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Were Anais Nin alive today, she’d undoubtedly have a blog. After all, this was the saucy, self-involved French author who once declared of her journal, “This diary is my kief [כיף], hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.”

Alas, she died in 1977 – when the internet was but a tiny, super-secret US military project (or just baby test tubes, depending on you ask). Still, I’d like to imagine her blog posts. What bits of fiction would she contribute to this site?

Perhaps she’d post a selection from her book of erotica “Delta of Venus.” Here, I’m thinking of her BDSM-themed story “Marcel,” in which the main character – who is only referred to in the first person – is having a go with her lover Marcel.

Marcel is a submissive, we find out. When he takes the main character back to his bedroom and lays her on the fur rug, he says, “For the first time, a real woman. So many have come here, but for the first time here is a real woman, someone I can worship.”

Later, the woman entertains his submissive fantasies, appearing before him in nothing but a pair of black boots and ordering to do “humiliating things.” As the piece de resistance, she demands that he fetch her another man, whom she’ll bed in front of Marcel.

Marcel protests at first but then relents and suffers throughout the ordeal. When the satisfied man finally leaves, Marcel turns to his mistress with recriminations: “That was cruel. You know that I love you. That was cruel.”

“But it made you passionate, didn’t it, it made you passionate,” she responds.