I flipped through Dworkin's "Woman Hating". In light of the podcast episode on BDSM, I was unsurprised to see Dworkin had it right. When writing about The Story of O (an old, violent french BDSM fiction from 1954 about a woman called "O") she says:

But what is most extraordinary about Story of O is the mind-boggling literary style of Pauline Reage, its author. O is wanton yet pure, Sir Stephen is cruel yet kind, Rene is brutal yet gentle, a wall is black yet white. Everything is what it is, what it isn’t, and its direct opposite. That technique, which is so skillfully executed, might help to account for the compelling irrationality of Story of O. For those women who are convinced yet doubtful, attracted yet repelled, there is this schema for self-protection: the double-double think that the author engages in is very easy to deal with if we just realize that we only have to double-double unthink it.

To sum up, Story of O is 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. It asks, like many stories, who is the most powerful, and it answers: men are, literally over women’s dead bodies.

What really resonated with me was this point that we are asked to see degradation as elevation. That the men who find arousal in hurting us are somehow not misogynists. That the bedroom is not an arena of "real life", but somehow removed from our day to day. It's deeply cruel. When violence shows up in other parts of our lives, we are allowed to reflect and call it out. So why not here?

Not to mention her last point that the patriarchy sets women up to be destroyed as a prerequisite for men to thrive.