Читать книгу Erotic Fantasy - Hans-Jürgen Döpp - Страница 9

The arse is the proletariat of body parts. It is condemned to namelessness; we search the dictionaries in vain for suitable expressions. At most, the common or vulgar expression serves as a term of abuse. The gesture of showing the bare behind is interpreted as obscene and shocking. Sometimes it is the despised location where punishment is administered. Its presence is characterised by passivity. The work ethic internalised in bourgeois society places passivity, indolence and inactivity under a taboo from the aesthetic point of view as well. Thus the posterior has become an obscene part of the body, especially when its indolence is emphasised by the growth of adipose tissue.[31] The rear-end represents worthlessness within the framework of the body; it is held to be the most soulless part of the body and thus has every reason to groan sometimes, deeply and wordlessly.

Idealistic aesthetic theory, with its reservations about anything that “resembles bestial ugliness” (Rosenkranz), banished the bottom from the repertoire of beautiful objects worthy of representation. It is a physical representation of the opposition between spirit and matter. Where the spirit strives upward, its gravity drags us down. In his work, The Nude, (1958), Kenneth Clark analyses the classical conception of physical beauty. “Nothing which bears any relationship to the human being as a whole was removed or ignored.” So the proportions of the body are discussed, the moulding of the stomach, the rounding of the hips, the play of muscles in the arms and legs, but not the posterior – as if it were not part of the whole.

In every respect the arse is the symbol of everything offensive. This verdict on the anal region is yet more effective and far-reaching since, from infancy onwards, it is linked with the experience of sexual pleasure. Lou Andreas-Salomé[32] argued that the first prohibition a child encounters is against taking pleasure in the products of the anal region. This prohibition is decisive for his or her entire future development. Freud explains; “It is in this context that the infant must first become aware of an environment hostile to its instinctive drives, must learn to separate its own being from this other, and then perform the first ‘displacement’ of its outlets for pleasure.” From infancy onwards, the anal region remains the symbol of everything worthless, everything that must be separated from life.

Bourgeois aesthetics and the libidinous destiny of anality converge in one concept; “disgust”. It is precisely the tabooing of the bottom, however, that gives its exposure a sense of potential anti-bourgeois protest. There have been many reports throughout the twentieth century of young women and girls baring their bottoms in public – provocatively, boastfully, ostentatiously. Towards the end of the 1950s, there was talk of a new phenomenon – “mooning” by entire groups of young men. By the 1970s, this was increasingly the case among young women as well. Hans-Peter Dürr[33] has indicated that this was a provocative act of rule-breaking. The taboo, which continued to exist under the concept of modesty, was deliberately broken by anal exhibitionism.

31. Berthomme de Saint-André, 1927.

32. Reunier (pseudonym of Breuer-Courth), 1925.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already written about the pleasures of anal exhibitionism. In his Confessions, he informs us that when he was about eighteen years old – round about 1730, therefore – he used to look for “dark alleys and remote spots where I would show myself at a distance to young women in the posture I really wished to adopt close to them. What they saw was not the obscene member – I never ever thought of that – but its reverse, the ridiculous. The silly pleasure I took in mooning in front of them is indescribable. I really only needed to take another step further in order to experience the treatment I longed for, since I had no doubt that one or other more resolute girl would have done it to me in passing if I had had the courage to wait.” Did he want to be spanked on his bottom? In any case, according to his own estimation, he gave the girls “more of a ridiculous sight than a seductive one. The cleverest pretended not to notice; others shrieked with laughter, while others took offence and made a fuss.”

In spite of disgust and shame, people retain their fascination with this part of the body, with its functions and products – even, and especially, when they campaign against “obscenity”. A secret, displaced pleasure can always be detected under cover of disgust.

We know of the twenty-one-year-old Mozart’s letters to “Bäsele”, presumably his first lover. In these, he celebrates scatological verbal orgies in a boisterous, almost infantile manner; this is probably the reason these letters were unpublished for so long. Untamed pleasure in anality ignites a verbal faecal-firework display. On 13 November, 1777, he wrote from Mannheim; “I’m sorry about the bad handwriting, my pen is already old. Soon it will be twenty-two years that I have been shitting out of the same hole, and it’s still not torn! – and I’ve shat so often…” On 28 February he writes; “I just did a big fart! Our arses should be the signs of peace. Shit! – Shit! O sweet word![34]“

Anal eroticism seems to be an indisputable fertile soil of our culture, and psychoanalysis has shown that the drives which are interpreted as anal-erotic have an extraordinary significance for our inner life as well as our cultural life. The bottom is a place where instinctive drives and their sublimation can be localised, so that it could be said that it represents the cradle of our culture. The posterior as the other side of “high” culture? What is our concept of beauty? It is there even when not discussed. Does not the idea “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we behold its glory” refer precisely to the buttocks?[35] Fashion has always been aware of this. Women have always tried to draw men’s attention to their rears, whether by swaying them ostentatiously while walking, or by artificial padding for fashionable emphasis, as though their entire attractiveness depended on the attractiveness of their bottoms.

In the history of fashion, periods of slimness alternate with periods of voluptuousness. The cult of the callipygian is always found in those periods where rounded, curvaceous, voluptuous women embody the ideal of beauty. The posterior loses its aesthetic value in periods where slimness is the norm.

The Rococo was a period of sophisticated eroticism. It is evident from illustrations of the period that a lovely backside was admired just as much as a lovely bosom. A publication entitled Servants of Beauty, which appeared in Leipzig in 1774, gives the following opinion of what constitutes a lovely backside: “Those buttocks are considered beautiful that are evenly placed, not too high, and not uneven as in lame people whose hip-bones are displaced, that do not stick out like a bay window; not so large and fat that you could dance on them, but not so skinny and sharp that you could drill holes with them, but rounded, hard, taut, so that they have a pleasing resonance when slapped, smooth and white…” We see that the image of a firm bottom is not new, just the concepts change.

Goethe was also aware of the charms of a lovely backside;

33. Berthomme de Saint-André, 1927.

34. Achille Devéria, circa 1830. Lithograph.

35. Achille Devéria, circa 1830. Lithograph.

36. Achille Devéria, circa 1830. Romantic Lithography.

It was the fashion to emphasise these curves with extra padding, for instance with an item known as the “Cul de Paris”. This was described in a women’s dictionary of 1725: “A French backside is a rounded, soft and lightly padded cushion or loincloth that a woman wears beneath her skirts so as to pad out her rear end and draw attention to her figure”. The “Cul de Paris” experienced its greatest triumph during the Biedermeier period, when it developed into a fixed steel frame which gave the impression of curves which often did not exist.

Men also took pride in having taut buttocks. During the Renaissance especially, opulent male figures were appreciated. Many contemporaries described the closely-cut breeches which particularly emphasise the buttocks as shameless. A chronicle from 1492 records: “Young men wore tunics that came no longer than a hand span below the belt, so that their breeches could be seen quite clearly, in front and behind, and they were so tight that the cleavage of their buttocks was obvious; a fine thing!” In the first half of the sixteenth century wide breeches which gave the impression of huge buttocks became fashionable, quite in keeping with the course sexuality of the period. In our own day the cult of the callipygian has gained a considerable improvement in status thanks to the modern fashion for trousers, especially the worldwide triumphal progress of jeans, for both sexes.

Nevertheless fashion has never managed to achieve a genuine “décolletage” of the buttocks. An erotic story from 1905 describes a “ball” of the buttocks: “Lovely lady, I think that bottoms have been condemned to suffer since the creation of the world; now it is time that they were honoured, it’s only fair… Choose a form of exposure that corresponds to the form of its beauty. You are permitted to adorn it elaborately with pearls or diamonds, veil it with gauze, frame it with ruches and frills, drape it with blue or red, according to the colour of your hair. If you adorn this part of your body with the same artistry as you adorn your bosom, I can guarantee, ladies, that you will look divine, and the success of the festivities will be recorded for posterity.” Only recently have “décolletages” for bottoms been seen at “Love-Parades”[36]

But there may be an archaic need to expose this part of the body which so fascinates one’s sexual partner. This may well be a survival of the time when copulation took place exclusively from behind. J. Eibl-Eibesfeldt[37] claims that bushmen still prefer to copulate in this position even today. Even in our own culture, the archaic methods of copulation play an important role. Freud established that in all fantasies or memories of origins, coitus a tergo, in the manner of animals, is imagined.

37. Lobel-Riche, 1936.

38. Lobel-Riche, 1936.

In antiquity, the admiring observation of the posterior was one of the common ways of evaluating a female. Competitions to discover the loveliest bottom were common. One of Alkiphron’s “hetaerae[38] letters” describes a wild symposium held by courtesans in which the spectacular climax is a dispute between two of them as to who has the prettier and more graceful bottom. The dispute is arbitrated by an exhibition: “First of all, Myrrhina loosened her girdle – she kept on her thin silken garment[39] – and swayed back and forth, so that her bottom trembled like thick, creamy milk, and she looked over her shoulder to watch its movements; she uttered soft sighs, as though she were in the throes of love’s ecstasy. But Thryallis didn’t let herself be intimidated, but went even further in shamelessness.

“‘I’m not going to compete in thin robes’, she said, ‘and I’m not going to be coy, but I’ll be naked as in a wrestling match. Coyness has no place in this competition’. She cast off her garment and swayed her hips slightly. ‘Look’, she said, ‘see how even the colour is, how spotless, how pure, see my rosy hips and how they shade into my thighs, there are no bulges of fat visible, nor any bones, nor any dimples. And indeed, by Zeus, it doesn’t tremble like Myrrhina’s – and she smiled slightly. And then she demonstrated the play of muscles and swayed her buttocks so that the muscles danced across her hips, and everyone applauded and victory was awarded to Thryallis.” The decision was influenced not only by the appearance and characteristics of the posterior but also by the charm of the environment in which it was exposed.

The well-known Judgment of Paris is the model for such beauty contests. A similar competition in Syracuse is at the base of the legend of the founding of a cult of Aphrodite. The two daughters of a simple peasant were competing to see which had the prettiest bottom; to judge between them they chose a young man of good family who promptly fell in love with the older sister while his younger brother fell for the younger sister. There was a double wedding and the two girls dedicated a temple to Aphrodite, to whom they gave the name “Kallipygos”, “She of the lovely Buttocks.”

Exposure and demonstration of the buttocks is part of the repertoire of erotic gestures which prostitutes use to arouse their clients. Already in the fifth century B. C. admiration was being expressed for dancers who danced “with kilted-up skirts” and then undressed and allowed their posteriors to be admired.

The posterior gained aesthetic recognition thanks to this exhibitionism; it is unjustly despised, because the charms of a beautiful bottom appeal to the aesthetic sense of both sexes. F. Th. von Vischer[40] states that it is the “peach-like shape” of the bottom which creates aesthetic appreciation. The effect of these sculptural charms explains why many content themselves with seeing the buttocks and derive sexual pleasure from the sight.

We know from reports of the Papal Court of Pope Alexander VI that the erotic attraction of the posterior sometimes led to public orgies. One chronicle reports; “Once there was a dinner in the Apostolic Palace at which many distinguished courtesans were present. After the meal they were required to dance with the servants and guests, first dressed, then naked. After the dancing, flaming torches were placed on the ground and chestnuts were thrown between them, which the naked women picked up, crawling between the torches, bending and swaying a hundred times, while Cesare and Lucretia Borgia watched. This charming scene took place on the eve of All Saints’ Day 1501.” In England the predilection for the sight of callipygian charms gave rise to a particular type of prostitute known as “posture girls”.[41] This branch of prostitution seems to have arisen about 1750, as it is mentioned for the first time in many erotic writings of that time. For instance, The History of the Human Heart or The Adventure of a Young Gentleman (London, 1769) refers to “posture girls”, who “stripped stark naked and mounted themselves on the middle of the table”[42] in order to show off their attributes. The behaviour of these “girls” in a brothel in Great Russell Street is graphically described in Midnight Spy. Urbanus says, “There we see an object that arouses at once indignation and pity. A beautiful woman lies on the ground, showing that part of her body which, were she not dead to all sense of shame, she would eagerly seek to conceal. As she is given to drunkenness, she usually arrives at the house slightly tipsy, and displays herself in front of men in this indecent manner after two or three glasses of Madeira. Look, now she is being carried out like an animal. People mock her, but she is delighted to prostitute such incomparable beauty.” This type of anal-erotic voyeurism was particularly common in England at this time.

39. Paul-Emile Becat, 1848.

40. Paul Avril, circa 1910.

This admiration of the posterior was definitely ambivalent, as expressed in accompanying fantasies of corporal punishment. That which is desired is also a “damnable” object, and not only in puritanical cultures. One’s own fascination has to be suppressed by punishing the desired object. Thus in the idea of flagellation (for which England was particularly notorious) there is a defensive reaction against one’s own desires. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens has this to say of the cherubic Mr. Wilfer: “So boyish was he in his curves and proportions, that his old schoolmaster meeting him in Cheapside, might have been unable to withstand the temptation of caning him on the spot”.[43] A pedagogue in antiquity would undoubtedly have solved the problem in an entirely different way. A poem by Heine also satirises the motif of corporal punishment. In Citronia, from the “Last Poems”, he describes a schoolmistress sitting in her armchair: “And a birch-rod in her hand, with which she beats the little brat. The little one, who committed a trivial fault, is weeping. She lifts up the skirts and the little globes with their charming, lovely curves, sometimes like roses sometimes like lilies – ah, the old lady beats them black and blue. To be ill treated and insulted – this is the fate of beauty on earth.” In normal editions of Heine, the middle section of the verse is omitted. Another stroke of the rod, this time from the pen of the censor against the delightful lines. It is not far from pleasure in exposure of the posterior to anal intercourse; a beautiful object that is desired must also be possessed.

In a study of The Posterior in Antiquity, Adrian Stähli indicates that, in vase paintings of the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. depicting the act of intercourse, the posture of anal intercourse is predominant or, if vaginal penetration is depicted, then it is in a position where the woman shows her bottom to the man, suggesting anal penetration to him or to anyone seeing the illustration. It is time to take a rear view of our idealised, posterior-less image of the Greeks. As Kenneth Clark emphasised: “This deeply rooted awareness, the recognition of the significance of physical beauty, protected the Greeks from the two evils of sensuality and aestheticism.” No – sensuality was increased by beauty! The classical object of libidinousness was – the posterior!

41. Paul Avril, circa 1910.

As Stähli has indicated, this was in no way gender-neutral; in antiquity, anal penetration was perceived at least potentially as a homosexual act. “The female posterior and that of a boy whom a homosexual lover finds attractive are, in principle, interchangeable.” In comparison with the much more highly valued charms of a boy’s bottom, a woman’s was always second best. “Homosexual epigrams from the Hellenistic period and the Roman Empire praise boys’ bottoms every bit as enthusiastically as the eulogies to women’s backsides”. As in the case of praise of women’s rears, the shape, form and colour of boys’ backsides are praised and described in detail. Far more often than the penis, the backside is seen as the decisive element of the desired boy’s sexual attractiveness. The desire to penetrate male rears is diverted to females. This is also the part of the body where sexuality is an expression of male dominance.

Contempt for the posterior no doubt owes its origin mainly to Christianity, which must have seen in it a heathen place of worship. At least since the thirteenth century, “unnatural indecency”, which included anal intercourse, was declared to be one of the worst of sexual sins, and the Church never ceased to condemn it most severely. Any danger that threatened the continuation of the species had to be abolished – thus, three sins against Nature were denounced more fiercely than ever; sodomy, masturbation and abstinence.

42. Courbouleix, circa 1935.

The Renaissance, however, did not only bring about a revival of the writings of the authors of antiquity. The new Humanism also led to an unusual valuation of sexuality. The confrontation with profane examples of classical literature led inevitably to recognition of the value of the erotic for Greek and Roman culture, a recognition that also encompassed the visual arts. For the “intellectuals” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the greatest happiness consisted of a symbiosis of intellectual, sexual and culinary pleasures. Aretino[44] wrote glowing praises of callipygian charms. In his “Dialogues” he writes: “then he held the cheeks of her bottom apart with gentle hands – it looked as if he were turning the white pages of a missal – and looked at her backside, absolutely enchanted. It was neither a spiky bag of bones, nor a wobbly lump of fat, but exactly the right size and shape, a bit tremulous and curvy, shining like living ivory. The dimples that one is so glad to see on the chin and cheeks of lovely women adorn her posterior as well. The cheeks were tender as a mouse born and bred in a mill, completely covered with flour. And all her limbs were so smooth that the hand he put on her flank slid down to her calf, like a foot turning on the ice.” At least in Rome in the sixteenth century, anal intercourse was re-instated in its rights. This is the interpretation of several extracts from Aretino’s Sonetti Lussuriosi, for instance the depiction of a woman grasping the erect penis of a man who is pretending to protest, in order to put it into her anus:

This is another very free rendering of another sonnet:

Aretino and many of his contemporaries were aware that many women disliked anal intercourse. The Sonetti Lussuriosi and the Dialogues of Courtesans repeatedly mention the fact that intercourse “from behind” was only a pleasure for the man:

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, pederasty was widespread among the educated aristocracy, just as it was in Greek antiquity – and also the desire to “treat women like men”. Especially the senior clergy showed a particular predilection for this phenomenon, which thus acquired the label “prelate’s dish” or “pleasures of the great and the good.”

Most lovers of boys, whether clergy, poets or aristocrats, were not homosexuals in the strict sense of the word but bisexual. They experienced the same pleasure that they got from sexual intercourse with boys when they “treated a woman like a man”. This pleasure was increased when the woman wore men’s clothes and so appeared to give the optical illusion of being a boy. This was something unheard of as it disregarded the Church’s strict prohibition. Nevertheless, Roman and Venetian courtesans were often happy to dress as men. Alfred Semmerau quotes a decree of 1578: “The licentiousness and brazenness of the courtesans and whores of Venice has grown to such an extent that, in order to attract and seduce young men, they have adopted, among other fashions, this new and uncommon fashion of dressing as men. Whores and courtesans are hereby forbidden to appear in the streets dressed as men, on pain of three years’ imprisonment and perpetual banishment. Gondoliers who assist them will be sent to the galleys for eighteen months…”

In another work of the period, the origin of the term “bugger” is discussed; this term for homosexual and anal intercourse is alleged to have developed from the fact that a king exclaimed “che buco raro” (what a rare hole!) on seeing his catamite’s anus. It was claimed that those who maintained that, on the contrary, the word was derived from “bucum errare” (to take the wrong hole), were misinformed. This type of etymology was the sort of intellectual word game that was very popular among bisexual writers’ circles.

43. Berthomme de Saint-André, 1927.

44. Jean Morisot, 1925.

Goethe was also indebted to the libertinism of antiquity when he wrote in his Venetian Epigrams of 1790; “I have also loved boys, but I prefer girls – If I am tired of them as girls, then I can still use them as boys”. Was Goethe thinking of the Roman poet Martial?

A girl’s “boyish garland”[46] was the ultimate aim of pleasure, and the bottom was an altar on which sacrifices were gladly made.

De Sade’s apotheosis of a lovely posterior was really a blasphemous insult to the view taken by Christianity, although he placed great emphasis on examples from Antiquity; “This rare pleasure has nothing to do with age; young Alcibiades was no less susceptible to it than the elderly Socrates; there are many nations who have preferred this exquisite part of the body to all other beauties of the female form; and indeed there is no other that so deserves the voluptuous caresses of a true libertine more than this, due not only to its pallor, curves, and enchanting perfection of form but also to the tender pleasures it promises.

“Unhappy the man who has never fucked a boy or treated his girlfriend as a boy! For anyone who has experienced neither the one nor the other, debauchery is still virgin territory” (Justine). In 120 Days, de Sade writes; “O precious arses, upon your altar I swear never again to stray from you.” For writers in classical antiquity, homage to this part of the body was a variation on the theme of sensual pleasure, but de Sade experienced it as “excess”, as expressed by Bataille.[47] The blasphemous intention is obvious. Coeur-de-Fer instructs Justine, “Many father confessors have trodden this pilgrims’ path, without anyone’s parents being aware of it. Do I need to say any more, Justine? If this temple is the most secret, it is also the most pleasurable.”

As recently as a century after de Sade and Goethe, the idea had already become anathema. Such pleasures suffocated under bourgeois morality, by which the Psychopathia Sexualis was very much influenced. Krafft-Ebing’s[48] air stood on end: “One hideous phenomenon is the paedicatio mulierum, in some circumstances even uxorum! Libertines sometimes do it for particular titillation with prostitutes or even with their own wives. There are examples of men who sometimes have anal intercourse with their wives!” All that remains of the breadth of humanistic education is bad schoolboy Latin. What was previously an enjoyable variant of sexual behaviour was now classified as a perversion. The previous condemnation of anal intercourse under Christianity had become a quasi-scientific condemnation, introduced under the cover of Enlightenment.

Are we experiencing a new Renaissance today, as far as sexuality is concerned? One of our aims in life, apart from career success, is to have a fulfilling sex life. We have a less rigid upbringing, with the result that anality is no longer so vehemently condemned. The pressure of Christian sexual morality has given way to a “morality of negotiation” between partners; whatever gives pleasure is permitted, as long as there is mutual consent.

45. Jean Morisot, 1925.

46. Marcel Vertés, 1938.

A culture of bisexuality is developing which is opening up the one-way street of heterosexual intercourse to traffic in the opposite direction. The image of a “boyish” posterior is idealised, at least within European culture, and men and women promise equal pleasures “from behind” – this is reinforced by fashions which minimise the differences between the sexes. Is there going to be a cultural reconciliation with our “part maudite”?[49] This poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger[50] may be an indication of the future:

47. Anonymous, 1900.