ABSTRACT
Might one beg—with trepidation—to differ on Casanova? On the face of it he might seem to be the perfect nineties sort of guy. Unlike his strange coeval the Marquis de Sade, Casanova (1725–1798) was sexy without being scary: of the hundreds of female conquests commemorated in the twelve closely-printed volumes of erotic memoirs he composed at the end of his life, not one ended up garotted, chopped up into little pieces, hideously sodomized, or dumped in some horrid well. Like the gentlemanly seducers of today, Casanova was not only solicitous about his partner's pleasure—concerned to “perform the gentle sacrifice” without rudeness or roughness or unseemly dispatch—but careful to take hygienic precautions whenever any “voluptuous combat” was about to ensue. To minimize the risk of a “fatal plumpness” in his lovers, he tells us, he never hesitated to wear a “little garment of very fine, transparent skin, eight inches long, closed at one end, but resembling a purse and having at its open end a narrow pink ribbon.” Way excellent!
