"Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity"
About this Quote
The paradox lands by turning a moral category inside out. Society labels certain desires and practices as aberrant, the fringes of acceptable behavior; Remy de Gourmont suggests that the real deviation may be the refusal of sexuality altogether. The provocation works because it questions the assumptions hidden in the word aberration: who decides what is deviant, and by what standard of nature or culture?
Gourmont, a French symbolist and fin-de-siecle skeptic of dogma, wrote amid a climate of Catholic morality, bourgeois propriety, and the new science of sexology. Physicians and moralists were cataloging perversions with clinical zeal, while the Decadent movement was challenging received values in art, language, and the body. He often used aphorism to unsettle certainties, and here he joins irony to anthropology. From a biological and psychological standpoint, erotic drive appears ordinary and pervasive; it animates imagination, social life, and art. Abstention, especially when elevated to a universal commandment, looks less like health than a renunciation of a basic human energy.
The target is not someone who freely chooses celibacy, but the cultural sanctification of chastity as superior virtue. Gourmont pricks the logic by which institutions designate desire as suspect while idealizing its suppression. Historically, that ideal policed women in particular, guarded inheritance and reputation, and enlisted religion to dignify control. The language of aberration becomes a tool of power. Calling chastity the peculiar one exposes the asymmetry: labeling others deviant masks a deeper estrangement from the human condition.
There is also a psychological edge. Repression often breeds hypocrisy, fixation, or neurosis; the refusal to integrate desire can twist it into something more destructive than honest indulgence. The quip thus proposes an ethic of lucidity: treat sexuality as part of life to be shaped, not denied. Heard today, it cautions against moral panics and points to a more humane criterion for judgment, one grounded in consent, harm, and vitality rather than inherited taboo.
Gourmont, a French symbolist and fin-de-siecle skeptic of dogma, wrote amid a climate of Catholic morality, bourgeois propriety, and the new science of sexology. Physicians and moralists were cataloging perversions with clinical zeal, while the Decadent movement was challenging received values in art, language, and the body. He often used aphorism to unsettle certainties, and here he joins irony to anthropology. From a biological and psychological standpoint, erotic drive appears ordinary and pervasive; it animates imagination, social life, and art. Abstention, especially when elevated to a universal commandment, looks less like health than a renunciation of a basic human energy.
The target is not someone who freely chooses celibacy, but the cultural sanctification of chastity as superior virtue. Gourmont pricks the logic by which institutions designate desire as suspect while idealizing its suppression. Historically, that ideal policed women in particular, guarded inheritance and reputation, and enlisted religion to dignify control. The language of aberration becomes a tool of power. Calling chastity the peculiar one exposes the asymmetry: labeling others deviant masks a deeper estrangement from the human condition.
There is also a psychological edge. Repression often breeds hypocrisy, fixation, or neurosis; the refusal to integrate desire can twist it into something more destructive than honest indulgence. The quip thus proposes an ethic of lucidity: treat sexuality as part of life to be shaped, not denied. Heard today, it cautions against moral panics and points to a more humane criterion for judgment, one grounded in consent, harm, and vitality rather than inherited taboo.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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