The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pleasure-Seeking Pagans -- (Chapter VIII, Part 8)

Venus in Furs is a remarkably modern tale about a Galician nobleman who falls in love with a rich, young Russian and turns her into a sadist.

Severin and Wanda von Dunajew initially bond over their belief that the Christian world is corrupt; it's more honest to live as pleasure-seeking pagans.

Unlike many modern hedonists, though, they're realistic about 'the world of the ancients:'

'Pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand. People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish ponds, and gladiators who do battle while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.' 

As in his real-life fling with Fanny, Sacher-Masoch's alter ego in Venus in Furs adopts the common servant's name of Gregor and follows his Mistress to Italy, where she seduces a Greek.

Besides their contract, Wanda goes the extra mile by having Severin write a suicide note in case she opts to kill him.

Sure enough, the crueler she treats him, the more he worships her, especially when she's wearing fur.

'Furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures,' Severin explains. 'Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth… This is why cats exercise such a magic influence...'

'A woman wearing furs, then, is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?' 

'Certainly.'

You'll have guessed that the ending isn't warm and fuzzy: Severin is 'cured' by being whipped within an inch of his life; he then turns into a sadist himself.

Years later, the Galician tells a friend what he's learned: in love, a man 'has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.'

The History of Sex: Seville -- Rape as a Weapon -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 10)

That claim that would have appalled the late 'Generalissimo of Spain' and self-styled 'Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic World.'

Not that he was a big fan of Don Juans.

Francisco Franco's father had been a womanizing military man who was often away from home (has anybody seen my daddy?), leaving the future Fascist to cling to his devout, bourgeois Catholic mother.

Like most dictators, Franco wound up running his beloved Motherland into the ground. But it wasn't meant to turn out that way.

In launching his coup against Spain's anti-Catholic government in 1936, Franco's goal had been to restore España to its glory days as a global power, adopting the 'Catholic Monarchs' who founded the Inquisition as his role models.

The Last Crusade: Fascist propaganda from the Civil War
Franco vowed to make Spain the 'Spiritual Guide of the World'

The Fascists aimed to bring about not just a political and economic revolution, but also a moral one, rejecting liberalism—particularly the relativism of Rousseau—and restoring the Church to the center of Spanish life.

Decadent Italy and the Vatican might be the Pope's home, but Franco's Spain aimed to implement the purest form of Catholicism on the planet.

And right from the beginning, sex was a weapon.

Seville was one of the first cities to fall to Franco's coupmongers, and the officer who conquered it bragged about the rapes committed by his troops.

For men who viewed women as either virgins or whores, of course, violating a godless Communist wasn't really rape at all: she was already a whore.

After the war, these false ideals became the focus of the Fascist regime.

'In the Spain of National-Catholicism, the accent on immorality fell almost exclusively on sexual sin, so much so that the multiple forms of theft and corruption were forgotten,' according to a fascinating history of Sexual Repression in Franco's Spain, which argues that 'the autarchy's sexual repression also had its Torquemada:' the Minister of Information and Tourism, a 'super-Catholic' who supposedly kept fiscal accounts of how many souls the Fascist regime saved each year.

Spanish Civil War poster:
'Avoid venereal diseases: They're as dangerous as enemy bullets'

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Church of Me, Myself, and I -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 5)

The Holy Office of the Inquisition got its start in Seville in 1478 after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella—the self-styled 'Catholic Monarchs'—became convinced that their newly united kingdom needed to be saved from fake converts to Christianity: namely, closet Jews and Muslims.

Conveniently, the men who convinced them were Dominicans, members of the order that had been founded by a saintly Spaniard but later racked up loads of expertise on How to Persecute Your Opponents.

The so-called 'Dogs of God' had burned the Cathars into oblivion two centuries earlier, and armed with the same how-to manuals on terror and interrogation, they resolved to do the same to heretics in Spain.

What's more, as Protestantism spread throughout Europe—with its very own 'Rome' in Geneva!—Spain's 'Modern' Inquisition increasingly served as an inspiration for the Catholic fightback known as the Counter-Reformation.

Detail from The Inquisition Tribunal by Goya

To be fair, just as Luther and Calvin had good reasons for reforming the Church, Rome's backlash wasn't just about preserving its earthly perqs.

Devout Catholics must have divined that once you start attacking the foundations of any institution, there's a danger the whole edifice will come tumbling down.

In that sense, the crisis in England was a warning of things to come, with a cretin like Henry VIII—as debauched as any Borgia—personally denouncing Luther yet setting himself up as the pope of his very own breakaway 'Protestant' church and murdering his wives because he couldn't father a healthy son.

It was even more perverse that the English should celebrate him as a jolly rogue—or at worst, a sympathetic monster—rather than a woman-killing tyrant.

And if King Harry could break away, it was just a matter of time before every Tom-and-Dick Commoner would end up worshiping at their own Churches of Me, Myself and I.

So for followers of the old faith, heresy had to be stamped out.

Like its European, Portuguese, American, and even Goan imitators, the Spanish Inquisition was so complex that historians still can't agree on body counts or how universally its diktats were applied.

At best, it seems to have tolerated transgressions so long as you didn't brag about them.

At worst, it fostered a culture of spying and informing on your neighbours, torturing and murdering innocents, and then stealing their estates to feed the killing machine.

As one man put it, 'if the Inquisitors don't burn, they don't eat.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- 'Fornicating Renegade Priests' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 5)

By 1541, Calvin's allies had come to power in Geneva and begged him to return, effectively granting him carte blanche to turn the republic into a Protestant theocracy.

By the time of his death in 1564, Calvin had vanquished the old guard of Geneva who resented 'that Frenchman,' his fellow foreigners, and his 'fornicating renegade priests.'

These free-spirited natives styled themselves the Children of Geneva, but Calvin denounced them as Libertines—giving us the modern meaning of the term—and ran their leaders out of town on pain of torture or execution.

Ironically, Catholic propagandists had invented a story that Calvin
had been branded as a sodomite before fleeing to Geneva

At the same time, he made Geneva an international safe haven for religious refugees.

These immigrants turned the 'Protestant Rome' into a center of artisanry and banking, with no fewer than forty printers cranking out Master Calvin's works as well as one of the first English translations of the Bible, compiled in part by the Scottish refugee John Knox.

The 'Geneva Bible' became the version read by Shakespeare and the one the Pilgrim Fathers took to America on the Mayflower, along with the founding principles of Calvinism.

Like its Catholic counterpart, though, the Protestant Rome had its excesses.

Calvin effectively ran Geneva as a religious dictatorship. As in much of Europe, torture was commonplace, though in Geneva's case it's ironic given the city's modern association with human rights.

It also doesn't seem much of a defense to argue that the self-styled City of God was as bad as everywhere else.

Geneva had already started cracking down before Calvin arrived, but the Reformer took the crusade against sin to Biblical extremes, outlawing prostitution (natch), but also premarital sex, dancing, immodesty, swearing, make-up and drinking in taverns.

In keeping with the rest of the Continent, heresy was a capital offence, but in Geneva that could take the form of simply disagreeing with Calvin.

The guy who complained about the Frenchman's 'fornicating renegade priests'—and was stupid enough to hang a placard on the pulpit where he preached—was tortured for a month and finally beheaded.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Marriage: The Healthy Alternative? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 2)

Luther and his fellow Reformers railed against Rome's corruption and preached marriage as a healthy alternative to celibacy.

Within five years, Luther's Swiss counterpart, Zwingli, openly committed heresy by marrying, breaking five centuries of tradition within the Catholic Church.

And in 1525, Luther himself went one better by tying the knot with a former nun he'd helped smuggle out of a convent.

The excommunicated Augustinian broke with the teachings of St. Augustine when it came to marrying his twenty-six-year-old bride.

By all accounts, Luther was still a virgin at the age of forty-two and, rather than 'descending with a certain sadness' into their matrimonial bed, he and Katharina seem to have gladly hopped to it.

They had six children, raised four orphans and had a very happy marriage—even though Luther could be a bit of a boor.

Martin and Katharina Luther, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder
(Martin liked to call her 'My lord, Katie')

A student recalled him teasing 'Katie' at the table, announcing: 'The time will come when a man will take more than one wife. A woman can bear a child only once a year while a husband can beget many.'

'Let the devil believe that!' she replied, quoting the Bible to him: 'Paul said that each man should have his own wife.' 

But the theologian kept on kidding her, noting that Paul had written 'his own wife;' not his 'only wife.'

'Before I put up with that,' Katie shot back, 'I'd rather go back to the convent.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Renaissance Smut -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 4)

With or without Romano's blessing, Rome's top engraver then copied the copulating couples and started circulating prints of the Sixteen Positions in 1524 among gentlemen in the know.

What happened then isn't entirely clear.

Aretino had good relations with the Pope—he'd been gifted a pension for praising him in verse—and some say the poet persuaded Clement VII to show the offending artists clemency.

Unfortunately, the pontiff soon found out that Aretino had been in on the game all along—he'd even composed verses for each Position.

The Pope ordered the prints destroyed and all three men arrested, but Aretino went on the lam.

That's how he wound up in Venice, where the authorities were only too happy to thumb their noses at Rome.

Thanks to his ceaseless self promotion, the poet also managed to rebrand Romano's artworks as his own, making them known to posterity as Aretino's Positions.

In a twist that provides some solace to us scribes, it's actually the low-tech portion of the package that's survived down the centuries.

A French take on Aretino's Positions
(Paul Avril, 1892)

The Vatican destroyed all of Romano's original images—except for a few scraps secreted in libraries—so there's no way of knowing exactly what each Position involved.

However, countless artists have hazarded a guess, based on Aretino's gleefully explicit dialogues:

'In the end, a small cock is unseemly if decorum is to be observed in the pussy,' observes the woman in Sonnet Three.

To which her lover replies:

Whoever has a tiny cock and sticks it in a pussy
Deserves an ice-water enema.
Whoever doesn't have much can screw ass day and night,
But those of us who've got it merciless and proud
Always satisfy their desires in the pussy. 

'It is true,' the woman concludes, 'But we are so greedy for dick that we want a spire in front and behind.'

Clearly, an appreciation of small penises was one thing the Renaissance didn't inherit from the ancients.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Compromising Positions -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 3)

The fact that both Columbus and Fallopius published their 'discoveries' in Venice was no coincidence.

As a standalone rival to Rome and the center of the richest, most stable empire in Italy (if not the world), the city built on the water was an oasis for rebels and troublemakers during the Renaissance.

Alongside many legitimate advances in art and learning, this official tolerance inevitably bred bastard offspring. 

Whereas Venetian maestros like Titian and Tintoretto painted the first modern eroticized nudes—naked women stroking themselves and scenes of 'heroic rape'—lesser artists cranked out smut on their newfangled printing presses.

Glamorized violence:
The Rape of the Sabines
as reimagined during the Renaissance

By the sixteenth century, the Most Serene City, the nexus where East met West, had become the first mass-media porn capital and Europe's center of illicit sex.

Venice's reputation as a safe haven for hellions made it a natural home for Pietro Aretino.

Born the same year that Columbus stumbled into the Americas, Aretino was a satirist who made his fortune by mocking the great and not-so-good.

A suck-up par excellence, a hypocrite for hire and possibly the first modern journalist, 'the Divine Aretino' managed to transform himself into a sixteenth-century celebrity, styling himself the Scourge of Princes. One biographer sums him up as a 'man who lived on libel and blackmail and respected nothing but art.'

But even that was subject to negotiation.

COMPROMISING POSITIONS

When critics in the Vatican were lambasting Michelangelo for the nudity in his Last Judgment, Aretino sided with the philistines who demanded that the naked images in the Sistine Chapel be loinclothed.

Barely two decades earlier, the writer had had his own clash with papal authority in an incident that created erotica as we know it today.

The trouble seems to have begun with an act of Vatican graffiti by a protégé of the Renaissance master, Raphael.

One of the more colorful versions of the story claims that Giulio Romano was so miffed that the Pope was late in paying him that he decorated the Hall of Constantine—a celebration of Christianity conquering paganism—with sixteen scenes of fornicating couples.