There is a great deal of enjoyable advice in the Marquis de Sade’s anonymously published 1795 masterpiece “Philosophy in the Boudoir.” The book chronicles three aristocrats who endeavor to sexually educate a fifteen-year-old girl, leaving her with much practical instruction on physical matters as well as more abstract pointers like these:
“It’s essential to utter coarse and filthy words in the intoxication of pleasure, and blasphemous language powerfully incites the imagination. Nothing is to be spared.”
“Above all, you must display a tremendous impiety when you’re among people of your own age. You must flaunt libertinage and free-thinking.”
“Show off religiosity and insolence together.”
Adolescent pupil Eugénie is so thoroughly transformed by her schooling that only 31 pages in, she exclaims, “Oh, my God! How your lessons excite me! I think I’d let myself be killed now rather than perform a good deed!”
By today’s standards, Sade’s aristocrats could be seen as successful in purging their student not only of the urge to virtue signal but to have any virtue at all.
Sade’s expression may have been a reaction to the religious mores that constricted sexuality in his age, but those mores have very little cultural power today. Instead, it is the progressive movement that has begun to prescribe sexual behavior, as Ross Douthat notes in his recent piece “Can The Left Regulate Sex?” He asserts that the moralizing left is “not quite in the cultural position that Christian churches once occupied in this country, but they are close enough.” This is a chilling thought, especially when one contemplates the eros-killing extent to which some educators are taking the concept of consent (for example, asking permission before each kiss and caress).
Douthat also makes reference to last month’s skirmish over BDSM at Pride, and whether kink paraphernalia should be visible in a setting where children are present. The left now presumes to synthetically control and ceremonialize expressions of adult sexuality (like the nonverbal progression of physical acts toward intercourse) and to benevolently include sexual oddities within the realm of the accepted. In their typical twisted way, that which is natural, they must obstruct; that which is out of bounds, they must “normalize.”
What does this do to sex? Inez Stepman of the Independent Women’s Forum posits in an interview with The Federalist that everyone’s deviance having to be “endorsed and indeed applauded […] by the entire society [is] not only destructive to society, it’s also destructive to any kind of genuine eroticism.” Indeed, the point of kink culture was once to exist outside the norm— to find one’s pleasures at the exiled margins, not to be lauded by hordes of well-meaning people while marching by a Duane Reade.
Douthat states that the “regulation of sex is an inescapable obligation of power.” The question in modern society is which regulating force is preferable.
I would rather my impulses be restricted by a moral code that respects the sanctity of life and recognizes forgiveness. And while there is much lamentation today about the risk of being canceled for various “isms,” it is worth noting that Sade was jailed for his writing under the diagnosis of “libertine dementia.”
We don’t need to normalize more people. We need more people willing to be outliers.