Why? - some thoughts about historical erotica

All writers read. Sometimes they read for pleasure - I recently caught up with G.R.R. Martin's latest instalment in his epic Song of Ice and Fire - and sometimes for education.

I've recently been reading some French erotica - Gamiani, anonymous but possibly by de Musset; de Sade's Justine and 101 nights of Sodom, a bit of Restif de la Bretonne, and two little porn works by Apollinaire - The 11,000 Pricks and Exploits of a Young Don Juan.

All by French writers. And all, also, by men.

What intrigues me is that in almost all of them, there's a fascination with incest. de Sade, of course, has his two sisters, Justine and Juliette, virtue and vice - though they're not incestuous, many of the other characters in the novels are (including Saint-Fond, who fucks his own daughter). Restif de la Bretonne builds incest upon incest, with schemes of impregnating his mother or a sister and then bringing up the resultant children as future objects of his own lust. Apollinaire too keeps his desires in the family - not just the maidservants, but sisters and aunts, are objects of satisfied desire.

I'm bemused by this. Apollinaire's Don Juan and Restif de la Bretonne end up practically like roosters in a barnyard, surrounded by plump hens of ambiguous relationship to themselves. Why did incest have such appeal for the French writers?

In de Sade, it's easy to explain. His obsession with breaking down the structures of the Enlightenment, his antinomian cravings, make mere sex ineffective in its appeal. After all, it's only natural; and what de Sade is after is the sin against nature. For de Sade, incest is one pole of his erotic cravings, and murder the other (echoed by Apollinaire in the 11,000 pricks, which ends with the martyrdom of its hero by bludgeoning to death with cocks, and pretty much runs the gamut of sexual perversion - though without incest, unless I've missed something.)

But I wonder what was the pull for the other writers? I just can't get on their wavelength. Equally, I find it difficult, in the end, to read novels where the women are simply objects - counters in a game, interchangeable - and where the maidservants of the family are quite simply exploitable sexual resources (though that was, of course, the attitude of many men of the 18th and 19th centuries).

Which leaves me putting this reading firmly in the 'educational' camp. But also still puzzling on why incest had such an appeal for these writers.