Synopsis Disgust can be as much part of erotic love as violence although the evocation of disgust has rarely reached the extremes portrayed in the fiction of Marquis de Sade. In de Sade’s stories, erotic unions are routinely preceded, accompanied or followed by the smearing and eating of faeces, drinking of or bathing in urine, the licking of spit and vomit, a reveling in bodily odours – all in the service of heightening the excitement of erotic union. Violence, too, physical or mental, is part of many contemporary depictions of love.