In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes, ‘[t]he erotic experience is one that most poignantly reveals to human beings their ambiguous condition; they experience it as flesh and as spirit, as the other and the subject’ (TSS 416). A woman's sexual life is dependent on her ‘social and economic situation’ (TSS 415) and therefore, in order to reach an independent experience of pleasure, she must first work to overcome objectification. As a consequence of her struggle, a woman is exempt from the myth of privilege that the erotic experience begins and ends with her sexual activity, whereas inversely, man ‘lets himself be duped’ (TSS 416). As Beauvoir sees it, a woman can embrace her ambiguity because she sees herself first as flesh, then as subject; she is aware of the difficulty and imbalance in her situation. Reclaiming her freedom and subjectivity, of course, is relative to situations wherein they are both reciprocated and recognised.

In her essay, ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, Beauvoir looked closer at the interrelationships between privilege and violence, considering more seriously the situated freedom involved with intimate erotic experience, although her attention on emotional experience has often been overlooked in favour of her ethical and political arguments. While Beauvoir sought to emphasise the ambiguity within the sexual act where ‘Through emotional intoxication, existence is grasped in oneself and in the other as at once subjectivity and passivity’ (MWBS 60), Sade was ‘absolutely ignorant’ of such experience (MWBS 59). Instead, he could ‘rejoin the other only through representations’, (MWBS 60) finding confirmation of his self in the other's orgasms he believed he engendered.

Through an examination of the Marquis de Sade's life and works, Beauvoir explores the fundamental imbalance of privilege and the cruelty that is required in order to sustain the violence it incurs through spectacle. Ultimately, she arrives at the conclusion that Sade failed in his project of living an ideologically defensible life based on egotistical pleasure, acknowledging that while his privilege enabled him to valorise cruelty in his acts of oppression – ‘he chose cruelty over indifference’ (MWBS 94) – he was not able to recognise a capacity for action outside of violence.