120 Days of Sodom is one of the most repugnant pieces of writing every thought of by a human being. The only reason I do not list it as the most repugnant is as in the last 20 years of the internet, the ease of access to a self destructive descent into porn addiction has only emboldened writers like Sade in the modern era. Sade’s writing is compulsive and neurotic. The way he describes his planning for 120 Days reads like he fetishes the inhuman nature that he writes pornography. It is not only enough for him to remove all of the love out of the act of sex by instilling in it his performative and evil need for control over others, but he also takes out even more of what makes sex important to human beings by organizing it like it is a bill going through Congress. Whatever happened to Sade in Jesuit College or whatever his older family members did to him clearly was something he never ever let go of. He presents to me as someone with such a deep sexual trauma so constantly present in his daily thinking he only found “relief” in inflicting pain onto others and by that method feeling a sense of regained control over his own life. This may be a reach I am just theorizing. The character he wrote of Duc de Blangis (representing nobility in the book) seems to partially or unintentionally be the most similar to Sade based on his personal history. Both Sade and The Duc had brief military service, and the slight vulnerability Sade attributes to The Duc in his description of his fear of confrontation and inability to directly be vulnerable leads me to believe this was an outlet in the writing to somewhat confess his fears or represent common issues among the nobility as a whole. The main thing Sade succeeds in throughout 120 Days is the overarching criticism that people in positions of power with infinite resources who have no virtue, principle or religion will endlessly pursue hedonism until they are empty skeletonized husks of human beings only capable of being briefly happy while creating such an immense harm to everyone around them they will only ever be remembered by how backwards they set the progress of humanity.