Quotation:

“MESSER NICIA: I made him undress. He was whimpering” (Machiavelli 5.2, 54).

Comment:

Messer Nicia is recounting the events of the previous night to Ligurio, wherein (on the ‘doctor’s’ request) they kidnapped a ‘stranger’, gagged him and put a bag over his head. After bringing him to the house, Nicia had forced him to undress, be inspected by Sostrata, and made him have sex with Lucrezia. The stranger had initially been quite confused and frightened, but Nicia pressed on anyway because he was that desperate for a child (5.2, 54).

I chose this quote because it made me think of the end of our class on Thursday, where someone had made a comment about what a gender reversal of this play would look like. While the point had been (I believe) intended comically, I looked at this whole scene and imagined how different it would feel if this stranger had been a woman forced to have sex with a man.

I mentioned the channel ‘Pop Culture Detective’ in class and the creator’s video about the sexual assault of men in TV and movies, and I really do think its applicable here. The point of the two-part video was that we generally accept the joke of men being assaulted because a) we believe it couldn’t possibly happen, b) they end up liking it so it’s fine, or c) the character being featured was horrible and ‘deserved’ it. To focus on the first aspect, men can be assaulted (usually by other men but sometimes by women), and even if women are more often the victims that doesn’t take away from those male victims. Assault usually has less to do with gender and sexuality and more to do with the assertion of power. So to present male victims as a joke might be said to be a continuation of that power assertion, i.e. that we should see these types of men as lesser.

To be fair, Callimaco was the stranger and he was playing an act, not actually scared of what was happening to him because he had planned it. But Nicia thought this was a stranger. So, to him, this was a perfectly acceptable thing to do to someone. Sure, the point of the play is that he wants a child (a son, really) so he’s desperate to try anything, but even then one might think his conscience might kick in at some point. He complains “about Lucrezia’s foolishness, and about how much better it would have been if, without so much bickering, she had given in at the very beginning,” but she was right to be hesitant (5.2, 54)!

Again, some would try to argue that ‘you really can’t force a man to have sex because that’s all men want anyway’, which would connect to that second point. In terms of this play, they might look to the end of the scene, where Nicia “couldn’t get that racal to get up” out of bed because he’d had such a good time (5.2, 55). But to push this idea that all men are sex-crazed fiends is just as horrible as saying that all women who are raped are ‘asking for it’ because of how they are dressed or what they were saying. And the men who commit assault, desiring to hurt another person just to have sex, should not be seen as the norm. Those women who assault, rarer though they may be, are proof of the fact that the act itself is about more than gender.

Question:

Would this play sit as well in our stomachs if Messer Nicia had been a woman with an infertile husband, and had been okay with forcing another woman to have sex with her husband?

Class discussion and impact:

I thought this was very much a continuation of last class’s discussion but with added elements. For example, some still finding the play funny despite its problematic elements or the idea that even the original audience was aware of the satire/intent of the play. My QCQ (and the last one) was definitely focusing more on male victims of assault and how society views them, but following the train of thought about autonomy was interesting. That may really be my main issue with the play (certain characters having their free-will ignored), and I suppose I needed to explore that more fully with the class. Everyone had good ideas, and this play definitely opens up the important ideas about the importance of considering intentions when harm is caused.