Tits out for the motherland!

Other countries and nationalities have always featured in people’s sexual fantasies — and moral judgment about those fantasies. Linguistically, France has loomed large. From the late nineteenth century onward in much of Europe and the Americas, condoms were « French letters », porn was called « French pictures », and blowjobs were doing it « French » style. For the overindulgent, there was the « French pox »: syphilis. 

For their part, the French called syphilis the « Spanish disease » and condoms « capote Anglaise », invoking the image of a penis in a raincoat. In Europe and the Americas, « Greek » was slang for anal sex. In Germany, « American Bars » were known for the waitresses who offered sex alongside cocktails, and after the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks blamed prostitution on Americans. In turn, Americans often spoke of the titillating evils of the « European bordello », articulating a sense of a cohesive yet dangerous European sexual character. 

If nationalism is « inseparable from the desire for power », as George Orwell noted, then it makes sense that it is often envisioned in gendered and sexual terms. During World War I, propaganda posters personified alliances and enemies through curvy allegorical women. The Triple Entente — Marianne, Mother Russia and Britannia — are tall and voluptuous, with their tresses cascading past bare shoulders. As men shoot and stab each other in the background and comically phallic Zeppelins demonstrate dominance in the air, these three knockouts with accentuated décolletage give them something to fight for.

In the nationalism beauty contest, however, Marianne is the clear winner. Eugène Delacroix’s massive 1831 painting La Liberté guidant le peuple still hangs in pride of place in the Louvre. In it, Marianne — bare breasted, bayonet in one hand and a tricolor in the other — bounds over a heap of fallen men. While some critics said she looked like a whore, others saw her bare breasts as a symbol of her purity, a connection to the nude marbles of antiquity. 

People are still talking about her. In the summer of 2013, France’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, pointed to Marianne’s naked breasts as evidence of her maternal nature, and as proof that it should be illegal for women to wear burkinis on French beaches. « She is not wearing a veil because she is free! Right there, that is the Republic! » Tits out for the motherland!

(Complicating Valls’s interpretation is evidence that Delacroix’s Marianne was based on a strikingly similar illustration, published in 1725, of a female pirate, breasts bare to symbolize her lawlessness, sexuality and violence.)

If the idea of the nation is often embodied by a woman, then the prostitute is also a marker of national sexual character — the dangerous whore lurking behind the Madonna. For those interested in the history of sexuality, focusing on prostitution is also a more practical matter. Commercial sex is one of the few places where what is ostensibly private becomes public, the subject of state law and policy, a place where sex leaves archival traces. It is also how sex becomes enmeshed in the market, where fetishizations of other nations who do it « Greek » or « French » can be translated into cash.

While nationalist sexual tropes in themselves are ridiculous, their histories provide an interesting opportunity to see where nationalism as an « imagined community » rubs up against deeply embodied desires and experiences. Three recent books approach these tropes from different angles.