Fourier on the end of sexual repression

Fourier on sexual liberation in his early 19th century socialist utopia:

Love in Harmony [i.e. the Phalanx] will be ‘free,’ but highly organized, the aim being to provide universal sexual gratification.  Everyone, including the elderly and the deformed, will be assured of a ‘sexual minimum’.  To effect this, philanthropic corporations composed of outstandingly beautiful and promiscuous erotic priests and priestesses will joyfully minister to the needs of less attractive Harmonians.  The qualification for admission to this ‘amorous nobility’ will be a generous sexual nature, capable of carrying on several affairs at once (this will be tested under examination conditions).  Polygamy and adultery will be praiseworthy in Harmony, and they will be open and unashamed – there will be no secrecy – whereas monogamy will be despised as the narrowest sort of love.  Polygamy, Fourier believed, was already almost universal – though covert – in our own civilization.  He drew up a list of seventy-two distinct varieties of cuckold.

In Harmony, the notion of sexual ‘perversion’ will be abandoned.  Lesbians, pederasts, flagellants, and others with more recondite tastes such as heel-scratching and eating live spiders, will all have their desires recognized and satisfied, and will meet regularly at international convocations.  Fourier himself confessed to a fondness for lesbians, and calculated that there were 26,400 men on earth, beside himself, who shared this abnormality.

The amorous affairs of each Phalanx will be organized by an elaborate hierarchy of officials, titled variously high priests, pontiffs, matrons, confessors, fairies, fakirs, and genies.  They will hold sessions of the court of love each evening, after the children have gone to bed.  In arranging relationships, they will depend on a complete knowledge of everyone’s likes and dislikes, obtained through confession, and an intricate card-index system of erotic personality-matching.

The quote is from The Faber Book of Utopias.