G'dat Tom'n'Yoshie,
It's been a good while since I had the beak in the marvellous Mr Pepys
diary, but wasn't he apt to pop by Hyde Park on his way home from Admiralty
Gate for a quick kneetrembler? And he mentioned that with very little
apparent angst. And it was also Pepys who averred that 'chastity is a lack
of generosity', no? And all that stuff, he unashamedly left in his wake.
Wonder if *L'ecole des filles* is still available. If it made Saucy Sam
blush, it musta had something other than run-off-the-mill sexual
exploitation or simple promiscuity about it, I reckon. Then again, maybe,
like now, a bloke having it away was an honourable and enviable thing,
whilst a bloke bent over a flying fist and a good book was rather
dishonourable and pathetic.
Interesting, too, that schoolgirls were already fetishised in the 1670s. Or
mebbe it's just that they were all taken off the market in their teens in
those days, and that they were oft as not drained crones by thirty and dead
by forty - ie there was no other category of lust-worthy lass about whom to
fantasise ...
Cheers,
Rob.
Wrote Tom:
>Samuel Pepys wrote,
>
>> . . . and also reading a little of
>>_L'escholle des filles_, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not
>>amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform himself in the
>>villainy of the world.
>
>> . . . and I to my
>>chamber, where I did read through _L'escholles des filles_, a lewd
>>book, but what do no wrong once to read for information sake.
>
>Pepys appears to have "read" the book twice. The first time, he "read
>it over" a little to assure himself of its lewdness. The second time he
>read it through. Was he "sober" during the second reading? He mentions
>having "drank a mighty store of wine" with his singing buddies. Could it
>be that Pepys is _coquetting_ with prudishness as a way of constructing
>his enjoyment of the "information"? Isn't it only for the prude that the
>text appears lewd and thus a potential source of pleasure?
