Eros in Iberia

Early twentieth-century Spain is often characterized as Catholic-conservative, repressive, backward. In Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898-1939, UCLA’s Maite Zubiaurre introduces “the ‘other’ early twentieth-century Spain— sparkling, dynamic, uninhibited, freed from tradition, happily oblivious to sexual constraints and gender norms, so radically different from the somber, identity-searching country of which history seems so fond.” In place of the normal division between a liberal, modernizing Spain and a conservative and nationalist one, Zubiaurre offers a distinction between the “visible” and “ghostly,” between the high culture that is found in most histories of Spain and the “mass-cultural Spain,” which she describes as “the almost entirely forgotten site of popular erotic cultural production.”

This ghostly layer of Spanish culture rode on the coattails of modernization, technological innovation and expansion  of trade: “Spanish popular erotica embraces foreign technology and its inventions to an extent rarely seen in high-cultural art and literature. It ‘imports’ modernity in the form of technoerotic artifacts such as bicycles and typewriters.”

The book is partly a contribution to gender studies. Zubiaurre writes that “the canonical culture of the Silver Age bears an unmistakable masculine aura. Tellingly, many (if not all) of the leading Spanish figures dealing with the complex political and philosophical issues surrounding the discussion of Spain’s nature and destiny invoked sex and gender as a means to take the nation’s moral temperature.” In the world of the erotic underground, though, women played a larger role. She sees this as a benefit to women, since “popular erotica makes it possible for Spanish women to look beyond the Pyrenees and seek models in their more advanced and certainly more liberated foreign female counterparts.” That is an odd claim; one would think that objectifying women as sex objects would play right into the hands of the dominant macho masculine high culture.

Describing the situation in terms of “two Spains” is misleading, Zubiaurre observes: “Although the two Spains—the chaste and the erotic—were discordant, they nonetheless passionately conversed with each other, and each in its way struggled to come to terms with (European) modernity. . . . Although history seems to have forgotten, the two groups constantly met on the streets of Madrid and were regular clients of the same cafés, cabarets, and theaters.” 

And they debated one another about the way forward for Spain: “‘Feminismo,’ a 1927 article published in the journal Sexualidad (whose main purpose was to combat sexual indeterminacy and short-haired ‘new women’), states, ‘Every time I pass along the street and see a guy with a Tutankhamen jacket, painted lips, and plucked eyebrows, I ask: does a Spaniard’s blood no longer boil with a nobleman’s strength? I believe it does, that there are still honorable gentlemen, with the souls of musketeers, who do not resign themselves . . . to wear the latest fashion in jackets. But everyday there are fewer men of honor; the star has replaced the noble Tizona sword, and the verdict of a court of law has replaced the duel between gentlemen, ‘God’s duel.’ Blessed was the age when men were slaves neither to fashion nor to pleasure; in which no idea reigned other than that of labor; in which tuberculosis held less ground because it had to fight against strong organisms . . . and not the weak ones of tomorrow’s society. We simply cannot continue to cater to the useless society of the dressing room, which fights for nothing more than a life made easy with morphine. The regeneration of the race is imperative; it is necessary that Spain be populated with macho men as it always was, and not with señorita men, like the large number of young men today seem to be.”

Two observations. First: Zubiaurre is writing about the early decades of the twentieth century, nearly a century ago. The conflicts over sexual freedom have been going on for quite a long time. Second: Between erotic liberation and the macho alternative offered by Spanish “conservatives,” there was no much to choose. One suspects that the two sides fed off each other in more ways than one.