Ars Erotica

By Mario Vargas Llosa, from Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society,
out next month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Vargas Llosa, who is the author of more than
a dozen novels, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. Translated from the Spanish
by John King.
A few years ago, a small media storm erupted in Spain when the Socialist government in the
region of Extremadura introduced, as part of its sex-education curriculum, masturbation
workshops for girls and boys over the age of thirteen a program that it somewhat
mischievously called Pleasure Is in Your Own Hands. Faced with protests, the regional
government argued that sex education for children was necessary to prevent undesirable
pregnancies and that masturbation classes would help young people avoid greater ills. In
the ensuing debate, the regional government of Extremadura received support from the
regional government of Andaluca, which announced that it would soon roll out a similar
program. An attempt by an organization close to the Popular Party to close down the
masturbation workshops by way of a legal challenge called, equally mischievously, Clean
Hands failed when the public prosecutors office refused to take up the complaint.
How things have changed since my childhood, when the Salesian fathers and La Salle
brothers who ran the schools scared us with the idea that improper touching caused
blindness, tuberculosis, and insanity. Six decades later schools have jerking-off classes. Now
that is progress.
But is it really? I acknowledge the good intentions behind the program and I concede that
campaigns of this sort might well lead to a reduction in unwanted pregnancies. My criticism
is of a sensual nature. Instead of liberating children from the superstitions, lies, and
prejudices that have traditionally surrounded sex, might these masturbation workshops
trivialize the act even more than it has already been trivialized in todays society? Might they
continue the process of turning sex into an exercise without mystery, dissociating it from
feeling and passion, and thus depriving future generations of a source of pleasure that has
long nurtured human imagination and creativity?
Masturbation does not have to be taught; it can be discovered in private. It is one of the
activities that compose our private lives. It helps boys and girls break out of their family
environment, making them individual and revealing to them the secret world of desire. To
destroy these private rituals and put an end to discretion and shame which have
accompanied sex since the beginning of civilization is to deprive sex of the dimension it
took on when culture turned it into a work of art. The disappearance of the idea of form in
sexual matters like its disappearance from art and literature is a kind of regression. It
reduces sex to something purely instinctive and animalistic. Masturbation classes in schools
might do away with stupid prejudices, but they are also another stab at the heart of
eroticism perhaps a fatal one. And who would benefit from eroticisms final death? Not
the libertarians and the libertines, but the puritans and the churches.
Of course, these workshops are only a minor manifestation of a sexual liberation that is
among modern democratic societys most important achievements. They are another step in

the ongoing effort to do away with the religious and ideological restrictions that have
constrained sexual behavior from time immemorial, causing enormous suffering. This
movement has had many healthy consequences, especially for women and sexual minorities.
Repression was long the cause of frustration, neurosis, and other psychic disorders in people
who had been the victims of discrimination and censorship, whose activities were condemned
to precarious secrecy by the rigidity of the dominant moral code. Women today now enjoy, if
not exactly the same freedom as men, at least a degree of sexual autonomy that is infinitely
greater than what their grandmothers possessed. Prejudice and hostility against
homosexuality have been reduced, even if they have not disappeared. Above all, an idea is
gaining ground that in sexual matters what adults of sound mind do or do not do is a decision
in which nobody, not the state or the church, should interfere.
All of this is progress. But it is wrong to believe, as do many promoters of sexual liberation,
that demystifying sex abolishing any symbolic transgression from the sexual act will
make it simply a healthy, normal activity. Sex is healthy and normal only among animals. It
was healthy and normal for bipeds before they were completely human, when sex was little
more than an instinct, a physical discharge of energy that guaranteed reproduction. The move
away from an animal state was a long and complex process for our species, a process in
which a decisive role was played by the world of culture and invention that Karl Popper
called the third world. Culture entails the gradual emergence of sovereign individuals, their
emancipation from the tribe, the development of leanings, aptitudes, wishes, and desires that
differentiate them from others and define them as singular beings. Sex played an essential
role in this process. As Sigmund Freud showed, the sexual domain, the most recondite area of
individual sovereignty, is where the distinctive features of every personality those which
belong to each of us and make us different from others are developed. It is a private and
secret domain, and we should try to keep it this way if we do not wish to cut off one of the
most intense sources of pleasure and creativity that is, of civilization itself.
In the darkness of earliest times, animals and humans alike engaged in a physical coupling
without mystery, without grace, without subtlety, and without love. The humanization of the
lives of men and women was a long process in which the advance of scientific knowledge
and philosophical and religious ideas all played their parts, as did the development of arts and
letters. But nothing changed as much as our sex lives did. This change has been a stimulus of
artistic and literary creation; in reciprocal fashion, painting, literature, music, sculpture, and
dance all the artistic manifestations of human imagination have contributed to the
enrichment of pleasure in sexual activity. It would not be outrageous to say that eroticism
marks a high point of civilization or that it is one of civilizations defining characteristics.
There is no better way to gauge how primitive a community is or how far it has advanced in
civilization than to scrutinize the secrets of the bedroom and to find out how its inhabitants
make love.
There are many ways to define eroticism, but the best might be to call it physical love
stripped of animality. The satisfaction of an instinctive urge becomes a shared creative
activity that prolongs and sublimates physical pleasure, providing a mise-en-scne that turns
it into a work of art. But eroticism does not only have the dignifying function of adding
beauty to physical pleasure, opening up a wide range of suggestions and possibilities through
which human beings can satisfy their desires and fantasies. It also brings to the surface those
specters, usually hidden in the irrational part of our natures, that are lethal and destructive.
Freud called the destructive urge Thanatos, which is in constant conflict with the vital and
creative instinct, Eros. Left to themselves, without any curbs, these monsters of the

unconscious can lead to dramatic violence (like the violence that bathes in blood and litters
with corpses the novels of the Marquis de Sade) and even to the extinction of the species.
That is why eroticism considers prohibition not only a voluptuous stimulus but also a
boundary that can lead to suffering and death when transgressed. Georges Bataille was not
wrong when he warned against excessive permissiveness in sexual matters. The
disappearance of prejudice which is doubtless liberating must not mean the abolition of
the rituals, mysteries, forms, and discretion through which sex became civilized and human.
It was around 1955 when I discovered that eroticism was inseparably bound up with both
human freedom and violence. I had just gotten married for the first time, and I had to take on
many jobs I ended up with eight of them to earn a living while I continued my
university studies. The most enjoyable was as an assistant to the librarian of Limas Club
Nacional, which was the symbol of the Peruvian oligarchy. The librarian was my university
teacher, the historian Ral Porras Barrenechea. My duties consisted of spending two hours
daily, from Monday to Friday, in the elegant building of the club, which was celebrating its
centenary around that time. In theory, I was supposed to be cataloguing new additions to the
library, but whether because of simple negligence or a lack of funds, I dont know the
Club Nacional hardly acquired any new books in those years, so I could spend my two hours
writing and reading. These were the happiest hours of days during which I otherwise never
stopped doing things that interested me little or not at all. I did not work in the beautiful
reading room on the ground floor of the club; I was in an office on the fourth floor. There I
discovered, with delight, hidden behind discreet folding screens and prim little curtains, Les
Matres de lamour, a splendid collection of erotic books, almost all French, compiled by
Guillaume Apollinaire (who wrote prologues to and translated some of the volumes). I read
the letters and sexual fantasies of Diderot, Mirabeau, Sade, Restif de la Bretonne, Andra de
Nerciat, and Aretino; I read Casanovas Histoire de ma vie, Lacloss Les Liaisons
dangereuses, and any number of other emblematic works.
Erotic literature had classical antecedents, of course, but it really came of age in eighteenthcentury Europe, in the heyday of the philosophes, with their great innovative theories on
morality and politics, their campaign against religious obscurantism, and their passionate
defense of freedom. Philosophy, sedition, pleasure, and freedom were what these thinkers and
artists demanded and practiced in their writings. They embraced with pride the use of the
term libertine to describe themselves. Historically, the primary meaning of this word was a
person who defies God in the name of liberty.
This doesnt mean that libertine literature must always be seen as a cry of freedom against all
the forms of subjugation and servitude religious, moral, political that restrict the right
to free will, to social and political freedom, and to pleasure. In fact, the great merit of the
monotonous novels of the Marquis de Sade is to show how sex, if practiced without any
limits, leads to deranged violence because it is the main channel through which the most
destructive instincts of personality are manifest. Books that concentrate in an obsessive and
exclusive manner on the description of sexual experiences soon succumb to repetition and
monomania. When separated from the other activities and functions that make up the lives of
men and women, sexual activity loses vitality and becomes a limited, inauthentic depiction of
the human condition.
An ideal eroticism would broaden the boundaries within which our sex lives unfold such that
men and women might act freely, exploring their desires and fantasies without feeling
threatened or discriminated against. But it would still maintain the forms that preserve the

private and intimate nature of sex, so that sex lives do not become banal or animalistic. With
its rituals and fantasies, its clandestine nature, its love of form and theatricality, eroticism
emerges as a product of high civilization, a phenomenon inconceivable in primitive or
rudimentary societies, because it requires a refined sensibility, a literary and artistic culture,
and a certain propensity for transgression. Transgression has to be taken with a pinch of
salt here, since, within the context of eroticism, it does not mean a denial of the dominant
moral or religious code but rather the simultaneous recognition and rejection of that code.
Violating the norm in an intimate setting, with discretion and through mutual accord, the
couple or the group performs a theatrical game that inflames pleasure while also maintaining
the confidential and secret nature of sex itself.
Without attention to the forms and rituals that enrich, prolong, and sublimate pleasure, the
sex act would again become a purely physical exercise a natural drive in the human
organism, devoid of sensitivity and emotion. A good illustration of this today can be found in
the trashy literature that purports to be erotic but achieves only the vulgar rudiments of the
genre pornography. Erotic literature becomes pornographic for purely literary reasons: a
sloppy use of form. When writers are negligent or clumsy in their use of language, their plot
construction, their use of dialogue, their description of a scene, they inadvertently reveal
everything that is crude and repulsive in a sexual coupling devoid of feeling and elegance
one that lacks a mise-en-scne which becomes the mere satisfaction of the reproductive
instinct.
Making love in our time, in the Western world, is much closer to pornography than to
eroticism. The masturbation workshops that young people will attend in the future as part of
their school curriculum might appear to be a daring step forward in the struggle against
priggishness and prejudice. In reality it is likely that this and other initiatives designed to
demystify sex revealing it as something as commonplace as eating, sleeping, and going to
work will prematurely disillusion future generations. Without mystery, passion, fantasy,
and creativity, sex becomes a banal gymnastic workout.
If we want physical love to enrich peoples lives, let us free it from prejudice but not from the
rites that embellish and civilize it. Instead of exhibiting it in broad daylight, let us preserve
the privacy and discretion that allow lovers to play at being gods, to feel that they are gods, in
those intense and unique instances of shared passion and desire.