The Lowest Whore In Creation

From the discussion in Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good of the British secret service and novels about it in the late fifties and early sixties:

In Casino Royale, Bond notes approvingly that Vesper Lynd's enigmatic, unfathomable personality means that 'the conquest of her body... would each time have the sweet tang of rape'. And in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Tracy tells him: 'Make love to me... Do anything you like [...] Be rough with me. Treat me like the lowest whore in creation. Forget everything else. No questions. Take me.'

There is, then, a startingly aggressive side to Bond's treatment of women [...] reminiscent of the violent hostility to women often present in the New Wave novels of the late 1950s. Just like Room at the Top or Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Bond novels such as Casino Royale or On Her Majesty's Secret Service present their readers with a hero who treats women as disposable commodities and barely distinguishes between physical love and sadistic violence. It was surely no coincidence that all these books... were eagerly snapped up by male readers at a time when women were financially, socially and sexually more independent and assertive than ever.

Sandbrook also quotes a reviewer for the New Statesman as describing the Bond novels as worse than straight pornography. Although I understand that there is good evidence to link the consumption of pornography with the holding of various beliefs about the occurrence of the sexual practices depicted in it and women's willingness to engage in them, evidence I've not heard of being produced for the readers of Bond or New Wave novels, you have to have a degree of sympathy for the reviewer's claim. Bond novels are better written than most pornography, and call upon a potential rather toxic combination of exotica, class superiority, and nationalistic chauvinism to objectify women, whereas pornography usually lacks pretensions to any artistic merit. The attitudes they display towards gays and lesbians are unsurprisingly vile: Sandbrook notes that many of the women Bond seduces are, when he meets them, lesbians, although of course brought back to the rightful place as sexual helpmeets by the end of their involvement with this epitome of masculinity. The best of British, eh?