so pray with me lover
and make me believe
that when you are hunched over me
pressed into me, dripping with sweat

that your sweat on me is baptismal
and making love to you will purge
this hunger i am built with
give name to all that is holy in me

that your tongue on my nipple
your teeth in the soft flesh of my breast
that sweet pain you deliver with each bite
is my sacrament and my sole path to redemption

We would rather have a pale, sorry Holbein Virgin who belongs entirely to us than a classical Venus, no matter how divinely beautiful, if she loves Anchises today, Paris tomorrow, and Adonis the day after. And when Nature does triumph in us, when we abandon ourselves in burning passion to such a woman, her cheerful joie de vivre strikes us as demonic, as cruel, and we see our bliss as a sin that we must atone for.

I have always rebelled against conventional relationships and the idealization of female virginity (unless of course we are talking about some good cherry popping erotica). And Wanda’s response to her society’s restraints:

But you mean to say that the individual who rebels against the institutions of society is ostracized, stigmatized, stoned. Fine, I dare to try. My principles are quite pagan, I want to make the most of my existence. I can do without your hypocritical respect, I prefer happiness.

Yes! Yes! Yes! And what sane passionate woman wouldn’t? Now the story takes a few interesting turns (some that I did not expect from what I heard about it) and you will have to read it yourself to really get to know these two characters. However, the last titbit I want to share with you is from the last page when the protagonist is trying to explain to his friend the moral of his story (remember this was written in the 1800s). He says that in their current society a woman can never be man’s companion, she is his “enemy” and can only be either his “slave or his despot”:

She will be able to become his companion only when she has the same rights as he, when she is his equal in education and work.”

Now maybe I am a complete nerd but I find that thought fascinating. That a cruelly dominant woman is a product of the patriarchal society. So in fact the very society that denies women equal rights is a breeding ground for the perfectly sadistic fem domme. Hmmm…

…and am I not entitled to be cruel? Man desires, woman is desired. That is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Nature has put man at woman’s mercy through his passion, and woman is misguided if she fails to make him her subject, her slave, no, her toy…

We can truly love only that what stands above us, a woman who subjugates us through beauty, temperment, intellect, willpower, a woman who becomes our despot.

…and everyone knows and feels the close kinship between voluptuousness and cruelty.

Think, you man, you’re not much better than a dog, a lifeless obect. You are my thing, my toy, which I can smash to while away an hour. You are nothing, and I am everything. Do you understand?