Ian Warden: When sleeping libidos awaken

Lisa Marlowe has written a liberally illustrated and rather blush-making Irish Times feature Sex on the canvas: Picasso's most erotic year laid bare. In the piece, Ms Marlowe gives adulterous lust credit for the great artist's creative feats of 1932. You may access the piece online, now, if you have parental guidance.

Back to Picasso's erotic year in just a few chaste paragraphs.

Meanwhile, a wit has said that Turnbull's "bonking ban" will be impossible to police without "putting a microchip in every penis".

My eyes watering a little at that thought, I press on to say that of course not many of us are Picassos (although I'm sure that Barnaby Joyce has a creative side of some kind).

And yet, just as the Picasso story looks on the bright side of lust, it would be refreshing if we could do the same during this current Joyce/workplace lust imbroglio. If only for balance's sake someone worth listening to (perhaps that dinky-di contrarian Germaine Greer) would pipe up in defence of some of the defensible things about sexual desire.

That same person might have some thoughtful things to say (instead of hatchet-faced condemnations like the prime minister's) about how and why adultery cometh to pass even among the most decent of folk.

But until contrary Germaine takes up the cause, the best and best-known commentator in this moral minefield is US public intellectual Laura Kipnis. Your crush-prone columnist has had an intellectual crush on her for yonks.

With Barnaby Joyce so life-rattlingly embattled I urge him to read Kipnis' book Against Love: A Polemic. Therein he will find a sympathetic discussion/explanation of the adulterer's plight.

Kipnis' book's thesis is that lurv, usually expressed in the state-endorsed shackled-to-each-otherness "coupledom" of marriage, drives people to divorce and adultery. It does this, she explains, because utter coupledom in an American-style marriage is so contrary to what human animals instinctively want and need, and to what we're capable of.

Here, to tease embattled Barnaby (and this column's other morally-embattled readers) into reading it, are some snippets from Rebecca Mead's (mostly) admiring New Yorker review of the book.

"Reading Kipnis is rather like sitting next to an engagingly acerbic guest at a dinner party - great fun for an evening, if somewhat curdling to the digestion.

"She says 'domestic coupledom is the boot camp for compliant citizenship'.

"The hero of Kipnis's story is adultery. Conducting an adulterous affair amounts to a courageous insurrection against an inhuman social order. 'Adultery is the sit-down strike of the love-takes-[hard]-work ethic,' she says.

"Kipnis considers adultery's highest good to be that 'it is at least a reliable way of proving to ourselves that we're not quite in the ground yet.'

"She is extremely funny on the allures of extramarital romance, describing the encounter at the academic conference. 'You slowly become aware of a muffled but not completely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing … Oh my God, it's your libido, once a well-known freedom fighter, now a sorry, shrivelled thing, gone from from swaggering outlaw to model citizen … in just a few short decades.' "

Kipnis will not be at all surprised by the aforementioned Irish Times reports of Pablo Picasso's lustfully productive superyear of 1932. After all it is one of her themes that adultery's setting-free of the marriage-imprisoned libido can be a liberating, inspiring thing.

In 1932 Picasso, 50, (eerily, that is Barnaby Joyce's age today) was married but embarked upon an intense affair with his young model, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Between bonks and with a big June retrospective of his works looming, from January to mid-April Picasso painted frenziedly, churning out dozens of new works.

The Irish Times reports that "Picasso's sexual obsession with Marie-Thérèse infused his work with new energy and changed his style. The connection between the artist's creative powers and his sex drive was summed up in a drawing of The Painter Before His Model, dated January 29th, in which ….."

But there the daringly adult Irish Times becomes explicit in ways my chaste column must censor, so as to preserve the moral tone of The Canberra Times as we know it.

"[1932] was such a pivotal year in Picasso's life," The Irish Times gushes, "that the Musée Picasso in Paris and the Tate Modern in London have joined forces to organise [a forthcoming] exhibition, Picasso 1932; Erotic Year, that takes visitors through 1932, day by day, in chronological order. 'Painting is just another way of keeping a diary,' Picasso said on the eve of his 1932 retrospective."

My morally-embattled, libido-besieged, Turnbull-rebuked sorts of readers, are you keeping some form of "diary"? Perhaps you should be, just in case this is an especially creative, libido-stoked time of your life. For example, if you are a basket weaver (Barnaby Joyce often says unkind things about basket weavers) do you find that thanks to your affair your weaving (like Picasso's painting in 1932) is infused with a new energy and a change of style?