1. Text is from The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 274–75, lines 1–14. Subsequent references to this poem are to this edition and will be cited within the text parenthetically by line number. In one manuscript the title is “The Debauch.” Love also has some verses on Rochester which read like a cut-down version of this poem.
2. Neither Vieth nor Love attributes the poem definitely to Rochester, though both agree that it may be about him; for a short discussion of the alternatives, see Kirk Combe, “Rakes, Wives and Merchants,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwells, 2001) and A Martyr for Sin: Rochester’s Critique of Polity, Sexuality, and Society (New York: University of Delaware Press, 1998). Vieth attributes it to
3. Sackville: Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester’s Poems of 1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 86–7, 168–72. Love rates it as D2 for likeness.
4. Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999): 87.
5. Evolutionary psychology sometimes wants to reiterate this; for a critique, see Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender (London: Icon Books, 2010).