"Sexuality is power," wrote the Marquis de Sade. His virtuous Justine kept to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; his Juliette, Justine's triumphantly monstrous antithesis, viciously exploited her sexuality. This is a world where all tenderness is false, and all beds are minefields. But now Sade has met his match. With invention and genius, celebrated novelist Angela Carter takes on these figments of his extreme imagination and transforms them into symbols of our time--the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a stunning vision of love that admits neither the conqueror nor the conquered. It is a dazzling meditation on women's sexual freedom.