Sex & The Book / When love becomes prison. Submission and devotion in the words of Pauline Réage

When in 1954 it was given to the press for the first time Histoire d’O, destined to become one of the most acclaimed masterpieces of world erotic literature, on the cover was the pseudonym Pauline Réage. A thousand hypotheses arose regarding the alleged identity of the author, above all it was believed for some time that it could be a man. Only in 1994, well forty years later, in an interview on the New Yorker, Dominique Aury, general secretary of the Nouvelle Revue Française, as well as an established literary critic with in his curriculum even a collaboration with André Gide and publications of a completely different kind, came forward. Born in Rochefort-sur-Mer in 1907, she studied English at the Sorbonne and began working at the Nouvelle Revue alongside the intellectual Jean Paulhan, twenty years her senior, with whom she had a long relationship.

Jean Paulhan himself - it was rumored - would help Dominique write the novel, also signing the preface with the emblematic title Happiness in slavery. For others, however, it would have been precisely his estrangement that inspired his lover, as well as his absurd belief that a woman could not be capable of writing an erotic novel. The Aury did not take long to prove the opposite: although initially rejected by Gallimard, theHistoire he found in the young Pauvert an excellent publisher and, in a short time, he gave him a great best-seller.
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When they had arranged the lamp so that the beam of light fell directly on the sex and face of his lover, who almost touched him, and on his hands that caressed him from below, René suddenly ordered: "Repeat: I love you." O repeated "I love you" with such delight that her beautiful lips barely dared to touch the tip of her sex, still protected by its sheath of tender flesh. The three men, who smoked, commented on her gestures, the movement of her mouth closed and tight on the sex she had grasped, and along which she went up and down, her unmade face that was flooded with tears every time the turgid member hit her. all the way down her throat, pushing her tongue back and making her feel nauseous. It was with his mouth almost gagged by hard flesh filling her that he murmured again: "I love you."

See also

Making love in the water

Making love with two men

Dirty talk: having sex with words to achieve a pleasure never felt before!

Other than chamber of secrets. Imagine that one day your lover takes you for a walk in a park and then, on the spot, invites you to get into a taxi waiting on the edge of the lawn. While the driver takes you quickly out of town, your lover takes off your panties and bra, then ties your hands behind your back, blindfolds you and, after half an hour on the road, drops you off at the entrance to a castle. . Welcoming you are two women dressed as eighteenth-century waitresses, with bodices and collars tight around the throat. Your lover disappears and the women arrange you naked in front of a mirror, with the obligation not to close or cross your legs. So they prepare you, make up and perfume your mouth, breasts, pubis and leave you alone for an unquantifiable time in a red sitting room full of mirrors, where they then take your measurements to dress you with very tight leather, laces and handcuffs. They take you to a library in the presence of four men, including your lover, who examine you and rape you, then they explain to you that in the castle it works in this way: every man is master of all the women who live there, real and proper slaves required to undergo any sexual abuse, as well as corporal punishment - from scourging to scarification - that is requested of them.

You would like to escape, don't you? What if the man you love asked you to become a slave of the castle of Roissy, as proof of devotion? And if then that submissive education ended up pleasing you, the renunciation of your own ego would result in an unparalleled mystical experience, just as total belonging to a man is the most liberating and triumphal gesture of your existence? Would you be able to live in the chains of a perennial orgy and how far would you be willing to go? This is O's story. Before you start living your own, remember: only you have the power to hold yourself captive.

by Giuliana Altamura

Here you can read the previous appointment with the column, Sex & The Book / The "sadomasochistic love between domination and narcissism in the verses of the poet Patrizia Valduga