The Enlightened Body
The Enlightened Body
A Libertine history of desire, power, and self-determination
The ParadoxThe Libertine movement flourished in the 17th and 18th century as a philosophical rebellion against prescribed morality, with the term libertin meaning "freethinker" who rejected Church doctrine in favor of reason, pleasure, and personal autonomy. In clandestine salons across Paris and London, what began as intellectual debate became embodied resistance: the body itself turned political, with libertines claiming that pleasure was protest and physical desire should answer to no authority.But this freedom was never equal. Women's bodies became sites of profound paradox—corsets restricted breath and movement while décolletage created spectacle. Women were contained and exhibited at once, shaped by stays and whale bone even as libertine men philosophized about freedom from constraint. When aristocratic men wore elaborate lace, jewels, and powdered wigs, it signaled power and status. When women adorned themselves extravagantly, society read it as either sexual availability or dangerous vanity.Some women navigated this impossible terrain with remarkable skill. Ninon de l'Enclos (1620-1705) stands as perhaps the most successful female libertine: she rejected marriage, maintained financial independence through her work as a courtesan, hosted a salon where Enlightenment philosophers gathered, and lived to 84 as a wealthy, respected woman. She wrote letters on philosophy, had lovers by choice rather than necessity, and famously remained "convinced she had no soul" even on her deathbed. Her life proved women could claim libertine principles—but only with extraordinary privilege and strategic maneuvering. The libertine woman wasn't granted autonomy; she had to seize it.She’s the ManIn the late 1600s, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the infamous rake, and Aphra Behn, who wrote “like a man” exposed what libertinism promised versus what it delivered.Rochester's "The Imperfect Enjoyment" is shockingly explicit even by today's standards. He confesses that his body responds to objectification and power dynamics with prostitutes, but fails with someone he desires through intimacy. Rochester exposes libertine masculinity as hollow performance: conquest without connection, virility without vulnerability, freedom that leaves the feminine unsatisfied.Aphra Behn responded to this masculine attitude by adopting it herself. In "The Libertine," she writes in the boastful voice of her male counterparts. "A thousand martyrs I have made, / All sacrificed to my desire... And while I thus at random rove / Despise the fools that whine for love." Scholars still debate whether she's sincere or satirical, and that ambiguity is the point. By putting libertine swagger in a woman's voice, Behn reveals how it sounds. Is this freedom, or predation?This wasn't merely literary provocation. Behn lived as unconventionally as she wrote—possibly bisexual, certainly financially independent, openly sexual in her work at a time when "respectable" women barely appeared in public discourse.Marquis de SadeBy the late 18th century, libertine philosophy reached its most extreme, and most troubling expression in the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). The word "sadism" derives directly from his name, and for good reason. Sade spent half his adult life imprisoned, first for sexual crimes against servants and prostitutes, later for his writing. In prison, he produced novels so violent that France banned them until 1957: Justine, Juliette, 120 Days of Sodom—works depicting rape, torture, and philosophical justifications for cruelty in exhaustive, repetitive detail.Sade's philosophy was materialist: humans are merely matter, the soul is myth, and "nature" demands we follow our basest impulses without moral constraint.Sade called his work liberating while depicting women almost exclusively as objects for male experimentation. His characters never seduce, they attack, plunder, and destroy. Some scholars argue his extreme misogyny was intentional satire meant to expose what male "freedom" actually costs women. Others see pathological hatred. What's undeniable is that Sade revealed libertinism's darkest truth: when "freedom from constraint" means freedom to exploit and harm others, it's not liberation at all.Redemption ArcWhat saves this history are the women who alchemized libertine philosophy into something worth having. Olympe de Gouges, who demanded equality in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen was guillotined during the very Revolution that promised freedom. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that virtue, as taught to women, was just another cage. They took the libertine promise of autonomy and made it real, not for conquest but for genuine freedom.Today, autonomy is still being fought for. We reclaim baroque excess not as performance but as pleasure: corsets chosen, not enforced; extravagance as refusal of smallness; presence as power. The body remains contested territory, yes, but it's also canvas, sanctuary, the home we refuse to abandon.Where libertines defied gods, we define ourselves. Pleasure without apology. Beauty without permission. Bodies belonging wholly to their inhabitants. The fight continues, but so does the freedom. That's the legacy worth keeping: not that the battle is won, but that we keep choosing ourselves anyway.