5

John Donne Compares His Dick To A Flea To Get A Woman To Have Sex With Him

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

4

Macbeth Pauses For A Soliloquy About Erectile Dysfunction

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Shakespeare's Macbeth is considered one of the greatest tragedies ever written ("tragedy" is a term here meaning "a story in which everyone dies"). It's full of hauntings and insanity and beheadings, which is to say it's super dope but about as bleak as the fourth season of The Wire. Not a lot of jokes or japes to lighten the mood in Macbeth.

HBO
Though we'd pay good money to see a dramatic reading by Senator Clay Davis.

The Insanity:

Except for one inexplicable scene in the middle of the play wherein a drunk doorman delivers a protracted lecture about the horrors of whiskey dick:

Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes;
it provokes the desire, but it takes
away the performance: therefore, much drink
may be said to be an equivocator with lechery:
it makes him, and it mars him; it sets
him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him,
and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and
not stand to

This character does not appear before giving this speech, and after it is finished, he is never seen again. It has absolutely no bearing on the plot, and in fact it hinders the progress of the story by holding up two characters who are busy trying to discover the King's dead body. Shakespeare shoehorned in a 13-line speech about how alcohol makes you want to bone and cruelly paralyzes your wiener at the last minute.

Pieter Borselaer
"This aside is brought to you by Dr. Jonathan's Swift Stiff Love Potion."

3

Voltaire's Candide Is A Rape-Filled Horror Show

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Candide, Or Optimism is the most famous novel by stuffy French author Voltaire. It was published around 1759 and concerns itself chiefly with a philosophical movement called (you guessed it) optimism, which was very in vogue at the time. The basic thesis of optimism was "Everything happens for a good reason."

Now, if most people hear "Everything happens for a good reason" at a funeral or in the wake of a large-scale national tragedy or whatever, they shrug it off and go on with their lives, thinking the person who dispensed that bit of wisdom is either trying to be nice or a thunderous idiot. Not Voltaire. Voltaire took personal fucking offense to optimism, and made a crusade out of thinking up the most horrific shit humans can endure and writing all of it down in Candide.

Baquoy
"Chapter 11: Teriyaki jerky."

The Insanity:

So much horrible shit happens in Candide that it'd be impossible to fit it all in one entry. The book is like a more graphic version of Requiem For A Dream, only where Requiem had a clear message about the misery of addiction, the only thing even vaguely resembling a moral in Candide is "Maybe try gardening?"

2

T.S. Eliot Wrote A Bunch Of Insanely Racist Poems

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T.S. Eliot is probably most famous for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land (which he didn't actually write), and the poems that inspired the musical Cats. Despite that last handicap, he managed to win a Nobel Prize for his poetry.

The Insanity:

But Eliot also wrote less highbrow stuff, such as a collection of 40 poems which he sold to a friend for $140 at age 34. He begged that friend to never publish them, and for good reason: When someone inevitably did publish the poems, it turned out they included anti-Semitic poop jokes and racist borderline pornography. One critic flatly said, "They're not worth reading," which is honestly the most gentle criticism one could level at them.

Harvest Books
"This is the way my legacy ends. Not with a bang, but with a *fart noise*."

1

Ernest Hemingway Hid References To Butt Stuff In All His Work

Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

If you were required to read Ernest Hemingway in school, you've probably read A Farewell To Arms, which is about an ambulance driver drinking himself cirrhotic with his army friends and getting a woman pregnant, or his Nobel-Prize-winning The Old Man And The Sea, which is about an old man waiting for a fish to die.

His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, is about a guy who loves bullfighting and got his dick shot off in World War I (seriously). Basically, his books were about grizzled-ass men doing grizzled-ass shit, both noble and ignoble. Which is what makes that scene in his autobiography A Movable Feast in which he and his wife cut their hair exactly alike really stands out:

When we lived in Austria in the winter we would cut each other's hair and let it grow to the same length."

So they got matching haircuts. What's surprising about that?

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
"Which anniversary is matching pubes?"

The Insanity:

Well, turns out Hemingway had a very specific sexual thing about androgyny. A Farewell to Arms has the exact same scene. And so does The Garden Of Eden, his last, unfinished novel, where things go well beyond matching haircuts. In it, the main character's wife is named Catherine (the same as the main character's wife in A Farewell To Arms), and Papa Hemingway tells us that Catherine demands experimentation in their lovemaking -- she wants them to pretend that she is the boy and he is the girl. In case that is any way unclear, he spells it out for us:

He lay there and felt something and then her hand holding him and searching lower and he helped with his hands and then lay back in the dark and did not think at all and only felt the weight and the strangeness inside and she said, "Now you can't tell who is who, can you?"
"No."

You've just read about Ernest Hemingway getting fisted by someone who has their hair cut to look exactly like him while he pretends that he's the woman and she's the man.

Lloyd Arnold
You may check that off your bucket list.

Now let's compare that language to a line from The Sun Also Rises:

His sword went in and just for an instant he and the bull were one.

Now, we're not saying that Hemingway's obsession with bullfighting was a prolonged metaphor for butt stuff, but that's probably exactly what it was. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just that "butt play" isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name "Hemingway." But it wasn't the first thing that came to mind when you heard the name "Kanye West," either. If their examples help us all be more open about that sort of thing, then so be it.

J.C. Breen lives and works in New York. To read some of his short fiction, or his first novel (free of charge), click on this son of a bitch right here.

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