A TO Z OF SEXUAL HISTORY: SADE, MARQUIS DE

The famous French pervert was jailed for 32 years as a result of his endless pursuit of pleasure. That's dedication to the cause. Unfortunately for him, the ultimate pleasure was pain, and inflicting it on others. The namesake of sadism theorized that because women can fake pleasure but not pain, the latter must be the higher form of sexual activity. He was convinced, deep down, that women loved it when he, for example, forced electric eels up their pussy while breaking them on the wheel. Incidentally, my dream date. For an 18th-century French nobleman--much like for Roman Emperors--being sexually depraved came with the title. It was your blood right, and the police would quietly tut and turn a blind eye for a very small price. Donatien de Sade, however, took it too far. His first run-in with the law came at 23--shortly after he was married--when he took prostitute Jeanne Testard to his country home. He locked the door and quietly asked if she believed in God to which she meekly replied that she was a good Catholic. Dissatisfied with her answer, he proceeded to rip her clothes off, shove pieces of communion host inside her vagina, and while shagging her, shout, "If thou art God, avenge yourself!" God did not respond. To further prove his point, he went on to masturbate with two crucifixes and attempt to give her an enema so she would shit in a holy chalice all the while referring to Jesus as a "motherfucker" and the Virgin Mary as a "buggress." His Catholic upbringing had clearly done him wonders. His uncle, a priest, had raised him by keeping a mother-daughter duo in the house to answer their every sexual whim and frequenting orgies at monasteries. Although he was arrested, his royal connections got him out of trouble and he was exiled to his castle. He had a run-in with police five years later for imprisoning a young girl, whipping her with a cat-o-nine-tails then masturbating into her wounds. Then again at 32 for poisoning four prostitutes with aphrodisiacal Spanish fly so they would fart as he sodomised them (sodomy was a still a crime then). He was forced to tell his wife Renée-Pélagie, who decided a bit of rape and torture was just her thing. The ever-forgiving Mrs. Sade agreed to procure six children--ostensibly as servants--for him to play with in his laboratory of sadism hidden deep within their castle. There was a six-week pedophilic orgy before the parents became suspicious and he was eventually arrested and imprisoned. This was the end of his serious sexual misadventures (those recorded at least) and he spent the rest of his life in and out of prison, where he wrote the majority of his fucked-up erotic books, ending his life at the ripe old age of 74 in an insane asylum. Sade was a libertine and an atheist. He held the philosophical belief that we are subordinate to our sex drive, and that rather than moralizing and calling it a perversion we should embrace our instincts. A bit of consensual whipping is one thing, but the scenarios he concocted in his writings are the stuff of Fred West's wet dreams. In this extract from his drama Philosophy in the Bedroom, 15-year-old daughter Eugenie has had her virginity taken by libertine Dolmance, who along with Madame de Saint-Ange and her brother Le Chevalier have given her a two-day course in depravity. When Eugenie's righteous mother interferes, they decide to torture her. The stage instruction reads: "Eugenie takes the pliers and continues to tear chunks of flesh from her mother's legs. When Saint-Age is finished, Le Chevalier steps in embuggering the victim while simultaneously punching both her ears with his fists. He is followed by Augustin, who, while embuggering the woman sinks a finger into one of her eyes and a thumb in one of her nostrils. After accomplishing which he twists his hand until the eye is disgorgered and the nostril splits open. During these proceedings, Dolmance reams the anus of each of the torturers." Finally, Dolmance asks the valet who has syphilis to put his "germ-infected snake" in both his mother's holes before Eugenie sews them up. Some people say Sade was wrongly vilified--his writing is just socio-political commentary and he was ahead of his time. Call me a prude, but even my most sadistic orgies have never concluded with me sewing shut my mother's cunt. CAMERON KING