SOURCE: "The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)," in Pornography: Men Possessing Women, The Women's Press, 1981, pp. 70-100.

A radical feminist essayist and fiction writer, Dworkin has published several books on the politics of gender. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, she argues that pornography functions in society as an instrument of power with which men degrade and subjugate women. In the following excerpt from that book, Dworkin posits that the violence against women that permeates Sade's work expresses basic assumptions about the relative rights of men and women in both his society and the present day.

Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade—known as the Marquis de Sade, known to his ardent admirers who are legion as The Divine Marquis—is the world's foremost pornographer. As such he both embodies and defines male sexual values. In him, one finds rapist and writer twisted into one scurvy knot. His life and...