The Wit’s Guide to Lust

Or, inverse prudery

Allegory of Lust, Daniel Mytens, the elder, c. 1590

Of all the deadly sins, lust seems the least. When taken to its natural conclusion, lust actually creates life! The opposite of fatal! Hence the magnum opus of James Newell Osterberg Jr., Lust for Life. When Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop, asks hey man, where’d you get that lotion, he speaks for all of us. Where did you get that lotion?

“We lust, because our ancestors’ lust helped pass their lustful genes on to us.”
— Richard Dawkins

All sins benefit from being rethought as polarities, too much of a good thing. Lust is just desire turned up to 11. That desire drives the birds and the bees and is why the world’s waking up again, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. So keep those urges in check, but understand that attempts to stamp them out will inevitably cause more problems. Or as my man Wynstan Hugh put it so well:

“Certain sins manifest themselves as their mirror opposites which the sinner is able to persuade himself are virtues. Thus Gluttony can manifest itself as Daintiness, Lust as Prudery, Sloth as Senseless Industry, Envy as Hero Worship.”
— W.H. Auden

This from a poet who said his face looked like a wedding cake left out in the rain, which in turn inspired the lyric in MacArthur Park. Unrelated but there it is.

“He that looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it, hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart.”
— C.S. Lewis

It’s true that lust is a problem for our species — bloodlust, wanderlust, and above all the lust for power. The traditional sexual flavour? That, we need more of. “Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes of the population implosion in the New Yorker. “The end of the world is usually dramatized as convulsive and feverish, but population loss is an apocalypse on an installment plan.” But you know what is convulsive and feverish, wink wink nudge nudge? Exactly!

“Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.”
— John Lahr

Maybe, through some twisted bit of misdirection, we’re actually lusting for the catastrophe our lack of garden(-of-Eden)-variety lust is inviting. When the essayist Becca Rothfeld examined celebrity declutterers in All Things Are Too Small, she found a particularly dark longing in their hearts: They lust after a calamity to clean out all our closets, permanently. “A dystopian natural disaster strikes many celebrity declutterers as a perversely appealing prospect because it would force us to evacuate, abandoning the preponderance of our possessions,” she writes. “In book after book, simplifiers, essentialists, and unstuffers alike savor the thought of societal collapse, of cleansing floods and purifying fires.”

“What critics call dirty in our movies they call lusty in foreign films.”
― Billy Wilder

So bring back the original lust, the one modelled by nature in this season of renewal. And if we need to sub in a sin, let’s castigate the unnatural craving to run the world (into the ground). Or to make it a rhyming slogan for the upcoming Canadian federal election: Less cranky yankee, more hanky panky!

“Tis better to have love and lust
Than to let our apparatus rust.”
— Kurt Vonnegut

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It’s hard not to think of the seven deadly sins as a way to nitpick our neighbours. But maybe leave them alone already? The line on March’s Riposte Card:

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― Jane Austen

Is a moral relative of another favourite:

“Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
― George Bernard Shaw

The illustrator Natàlia Pàmies Lluís made these words magical in her work of art, and if you upgrade your subscription to paid, I’ll be mailing it out on printed postcards later this month.

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“Whether a man’s lust for big-breasted women is a hunger for mountains or his hunger for mountains is a lust for big-breasted women is a moot question.”
― Brendan Francis

So now we’ve tackled Anger and Lust, leaving five more sins. But loyal readers have suggested more topics — thank you! — including Grudges (to pair with last week’s Gripes, via Rich) and Pejoratives (inspired by the real meaning of words like smut and dreck, via Blake). So we’ll get through the Deadlies, but perhaps with a grudgily smutty pit stop?

That was Issue 299 of Get Wit Quick: A natural, zesty enterprise. When you talk about the birds and the bees, recall the lasting lesson of Birds of Britain: “Baby birds are called bees.” Speaking of, the newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Is the difference between lust and love is the difference between 🫀 and ❤️ ? Tap the ❤️ below if so.