A central paradox of Restoration libertinism, as this study has shown, is that the principles of conduct it advocates are in some fundamental respects incompatible. Libertinism tends to equate freedom with mastery, reducing all sexual relations to ‘new Conquests’ in an endless war: as a rather battered, disreputable rake says in Sir Charles Sedley's Bellamira (1687), paraphrasing Hobbes: ‘In matter of Women, we are all in the State of Nature, every man's hand against every man. Whatever we pretend.’ The courtesan heroine Bellamira, fiercely independent and generous of spirit, like the heroines of The Lucky Chance, The Rover, The City-Heiress and other plays by Behn, contests the assumption, implicit in the lines just quoted, that women serve primarily as objects of desire, rather than as desiring agents; and indeed the women in Bellamira consistently behave better than the men, a middle-aged, pox-ridden collection of ‘Whore-masters, Gamesters, Drunkards, Bullies’ (v.i.623), who illustrate the darker side of libertine hedonism. Both Behn and Rochester in their writings frequently project an equality of desire, in which men and women alike are subject to the transgressive force of Eros. In poem after poem, Behn and Rochester argue much the same libertine doctrines, treating ‘affected Rules of Honour’ with contempt, and contrasting the ‘holy Cheats, and formal Lyes’ imposed by fearful tyrants, domestic and political, on ‘their fellow Slaves’ with a natural freedom ‘kind Nature’ offers to all, of either sex, who are bold enough to grasp the offered opportunity.