Talk:Philosophy in the Bedroom
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I don't think the dichotemy in the first paragraph is acurate. de Sade clearly intended his work to be considered pornographic and it is certainly not erotic in the traditional sense. Some people like Simmone de Beauvoir (Mrs Jean Paul Satre as Eric insists) have seen philosophy within the pornography but I don't think there is a serious argument that it is not pornographic.
The piece is 200 years old, so many of the cliches of modern pornography were not really cliches at the time. There was not a lot of pornography in circulation at the time to compare it to.
The other aspect of the work that should be brought out is that until authorized se-ed became part of the curriculum in the mid 60s/70s a large number of kids (and adults for that matter) were reading de Sade for sex-ed as it was one of the few places where it was considered.
Neil Fletcher, in his biography of Sade, made a good case for the work to be considered as satire. There have been other writers who have argued the satirical nature of many of Sade's works.
