This article accompanies the fable
The Whore's Revenge



Casanova and Academia

Casanova would not live to see how later generations would discourage the genre of autobiography, seeing it as egotistical.  Universities avoid him like a venereal disease: his memoirs are almost never taught in university classes.  In literature departments, the erotic arts are limited to the occasional class where de Sade, Byron and D.H. Lawrence receive the full neurotic treatment and moralistic lectures are delivered in sterile auditoriums (ah, but tutorials and office hours are another matter!).  Yet students generally have little else on their minds.

Michel de Montaigne - writing in the 1580's - would have agreed with Casanova:

What has the sexual act ever done to mankind, what has this natural, necessary, and legitimate act done that men do not dare talk of it if not with shame and exclude it from all serious or pondered discourse? (Essais III, V - "On some lines of Virgil").