ON GETTING OFF: Sex and Philosophy

'The libidinal, erotic and romantic need not come together in one lover. We can fuck without devotion, adore without horniness, gape without love - this has been the stuff of literature and song for millennia.' Yet sex talk is oddly superficial and much of daily life is certainly sexualised, typically while trying to sell us something. In 'The Secret Life of Catherine M'. Catherine remembers the beautiful anonymity of orgies, the free abandonment of herself to men. Similarly, theorist David Halperin describes gay bathhouses as opportunities for sex without elaborate straight courting rites. European philosophers and theologians have been at the forefront of this campaign against carnal joy and have deemed lust ignoble. Plato was writing in the 4th century before Christ and raised without any Christian shame. In his Symposium he portrays flirting with wit and charm and has no qualms about describing an erect penis. The generation after Plato, the early Stoics were not prudish about sex - statesman Seneca called desire a 'secret destruction'. The philosopher and commune leader Epicurus believed that sex was natural but superfluous and that sex was often healthier to relieve lust than not, especially if longing and love led to pain. Here is figurative fucking, achieving oneness, and sexual intercourse while being 'ashamed of being in the body'. For Augustine our genitals are wilful and capricious, and procreation without orgasm is the ideal. In his Paradise, men ejaculate like they might reach for a fruit - calmly, with no shudder. Aristotle rarely discussed sex and sexuality; 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas married Augustine's fear of lust to Aristotle's virtue theory, and idea of a purposeful universe. For Aquinas, we were not made by God ...to wank or suck one another. These are all sins and the only allowable fucking is between a married man and woman to make babies.... In the 15th century, philosopher Marsilio Ficino was clearly in love with the younger Giovanni Cavalcanti, but was wary of 'the filths of the body' as he put it in De Amore. To many, screwing was safer as an intellectual or poetic trope than as an actual part of philosophical life. On sex, the most radical departure from medieval and Renaissance ideas came in the 18th century with philosophers like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire. The Marquis de Sade took this brazen materialism and turned it against his era's gentile rationality and the aristocratic aesthete used his position to rape and torture the poor, eventually being jailed then committed for his crimes. He was typical of another powerful man abusing women and another thinker who made sense of sex only by stripping it of everything but pure physicality. Inspired by philosophy, literature and private life, Damon Young explores the paradoxes of the bedroom in a book which more than teases your mind. 278pp.