LITMIR.BIZ

      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:

      Shit

      I often hear people talk about it

      As though everything were its fault.

      But look how gently and modestly

      It takes its place among us!

      So why do we sully

      Its good name

      And bestow it

      On the President of the USA,

      On the cops, on war

      And on capitalism?

      How transitory it is,

      And how permanent

      Everything we give its name to!

      It is yielding,

      But when we talk about it

      We mean exploiters.

      Is

Скачать книгу