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and the male must not be devoured.
    There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.
    The bad woman must be punished, and if she is punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.
    Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.
    Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.
    The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who is good —inert, passive, victimized—and that a good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Part Two
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    THE PORNOGRAPHY
Among my brethren are many who dream with wet pleasure of the eight hundred pains and humiliations, but I am the other kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape after escape, I dream only of escaping, ascent, of a thousand possible ways to make a hole in the wall, of melting the bars, escape escape, of burning the whole prison down if necessary.
    Julian Beck,The Life of the Theatre
     

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a staple of the market place, and where it is illegal it flourishes and prices soar. FromThe Beautiful Flagellants of New YorktoTwelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions of fucking, sucking, whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all of their manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point of inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses of men and women?
    Literary pornography is the cultural scenario of male/female. It is the collective scenario of master/slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown now out of the fairy-tale landscape into the castles of erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit, her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her end annihilation —death or complete submission.
    Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It is the structure of male and female mind, the content of our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and mile of our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and how can we bear it?
     

CHAPTER 3
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    Woman as Victim: Story of O
    TheStory of O,by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion of children’s fairy tales. The female as a figure of innocence and evil enters the adult world—the brutal world of genitalia. The female manifests in her adult form—cunt. She emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition,Story of Ois more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is, what she needs, her processes of thinking and feeling, her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic dance of some