by Ritter von Leopold Sacher-Masoch
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VENUS IN FURS is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s legendary confession of a fur fetishist, Severin, whose sexual pleasure derives from absolute self-subjugation to a cruel, semi-naked whip-wielding mistress. Sacher-Masoch was the poet of the anomaly now generally known as masochism. By this is meant the desire on the part of the individual affected of desiring himself completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex, and being treated by this person as by a master, to be humiliated, abused, and tormented, even to the verge of death. This motive is treated in all its innumerable variations. As a creative artist Sacher-Masoch was, of course, on the quest for the absolute, and sometimes, when impulses in the human being assume an abnormal or exaggerated form, there is just for a moment a flash that gives a glimpse of the thing in itself.

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