I had to laugh when I read the following excerpt by Germaine Greer:
Since classical antiquity, being on the receiving end has been understood to be inappropriate and degrading for grown men. Rimbaud fascinates White and his readers because he controlled, harassed and terrorised Verlaine "in the bedroom". Drunken, dirty, guilty, feminised, abject Verlaine cannot be a hero, although in my view he is the better poet.
As a variant on the penetration theme, anal intercourse has been used probably more often by heterosexuals than homosexuals. There are few human societies in which it is unknown, though none is prepared to admit that the practice is at all common. In the 1970s, Italian boys used to tell me that American girls insisted on it because they wanted to keep their hymens for their husbands; American men told me the same thing about Italian girls. We shall never know how many farmers' wives bit their pillows as their husbands took their pleasure; what we do know is that, long before contraceptive appliances, birth rates fell in western Europe when people began to want to limit their families, almost certainly because of variations on the penetration theme. Some were intensely pleasurable, but by no means all. Lucky women might get to choose; the rest didn't.
Greer, as she often does, is so obsessed with her own lassitude of anal sex, that she misses the point although I share her view that Verlaine is better than Rimbaud. Sex between Rimbaud and Verlaine is relevant to understanding them not because its nature or because the participants, according to Greer, found themselves replaying typical gender roles. Sex between Rimbaud and Verlaine is fascinating precisely because it shows that submission isn’t about gender, but about keeping our possessions or acquiring some sense of security. Verlaine doesn’t play the role of the woman. He isn’t being feminized, he is being Verlainized, which until Rimbaud, and he certainly never allowed himself to be fully. Because he madly loves Rimbaud, Verlaine abandons all pretenses, his wife, his catholic faith, values, which led him to marry to control his unnatural urges to be with him. For the first time, Verlaine is simply realizing that norms especially the social and the sexual ones are irrelevant when one is choosing as he does not only to transgress rules, but to do it openly while believing that it will lead to happiness. The point is to be rebel against nature and to become submissive for a poet such as Verlaine or even Rimbaud are only possible when love/sex stops to be about gender/moral/domination to be about who they are. Verlaine didn’t end up shooting Rimbaud because he felt that he had made a woman or love being penetrated anally; Verlaine shot Rimbaud because he realized that he hadn’t changed him in spite of his love just as his wife Mathilde, whom he abandoned when he found true love, couldn’t change him in spite of his devotion. The anal sex between Rimbaud and Verlaine is probably one of the most ineffective forms of communication ever between two gifted people who were among the best at using words to draw pictures, to create universe, to express love, and to inspire couldn’t communicate probably because one of them thought that sex was solely about possession.
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