The Secret Life of a Feminist

The Secret Life of a Feminist
By
Lisa Raphael

The story of O was my bedside companion from the time of my first sexual encounters until I left my husband, thirty-five years later. A liberated woman, I never understood my fascination with the book.
The story of O describes the progressive debasement of a young woman who wants nothing more than to be a slave to her lover. The tests she endures at his hands and those of his friends include sodomy rape, flogging, bondage, branding and deliberate psychological humiliation, all detailed in erotic, and sensuous prose. As long as her lover loves her, O’s spirit remains unbroken.
I could not have been more different from O. By my mid-thirties, I had lived and traveled on three continents, established a career and changed nationality all without a man in my life.
Then I got married.
Soon after our wedding, I began to feel small and helpless around my husband. During the course of our sixteen years together, I gave him complete control of our affairs. I earned the income, but he determined our life style. In the office, I counseled women to take charge of their lives. In private, I was afraid to put gas in my car without permission. When the incongruity between my public life and private life became too painful, I sought help.
The source of my submission was deep. A child of the Holocaust, I had lost everyone and everything familiar to me before I was four years old. The persecutions that took place after Hitler occupied my birthplace had made everything and everyone outside of our immediate family unsafe. When I became a family with my husband, my terrorized inner child latched on to him as the sole source of security in an unsafe world, overwhelming my adult experience as a liberated woman. Facing my childhood fears gave me the courage to stand up to my husband, which led to our divorce.
I celebrated my renewed independence by taking on a new name, and committed to healing the feminine in all her forms. Suddenly, as if from nowhere strange marks appeared on my back and buttocks, as if I had been whipped. Strange, suggestive dreams haunted me and I was overcome with uncontrollable weeping. Exploring these symptoms in therapy lead to the recovery of memories of sexual abuse by my brother and his friends. My older brother and his friends had raped, sodomized, assaulted, bound and whipped me in precisely the way described in the Story of O, before I was old enough to go to school. Like the heroine in the novel, I romanticized the relationship with my brother and married someone just like him. I overlooked my husband’s emotional cruelty because I had disassociated from my brother’s abuse in childhood.
I left my copy of Story of O behind when I left my husband - and discovered its sequel. In Return to the Castle, O’s lover openly prostitutes her and she realizes that he no longer loves her. With the loss of his love, all illusion of freedom within enslavement is destroyed.
I dreamed I was at a crossroads. There was the goddess, Hecate, holding Freedom in one hand and Love in the other, inviting me to choose.
This time I chose freedom.