To all the polyamorists I ever loved

"It's not a cult, but the victory of reason over myth. It's not a movement of the senses, it's an exercise of the mind. It's not an excess of pleasure, but the pleasure of excess. It's not a license, but a rule. And it's a morality."

Eroticism. This is not the dirty book I expected it to be.

Yes, Emmanuelle spends the early pages having adventures with men on airplanes and with women in squash courts and other places.

She has great sexual appetite and, for the most part, celebrates it. But she also thinks about it more than she acts on it.

Then she meets Mario.

And suddenly, that great classic of erotic literature, Emmanuelle, by Emmanuelle Arsan, reveals itself to be a philosophical treatise on sensual pleasure.

"Eroticism is not a handbook of recipes for amusing yourself in society. It's a concept of human destiny, a gauge, a canon, a code, a ceremony, an art, a school. It's also a science — or rather the choice fruit, the last fruit, of science. Its laws are based on reason, not on credulity... on confidence, instead of fear... and on a taste for life, rather than on the mystique of death. Eroticism is not a product of decadence, but a progress. Because it helps to desanctify sex, it's an instrument of mental and social health. And I maintain that it's an element of spiritual elevation, because it presupposes character training and renunciation of the passions of illusion in favor of the passions of lucidity."

Mario lectures Emmanuelle on not giving herself too freely while also encouraging her to indulge herself.

He exalts beauty because it is a man-made construct. Since the reproductive act itself is so absurd, he exalts sexual acts which are against nature. Sex grounded in impulse, habit, or duty cannot be erotic.

To be erotic, sex must have an aesthetic, not a biological, purpose. Eroticism, Mario claims, demands a systematic mind.

Eroticism then is not about love or pleasure, it's about freedom from the constraints of nature, of the body, from aging and gravity. It's an exercise of the mind and of consciousness. (But how, I wonder, can you remove the body from sex? Mario's philosophy is frustratingly paradoxical at times.)

What's erotic is what's unexpected, and therefore always shifting. What's erotic is not a matter of positions, but of situations. What's erotic is the journey, not the end (a tenet of tantra).

This is where it gets complicated: there's a difference between sensuousness and eroticism. Eroticism is rational, it's what separates us from animals. But in the end I fail to see the difference between a sensuous and an erotic act. Maybe the only difference is in intent? Sensual is primal, but erotic is elevated, evolutionarily advanced.

Monogamous attachment, not unexpectedly within the code that is being laid out, is learned behaviour. Adultery is erotic because a third party is always present (in the relationship).

Over the past year, I've chatted with several men, met some of them. They label themselves variously: polyamorous, ethically nonmonogamous, sensualist, hedonist, eroticist. "Open-minded." These terms are used flexibly, to mean what they want them to mean, but by naming their outlook, they feel they have established a framework for their behaviour. They are like Mario, strong in their beliefs, but occasionally faltering in contradiction. Perhaps they are nothing more than selfish, armed with words. (Coincidentally, I have not seen the film adaptation of this book, but it seems every teenage boy of my generation has.)

Emmanuelle wonders why she can't simply do as she pleases, sexually speaking, without having to devise a moral code around her behaviour. Why should a morality founded in eroticism be better than no morality at all? (I ask myself this every day.)

And then [SPOILER] Emmanuelle and Mario smoke opium and have a threesome with the driver.

Where is love in all this? I don't know.