My stumbling across The Story of O on my mother's bookcase came at a remarkably young, impressionable age. I was a geeked-out 11-year old who read indiscriminately and the surprisingly plain cover was all the incentive I needed to wade directly into the deep end.

FYI for parents... Unless you're willing to shell out the big bucks for therapy down the road, you might not want leave this book out where your unsuspecting pre-pubescent darling will find it.

As the book begins, O's lover, Rene, is in the process of delivering her to a chateau in the Parisian suburb of Roissy to begin her training as a slave. She is beaten. She is f***ed mercilessly. She is constantly available to any and every man who may want her... and she considers it an honor and a privilege to serve her lover in this way. That submission continues as O leaves Roissy and is given to Rene's best friend, Sir Stephen. With Sir Stephen, the beatings become harsher and the humiliations more complex, but O continues to view her docility as the ultimate proof of her love for Rene. Her complete and unreserved yielding to authority reaches its emotional, spiritual, and physical climax when her labia are pierced and hung with chains and her ass is branded with Sir Stephen's monogram.

Legend has it that the author, Anne Desclos (writing under the pseudonym of Pauline Reage), wrote the book after her publisher and lover, Jean Paulhan, told her that erotica was not something a woman was capable of writing. Paulhan was wrong. It has also been said that Desclos wrote The Story of O as a love letter to Paulhan. Regardless of the story's origins, the book pulls you in with page after page of some of the steamiest bdsm scenes I've ever encountered. The beatings and tortures turn pain into something to be actively pursued. Humiliation becomes a creative act rather than a punishment.

I've spoken with acquaintances about what got them into BDSM. The vast majority say that this book served as a pivot point. It struck some chord within them that had previously been unexpressed. In a lot of ways, The Story of O is to BDSM what Romeo and Juliet or Oliver Twist is to English literature. You just know it. You can't provide a superficial account of something that's so deeply engrained in a culture.

The Story of O is a classic and deservedly so. As such, I don't think it can be summarized in a way that would do it justice. I do, however, think it can be engaged with and talked about. Rather than view this as a review of the book (or - heaven forbid! - something as banal as a book report), I'd like see my "review" here as a way of opening a discussion on one of the more important contributions to literary erotica in the last century.