Montaigne’s Virgil essay is most famous for being his most extensive writing about sex, but in my opinion, his Ovid-featuring essay “That Difficulty Increases Desire,” is by far his most erotic. This short piece is stuffed with colorful quotes, but two from Ovid stand out:
If she would reign long, let her scorn her lover.
-and-
What is allowed, we scorn; what’s not allowed, we burn for.
The essay begins with a nod to Pyrrhonism. Montaigne calls it the wisest philosophy and assigns to it the thought that there is no reason that does not have its opposite. He uses this to analyze and attack a stoic belief, taken from Seneca, that no good can bring us pleasure unless it is one for whose loss we are prepared.
Montaigne believes the opposite is true:
We clutch and embrace this good all the more tightly and with more affection because we see that it is less secure and fear that it may be taken from us.
Not surprisingly, Montaigne quickly turns this into a critique of marriage:
To keep love in breath, Lycurgus ordained that the married people of Lacedaemon could have sexual relations only by stealth, and that it should be as great a shame to find them in bed together as with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprises, the shame of the next day, And listlessness, and silence, And, fetched up from the depths, a sigh (Horace), that is what gives a tang to the sauce.
This is actually a great improvement over Montaigne’s usual griping about marriage, at least here he’s putting some thought into how to make it more pleasurable.
But Montaigne doesn’t stop there. He also takes a turn towards mixing pleasure with pain. If this doesn’t quite reach Marquis de Sade territory, there is at least a nice nod towards sex that is more than vanilla:
Even sensual pleasure seeks stimulation from pain. It is much sweeter when it burns and stings. The courtesan Flora used to say that she had never lain with Pompey without making him carry away the marks of her bites: They hurt the longed-for body with their viselike grip, And with their teeth they lacerate the tender lip, Goaded by secret stings to hurt the very thing, Whate’er it be, from which these germs of madness spring. (Lucretius) It is the same way everywhere; difficulty gives value to things.
While I am not terribly comfortable writing about sex, I am ok with endorsing Montaigne’s viewpoint that this variety can be much more pleasurable at times. I’m also in agreement with him that it’s generally the forbidden aspects of the erotic that make them consume our time and attention. However, I do have some problems with this:
For there is not only pleasure but also glory in driving wild and seducing that soft sweetness and that childlike modesty, and in reducing a proud and commanding gravity to the mercy of our ardor. It is a glory, they say, to triumph over rigor, modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever dissuades the ladies from these attitudes betrays both them and himself. We must believe that their heart shudders with fright, that the sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us for it and yield themselves to our importunity only with a forced constraint. Beauty, all-powerful as it is, has not the wherewithal to make itself relished without that interposition.
Yes, this all comes across as rapey to me as well, and it needs to be banished down a time hole. I have no problem with elements of sex play that include some gamesmanship or play acting. But consent is consent, and at a point long before this “forced constraint,” the games need to end.
But I do agree with his point about marriages that:
The knot of will and affection has become loosened and undone as much as that of constraint has tightened.
The harder cultures make it to divorce, the more corrosive marriages become. And I would append that, Pyrrhonist style, by also arguing that open marriages and relationships take away much of the heat as well. Once everything is permitted, it all becomes ordinary or, at worse, something new for partners to compete about.
And while I am not one to condone cheating in relationships, there’s a reason why that’s the kind of sex that is featured most prominently in our dramas, especially day time soap operas. What is not allowed, we burn for.
As an audio accompaniment to this piece, I offer the smoldering Lucinda Williams song “Essence.”
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