I haven’t given fair weight to how beautifully Montaigne begins this essay. Maybe it’s taken time for me to catch up with his feelings. I am older than Montaigne was when he wrote it, but I don’t share his physical state. I am in remarkably good physical shape, and not just comparative to my age. I am regularly complimented for my strength and stamina by men and women at my gym. And yet, I find myself agreeing with Montaigne sentiments such as:
Nowadays. I am in a different state: the properties of old age give me too many counsels, making me wise and preaching at me. I have fallen from excessive gaiety into excessive seriousness which is more bothersome. That is why I deliberately go in for a bit of debauchery at times by employing my Soul on youngish wanton thoughts over which she can linger a while. From now on I am all too stale, heavy and ripe. Every day the years read me lectures on lack of ardour and on temperance. My body flees from excess: it is afraid of it. It is its turn now to guide my mind towards amendment of life. It is its turn now to act the professor, and it does so more harshly and imperiously.
To put it in my terms, I feel fully capable of performing and enjoying sex, but I find the pursuit of it ridiculous for someone my age. So like Montaigne, I too have become excessively serious, and I feel compelled to act the professor. To add a blunt opinion to it all, I find sex rather boring at this point in life. I am so performance oriented that it tends to become just another exercise for me, and I often find my partners checking out before I’m ready to do so. The last long-term relationship I was in, my partner would literally pass out whenever she climaxed (not due to any special skill on my part, she claimed she did this her whole life,) so I would often just slink over and fall asleep as if the buzzer just sounded on the workout.
So Montaigne makes clear from the start that he is not talking about his current sex life in this essay, it is retrospective in nature, and in that sense, similar to the recounted tales of Marcel from “In Search of Lost Time.”
The years can drag me along if they will, but they will have to drag me along facing backwards. While my eyes can still make reconnaissances into that beautiful season now expired, I will occasionally look back upon it. Although it has gone from my blood and veins at least I have no wish to tear the thought of it from my memory by the roots.
Montaigne quotes Plato as saying we should look at the beautiful bodies of youth wistfully in old age. I admit that one of the primary reasons I work out at F45 not only in Chicago but everywhere I travel is that I immediate get to see and meet the most fit, attractive women wherever I am. And perhaps this warps my perception a bit—if it’s true that you covet what you see every day, what I see routinely is pretty damn spectacular. But I also don’t want to spoil that vibe by coming across as some lecherous old man, so my visual splendor comes at a price. On the other hand, I probably have an easier time talking to very beautiful women than the vast majority of men at any age.
Even though Montaigne often comes across as someone trying to hide from the world, this essay makes clear that it’s not true at all, he loves travel and enjoys nothing more than finding people eager to discuss the topics he raises in print face to face:
I would run from one end of the world to the other to seek a single twelve-month of gay and pleasant tranquillity: I have no other end but to live and enjoy myself. There is enough sombre and dull tranquillity for me now, but it sends me to sleep and dulls my brain: I can never be satisfied by it. If there is any man or any good fellowship of men in town or country, in France or abroad, sedentary or gadabout, whom my humours please and whose humours please me, they have but to whistle through their fingers and I’ll come to them, furnishing them with ‘essays’ in flesh and blood.
I would also love to travel as Montaigne describes here, and consider it perhaps my greatest disappointment in life that I have no one to have these kinds of discussions with anyone, so I must spill my thoughts out here. I am so bored by the general discussions of life that I will sometimes divert the topic of a work meeting just to enter terrain that I find lively enough to engage in. Somewhere along the way, those I’ve depended on for enlivening conversation have drifted away and no one has taken their place.
And one reason that he speaks so freely about himself and his actions is that Montaigne sees a great freedom in it:
Any man who would bind himself to tell all would bind himself to do nothing which we are forced to keep quiet about. God grant that my excessive licence may draw men nowadays to be free, rising above those cowardly counterfeit virtues which are born of our imperfections, and also grant that I may draw them to the pinnacle of reason at the expense of my own lack of moderation! If you are to tell of a vice of yours you must first see it and study it. Those who conceal it from others usually do so from themselves as well: they hold that it is not sufficiently hidden if they can see it, so they disguise it and steal it from their own moral awareness.
This is all a wonderful setup for an essay about sex, which was groundbreaking in its time. But as I’ve written before, what follows now doesn’t seem all that interesting or even expository. Take this excerpt, for example:
The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe a word about sex the more right we have to allow it to fill our thoughts?
I guess to a certain degree it’s still true. It’s so much easier to get away with dozens of murders in a movie, for example, than showing a couple of people fucking. But the prevalence of the word I’ve just used, now just an everyday adjective to those in my children’s generation, point to how much easier we find discussions of sex today.
Now, sex is so ubiquitous that sections like this are too easy to mock:
Reflecting as I often do on the ridiculous excoriations of that pleasure, the absurd, mindless, stupefying emotions with which it disturbs a Zeno or a Cratippus, that indiscriminate raging, that face inflamed with frenzy and cruelty at the sweetest point of love, that grave, severe, ecstatic face in so mad an activity, the fact that our delights and our waste-matters are lodged higgledy-piggledy together; and that its highest pleasure has something of the groanings and distraction of pain, I believe that what Plato says is true: Man is the plaything of the gods — what a ferocious way of jesting! – and that it was in mockery that Nature bequeathed us this, the most disturbing of activities, the one most common to all creatures, so as to make us all equal, bringing the mad and the wise, men and beasts, to the same level.
We live in far more immodest times, so Montaigne’s thoughts on the subject are rather quaint. In fact, Montaigne believes that sex is evidence of human beings’ core stupidity … which I’m ok with:
But that other activity makes every other thought crawl defeated under the yoke; by its imperious authority it makes a brute of all the theology of Plato and a beast of all his philosophy. Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as flawed or ridiculous. Just try and find a wise and discreet way of doing it! Alexander said that he acknowledged he was a mortal because of sleep and this activity: sleep stifles and suppresses the faculties of our souls; the ‘job’ similarly devours and disperses them. It is indeed a sign of our original Fall, but also of our inanity and ugliness. On the one hand Nature incites us to it, having attached to this desire the most noble, useful and agreeable of her labors: on the other hand she lets us condemn it as immoderate and flee it as indecorous, lets us blush at it and recommend abstaining from it.
So far the essay is fine—yes, discuss sex openly and plainly, sounds good to me. But Montaigne doesn’t stop here, he has to get into his own issues, and they’re all about his penis size:
When I have found a woman discontented with me I have not immediately gone and railed at her fickleness: I have asked myself, rather, whether I would be right to rail against Nature. Should my cock be not long enough nor good and thick, then Nature has indeed treated me unlawfully and unjustly – Even good matrons know all too well and do not gladly see a tiny cock – and inflicted the most enormous injury.
None of these critiques seem to have been lodged directly by women, so he’s just projecting here. He goes on to raise some amusing questions about male clothing:
Why do we parade our genitals even now behind our loose-breeches, and, what is worse, cheat and deceive by exaggerating their natural size? I would like to believe that such styles of clothing were invented in better and more moral times so that people should in fact not be deceived, each man gallantly rendering in public an account of his endowments; the more primitive peoples do still display it somewhere near its real size. In those days they supplied details of man’s working member just as we give the measurements of our arm or foot.
But now he’s back to penis size again, and I think he’s making too much of it:
It is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big. And one man I know lost out by exposing his somewhere while they were still unready to perform their most serious task …. We bait and lure women by every means. We are constantly stimulating and overheating their imagination. And then we gripe about it.
But what if what you have is neither something to be ashamed of nor to brag about? Why bring it up at all? Especially if you know what you’re doing? Montaigne still claims to be modest, however:
I like modesty. It is not my judgment that makes me choose this shocking sort of talk: Nature chose it for me. I am no more praising it than I am praising any behavior contrary to the accepted norms; but I am defending it, lessening the indictment by citing individual and general considerations.
Along the same lines, Montaigne notes that you really shouldn’t worry about people gossiping about you—because if what they are saying is untrue, they aren’t actually discussing the real you:
When somebody told Socrates that people were gossiping about him he said, ‘Not at all. There is nothing of me in what they are saying.’ In my case, if a man were to praise me for being a good navigator, for being very proper or very chaste I would not owe him a thank you. Similarly, if anyone should call me a traitor, a thief or a drunkard I would not think that it was me he attacked. Men who misjudge what they are like may well feed on false approval: I cannot. I see myself and explore myself right into my inwards; I know what pertains to me. I am content with less praise provided that I am more known. People might think that I am wise with the kind of wisdom which I hold to be daft.
I don’t know if anyone has ever gossiped about my personal life. Well, actually, that’s not quite true. I was stupid enough on one job, many years ago, to hook up with a woman who liked to seduce but liked to talk even more. We only had sex once, but I doubt if anyone in the office was unaware of it within several weeks. That was a miserable experience—but it strangely enough made me an object of desire for a brief, intense period.
Montaigne was well ahead of his time in criticizing sexual mores for protecting the interests of men. Here, he notes that women have a point in rejecting the mores entirely:
Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them. There is by nature always some quarrelling and brawling between women and men: the closest union between us remains turbulent and tempestuous. In the opinion of our poet we treat women without due consideration. That is seen by what follows.
Next, he analyzes how foolish it is to expect chastity from women and not men. To begin, he notes that women simply have a greater capacity for sex, so it’s nonsensical to expect them to have less of a sex drive:
Women have an incomparably greater capacity for the act of love than we do and desire it more ardently – and we know that this fact was attested in Antiquity by that priest who had been first a man and then a woman: He knew Venus from both angles …. We go and assign sexual restraint to women as something peculiarly theirs, under pain of punishments of the utmost severity. No passion is more urgent than this one, yet our will is that they alone should resist it – not simply as a vice with its true dimensions but as an abomination and a curse, worse than impiety and parricide. Meanwhile we men can give way to it without blame or reproach …. Yet we men on the other hand want our wives to be in good health, energetic, radiant, buxom… and chaste at the same time, both hot and cold at once.
Culture trains girls at a young age to be sexually desirable … and the very nature of female relationships makes them far better attuned to romantic interest than men:
We train women from childhood for the practices of love: their graces, their clothes, their education, their way of speaking regard only that one end. Those in charge of them impress nothing on them but the face of love, if only to put them off it by continually portraying it to them. My daughter – I have no other …. There is no word, no exemplary tale and no stratagem which women do not know better than our books do. The doctrines which nature, youth and good health (those excellent schoolmasters) ceaselessly inspire in their souls are born in their veins.
I could go on like this for dozens of pages. But I’ll wrap this up by pointing out just two more of Montaigne’s “insights” about sex. First come his thoughts on what matters most for a man in gaining the attention of women:
If anyone were to ask me what is the first quality needed in love I would reply: knowing how to seize an opportunity. It is the second and the third as well. It is the factor that can achieve anything. I have often lacked good fortune but also occasionally lacked initiative. God help those who can mock me for it! In our days you need to be more inconsiderate – which our young men justify under the pretense of ardor; but if women looked into it closely they would find that it arises rather from lack of respect. I myself devoutly feared to give offense and am always inclined to respect whomever I love.
Montaigne’s last section relates to a sexual life seen in retrospect. First, he restates his belief that sex, for all of its absurdity, is a healthy, important activity:
It is a vain pastime, it is true, indecorous, shaming and wrong; but I reckon that, treated in this fashion, it is health-bringing and appropriate for loosening up a sluggish mind and body; as a doctor I would order it for a man of my mould and disposition as readily as any other prescription so as to liven him up and keep him in trim until he is well on in years and to postpone the onset of old age.
Finally, Montaigne returns to where he began, on sex and growing old. It’s a sad close to what appears to him to be a joyous chapter. As noted previously, Montaigne believes it is very important for people who have grown beyond their sexual prime to keep an adolescent mind and not become hypocritically intolerant in their old age. This passage needs to be read with that thought in mind:
I am well aware that love is a good thing very hard to recover. Our tastes have, through weakness, become more delicate and, through experience, more discriminating. We demand more when we have less to offer: we want the maximum of choice just when we least deserve to find favor. Realizing we are thus, we are less bold and more suspicious; knowing our own circumstances – and theirs – nothing can assure us we are loved.
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