Sex, Lust, and Self-Pleasuring for a Purpose
Some random observations on recent movies, novels, and a Renaissance icon
I’ve been having some problems with sex lately—no, not on a personal level. I gave up that madness shortly before the pandemic, when my last prospect for a so-called relationship revealed, on the cusp of “doing it,” that he already had a partner. “Then why have you been chasing after me?” I asked. “Everyone has the right to look for love,” he responded. Male logic. Go figger.
I’m talking about sex in the movies, sex scenes in fiction. Of late these have grown increasingly strange. A recent report in The New York Times claims that erotic moments onscreen in a clutch of recent movies “explore complex power dynamics between characters.” As an example, the writer cites the moment in Nosferatu when the heroine “dons a bridal gown and welcomes Orlok [the vampire] into her room. She undresses and as he sinks his teeth into her chest, she appears in a state of ecstasy.” In the queer love story, unabashedly titled Queer, one of the characters, named Allerton, “after a night of drinking, vomits into [a] toilet,” inviting his prospective lover’s “hunger for him [and taking] this opportunity to perform oral sex.”
I did wonder if he brushed his teeth, but I don’t think I want to see either of these movies to find out more.
It’s not that I’m prudish, really. I grew up watching occasional porn, such as a screening of Deep Throat around 1974 with an audience that included Betty Friedan, as recounted a couple of years ago in “Art Groupie in Training.” When I was a teenager, Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Joy of Sex were almost required reading. In graduate school, I had friends who regularly got involved in foursomes or fivesomes and visits to Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swingers’ club that opened in 1977. We watched I Am Curious (Yellow), described as the first mainstream movie to show sexual intercourse, and Last Tango in Paris, shocking at the time for its “raw portrayal of rape and emotional turmoil” with nary a blush.
But over the years I seem to have become more squeamish. Or simply bored. Or often annoyed. Reading good fiction is my favorite activity before drifting off to dreamland, and so, with great anticipation, I picked up the highly praised All Fours, by Miranda July, which made several “best” lists for 2024. (“Picked up” is somewhat antiquated usage since I downloaded a sample to my Kindle.) I got to the part where the heroine’s gay best friend describes her nocturnal encounters with her partner: “Well, often we’re in a kind of ugly position, like with both our legs wrapped around each other, kind of in this tight ball, and I really like my mouth to be overfilled so almost her whole hand might be in my mouth so there’s drool running down the sides of my face and we’re just, you know, humping, kind of like animals….Usually we’re too asleep or lazy to go down on each other or use a dick so there’s just, like, a bunch of fingering, or not even that, just grinding. Sometimes I will literally just hump her butt until I come, without even fully waking up. Sometimes I fall asleep with my fingers in her cunt and when I wake up they’re all pruney.”
A few pages later the unnamed narrator describes taking a bath with her “nonbinary” seven-year-old son (that’s how the reviews describe him, but, really, how do kids know at that age?). He’s referred to throughout the book by the third person: they, them, their, etc. Sam, the son, “lay languorously between my legs, like a slipper inside a slipper, using my chest as a pillow. We kept it dark and burned a musky candle, steam rising around the flame….Often we mused about love and how we would always take baths together like this.” Seriously? I don’t have children, but I wonder if this is heathy.
Another widely reviewed and much praised novel, Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, recounts a major character’s weekly S-M session with a regular hooker, who has brought along a female friend to join in the fun. “The new person stuck a long, fake fingernail—the acrylic kind that comes in colors and with crystals glued onto them—right up his ass. It had aroused him to look at those terrible nails, but now that one was up his acctual rectal cavity, he was wondering exactly how well-glued those crystals were, and also how well glued that nail was, now that he was really thinking about it, and what exactly is the thing you can explain to an ER doctor or a physician’s assistant at an urgent care if you had to get it removed.”
I quit reading both novels soon after the afore-quoted passages, grateful I downloaded only a sample and did not have to pay full price.
What is the point of these details? To flesh out the character (the lesbian friend in All Fours, as far as I could tell, wasn’t a big part of the story)? To provoke repugnance or disgust? (Yep, these surely do the trick.)
I want to believe that filmmakers and writers know what reactions they hope to elicit in viewers and readers, or perhaps they get a secret thrill out of erring just this side of flat-out pornography.
But what, I wonder, about artists, the makers of paintings and sculptures and photographs destined for a smaller audience than films or novels? We may not find them arousing, but surely all those fleshy naked women of the Renaissance and later (from Titian to Boucher to Ingres and Renoir) were meant to appeal to male patrons, those hapless perpetrators of the frequently maligned male gaze?
I find that there’s not much in art that makes me “hot,” the way a few rare bits from movies do (one of my favorites is the slow-dance scene between Robert Redford and Kristin Scott Thomas in The Horse Whisperer—and it’s all hands and looks and not so much as a kiss. Woohoo!)
But that doesn’t mean that the so-called fine arts can’t be sexy, if you get my drift. Many works probably weren’t meant to literally arouse viewers (though we can’t really know from a distance of hundreds of years). Nonetheless, they can be deeply suggestive. Among the most risible books I wrote about for ARTnews was Jonathan Jones’s The Loves of the Artists: Art and Passion in the Renaissance. I can no longer find my review, either as a Microsoft document or saved online by the magazine, but the judgment of a book critic for The Guardian pretty much echoed my sentiments : “For Jones, Renaissance painting is a pornotopia, and the artists he studies are sexual radicals, flagrantly disrupting convention. Their scandals, in his racy telling, are tabloidesque: the erect penis of Fra Lippo Lippi is a symbol of Christ's resurrection, and Donatello's David sports kinky ‘bronzie lingerie.’ A painting's "tactile values", as Berenson called them, are only too palpable when Jones appraises the mammaries of Titian's models or the ‘bulging codpiece’ of a figure in Giorgione. Sometimes he gets overexcited. I find it hard to envisage Brunelleschi's dome in Florence as ‘a soaring airborne breast,’ and do Venetian windows really resemble slit skirts?”
And yet there have been scholars who seriously investigate the sexual messages in the Old Masters. About 15 years ago, I pulled together a book proposal for a history of the reclining nude, from Giorgione to John Currin, and had worked up a couple of splendid chapters, but alas there were no takers. In my essay on interpretations of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, his great masterpiece from 1538, I included the discovery of a dear friend and brilliant art historian, Rona Goffen, who died far too young in 2004. Rona combed through Renaissance medical treatises to arrive at a surprising conclusion about Venus’s come-hither gaze and sexy pose (see the image at the top of this newsletter).
Earlier art historians had concluded that this was a painting meant to celebrate a marriage: the little spaniel sleeping at the model’s feet, the maids packing or unpacking a trousseau in the background, and the trimmed myrtle bush on the window ledge are all symbols of matrimony in Renaissance painting. And for years scholars assumed that Venus’s left hand was shielding her sex, attempting to hide it from view, as did the surprised goddesses in ancient statuary. But her fingers are curled, captured in an active gesture, not extended or splayed flat as a means of covering her pubic area. After examining the contemporary literature, Goffen came to the conclusion that the Urbino Venus is actively masturbating. “Under most circumstances, this kind of self-caress was unequivocally condemned by medieval and Renaissance theologians and physicians,” she noted. But in the context of marriage it may have been at times an absolute necessity, for it was believed that if a woman did not have an orgasm during intercourse she could not conceive, and the chances were even better for conception if both husband and wife climaxed simultaneously. To reach this blissful and fruitful end, female masturbation was considered acceptable. Indeed, as Goffen discovered, 14 out of 17 Renaissance theologians studied by Jean-Louis Flandrin, the French cultural historian, permitted women to reach orgasm through masturbation and thus, they believed, encourage gestation.
Conception was no small matter in Titian’s time. “Unproductive marriages in sixteenth-century Venice threatened the survival of her ruling class,” according to Margaret King, author of Women in the Renaissance. And conception, or its possibility, was the only justification for sexual congress, according to Church doctrine then and now. So this Venus, lying on her right side (considered at the time the most likely pose to maximize her chances of conceiving a male child during or immediately after sex), makes more than the standard pornographic appeal of similar images of women fondling themselves from our own times: Be with me, says this goddess of the nuptial chamber, and I will be fertile.
I wonder if this image, along with so many others, was meant to inspire lust in either a male or female viewer. We can never really know, but it’s safe to say that down through the ages it’s always been a matter of different strokes for different folks.
This is a great column. I ordered a hardcover of All Fours and hated it. How about if authors started writing again instead of trying to shock. I always appreciate your perspective and here you seem at your best!
Nice to know your friend's interpretation of Titian's beautiful Venus. A good read in the dead of winter!