For a writer who called his project an effort to make his mind ashamed of itself, it was probably inevitable that Montaigne would devote an essay to sex. But I always approach this essay with a great deal of discomfort.
Montaigne brackets off most of the aspects of sex that allow us to observe this most intimate act from an empathetic perspective. Comfort levels discussing sexual issues wax and wane through eras—the U.S. Supreme Court is even taking up the issue of pornography and free speech once more. But it is certainly easier to handle these discussions if there is some emotion—not necessarily love, even lust will do—tied to the act, so we can then view the sexual activity as an extension of feeling and not just a joint naked exercise.
I don’t believe I’m alone in his discomfort. Part of the reason why sex education classes are excruciating for every generation of children is that the act seems completely ridiculous when broken down into a purely biological activity, one where teachers are actively trying to avoid any aspect that could be arousing.
To me, reading Montaigne’s sex essay feels all too much like being transported back to health education classes. His discussion ranges over numerous topics, from cuckolds to cod pieces to whether the most enjoyable sex might prevent conception. But honestly, who wants to listen to an elderly man ramble on about his sex life, especially when he doesn’t discuss any partners? I feel this essay is nearly as embarrassing as listening to anyone discuss their masturbation routines.
And keep in mind, this is the 16th century, so there are odd beliefs aplenty in this essay’s many pages. But at least the essay gets off to a decent start. He begins:
I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do, and I dislike even thoughts that are unpublishable. The worst of my actions and conditions does not seem to me so ugly as the cowardice of not daring to avow it. Everyone is discreet in confession; people should be so in action. Boldness in sinning is somewhat compensated and bridled by boldness in confessing. Whoever would oblige himself to tell all, would oblige himself not to do anything about which we are constrained to keep silent.
He then builds on this goal by extolling the poetry of love. If only the rest of the essay had stayed in this territory:
Whoever takes away from the Muses their amorous fancies will rob them of the best subject they have and the noblest matter of their work. And whoever makes Love lose the communication and service of poetry will disarm him of his best weapons. In this way they charge the god of intimacy and affection, and the patron goddesses of humanity and justice, with the vice of ingratitude and lack of appreciation.
The essay’s title cites the great Latin poet Virgil, and these are the lines that Montaigne intended to frame the piece:
The goddess ceased to speak, and snowy arms outflung Around him faltering, soft fondling as she clung. He quickly caught the wonted flame; the heat well-known Entered his marrow, ran through every trembling bone. Often a brilliant lightning flash, not otherwise, Split by a thunderclap, runs through the cloudy skies. He spoke, Gave the embraces that she craved; then on her breast, Outpoured at last, gave himself up to sleep and rest.
Montaigne has an interesting take on this verse:
What I find worth considering here is that he portrays her as a little too passionate for a marital Venus. In this sober contract the appetites are not so wanton; they are dull and more blunted. Love hates people to be attached to each other except by himself, and takes a laggard part in relations that are set up and maintained under another title, as marriage is. Connections and means have, with reason, as much weight in it as graces and beauty, or more. We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family.
This is one of the most revealing statements in Montaigne’s work, a wistfulness that his marriage has been little more than a familial contract, and that he has missed the passion he surrendered by entering into that bond. He elaborates a bit later:
The fact that we see so few good marriages is a sign of its price and its value. If you form it well and take it rightly, there is no finer relationship in our society. We cannot do without it, and yet we go about debasing it. The result is what is observed about cages: the birds outside despair of getting in, and those inside are equally anxious to get out.
He then states explicitly that perhaps he never should have married at all:
Of my own choice, I would have avoided marrying Wisdom herself, if she had wanted me. But say what we will, the custom and practice of ordinary life bears us along. Most of my actions are conducted by example, not by choice. At all events, I did not really bid myself to it, I was led to it, and borne by extraneous circumstances. For not only inconvenient things, but anything at all, however ugly and vicious and repulsive, can become acceptable through some condition or circumstance: so inane is our human posture.
Even though I’m divorced, I don’t have Montaigne’s sense of regret and feel like I’m in a very different place than him at this stage of life. Perhaps he would appreciate the Pyrrhonist skepticism I have about life paths and attitudes. This essay came from Montaigne when he when he was in declining health and saw sex as something clearly in the past. This doesn’t resonate with me. For example, as one who competes on a nearly daily basis in physical activities with men and women half my age, I don’t relate to this statement at all:
It is for us to trifle and play the fool, and for the young to stand on their reputation and in the best place. They are going toward the world, toward reputation; we are coming from it. “Let them have to themselves weapons, horses, spears, clubs, ball games, swimming, and races; let them leave to us old men, out of many sports, dice and knuckle-bones.” [Cicero].
This leads to my strongest break from Montaigne on this topic; He sees love as being nothing more than sex:
Speaking more materially and simply, I find after all that love is nothing else but the thirst for sexual enjoyment in a desired object, and Venus nothing else but the pleasure of discharging our vessels—a pleasure which becomes vicious either by immoderation or by indiscretion.
He expands on that a bit later, when he relates an anecdote about the relation between love and wisdom:
A young man asked the philosopher Panaetius whether it would be becoming to a wise man to be in love. “Let us leave aside the wise man,” he replied, “but you and I, who are not, let us not get involved in a thing so excited and violent, which enslaves us to others and makes us contemptible to ourselves.” He spoke truly, that we should not entrust a thing so precipitous in itself to a soul that has not the wherewithal to withstand its assaults and to disprove in practice the saying of Agesilaus, that wisdom and love cannot live together.
But, given that this is Montaigne, he’s not afraid to offer a contradictory argument, which he supplies from Socrates:
And Socrates, when older than I am, speaking of an object of his love, said: “When I had leaned my shoulder against his and brought my head close to his, as we were looking into a book together, I suddenly felt, without prevarication, a stinging in my shoulder like some animal’s bite, and I was more than five days with it prickling, and a continual itching flowed into my heart.” A touch, and an accidental one, and by a shoulder, to inflame and alter a soul cooled and enervated by age, and the first of all human souls in reformation! Indeed, why not? Socrates was a man, and wanted neither to be nor to seem anything else.
I believe that Montaigne completely misses Socrates’ point here—he was making a declaration about beauty that transcends discussions of sex, which I also believe directly contradicts Montaigne’s point above about love being nothing but an expression of desire for sex. In a previous version of this essay, I used this as a launching point for a rather lengthy discussion of beauty that brought in Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But I now see that Montaigne returns to this issue in On Physiognomy, making that essay a better spot for a lengthy discussion, and I will elaborate elsewhere.
But I think it’s important to retain this point. I don’t deny that there is a connection between beauty and sex, but to reduce the sensations that move us towards another purely as a desire to have sex with that person is to miss a vital aspect of life. Beauty has its own power and meaning. We can experience it not only in people, but in a stunning landscape or work of art. Do we desire to have sex with a Picasso? Beauty creates a feeling of transcendence — and an experience called Stendhal Syndrome proves that it can be one of the most physically overpowering experiences in life.
Perhaps what Montaigne doesn’t get is that overflowing meaning is what Socrates was describing in his story about the young man on his shoulder, not sexual arousal. Lawrence Haas, in his book “Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy” explained the process that made Socrates’ description possible:
Leaving “profane” vision (abstract ideas of seeing) behind requires that we understand the specific forms of thinking that block our sensibilities. It requires patience and caring—a commitment to study our experiences as they unfold. Stop and listen. Listen in the silence. There is the wren singing her delicate song. Here is this complex of flavors in a glass of wine (how extraordinary!). Or there, notice how the sunlight and shadows play through the trees. These are the things and non-things that make our experience possible, and they are easily forgotten.
To me, the transcendence made possible by our attunement to the world and the extraordinary beauty within it, is far more meaningful in life than feeling sexually aroused by the way someone looks. And I wouldn’t trade the experience of being overwhelmed by someone’s beauty for all the sex in the world.
As for Montaigne and his thoughts on sex, they include many generalizations and his typical quotes from ancient literature, but not enough personal story telling and vulnerability on his part.
This paragraph is all too typical:
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?
There’s some interesting imagery in this quote, but again, it’s littered with too much classicism and not enough personality:
Considering often the ridiculous titillation of this pleasure, the absurd, witless, and giddy motions with which it stirs up Zeno and Cratippus, that reckless frenzy, that face inflamed with fury and cruelty in the sweetest act of love, and then that grave, severe, and ecstatic countenance in so silly an action; and that our delights and our excrements have been lodged together pell-mell, and that the supreme sensual pleasure is attended, like pain, with faintness and moaning; I believe that what Plato says is true, that man is the plaything of the gods: “What savage jest is this!” (Claudian) and that it was in mockery that nature left us the most confused of our actions to be the most common, in order thereby to make us all equal and to put on the same level the fools and the wise, and us and the beasts.
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.
He has more to say about penis size, and I’ll spare my readers the details. I could go on like this for dozens of pages. But I’ll wrap up by pointing out just two more of Montaigne’s views about sex. First come his thoughts on what matters most for a man in gaining the attention of women:
Oh, what a terrific advantage is opportuneness! If someone asked me the first thing in love, I would answer that it is knowing how to seize the right time; the second likewise, and the third too; it is a point that can accomplish anything.
I slightly take issue with Montaigne here. It’s been my experience that most opportunity consists of being aware of what women were interested in me. It’s true that if you are attuned to this, opportunities are more obvious and more fruitful. As I’ve aged, however, I’ve become extremely discriminating in my desires. I am working on ignoring these opportunities if they don’t suit my now better-defined values and tastes.
Finally, Montaigne returns to where he began, on sex and growing old. It’s a sad close to what appears for 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 quite understand that love is a very hard commodity to recover. By weakness and long experience our taste has become more delicate and exquisite. We demand more when we bring less; we most want to choose when we least deserve to be accepted. Knowing ourselves for what we are, we are less bold and more distrustful; nothing can assure us of being loved, knowing our condition and theirs.
I give Montaigne credit for speaking truthfully about the subject that was not broached in his age and to do so from the perspective of someone looking back on a lifetime of sexual activity with memories bitter and sweet. For me, this essay doesn’t hold up as well as others in his canon, but others may disagree—Sarah Bakewell, for example, compares this piece favorably with the comedic approach to sex of Howard Stern. There is a certain self effacement to his views of sex that make his opinions easier to take than if he were bragging like people I would rather not mention.
Personally, I wish Montaigne would have been more intimate and vulnerable in matters of the heart than his penis, but the essay stands as a monument to his bravado and candor.
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