Story of O, an erotic novel that shocked and aroused millions—was published in 1954 under the pseudonym Pauline Réage; many suspected the book, with its frank descriptions of bondage and desire, must have secretly been written by a man. The French intellectual Dominique Aury (born Anne Desclos, 1907-1998) came forward to reveal her identity in 1994 in an interview at the age of 86. 

Aury was co-editor of the French literary publication Les Lettres Françaises and an editor and general secretary at La Nouvelle Revue Française, a literary review. She was the only woman to sit on the reading committee of the leading French publisher Gallimard, where she worked as an editor and translator for the last fifty years of her life and received the Légion d'Honneur. She was also one of the first women to write openly and explicitly about domination, submission, and sex. 

O is a love-letter of seduction. Aury wrote the book to intellectually woo her lover, Jean Paulhan, the head of Gallimard, who believed that women were not capable of writing erotica and who she feared, was straying. She changed his mind: It was Paulhan that encouraged Aury to turn her notebooks into a novella. He wrote the preface to the first edition of O—but did not acknowledge their relationship, instead writing it as if they were strangers.

In 1955, O won the Prix des Deux Magots, while the book’s publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who had previously published Sade’s complete works, was charged with obscenity. The first English edition of the book was published in 1965 by Olympia Press, infamous for its publication of Lolita, The Ginger Man, and Naked Lunch, as well as pornography for sailors. During the1960s, O became the most-read contemporary French novel outside France.

In the decades that followed, feminists viewed the book as pornography and a symbol of oppression to women's equality, educational and employment discrimination, and thwarted access to birth control and abortion. On American college campuses, the book was seized and ceremonially burned. Feminist writer and critic Andrea Dworkin embodied both sides of the polemic regarding O. In her book Woman Hating from 1974 , she wrote: "What lifts this fascinating book above mere perversity is its movement toward the transcendence of the self through a gift of the self… to give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, as if it is done with love for the sake of love.” However, by the end of her chapter about O she calls it “a story of psychic cannibalism, demonic possession, a story which posits men and women as being at opposite poles of the universe — the survival of one dependent on the absolute destruction of the other.”

During the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1970s and 1980s, an opposition grew against activists like Dworkin and journalists and writers such as Susan Brownmiller and Robin Morgan (who helped form Women Against Pornography in 1978). Sex-positive feminists led by scholars Carol Vance, Ellen Dubois, Ellen Willis, and Gayle Rubin wanted to move beyond debates about pornography and violence and focus on sexuality apart from reproduction. These factions came to a head at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality in 1982, with protests and pickets from anti-pornography groups, threats of pulled funding from Barnard College administration, and confiscation of the conference’s Diary, which contained information about convention events and works by feminist artists. This rift amongst feminists persists: many believe that fighting porn is key to preventing sexual assault and rape. The campaign against pornography has also brought together sex workers, sex positive feminists and anti-censorship crusaders who unify for desired freedom.