The Story of O
By Pauline Réage and Guido Crepax
Eurotica
$24.95, 176 pp.
In a house of professional Dommes, The Story of O inevitably comes up. If you are kinky, or trade in sadomasochistic fantasies, you have an opinion on Pauline Réage's infamous novel of the erotic sexual preoccupations of the French bourgeois. It's kind of like the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Bhagavad Gita of BDSM.
My copy of Guido Crepax's comic version didn't fail to start some conversations at work this week.
Mistress Louise confessed that she actually abhors fantasies of erotic servitude. Her objection is not rooted is prudence, but profound envy. She just can't tolerate the implication that an underground where women are bound, punished, humiliated, and used may exist and never invited her to the party.
By contrast, Mistress Yuki scoffed, pointing out that all these stories depicting slaves used anally in acts of extreme humiliation "never make any mention of the shit."
My personal fascination with BDSM never did a lot of damage to my wallet in the form of elaborate fetish wardrobe—but I did spend a lot of money on dirty books. Particularly when I became a professional, I considered it an invaluable exercise to familiarize myself with the kinky canon. It was a tough job, all those Venus in Furs and Shadow Lanes, but I wanted the inspiration behind the preoccupation that would lead so many people to my door.
San Francisco is a town where the Kink powers that be have transformed a Mission block into a thriving industry and adult playground for the dynamics explored in Story of O, creating something of a reality series of sexual slavery. Evidently, that game is being lived and played behind closed doors and massive brick walls and in the minds of 21st century folk all over the world.
For the uninitiated, the "story" in question involves a woman who is taken to the Roissy estate by her lover, having agreed to do whatever he says to prove her devotion. Roissy houses a society of men who train and break women to their particular brand of D/S etiquette. Along with other beautiful naked ladies, O is subjected to sexual torture and humiliation including whipping, anal stretching, and being forced to wear uncomfortable fetish attire day and night. She sleeps in chains and is available to be abused and fucked by servants and men in this secret society.
Returning to her life as a trendy fashion photographer, O must accept that her training extends beyond the walls of Roissy. Her debasement continues at the hand of her lover's half-brother, whose prefers to use her analy, and a Mistress who pierces her labia and brands her ass. And somewhere along the line she finds time to fool around with her glamorous fashion models, depicted with much femme-on-femme fingering.
The first time I read Story of O, I, like Louise, became engrossed in a fantasy world of sexual surrender. The concept of an erotic game in which a lover or a lover's agent could take complete control over my appearance and behavior thrilled me. Having given it some thought over the years, it is my opinion that the appeal lies in the desire to please someone utterly, to relinquish responsibility. I have devoted a lot of time to play in which I am desired so intensely that someone would go to the extreme of something as empirically reprehensible as enslavement in order to have me.
The soft-lit film version of the novel doesn't do its legacy any favors by making understandable—if unforgivable—slices and dices to the really nasty stuff and replacing it with soapy melodrama. There is no redeeming character in this story, and to attempt to create one is to miss the point.
Much more in the spirit of the original is Italian artist Guido Crepax's gothic comic version, which has just been released in a no-frills hardcover by the bastions of elegant European filth, Eurotica . If anything, Crepax emphasizes and fleshes out the really nasty stuff.
No stranger to adapting erotic and kinky classics (check out Justine, Emmanuelle, and my personal favorite, The Art of Spanking), Crepax devours and regurgitates Réage's fantasy as if it were his own. It's very interesting to experience a woman's prose fantasy given an intense visual dimension by a man.
Crepax does credit to his material by creating a nightmarishly evocative visual narrative. The artist's genius is his unconventional narrative use of panels. Often referred to as psychedelic (a word metonymic with "made in the 70's"), Crepax's non-linear and disorienting visual style heightens the surreal dreamscape of the story and creates an almost nauseating density of scintillating imagery.
To read this comic is to glut oneself on elegant black-and-white illustrations of stylized stiletto heels, improbable corseting proportions, stockings, posture collars, cuffs, psychological humiliation, whipping administered by naked men with imposing hard-ons (ladies, for the record, you should be safe-wording when somebody lets one get away from them and hits your lower back where some valuable organs are chillin' unprotected, alright?), pre-Good Vibrations butt-plugs, human furniture, hardcore female-submissive heterosexual sex, and that aforementioned femme-on-femme heavy petting.
Of course, it's the prerogative of male erotic illustrators to make every female character their personal ideal physical type. With Crumb you see thick thighs and piggyback-ready backsides even in the Book of Genesis; Crepax's type is evidentially slender and willowy, with a heart-shaped ass and full teacup breasts. I find a world in which every character looks like the same woman with a different wig a little tedious. Yet Crepax's obsessive style cements itself in the brain, and leeches onto my own preoccupations. (Especially in an urban autumn, when there are so many damn distracting black leather high-heeled women's boots shamelessly parading the street in broad daylight…)
Certainly, The Story of O stands to offend many, particularly in this version where a classy hardcover hides some obscene pictures. Those who refuse to contextualize depictions of sexual power games and Sadomasochism within the boundaries of the imagination or adult consent could open any page of the book and find reason to ban or burn it. Meanwhile, progressive kinky folks may take reasonable umbrage at the high profile portrait of a submissive woman as a spoiled bubble-headed socialite whose subservient nature extends beyond Roissy and the bedroom.
O is not a independent woman who chooses her role and grasps the power and pride of the submissive. She is limp, needy, whiny. Yet a literary depiction of a woman who consents to and passionately embraces her servitude is a fascinating and important one, precisely because it is so offensive. Private fantasy is not the place for political correctness. A woman does not need to be intelligent or strong-willed in order to deserve the sex life she desires.
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