Why should sex not be speakable? Montaigne asks and delights in thrusting into consciousness, through all the refinements, decencies, and equivocations with which most writers have clothed the matter, the reminder of some naked truths:
Well then, leaving books aside and speaking more materially and simply: when all is done, I find that love is nothing else but an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired subject... a tickling delight of emptying one's seminary vessels: as is the pleasure which nature giveth us to discharge other parts: which becometh faulty by immoderation, and defective by indiscretion.
To Socrates, love is an appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty. Now considering oftentimes the ridiculous tickling, or tittilation of this pleasure, the absurd, giddy and hare-brained motions wherewith it and agitates
Like when you see a beautiful woman: Listen
Wherefore out t unadvised rage, our enflamed visage in love's lustful and sweetest effects: and then a grave, stern, severe, surly countenance in such an act, that one hath pell-mell lodged our joys and filths together, and that the supremost voluptuousness both ravisheth and plaineth, as doth sorrow: I believe that which Plato says to be true, that man was made by the Gods for them to toy and play withal. — quaenam istajocandi Saevitia ?
as to sex:
What cruelty is this, so set on jesting is?
And that Nature in mockery left us the most troublesome of our actions, the most common: thereby to equal us, and without distinction to set the foolish and the wise, us and beasts all in one rank, (iii. 105 f.) Nor is it only the sexual act in itself which marks 'our vanity and deformity', but our peculiarly preposterous sense of shame at so fundamental a part of our being:
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