it is horrific - but you’re missing some of the context.

De Sade partly wrote it as a fuck-you to the establishment in and of itself

Partly as a satire of the aristocracy - and you can’t understate exactly how much he hated them - which is why he casts them as rapist pedophiles that prefer young boys

And partly as an attempt to catalog horrors of abuse and mental illness and the suffering of the common man at the hands of those in power