Sex from ancient times to now
The cover of The Literary Companion to Sex shows a detail from Antonio Canova’s sculpture of Psyche brought back to life by the kiss of Amor. The classic and elegant lines of the sculpture prefigure the contents of this book. The Literary Companion to Sex, edited by Fiona Pitt-Kethley, covers the ancient world up to the 20th century.
It’s a whirlwind ride. In her introduction, PittKethley said that her criteria included “realism, humor or the unusual — preferably all three.” Sex in the ancient world seemed to be more open, since their views on sex were not yet tainted by religious dogma or doctrine. There’s an excerpt from the “Homeric Hymns to Venus,” where Venus pretends to be an ordinary woman to set Achises at ease.
It begins, “Resistless love invading thus his breast,/ The panting youth the smiling queen address,” and ends with “The Queen of Love the youth thus disarrayed./ The sweet extreme of ecstasy attained.” And oh, there is no truth to rumors going around academe that Homer was gay, because his full name was Homer Sexual.
Now, this one was definitely gay: Sappho of the island of Lesbos in Greece. Unfortunately, much of her poetry is now lost because the bishops found her work too controversial, and proceeded to burn them. Only fragments remain, but what beautiful fragments they are: “My bosom glowed; the subtle flame/ Ran quick through all my vital frame;/ O’er my dim eyes a darkness hung;/ My ears with hollow murmurs rung.”
Religion and doom darken the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here the literary giants Boccaccio and Chaucer, Shakespeare and Donne jostle each other for space. But for sheer inventiveness, you have to give it to Shaykh Nefzawi. In The Perfumed Garden, he gives various names to a man’s sex organ – and what inventive names they were!
I taught Asian Literature at Ateneo de Manila University for decades, and I can still remember the shock on my students’ faces every time they read poems that merged the vulgar with the holy, the rude with the sublime. Look at this passage: “Know, O Vizir (to whom God be good!), that a man’s member bears different names, such as: El zodamme, the one with a neck. El bekkai, the weeping one. . .” And these are just the ones fit to print on a sunny Saturday like today.
The following section – the Restoration and the 18th century – is a horn of plenty. Condoms (called “cundums”), dildos, and sex jokes fill this section. The rise of the leisure class led to the writing of serialized novels and autobiographies. A gathering of titans began to write: Marvel and Herrick, Milton and Burns, Swift and Sterne, Rousseau, Franklin and Voltaire.
Some of them used sex to point out philosophical implications. Moreover, the women were beginning to write, even if only on top of their dining tables, after they had wiped it clean of every meal’s last morsel. Translations of classical texts also flourished.
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” still surprises everyone who reads it, with lines like these: “My vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow./ A hundred years should go to praise/ Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze./ Two hundred to adore each breast:/ But thirty thousand to the rest. . . Let us roll all our strength, and all/ Our sweetness, up into one ball:/ And tear our pleasures with rough strife/ Through the iron gates of life./ Thus, though we cannot make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run.”
As expected, the 19th century has slim pickings, what with Queen Victoria’s puritanical reign. Remember the Queen’s remarks when told she had subjects who were lesbians. The dowdy one was supposed to have asked: “And pray tell, what do they do in bed?” The French did some vivid erotica, too, but the doors were tightly shut in England, except in the works of Byron.
Sex was taboo in the official English literature, but it was found “in The Pearl and other underground writing. Kinkiness was in. It was the great period of fetishism and sado-masochism. At the same time, censorship was paramount.” People began to collect bawdy folk tales, if only on the sly.
The 20th century was a mixed bag. On one hand, D.H. Lawrence (The Lady Chatterley’s Lover) and James Joyce (Ulysses) liberated writers from the confines of censorship. But on the other hand, there was also so much bad writing, porn masquerading as profitable erotica, like the Tagalog indie films of a decade ago.
Still there were the frank and good writers like e.e. cummings with his quirky and original poems, as well as Philip Roth, whose adolescent Portnoy makes do with a cored apple and a piece of liver. Wendy Perriam writes about the pious Catholic housewife, Mary, pleasing herself on her own (even if filled with guilt), while Erica Jong conquers the fear of flying.
This anthology also finds space for gay and lesbian writing, such as in the excerpts from the playwright Joe Orton’s diaries and from Colette’s La Vagabonde.
The mistress of them all, Anais Nin, still enchants us with this excerpt from Little Birds. I saw this book on my first day at the University of Stirling in Scotland, displayed so openly in the John Smith’s Booksellers. But I was hesitant to buy it, even gingerly walked around it, with my very provincial frame of mind. Little Birds goes this way: “He came to her room and merely caressed her. They lay enveloped in the white mosquito netting as within a bridal veil, lay back in the hot night fondling and kissing. Fay felt languid and drugged. He was giving birth to a new woman with every kiss, exposing a new sensibility. Afterwards, when he left her, she lay tossing and unable to sleep. It was as if he had lit tiny fires under her skin, tiny currents that kept her awake.”
If only all of us could write with such lyricism and love!
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