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Several years ago, some seventh-grade boys from a small Vermont town where I live flashed their bottoms at the boys in the next cabin during a school retreat. It was their last evening in a program called Nature's Classroom (could Nabokov have come up with a more perfect name?) on Cape Cod, everybody was feeling warm and goofy, and the two twenty-ish male aides in charge allegedly failed to stop them.
Upon returning home, the aides were anonymously reported to the school authorities, who immediately suspended them. Misconduct hearings were convened. The students staged a protest, the parents and school board met. The local paper ran front-page coverage for weeks, including an editorial, tongue in cheek but critical of the school's actions. Letters to the editor poured in, almost unanimously in support of the aides. The one exception was a several-thousand-word screed from the school superintendent, who inveighed against the paper's sensationalism, bias, ignorance, and mockery-making of democracy, due process, educational standards and just about everything else fair and decent. The matter was referred to the state commissioner of something-or-other, who, after a thorough investigation, discovered no foul play. His conclusion: "It was pretty much a mooning incident."
Finally, the aides were acquitted, with regrets voiced from most quarters. "I think it's unfortunate that the procedure we are forced to go through, we are forced to go through," one school board member told the paper. "I think it is unfortunate we had to go through this. Hopefully, if it happens again, we can go through it in a better way."
Of course, everyone hoped it would not happen again.
But what, exactly, was "it"? Once I finished musing on the two-bit prudery of small-town officials and the heartening sexual tolerance of small-town people (proven once again by America's collective yawn at the President's consensual extramarital fondlings), I began to gaze at the moon itself. Why all the fuss about a flash of the buttocks? Is mooning a harmless juvenile prank? Or is it, as the school administration's actions implied, a genre of sexual harassment? Is mooning obscene?
In the West, where the buttocks are customarily clothed, dropping trou has long been a gesture of disrespect and a staple of bawdy humor. The grotesque figures high on the walls of French medieval churches are busy wagging their naked bottoms. Boccaccio, Rabelais, and the other Renaissance conteurs gave us their share of cheek. (My dictionary traces the etymology of cheeky, by the way, to the face -- to speaking impudently -- but I have my own suspicions.) In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale," the hick Absalon thinks he's kissing his beloved Alison, but he's actually bussing her ass (her "nether eye," in fact). Later, Alison's lover Nicholas sticks his own posterior out the window, to trick Absalon into rendering him the same honor. But in the dark of the moon, his own moon gets lit. As Leo Braudy, at the University of Southern California, eloquently put it, "Absalon shoves a red-hot plowshare where Nicholas expects a more tender tribute." And in Shakespeare's "Midsummer Night's Dream," the jealous Oberon arranges some magic against the fairy queen Titania, causing her to fall in love with Bottom, whose head has been transformed into that of an ass -- a sort of mooning-by-proxy.
"The exhibition of the buttocks was something of a standard trope in [sixteenth-century] North German Reformation woodcuts," University of San Diego theology professor Joseph Colombo emailed me. "The object of such exhibition, sometimes accompanied by defecation and/or the passing of gas, was the Bishop of Rome." In France as well, when mooning was insufficient insult, farting was added for a measure of injury. McGill University's Louis Godbout, a fount of ass-related arcana, advised, "Check out the frontispiece of the facetious eighteenth-century book, The Art of Farting. It shows a row of butts lined up on a crenellated rampart, proudly firing away as so many canons."
When the butt wasn't being deployed as an instrument of derision, it was derision's target. Voltaire's mock-heroic poem "La Pucelle" tells of Joan of Arc inscribing three fleurs de lys on a page -- that is, on the exposed ass of an English general's sleeping page. A contemporaneous English engraving depicts the poet Alexander Pope, whose literary and political disputes were legion, standing on a ladder among his enemies. The caption: "The Higher Up You Go, the More They See Your Ass."
Mooning surely endured through the nineteenth century -- there's a scene in Moby Dick where the sailors moon Captain Ahab -- though it could be argued the Victorians and their successors found a better use for the gluteus maximus: spanking. Evidence of the British national fetish is still ubiquitous, from pornographic etchings to the Sunday comics.
This chain of associations, from farting at the Bishop to the erotic mortification of the backside, offers a clue: mooning is silly and insouciant, but at the same time it is slyly sexual. As with pornography, the meaning of the moon depends on the beholder's mood. But like all pornographers, the mooner intends to affect that mood. He deploys his own immodesty to aggravate the other's modesty, to humiliate or embarrass. Of course he can also deny that intention, because he's only joking. Since a joke is hard to reprimand without looking like a poor sport, mooning simultaneously offends and disarms.
I say "he" because the quick, and often collective, butt-flash is almost exclusively a masculine act, and a heterosexual one at that. "The swelling and coloration of the backside is particularly conspicuous in those species which have the most aggressive and quarrelsome males," said the anthropologist Robert Brain. Diana, goddess of the moon, is a woman, but women do not moon. When a woman shows her ass -- as Monica Lewinsky did, strapped into thong panties -- she does so to entice, to invite. When a straight man shows his, he means to aggress, to repel, to dare the observer to look or force her to avert her eyes. That the ass cheeks are frequently smooshed unattractively against a car or bus window indicates that mooning's goal is opposite that of displaying a well-muscled posterior in, say, coyly lowered Levis, a classic homosexual come-on. That this form of exhibitionism is commonly performed by pubescent boys in testosterone-catalyzed clusters (fraternities, sports teams, seventh-grade cabins) is further proof that mooning is not a seduction of the other, but a form of male homosocial bonding. "Mooning? That's something straight guys do," sneered Frank Browning, author of several books on gay male eros. He found the subject utterly uninteresting. Heterosexual, hypermasculine, infantile: think of those Wall Streeters indulging in a truly postmodern sexual practice -- representing a moon by sitting bare-assed on the Xerox copier. Tucked into a female coworker's mailbox, that image doesn't say "Fuck me." It says "Fuck you."
The ass is both erotic and degraded -- in short, obscene. Pornography statutes never fail to include the buttocks in their lists of offending body parts. Keep that snapshot of Junior's yummy tush off the mantelpiece: if a vice cop happens by, you could find yourself in jail under child pornography laws.
The fact is, these cute, plump pillows are but one fleshfold from the most abject, despised, and thus most sexually transgressive orifice: the anus, orifice of shit, of sodomy, and now, of sexually transmitted death. To show the butt is to suggest anal intercourse. And to bugger is as low as you can go, according to conventional morality; it is to debase both yourself and the other. Cultural theorist Kaja Silverman pointed out that anal intercourse is so outré it exists beyond gender: it is described as both "using a man as a woman" and "using a woman as a man."
If not filthy, the ass, and its hole, are trivial. In French, which has an extensive argot based on the word cul, or ass, a cul-de-plomb is a pencil-pushing petty bureaucrat (and everyone knows there is no petty bureaucrat pettier than a French bureaucrat). To pick nits or split hairs is enculer les mouches -- literally, to bugger flies.
So did those Vermont school authorities overreact? To the immediate situation, of course. But given the heft of history, who could blame them? They were onto something they could not, and surely would not if they could, articulate -- something, uh, deeper about the meaning of the exposed buttocks of seventh-grade boys. Out there in Nature's Classroom, unintended lessons were obviously being learned.
I leave you to ponder another sweet and "meaningless" schoolchildren's activity, the singing, the world over, of "Au Claire de la Lune." According to some scholars, the ditty, written by a well-known seventeenth-century sodomite named Jean-Baptiste Lully, describes the attempted anal intercourse of two familiar, farcical characters. Lend me your pen, the ever-horny Arquelin implores the ever-impotent Pierrot. My candle has lost its fire. Open your door to me, my friend. Pierrot, in bed, sends his importuner to the neighbor woman's door. Pens, candles, fire, beds, doors that open and shut -- my god, what are these children singing about?
The light of (yes) the moon.
in a program called Nature's Classroom (could Nabokov have come up with a more perfect name?) on Cape Cod, everybody was feeling warm and goofy, and the two twenty-ish male aides in charge allegedly failed to stop them.
Hopefully, if it happens again, we can go through it in a better way."
advised, "Check out the frontispiece of the facetious eighteenth-century book, The Art of Farting. It shows a row of butts lined up on a crenellated rampart, proudly firing away as so many canons."
When a straight man shows his, he means to aggress, to repel, to dare the observer to look or force her to avert her eyes. That the ass cheeks are frequently smooshed unattractively against a car or bus window indicates that mooning's goal is opposite that of displaying a well-muscled posterior in, say, coyly lowered Levis, a classic homosexual come-on. That this form of exhibitionism is commonly performed by pubescent boys in testosterone-catalyzed clusters (fraternities, sports teams, seventh-grade cabins) is further proof that mooning is not a seduction of the other, but a form of male homosocial bonding. "Mooning? That's something straight guys do," sneered Frank Browning, author of several books on gay male eros. He found the subject utterly uninteresting. Heterosexual, hypermasculine, infantile: think of those Wall Streeters indulging in a truly postmodern sexual practice -- representing a moon by sitting bare-assed on the Xerox copier. Tucked into a female coworker's mailbox, that image doesn't say "Fuck me." It says "Fuck you."
an extensive argot based on the word cul, or ass, a cul-de-plomb is a pencil-pushing petty bureaucrat (and everyone knows there is no petty bureaucrat pettier than a French bureaucrat). To pick nits or split hairs is enculer les mouches -- literally, to bugger flies.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
