dedication to the subject matter, that you were relentless in pursuing the material and meticulous in presenting your findings.

they sincerely hope you will do post-grad work...

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Ohhh Hell yes......I mean ohh of course ........smiles like an angel...... I plan to really throw myself into the 'arena' again Sir Shank the wellbeing of Sadeans of the future may hinge on that .........not every day you meet someone as selfless as moi huh ..........grinsmiles.....

I was reading through some archives of Mistress Matisse's Journal earlier this evening hoping to find some literature on Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and BDSM when I stumbled across this article ( thats what submissives do on early Sunday evenings okay )

As I recall Miss Shy ( hurry back sweety , apologies Andante ) had a Thread on the movie the Secretary which was soon hijacked into a RPHS festival by quite a few of the regulars.

Thanks to serendipity ..........



Since some of you expressed some curiosity yesterday about my date with Roman – and since he's given the okay to me writing about it in some greater depth – I suppose I could talk some more about that…
I knew he had a special surprise of some kind planned for this date in honor of my birthday. And I knew better than to take his mock-hints about Mexican wrestlers, midgets and trained llamas seriously. But I really had no idea what he had planned, and it's hard to explain why I enjoyed what he did so very much without first giving you some backstory.

You see, back when I was a teenager, and I was figuring out that gee, my sexual desires didn't line up with what the other kids seemed to get off on, the internet wasn't yet a part of people's daily existence. So it was a lot harder for a young person who was…questioning their sexuality, to find much evidence of a sexual world beyond very tame vanilla heterosexual monogamy. I was already a bibliophile, and in spite of what James Walker once said, I had occasionally found some vague intimations of who I might be by searching through books.

But the first real clue I ever had that there might be a culture that embraced me was…The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I was sixteen years old. I went into the theatre at midnight with a group of friends, without really knowing what I was going to see. I watched the movie, and watched the strangely dressed people cavorting in the aisles, and I knew there was something there for me. As I watched Frankenfurter, that bitchy, dominant, omnisexual drag queen, wreak sexual havoc on Brad, Janet, and Rocky, I saw what I wanted. I wanted to be him: dangerously transgressive yet irresistibly sexy. And I wanted to fuck him, the hot hungry man/woman, with whom nothing would be too much or too far. I wouldn't have to explain what I didn't yet have words for - he would know who I was. He would know what I wanted.

"At the late night, double feature, picture show…
I wanna go…Oh ohhhhhhh…
To the late night, double feature, picture show…"

I went back the next weekend. And the next, and the next…
The idea of getting all excited about a rather cheesy B-movie with a few only mildly naughty sex scenes will probably seem quaint to the under 25-crowd. But you perverts from my generation – you know what I'm talking about. Back then, Rocky Horror was the only place, in a lot of smaller towns and more conservative places, where a teenager could go and be openly freaky without too much fear of reprisal. (Plus, it does feature the young and quite yummy Susan Sarandon running around in white cotton panties.)
That's how I came to be a Rocky Horror regular for several years. Yes, I was in the cast for some of that time. (I was Magenta.) Yes, I have the bootleg copy of it on video with Japanese subtitles, from back before you could buy it legally. And yes, I still remember all the words to the songs, and all the audience partici – (Say it!) -pation lines. I haven't been for years, but still, whenever I see a snippet of the movie somewhere, or hear the music, I smile, because I remember how it felt to finally find a place where I felt…at home. Roman and I have talked about this, and he understands perfectly. He's a Rocky Horror alumnus himself.

So when I sat on my couch with a blindfold over my eyes, and the sound of Tim Curry's rich, throbbing voice came to my ears,
"How d'you do,
I see you've met my,
Faith-ful handy-man…"
I threw back my head and let out a shriek that was part delighted laughter, and part disbelief that no, I couldn't possibly see what I thought I was going to see when I took off that blindfold. He didn't really – he couldn't have…
"Okay, you can take off the blindfold now," said Roman.
He did.
Whiteface makeup with dark drag-queen eyeshadow halfway up his forehead, lushly painted red lips, a long black cape and – oh, my – fishnet stockings and fetishdiva six-inch platform heels. Roman danced and pranced around the room for me in those high heels like he'd been punching the clock at the Lusty Lady forever.
"But by night I'm one hell of a lov-a-hhrr!" With a dramatic flourish, he threw off the cape to reveal a black satin corset with garters, a silky black thong, and of course, a string of white beads, just like the ones Frankenfurter wore. With the fishnets and heels – it was…perfect. Just perfect.
"I'm just a sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania." When he shook his barely covered package in my face, I howled like an overstimulated small-town girl at her first Chippendales show.
And I was definitely overstimulated. This is what went through my mind - try to imagine them all flowing through your head in rapid succession, several times in a row.

Oh, my god, look what he did for me! Look at all the trouble he went through to do something he knew I'd really like! This is so sweet and special!

Oh, my god, look at his cock in those shiny stretchy underwear. That's fucking hot.

He's really good in those heels. He must have been practicing. And, wow, they make him look about seven feet tall. Oh, yeah, bend over, oh yeah - nice buttcheeks, baby…

What a sweet, thoughtful, special thing to do for me. What a wonderful, kinky, nasty boy he is. I think I'm going to have to fuck him raw.

I was saying some of this out loud, of course, in between catcalls and wolf-whistles and various other sexually appreciative noises.

"So I'll remove the cause - but not the symptom." As the music faded, he planted one high-heeled foot – (Where did he get those shoes?) on the couch between my knees.
"So," he said, panting just slightly, "want your other present?"
"There's more? Did you bring Rocky as well?"
"No, I asked (insert name of Roman's good friend), but he passed. Didn't want to bleach his hair blond."
I stared up at him. "Hair…Oh my god, that's why you look so different. You shaved off your beard!"
He let out a whoop of laughter. "That's why I look so different?"
I flapped my hand at him. "Oh, you know what I mean! But darling – your nice beard. You shaved it off – for this? For me?"
He smiled, his teeth gleaming whitely against the dark, glossy lipstick. "No big deal, it'll grow back."
"You are absolutely the coolest thing alive, did you know that? Okay, if there's more, bring it on."
He brought me a gift-wrapped package slightly smaller than a shoebox. I tore off the paper, opened it, examined the contents.
"Oh my. Well, look at these pretty things…" I stared at him, arching one eyebrow questioningly. "For tonight?"
He nodded.
"You're ready for this?"
He nodded again, giving me Frankenfurter's come-hither look.
"All right then, baby…let's go downstairs."
So we did, and there, dear readers, is where I draw the curtain. Because certain things that happen between a girl and her drag queen in the dark of the night should remain…private.

"Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me!
I wanna be dirty!
Thrill me, chill me, fulfill me,
Creature of the night…"

@}-}rebecca---- said:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/masochist.jpg​

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I love this and considering I am in DK and still in Lit for brief moments must mean there are people here I love that much

shy slave said:

I love this and considering I am in DK and still in Lit for brief moments must mean there are people here I love that much

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Yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee its you !!! Great Minds think alike. Have a look at the intro in the post I just made before this one Miss Shy. We may have been writing at the same time .........smiles. Little Emperor requires attention must go for now. Huge hugs to you and Andante. Love from me

places to hide part 1............

@}-}rebecca---- said:

http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/employee_of_the_month.jpg

Rebecca isn't hereeeeeeeee...........now go away please echo echo​

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hmmmm, wonder where she is? The good thing is that if I can't find her EG can't either....


Well, I gota go to several meetings tonight so it will be late before I can return to join in the hunt.

Basic Physics with Rebecca............

@}-}rebecca---- said:

assemble as instructed
​

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OH MY! All that time on the lamb, running, always running, wondering if she would be found and punished for her indiscretions, Oh Dear, have take it's toll

'round the bend I'm afraid

I hope things in not too late


Dr Dear It's OK - all if forgiven - You can come home!!!

Shankara20 said:

OH MY! All that time on the lamb, running, always running, wondering if she would be found and punished for her indiscretions, Oh Dear, have take it's toll

'round the bend I'm afraid

I hope things in not too late


Dr Dear It's OK - all if forgiven - You can come home!!!

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Better karma in Kitten/toast physics than flogging a dead horse over at Clash of the Titans Central Sir Shank...........

@}-}rebecca---- said:

Better karma in Kitten/toast physics than flogging a dead horse over at Clash of the Titans Central Sir Shank...........

Home Sweet Home ​

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your the Dr.

@}-}rebecca---- said:

one piece of toast http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/toast.jpg
+ one cat http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/cat.gif

assemble as instructed
= http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c224/rebecca000/ag.gif
Antigravity .........YAY... ​

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*hides my precious kitties*

*makes toast anyway*

Fury