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 if you think it might also lead him to some of his most playful and unguarded writing, you’d be disappointed.
Montaigne’s sex essay ranges over numerous topics, from cuckolds to cod pieces to whether the most enjoyable sex might prevent conception. Remember, this is the 16th century, so there are odd beliefs aplenty in this essay’s many pages. But that’s not the part that bothers me most.
What I dislike about Montaigne’s writing on the subject is how impersonal it is. You wouldn’t expect it would land there given its setup:
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.
This quote makes me feel a bit ashamed, because I have written on this topic several times, but eventually edited out the most personal parts each time. But the kind of disclosures I made here are perhaps not the same as what Montaigne had in mind. He makes a plea for confessing your vices. But given what follows in the essay, that is probably little more than admitting that he had pre-marital sex.
In addition, Montaigne also extols the poetry of love as the best entry point to the topic:
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. One of the benefits of being introspective is that I’ve put a significant amount of thought into just about every potential avenue of my life and have concluded that they can all work for me as long as I attend to the things within my control.
But the differences between Montaigne and me are significant. He wrote this essay when he was in declining health and saw sex as something clearly in the past. 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 before I drop the quote, today is Christmas and I have a theory that Montaigne has a virtue continuum that has Socrates at the edge of human perfection which no one can actually reach. Only by becoming divine like Jesus can you arrive at perfection, but by then you aren’t human. But I’ll develop that idea later:
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.
This makes a very nice transition to my own thoughts about attraction and love. How we determine what is beautiful is a very profound question, even though we seem to make these kinds of determinations routinely with no thought attached. Sensations either exist or they don’t — a thought Montaigne examines in greater depth in On Experience. But how we process those sensations is tied to our philosophical assumptions about the world. While Montaigne interpreted that bit about Socrates as evidence of his folly, I would contend that it was actually a highly philosophical, and very human, statement from the sage.
Take something very simple, the swiping dating app such as Tinder, Bumble or Hinge. The entire premise of these apps is that beauty can be judged objectively. If you remove all background and put people on the same terrain, judged mostly by their pictures, these apps make the assumption that you can objectively view who is most attractive to you, and when the judgments are mutual, matches take place and relationships could possibly commence.
But beauty is not an objective sensation, it is a highly subjective evaluation that is most meaningful when it takes in everything about the experience: preconceptions, mood, previous experiences, expectations — and in Socrates’ case, how this young man’s head on his shoulder made him feel.
Experiences like this formed the core of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist who was overshadowed by the existentialists in his day, but has become increasingly popular as neuroscience finds frequent evidentiary backing for embodied consciousness. At the risk of being far too reductionist, Merleau-Ponty believed that bodily sensations carry with them an “overflowing meaning” that alter our perception of the world.
Beauty, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, cannot be pinned down or fully understood. It’s not a sum of parts but an overwhelming whole, a Gestalt that transcends sense-data and categorization. It is not merely observed but lived, it affects the nervous system. It moves through me and leaves me changed. It’s something I cannot hold or fully explain. How exactly does it do this? Merleau-Ponty hints that it might have something to do with the connection between our nervous system and our system of attention:
At the very moment when I live in the world, when I am given over to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, I can close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anonymous life which subtends my personal one. But precisely because my body can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon the world and places me in a situation there. The momentum of existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes.
As I interpret this, because we have an ability to shut ourselves off from experience, to “mindfully” detach, we can then also know that we are capable of attachment. We can choose to open ourselves to the flow of life and to give voice to that we are silencing, mostly by habit. All that we can shut off we can also turn on.
How we spend our attention matters, which also underscores why we need to aggressively fight all attempts to objectify people. When we reduce beauty to something that can be easily catalogued and rated, we shut ourselves off from this deeper, more nuanced understanding of beauty and how our articulation of it says so much about ourselves, our deepest wants and psychic needs. To Merleau-Ponty, exposing our misunderstandings of beauty helps us discover how we view so much of life in questionable terms, always hunting for objects and subjects, and always dividing the mind from the body.
One final thought from Merleau-Ponty: the effects of these physical processes creates a dynamic. Physical presence leads to gaze, which then alters how the observed person interacts. All that we think of in terms of human connection are affected by this dance:
Usually a human does not show their body, and, when they do, it is either nervously or with an intention to fascinate. They have the impression that the alien gaze which runs over their body is stealing it from them, or else, on the other hand, that the display of their body will deliver the other person up to them, defenceless, and that in this case the other will be reduced to servitude. Shame and immodesty, then, take their place in a dialectic of the self and the other which is that of master and slave: in so far as I have a body, I may be reduced to the status of an object beneath the gaze of another person, and no longer count as a person for them, or else I may become their master and, in my turn, look at them. But this mastery is self-defeating, since, precisely when my value is recognized through the other’s desire, they are no longer the person by whom I wished to be recognized, but a being fascinated, deprived of their freedom, and who therefore no longer counts in my eyes.
In this essay, Montaigne makes this complimentary point:
We allure and flesh them by every means; we incessantly heat and excite their imagination; and then we bellyache.
This returns me to Montaigne’s thoughts about sex, but let me say a final word about beauty. 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 the point entirely. 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.
Ultimately, Montaigne’s essay is less about sex than it is about the contradictions of human nature. His candid exploration of the absurdity of desire mirrors our broader struggles to reconcile the physical with the transcendent. While I find his focus on the body limiting—and his refusal to ever link love with sex is one of the great weaknesses of his project—it underscores the value of a more holistic understanding of intimacy, one that embraces the Gestalt of beauty and connection without reducing it to parts. Montaigne may have been preoccupied with the physical, but in doing so, he opens the door for us to think more deeply about the ways we experience and define love, beauty, and presence.
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