'Sexual Poverty,' or, The Price of Love for Old Men

Abstract

Abstract: While the notion of 'sexual poverty' is rightly contested in contemporary discourse, the phrase usefully describes a style of economic thinking about sex that can be found in a variety of nineteenth-century French texts, in which sex is imagined as a scarce resource and a bodily need. The emblematic figure of such deprivation is the vieillard , the old man imagined as desiring but obviously undesirable in erotic terms. I trace this figure in writings by Chateaubriand, Balzac, Fourier, and Baudelaire, and draw out the ironies and ambiguities of how these writers present old men as 'victims' of sexual poverty.