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Title: Variations on Voluptuousness Author: Émile Armand Language: en Topics: free love, individualist, love, sex, sexuality Source: Retrieved on December 22, 2011 from http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/2011/09/emile-armand-on-sensual-pleasure.html Notes: This short piece by Emile Armand appeared with his essay “On Sexual Liberty”
I know that sensual pleasure is a subject about which you do not like
people to speak or to write. Dealing with it shocks you. Or provokes a
joke in bad taste among you. You have books in your libraries which
embrace nearly all the branches of human activity. You possess some
dictionaries and encyclopedias. You count perhaps a hundred volumes on
one specialty of manual production. And I do not speak of political or
sociological books. But there is not on your shelves a single work
consecrated to sensual pleasure. There are some journals concerned with
numismatics, philately, heraldry, angling or lawn bowling. The least
poetic or artistic tendency has its organ. The tiniest chapel of an ism
has its bulletin. The novels of love abound. And we find brochures and
books concerned with free love or sexual hygiene. Not one periodical
devoted to sensual pleasure frankly considered, without insinuations. As
one of the sources of the effort to live. As a felicity. As a stimulant
in the struggle for existence. Long studies unroll on the techniques of
painting, and sculpture — on the working of wood, stone, and metals. I
search in vain for documented articles which consider sensual pleasure
as an art — which exhibit its ancient refinements — which propose novel
ones. It is not that pleasure leaves you indifferent. But it is only
clandestinely, in the shadows, behind closed doors that you discuss or
debate it. As if nature was not truly voluptuous. As if the heat of the
sun and the scent of the meadows does not invite sensual pleasure?
I am not unaware, certainly, of the reasons for your attitude. And I
know its origin. The Christian poison flows in your veins. The Christian
virus infects you cerebrally. The kingdom of your Master is not of this
world. And you are his subjects. Yes, you, socialists, revolutionaries,
anarchists, who swallow without batting an eye a hundred columns of
estimates for demolition or social construction, but that two hundred
lines of appeal to voluptuous experience “obsess” — that is to say
“scandalize.”
Oh, slaves!