The Back Door of the Renaissance: (Anal) Sex in the City (States)

By Yannick Peetridish

Dear Reader,

As an homage to the Renaissance form of submitting work so lovely and profound under the guise of imperfection and rushed completion, and for the somewhat startling nature of the subject, I offer this humble apology as a prelude to my work. And yet for a time remembered most notably for Brunelleschi’s Dome, Michelangelo’s Chapel, or Bernini’s Doors, what could be a more appropriate topic of inquiry than that which symbolizes the more sordid realities of Renaissance life – the back doors? If an investigation of history and humanity is to be judged and valued by a thorough investigation of every facet of human events, then just as academics pour over the more distinguished and refined elements of Renaissance life – its painting, its poetry, and its prose, so too must the deepest and darkest recesses of less-than-distinguished sexual life be examined. Therefore anal sex in the Renaissance may, in some ways, be the subject most fitting for illumination.

It may appear that an investigation of the attitudes towards back door sex would require tedious sifting through the records of obscure historians, or perhaps even the annals and journals of prostitutes and courtesans themselves. However, we need not look any further than the work of one of the Italian Renaissance’s most gifted writers – Pietro Aretino. Well known for his insightful The School of Whoredom and the satirical will and testament of Pope Leo X’s elephant, Pietro Aretino also authored explicit sonnets or Sonetti Lussuriosi to accompany Guiliano Romano’s drawings of 16 sexual positions. In these sonnets, Aretino not only expresses a lively discussion of sex and lust far beyond the church mandated missionary position for the purpose of procreation, but also and most notably for the purposes of this paper, a male and a female fascination with anal sex. Through the attitudes expressed in his Sonnetti, ranging from female delight, agony, distaste, or indifference to back door sex, we discover a perfectly playful framework for the heavier implications of the back door as it relates to sexual life in response to the church, gender roles, and even national sentiments.

The fact that the Church remained a driving, economic, social, cultural, and moral force of the Renaissance whilst, what we shall for convenience call “Italians,” abided by sexual norms that included hetero and homosexual relations leaves the back door as an area of consideration as well as a common denominator – an idea mirrored in Celia R. Daileader’s book, Back Door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic. Yet, a sexual culture without clear distinction in sexual practice was precisely what Girolamo Savonarola railed against when he preached, “Young lads have been made into women. But that’s not all: fathers are like daughters, brothers like sisters. There is no distinction between the sexes or anything else anymore.” The Church not only sought to regulate sex for the purpose of adhering to sacred text, but also to adhere to the comfort of traditional practices and norms of social identities.

Despite the anxiety and consequential legislation of the men in the Church, the burden of sexual decency was most often thrust upon women. Bernardino’s discussion of the indecency of a woman even voicing her desire for sex in his sermons to the Sienese and Florentines, not to mention the paradoxical expectation of a woman to be well versed in the arts of sexuality and yet completely chaste and innocent, not only symbolizes an enduringly impossible ideal for women, but also lends itself to wanting to indulge in the repression of that which was contra naturam – or that which was not for the purpose of procreation. Anal intercourse was therefore not only a possibly exciting taboo and deviation from the oppression of the Church of which the Renaissance was so want to indulge in privately, but also a practical means of birth control – a concept which declining birth rates in 15th century Tuscany, for instance, would suggest. Thus we also see a means of extra-marital excitements as well as a sexual practice for the upper classes that safe guarded against the metaphorical or literal life-ending for either partner with the possibility of pregnancy. Within the framework of the Church alone, we have produced several attitudes towards back door sex. On the one hand it is contra naturam and heavily forbade as a source of shame by clergymen both because they were clergy but more likely because they were men. On the other hand, Celia Daileader will go so far as to retrospectively comment on anal sex in Italy as fashionable, which if practiced by the upper classes to avoid pregnancy and distinguish themselves from the extra-marital pregnancies of the less scrutinized lower class women, indeed presents a sort of fashion. Lastly, and furthermore in Aretino’s School of Whoredom, through the voice of Nanna, Aretino describes how men of the clergy will “[request] the honour of taking the back road” and continues, “These scoundrels, these enemies of faith, suck, grope, and penetrate every hole and crack just like any other good-for-nothing, and when they find a woman who knows how to hush up the sleazy habits they delight in, they’ll give it their all without holding back.”

While the Patriarchal dominance of Renaissance society attempted to regulate the chastity of their daughters, even if a woman was married she was still under the microscope of moral scrutiny - perhaps even more so. Matteo Palmieri would write, “Wives must exercise the greatest and most extraordinary guard not only against uniting with another man, but even to avoid all suspicion of such filthy wickedness. This error is the supreme disgrace to decency, it effaces honour, destroys union, renders paternity uncertain….she no longer deserves to be called a married woman but rather a corrupt wench, worthy only of public humiliation.” It is then intensely ironic, or in fact fitting that the most horrid of humiliations to a woman, specifically a prostitute, was the practice of the “31” involving repeated vaginal and anal penetration - precisely the kind of shame-bearing practice she was being punished for. Further, 15th and 16th century Venetian records show the prevalence of anal rape in gangs. In consideration of these gangs being driven by a group demonstration of virility and dominance, than humiliation through the taboo of anal sex was indeed the (inter)course to take. Through the representation of anal sex as both a castigated form of intercourse and yet a choice means of punishment, we see how conflicted Renaissance Italians were in mind and bed.

The majority of these adult and adolescent males who roamed the streets were themselves active in same-sex sodomy. In fact, according to Michael Rocke, two out of every three Florentines who had reached the age of forty had been a party to the act of sodomy. Rocke continues that the concept of sex with a man, so long as the adult male was in the “active role” was not a sign of being characteristically less male, in fact it may have even strengthened the male identity. Throughout documentation and legislation it seems very clear cut that so long as the penetrator was an adult and the penetrated was an adolescent there was in fact nothing queer about the situation, in any sense of the word. Pietro Fortini approached the matter from an intriguing perspective when he commented on such homoerotic practices in Florence and Lucca as indicative of their misogyny: their “vices are such that they cannot bear to look at women, who they say are their enemies.” Thus for many, including the fathers who were more anxious about unmarried pregnant daughters, not to mention the spiritual implications of sinfully debasing one’s self with the lesser being of a woman, homosexual relationships were even preferable.

Yet the concept of referring to the taking of a young boy as “a wife” in reference to using him in the passive role of sex, is the kind of blurring of gender and societal boundaries that would make Savonarola cringe. To dig deeper, if, according to Rocke, the average age of boys in passive role of same-sex anal intercourse was 16 years old and the average age of those in the active role was 27, surely the years sandwiching a 21 year old made for a confusing period of time. This, in addition to the fact that Rocke’s consideration of young adult males experiencing a state of “prolonged and powerless adolescence,” expected to satisfy their sexual needs as opposed to playing an active role in their patriarchal dominated society, there is less of a surprise that gangs of adolescents would go to such lengths to confirm their own dominant identity. This in addition to the fact that it is hard to imagine that 66.6% of adolescent boys were enthralled about their passive role in anal sex would thus, when presented with the opportunity, perpetuate the cycle. These relationships were at best the result of mindless and normative practice but possibly sadistic reciprocation as well. Upon the examination of the Renaissance man’s obsession with dominance and masculinity, stemming from the medieval fear of woman’s otherwise unbridled and voracious sexual appetite and exacerbated by societal expectations, such as laws allowing a woman to divorce or a man who could not achieve an erection, we come to understand the literal value was placed on the sexual potency of man just as chastity and sexual purity were the defining values of a woman. It is not only not surprising, but moreover to be expected that disenfranchised boys under patriarchal dominance, expected to be dominant males, whilst in flux between passively and actively engaging in anal sex with men and yet given free reign to pursue their sexual needs for the eventual purpose of marrying a woman, would wrestle with the dichotomy of literally or metaphorically playing an active or a passive role in society. And in both the instances of homosexual and heterosexual relationships anal sex represents the means and the bridge and begs the question that Daileader also asks, “Is the anus male or female?” Or in other words we may consider whether anal sex “’boys’ the girl or ‘girls’ the boy.”

Furthermore In consideration of gender roles, we may lastly examine that “from a feminist point of view…the stakes are very high: erotic agency, variety of pleasure, even reproductive freedom – all may be accessed by or denied women through the back door.” Finally, to expand the discussion of back door sex even further, we may also consider the words of Kim Hall in Daileader’s research when she writes that women and their bodies can be viewed as “the repository of the symbolic boundaries of [a] nation.” Renaissance Italy, and its anxieties surrounding foreign trade, security, immigration and homogeneity in culture projects onto the body. While this is surely quite the abstraction from the more literal implications of sexual practice and gender roles, the borders of Venice for instance, open to trade and thus to Moors, Jews, Africans, xenophobia and fear of invasion, may very well contribute to the sexual attitudes of the time. Daileader notes the “exoticism of Venice and by extension Italy as the door to the east” which mirrors the once rich culture of prostitutes and courtesans who surely allowed the opening of whatever doors their clients desired. And yet attitudes about the back door had much more significance than just sex. The back door expressed feelings about contamination, as well as blackness and the “other.” And while it is beyond the scope and length of this paper, it is quite interesting to note the eventual condemnation of prostitutes and courtesans, the return to conservatism, and the fluctuation of sumptuary laws following the outbreak of the plague, national sentiment towards minorities and foreign invasion. It may seem a stretch to associate body boundaries with those of culture and the nation, however, if one can learn anything from the Renaissance, it is never to underestimate the insecurity and anxiety of men concerning their power and the lengths they will go to punish women for them.

To conclude, Daileader expresses the basic divide in the attitudes and practice of anal sex best when she writes, “the masculinist anxieties which attend to this aperture make for [some] ambivalence...allusions to back door sex range from a sadistic xenophobic misogyny….which forecloses the question of female pleasure, to a more playful carnivalesque treatment which exploits the polymorphous and transgendering erotic potential of the back door.” Anal sex was in many ways symbolic of the Renaissance. On the darker side, there was pleasure for men at the expense of women. But on the brighter side there was also a mutual celebration of the human body in spite of the Church’s condemnation of the flesh and fear of transgenderment. Furthermore, whether on a conscious level or not, the polymorphous possibilities of blurring the lines of gender opened the possibility of exploration and indiscriminate love and a rejection of the obsession of an after life for pleasure on earth. We may even be able to take accepting anal sex as one with rejecting the oppressive aspects of the Church in what was both – and excuse the pun - both an affront and an aback to it.

That “backwardness” was in many ways to be expected form a society that pushed orthodoxy in religion, gender roles, and national unity. Anal sex served as a nearly universal taboo in the Italian Renaissance and thus an outlet at every level of society, with varying levels of abstraction and intention within it. It seems only appropriate to end with the man who began the vivid and, at the time, radically explicit discussion of exploring humanity and sexuality in spite of the rigid dogma of the Church or society and who appropriately became the namesake for sexual license in Renaissance Italy – Aretino. In light of sexual repression today his words echo, “What harm is there in seeing a man mounted atop a woman? Must beasts be more free than we are? It seems to me that the organ given us by Nature to perpetuate our race should be worn around the neck like a pendant or as a medallion on a hat, because it is the source that feeds the rivers of mankind ... “ We must understand that human sexuality in general feeds the rivers of man and womankind. And though the Renaissance exemplifies the unsettling ability of that which is deeply sensual to also be deeply destructive, Aretino reminds us that we always have the choice to choose the former, and to celebrate it.

Bibliography

Aretino, Pietro, and Paul Bailey. The School of Whoredom. London: Hesperus, 2003

Daileader, Celia R.. Back Door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic ELH, Vol. 69, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 303-334Published by: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press Erotic Art Museum - Aretino. “Aretino and His Sixteen Postures”. Artsrchiv Fine Arts. Web. 21 Aug. 2010. <http://www.artarchiv.net/doku/museum/Aretino.htm>.

Findlen, Paula. The Italian Renaissance. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.

Rocke, Michael Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York 1996).