She heard them saying that they would have to make her kneel down. But suddenly she lost her balance and fell backward (supported by whose arms?), while they opened her legs and gently spread her lips.

A hand seized one of her breasts, a mouth fastened on the tip of the other. They turned her around, and the heat of the fire was against her back. She would be stripped, chained, whipped and “gangbanged”: Story of O begins with René, her lover, taking her to a secret club in a château in Roissy to have her trained on sexual submission. However, there was a ban on promoting the book until 1967. The French authorities took the publisher to court for obscenity charges but they did not win the case. O for objectification: When a woman allows men to use her.

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