Sex and Nature
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| Jean Jacques Rousseau and benevolent Nature; Marquis de Sade and malevolent Nature |
On the Marquis de Sade and feminism:
We are still in the age of Romanticism and that for every idealism you need the opposing voice to puncture the false hopes…
Rousseau believes that we are born good. He is going against Christianity here, which believes we are born with a propensity toward evil. So anything bad in us, for Rousseau, is coming from corrupt society. We have to get back to Nature.
Now, I’m saying that he was answered in France by Sade who showed, “yes let’s back to Nature, but Nature is filled with aggression and violence.”
And so the same thing I think happened in English literature, that is Wordsworth followed Rousseau: “Nature is good. We are all born benevolent. We’re benevolent creatures.” And he’s answered by Coleridge in his vampire tales, or in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where you see all this slimy things coming out of the sea, which shows the reality of Nature. So I think we’re still in this 200 years later.
Feminism is going off towards the Rousseauist or Wordsworthian view that we’re born good, and sex is this wonderful thing over here, and aggression is something over there that’s nasty. Therefore anything like rape and battery, those things are coming from the “patriarchy.” It’s absurd! I’m saying that sex and aggression are fused. We’re very complex creatures, and sexuality is a dark power that feminism is being totally simplistic about.
Patriarchy… Meaningless word. Big, fat meaningless word. It only applies to Republican Rome, and that’s it.
On sex and Nature:
Paganism was much more accurate about Nature—that it’s not Dionysian fun and games. My famous phrase: “the Dionysian is no picnic…” I’m one of the first to say that the Roman Catholic Church is indeed more pagan than Christian, and that Martin Luther was correct in seeing a drift away from primitive Christianity in the medieval Church…
The fact [is] that our physical experience is this continuum of pleasure-pain… Once you open the door towards sex, as my generation of the ’60s did, you are letting in all of the storm of Nature. It is extremely turbulent.
I’m saying that part of this fetish that current feminism has with rules and regulations is a vain attempt to stem the storm of Nature, and that we can study Nature better—what it really is—by studying Blake, by studying the Romantic writers. For two hundred years we have been trying to come to terms with Nature. It’s very complex.
Sex and Nature are completely intertwined with each other. You cannot understand anything about sex until you study Nature. But you see feminism of the last twenty years is obsessed with social constructionism. It believes everything that we are sexually is coming from environmental pressures. It’s utterly naïve.
Camille Paglia
(November 1992)
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