9/13/2012 12:46:28 PM: Quotes from Le Marquis, whose last name I have adopted here: Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite. Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust. If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be. When she's abandoned her moral center and teachings...when she's cast aside her facade of propriety and lady-like demeanor...when I have so corrupted this fragile thing and brought out a writhing, mewling, bucking, wanton whore for my enjoyment and pleasure.....enticing from within this feral lioness...growling and scratching and biting...taking everything I dish out to her.....at that moment she is never more beautiful to me. We are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves. Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy...Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice. In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice. True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them. Sex without pain is like food without taste. It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure. One must do violence to the object of one's desire; when she surrenders, the pleasure is greater. What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you... It is only by enlarging the scope of one's tastes and one's fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man (mankind, ie. men and women), thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life's thorns. The imagination is the spur of delights... all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise? ...your service will be arduous, it will be painful and rigorous, and the slightest delinquencies will be requited immediately with corporal and afflicting punishments; hence, I must recommend to you prompt exactness, submissiveness, and total self-abnegation that you be enabled to heed naught but our desires; let them be your laws, fly to do their bidding, anticipate them, cause them to be born... Extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, so kill me or take me as I am, for I shall not change. I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will. The completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all... ― Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade

4/11/2012 11:45:30 AM: Most people do not understand this quote from Anais Nin:                  “I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”                                                                                                             Anais Nin was very accomplished in many areas in her own right, and had the ear, company and sometimes intimacy with many of the movers and shakers of her time.  Not just jet-setters or the wealthy, but the intelligentsia, and the people with genuine power, so she was no shy retiring submissive wall-flower, she was an intelligent, strong willed, passionate woman who worked hard to understand her own true desires and then to explore them. The quote below seems to oppose the previous one but actually doesn't; the two need to be understood together. 'How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.'