Titian's Venus and Adonis

This portrait makes the attack on Adonis a little less disturbing, as he's shown to be a full-grown man rather than the boy that Shakespeare describes. Reading this poem really makes me reconsider Shakespeare's stance on gender roles. While before I would have thought of his play on gender as a stage device for entertainment, there's really no reason to take things to the extent he does here unless he genuinely wants to examine what society has in place for men and women. In a way it's just baudiness, considering his audience - a teenage boy might find a lot of amusement in a sexual epic about a lust-crazy older woman attacking a young innocent - but his depiction of Venus says a lot about fear of female sexuality in this period. Perhaps this fear of the devouring mother/womb, or the underlying fear about the possibility that at any given moment a woman could reveal herself to be a man underneath her clothes (either on stage or in real life in the case of hermaphrodites), is why there seems now to be a lot of homosocial behavior in this era - male romantic friendships were less threatening than having equal relationships with females.