SOURCE: "Polemical Preface: Pornography in the Service of Women," in The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 3-37.

An English fiction writer and critic whose novels and short stories combined lush prose, eroticism, and elements of the macabre, Carter explored gender issues in both her fiction and her non-fiction. In the following excerpt, she argues that Sadean pornography is indirectly useful to women because it lays bare the oppressive politics of conventional male-female relationships.

It is fair to say that, when pornography serves—as with very rare exceptions it always does—to reinforce the prevailing system of values and ideas in a given society, it is tolerated; and when it does not, it is banned. (This already suggests there are more reasons than those of public decency for the banning of the work of Sade for almost two hundred years; only at the time of...