The Naughty Bits (14 page)

“Now isn’t that an infallible solution? So take my advice and always keep your wife’s ring on your finger!”

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
Voluptuous Sonnets

PIETRO ARETINO

Pietro Aretino wrote his “Sonetti lussoriosi” in the late 1520s to accompany a series of erotic paintings that he had discovered. Even without seeing the oils, it’s not hard to imagine what they depicted. The sonnets are joyous and playful dialogues between lovers, shifting voices (and often positions) even within single lines. Aretino knew he was writing things that hadn’t really been seen in Italian, as he points out in the prologue to Book 2 of the Sonetti: “This book is not composed of sonnets, / Nor of chapters, eclogues or songs; / Instead, you’ll find . . . people both fucking and fucked-out / Cocks and cunts innumerable; / And many souls lost in the black holes of asses.” His little book proved to be the first erotica published with the printing press in Europe and has been reprinted dozens of times since—with good reason.

Aretino’s sonnets are marked not only for their ribald wit and consistent polymorphous perversion but also for the full range of loves he and his partner draw into their compass. Despite what we might think of women’s expressions of sexuality in ages before ours, Aretino’s partner is no less enthusiastic than he, and theirs is a model of balanced gender and sexual relations. Like Chaucer’s
Wife of Bath,
the woman in Aretino’s sonnets is an outspoken sexual predator. Both characters, however, were written by men, which leads one to wonder: are these women male fantasies, or protofeminist calls for women to embrace their own sexuality? I’d say a little of both.

IV (first book)

Throw your leg up on my shoulder, baby,
And take my cock up in your hand,
And when you want me to push hard or soft,
Whether hard or soft, just dance your ass upon the bed.

And if my cock moves from cunt to ass,
You can call me a rake or a backalley villain;
But I know your lips and I know your holes,
As any good horse knows his mate.

I’ll never take my hand from your cock—
Not I, who would never call this way crazy,
And if you don’t like it,
Vaya con Dios!

They say the pleasure behind belongs to you,
And the pleasure in front is made for me,
So just do it right, or I’ll make you take a hike!

Rest assured: I would never leave,
Dear woman, from such a sweet assfuck,
Not if it would save the King of France.

XIV (first book)

Give me your tongue, with my feet against the wall,
Tighten my thighs—yes, tight tight together;
Let it go back and forth here in this bed
Where I haven’t a care but to be fucked.

Ah, traitor! But my how your cock is hard!
Oh, don’t worry! I’ll make you whole in my hole;
And one day, you can have me in the other, I promise,
And I vouch I’ll leave you a happy man.
I thank you, dearest Lorenzina,
I’ll push myself to serve you, but you push too
Push like little Ciabattina knew how to do it.

Come on, come on; I’m pushing, when will you?
Now, I’ll do it now! Just give me all that little tonguelet
So I might die. And I, who thirst so for you,

How will you bring me to my conclusion?
Now, now I’m doing it, my good good Lord.
Oh! And now it’s done. And I . . . Oh me! O God!

II (second book)

Madame, your malady is in the lungs;
The remedy is at hand, if you want it.
Lift your thighs a bit higher
To receive in your ass the good medicine.

This works better than waters to the chest,
Dear lady, of this I assure you.
But Sir, if this you want me to believe,
Don’t make me wait any longer for my cure.

And voila’, my asshole. Oh my! What are you doing?
That’s a different shaped hole that you’re wrecking;
It’s not my pussy you’re giving it to there!

Slowly, slow—it’s stuffing me to the brim!
But woman, perhaps I should tell you the truth.
That my tool is so enormous.

It’ll take the cough right out of your lungs.
Good sir, of my eventual cure I can only hope,
Just don’t stop treating me anytime soon.

—translated by Jack Murnighan

from
The Starr Report

KENNETH STARR

It is a curious moment in history when the steamiest literature you can get your hands on is a Congressional investigation, and the male protagonist is no Fabio, no stable hand on the Chatterley estate, but the President of the United States. For despite what Ken Starr might have us believe, his Report was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story. It has all the components of the pinkest romance novel: the oblique promise of
l’amour propre
is continually proffered in the resiliency of Monica’s naïve optimism. And bad Bill’s responses are marked by the diffidence and resignation of a man who sees the writing on the wall. We see him committing the classic error of forgetting that there was a mind behind the convenient lips, a heart within the heaving chest, of seeing Monica Lewinsky not as a person but as an appliance. Thus the abstraction of his responses, as if what was transpiring involved historical chessmen or universal allegories, not flesh and blood humans. When she suggested she might tell if he didn’t treat her better, he rejoined, “It is illegal to threaten the president of the United States.” Now this is a phrase I could never imagine saying to a lover (and not only because I might have inhaled); it confuses self and office, man and symbol. Lovers’ quarrels are not resolved by consulting the Constitution. Bill, stick in hand, was clearly trying to scrape off the unfortunateness he had stepped into. And Monica, meanwhile, persisted in her hopes, questioning if he really knew her, asking him if he wanted to, only to be silenced by his kisses. Kisses that said, in effect, “Dear girl, don’t you know that real emotions are not permitted on the stage of a Trauerspiel? Identity is unimportant here; a hand is moving you. I am that hand . . .”

I myself have come to fear such encounters, where an atavistic urge or momentary impulse leads me into temptation, or into tempting, a woman but a decimal of my years. And, like decimals, it is hard to remember that they are also wholes and harder still to remember that they might see you as larger than life or larger than you are. The easily won, never-asked-for heart is worn like a lodestone, a mantle of lead we try to wriggle out from under. I feel for Clinton because it’s hard not to wield power, to not feel and lust for the very act of wielding, and then to shrink beneath the burden of its consequences. Power scripts its own abuse. And thus I feel for Lewinsky too. For it is all too easy to come under its spell. To say, as she did again and again, “Even though he’s a big schmuck . . .”

And we, the American people, did we not in the end permit this to pass, murmuring to ourselves the very same sentiment?

January 7 Sexual Encounter

. . . “[H]e was chewing on a cigar. And then he had the cigar in his hand and he was kind of looking at the cigar in . . . sort of a naughty way. And so . . . I looked at the cigar and I looked at him and I said, we can do that, too, some time.”

March 31 Sexual Encounter

According to Ms. Lewinsky, the President telephoned her at her desk and suggested that she come to the Oval Office on the pretext of delivering papers to him. She went to the Oval Office and was admitted by a plainclothes Secret Service agent. In her folder was a gift for the President, a Hugo Boss necktie.

In the hallway by the study, the President and Ms. Lewinsky kissed. On this occasion, according to Ms. Lewinsky, “he focused on me pretty exclusively,” kissing her bare breasts and fondling her genitals. At one point, the President inserted a cigar into Ms. Lewinsky’s vagina, then put the cigar in his mouth and said: “It tastes good.” After they were finished, Ms. Lewinsky left the Oval Office and walked through the Rose Garden.

February 28 Sexual Encounter

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had a sexual encounter on Thursday, February 28—their first in nearly eleven months . . . [A]ccording to Ms. Lewinsky, the President “started to say something to me and I was pestering him to kiss me, because . . . it had been a long time since we had been alone.” The President told her to wait a moment, as he had presents for her. As belated Christmas gifts, he gave her a hat pin and a special edition of Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of
Grass
. . . [A]fter the President gave her the gifts, they had a sexual encounter: “[W]e went back over by the bathroom in the hallway, and we kissed. We were kissing and he unbuttoned my dress and fondled my breasts with my bra on, and then took them out of my bra and was kissing them and touching them with his hands and with his mouth.

“And then I think I was touching him in his genital area through his pants, and I think I unbuttoned his shirt and was kissing his chest. And then . . . I wanted to perform oral sex on him . . . and so I did. And then . . . I think he heard something, or he heard someone in the office. So, we moved into the bathroom.

“And I continued to perform oral sex and then he pushed me away, kind of as he always did before he came, and then I stood up and I said . . . I care about you so much . . . I don’t understand why you won’t let me . . . make you come; it’s important to me; I mean, it just doesn’t feel complete, it doesn’t seem right.”

Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President hugged, and “He said he didn’t want to get addicted to me, and he didn’t want me to get addicted to him.” They looked at each other for a moment. Then, saying that “I don’t want to disappoint you,” the President consented. For the first time, she performed oral sex through completion.

from
Hell

HENRI BARBUSSE

The philosophy of aesthetics teaches that art is a function of certain mind-sets adopted by both artist and audience. Photography demonstrates the principle most readily: A photographer must gaze at reality in a particular way, see something photo worthy, click the shutter, capture, print, and frame it. The viewer then must look at it, not as the any old reality that surrounds us but as an isolated fragment put on display for a particular purpose. If these things don’t happen, the photo remains a “mere snapshot,” and doesn’t hold artistic interest. Not only the photographic medium but all of art relies on being designated as such, as Marcel Duchamp tried to indicate when he took a porcelain men’s urinal and parodically called it a sculpture. The response he might not have anticipated was that his “Fountain,” when placed in a museum context with soft lighting and the requisite mulling students, would elicit an aesthetic response: In that context, the urinal looks almost beautiful. Having been trained how to look at museum pieces, we notice its curvature and form in a way we probably never would have if we were just looking at it in the men’s room.

A lot of art benefits from, or even relies upon, this “museum effect.” But what about the artist’s eye? How do you see the art of the urinal before it’s put in a museum? In the first decade of this century (a few years before Duchamp’s first exhibitions), Henri Barbusse provided a kind of answer to this dilemma in one of the sexiest philosophical novels ever,
Hell.
Barbusse’s contention is that to see art in reality you need to gaze with the eye of the voyeur. Nor does his argument stop there. Reading
Hell,
we ultimately realize that philosophy as well depends on the distance, alienation, detachment, and framing that define the voyeuristic gaze. Philosophy, like art, is all about seeing from the outside the life we live from the inside.

The voyeuristic gaze becomes central in
Hell
when the protagonist, having checked into a boardinghouse, realizes that there is a crack in the wall through which he can see the adjoining room. Never seen, he is nonetheless able to witness a series of people come and go. Soon he finds himself unable to return to his previous life, unable to leave the crack at the wall. He watches a young couple fall in love and an adulterous couple fall out of love, he sees sex and disappointment, lies and heartbreak, and, slowly, he comes to see himself in the steady march of all people toward isolation and death. Though Barbusse’s worldview is morose and unrelenting, he is right in saying that one cannot steadily watch the lives of others without eventually becoming a philosopher.

She was standing now, half-undressed. She had become white. Was it she who was undressing, or he who was divesting her of her things? I could see her broad thighs, her silvery belly in the room like the moon in the night. He was holding her, clasping her as he hung on the divan. His mouth was near the mouth of her sex, and they drew together for a monstrously tender kiss. I saw the dark body kneeling before the pale body, and she was gazing fervently down at him.

Then, in a radiant voice, she murmured: “Take me. Take me again after so many other times. My body belongs to you, and I give it to you . . .”

He stretched her out on his knees. I had the impression that she was naked, though I couldn’t make out all the shapes. Her head was thrown back from the window, and I could see her eyes shining, her mouth shining like her eyes, her face starlit with love.

He pulled her to him, the naked man in the darkness. Even in the midst of their mutual consent there was a sort of struggle . . . Pleasure, going beyond the law, beyond even the lover’s sincerity, was frantically preparing its final masterpiece. It was such a frenzied, wild, fateful movement that I realized that even God could not stop what was happening . . .