Monthly Archives: March 2010

Augmentation out of control

One of the twin crises that have Aloysius running back and forth late in Progress in Research is an attempt at breast augmentation that runs way out of control.

Well, maybe I’m just being immature to notice such things, but even this odd little theme has a history.  One example (which I only vaguely remembered from video-store box art until I finally got hold of and watched a copy, just for your benefit, dear readers) is the 1982 comedy Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again.  I’ll never have those 87 minutes of my life back, but I can report that there is a scene in which a plastic surgeon named Dr. Knute Lanyon gets distracted in the course of a procedure that “injects collagen behind the soft tissue of the breast” or one Mrs. Simpson.  This inflation goes on and on.  Mrs. Simpson actually seems rather pleased with the unplanned result.

As she admonishes Dr. Lanyon “don’t you dare touch a thing…Bernie’s going to love these.”

A better example of this sort of thing can be found in Vittorio Giardino‘s Little Ego (1985).  This is an erotic tribute (Wikipedia suggests “parody,” but I think tribute might be better) to Windsor McCay‘s extraordinary Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905 to 1914).  Nightly, Little Ego has dreams in which all sorts of absurd and wrong and yet highly erotic things happen.  (There is an extended “abduction into a harem” sequence which doubtless influenced the “Odalisque” segment of Study Abroad.)    It is an exquisite piece of work that belongs in the library of any serious collector of comic-book erotica.

In one of Ego’s dreams, she stands before a mirror, wishing she had bigger breasts.  By the merest chance she finds before her a jar of cream the label of which proclaims “increases and firms breasts in minutes.”  “Why not?” asks Ego, trying it out.  And before you know it…

The dream ends with Ego in a rather unusual modeling career.  For a Vittorio Giradino site look here.

Girl, suspended

Invisible Maureen witnesses an initiation at Sigma Epsilon Chi that makes the Omega initiation in Apsinthion Protocol look like a merry little romp (if you discount the SWAT team raid at the end, anyway).  What is going on here?

Well, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to have to go one of those corporate training thingies where you do “trust exercises” like falling backwards and trusting your colleagues to catch you (good luck!) then you might have something of the flavor of it.  Want to prove your trust, Kyra?  Well, here’s an exercise where you can really prove it.

Because what Kyra’s having done to her here, well… Let me put it this way: it can’t plausibly be described as anything other than dangerous.    Unlike humanity’s evidently-endless number of paternalists and pokenoses I regard it as no part of my remit in this world to dictate to other grown-ups what they may and mayn’t do with themselves.   But I am obliged to point out that responsible people more knowledgeable than I about practices like the one depicted just cannot be done very safely.  Autoerotic asphixia is believed to have killed the pioneering cartoonist Vaughn Bodé and the actor David Carradine and might kill as many as 1000 people in the U.S. alone.  So it’s not to be trifled with, by any stretch of the imagination.

But… considering at least just the fictional context here, the danger might be the point.  If you really want to signal to someone just how amazingly comitted you are to some group or cause, wouldn’t the fact that your signal is not just costly, but really scary and dangerous for you, make it all the more effective?

In trouble at Magdalene

It can be a serious mistake to piss off a bunch of nuns, especially if said nuns maintain enough bondage dungeons in their cloistered spaces that they have to be given numbers.  Willie has already found out that you trifle with the Magdalene College nuns at your peril, and Professor Rebecca Waite is about to learn the same, the hard way.  As Rope Guy over at Bondage Blog once observed

Enraged nuns. With ropes. It’s never pretty:

…they seized the luckless wight,
And began to exercise their spite;
They tied him to a tree, that grew
Within the yard, of mournful yew,
Then went to search with indignation
For instruments of flagellation.

Ouch.  He’s quoting a much longer poem, the whole of which can be found here.

And as for the fact that Professor Waite is eventually delivered back to campus with her clothes freshly laundered and folded?  Well, I guess I couldn’t quite avoid alluding to this little scandal…

More locker-room snooping

Maureen takes advantage of her ability to be invisible to find an unusual scene, and an unusual gratification.

A story from Dr. Faustus’s life lies behind this scene (sadly, one less interesting than I’m sure many of you readers promptly thought of).  Here is the background:  I spent adolescence surrounded by nice, well brought-up Christian girls whose attitude toward erotic materials was “Porn!  Icky poo!  Baby Jesus cries!”  And then I went off to college and found myself amongst outstanding, well-educated college women whose attitude toward erotica was “Porn!  Icky poo!  Degrades women!”

And then at about 21 or so I found myself in the company of a lady companion who told me — perhaps a little bashfully — about who incredibly horny she found herself watching a gay male porn movie.

It was a revelatory moment.  And Maureen’s invisible girl voyeurism is a tribute to that revelation.

In retrospect it should not have been so surprising.  The athlete is one form of extraordinary human perfection, and thereby loaded with erotic interest.  The Greeks, in their Olympic games, understood this fact perfectly well.

And significantly, the modern Olympics have always been freighted with both heteroerotic and homoerotic interest.  There is a goofy fun pre-code Hollywood movie about which I have blogged before called The Search for Beauty (1934), which pus beauty on display in (among many other ways) the form of Buster Crabbe in the shower.

Naturally, the whole fun them will find its way to Japan, where it will be exploited in anime.

(Note:  what an awesome era we live in!  You google image search on “gay hentai locker room” and you get “gay hentai locker room.”  187,000 results in 0.07 seconds, when I tried it.)

With the beautiful boys going at it in the locker room, there’s a thought that stands out for me, which I might attribute to my lady companion of all those years ago, or to Maureen for that matter.

Quite.

Fresh from the bath

Tricia knew what she was doing, attempting her seduction of the by-mad-science-enhanced Aloysius by showing up fresh from a shower, clad only in a towel.  It’s a very sexy way to come on, as Pierre Bonnard clearly understood.

Pierre Bonnard (1867 - 1947), "In the Bathroom" (1907)

(Fine Wet Canvas forum discussion on Bonnard here.)  Needless to say the theme continues right down to the present day, and what better excuse than this scene to throw in a picture of an anime goddess, wrapped in a towel.

Click on the image to see more of the same.

What Aloysius is about to discover, rather to his sorrow, is that even if you go through a thaumaturgic transformation like Den, you are not automatically transferred to a sword-and-sorcery realm of abundant sexual gratification.  In fact, a surprising number of your life-problems stay with you…

Some housekeeping items

It’s time to bring people up to date on some minor site policy items here at Erotic Mad Science.

Comments and comment spam. In an ideal world, there would be no need to moderate comments at all.  We do not live in an ideal world.  There are a lot of comment spammers out there, and unfortunately there are also some people who troll or otherwise behave abusively   In order to keep this blog from being spammed up, first-time commenters here at EroticMadScience.com are moderated by default.  I will be as prompt as I can about approving bona fide comments, but please keep in mind that it will not always be possible for me to respond immediately to all comments.  Good things come to those who wait…

Also, please note that there appears to be a new trend in comment spam in which someone (or, far likely, some bot) leaves an utterly generic comment on a post (e.g. “I really liked this post which was really interesting and I have bookmarked your blog to visit it in the future.”  The comment then contains a link back to some spammy website.  This tactic appears to be an attempt to escape moderation by making the blogger feel good about verself and let the comment through.  The comments are clearly spam to a discerning eye, and I intend to be aggressive about deleting them.  I do not want to delete bona fide comments unnecessarily, of course, but getting rid of spam is necessary both to preserve my sanity and the reader’s experience.  So a suggestion:  if you are a first-time commenter, it would be a good idea not to write a purely generic comment, i.e., try to write your comment in a way that refers to the post and shows that you are a human being, not a bot.

Trading links. I have received a few requests from commercial sites to trade links.  I’m sorry, but no.  My policy is that links here serve two functions:  either to show the source of material and give proper credit to those to whom it is due, or to provide something that will be of interest to readers of this blog.  When I provide a link, I want my readers to be able to trust that I am doing it because I’ve looked at the link and have formed my own judgment that what’s there is at least potentially interesting to someone reading a given post, or page, or the site as a whole.  To provide links simply as a part of a quid pro quo, even one that might benefit this site by raising it in search-engine rankings, is at least slightly abusive of my readers.

The rule is this:  if you’re interesting to me or my readers, I shall to link to you, plain and simple.  If I am interesting to you or your readers, then you should link to me.  Plain and simple.

Thanks, and now back to your regularly-scheduled mad science.

Added 10a: With respect to the “show that you are a human being and not a bot” remark above, I should note that as a thaumatophile and sci-fi fan I would remiss in not adding, “unless of course your are such an awesome bot that you can convince me that you are human.”  In that case, you’re more than welcome to comment!

Transforming Aloysius

The strange transformation that Aloysius manages to work upon himself with his wire machine might have any number of precedents.

The fact that he’s pierced by a lot of wires from his machine is evocative, perhaps, of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a subject that found great favor with religious artists and is certainly not without homoerotic interest.

Andrea Mantegna (1431 - 1506), _St. Sebastian_ c. 1506

And in another way Aloysius’s self-induced experience might also be thought a version of the BDSM-related practice of needle play.

Closer to home, perhaps, what Aloysius does to himself is live out a pretty common geek fantasy — go from science nerd to Greek god through a miraculous technological (or just miraculous) intervention.

Searching my own memory for antecedents to this scene the one that leaps to mind most readily  is the “Den” sequence from Heavy Metal (1981), in which a nerdy teenager is transformed through the Loc-Nar (a glowing green sphere that represents super-evil, or something) with lightening, (in the best Frankenstein tradition), and then transported to a swords-and-sorcery fantasy world far away.

(Heavy Metal definitely deserves to be on any thaumatophile‘s preferred viewing list, since not only does it have this transformation sequence going on, but it also has — at least impliedly — woman on funny little robot sex.)

But perhaps most centrally of all to this scene is that Aloysius has decided to jump in with both feet and adopt, with his “death or glory, here I come” remark the operative philosophy that drove both Moira in Apsinthion Protocol and Iris in Study Abroad.

Must be something in the Pleasant Prairie water supply, I guess.

Ancestress of Invisible Girl

Maureen Creel’s zeal in the pursuit of invisibility technology has a pretty obvious antecedent.

I must have seen The Invisible Woman (1942) for the first time when I was about eleven, when it as the sort of thing that would run on weekend afternoons on UHF television stations that couldn’t acquire other programming.

A comparatively benign — as in dotty elderly professor type — mad scientist named Professor Gibbs (played by John Barrymore, a great Shakespearean then near the end of his career, and yes, he is an ancestor of Drew Barrymore), is perfecting a machine that will make living things invisible.  He needs a human subject on whom to test his device, but how to find one?

Since it’s 1940 and there is no Craigslist (and no pesky protocols about human experimentation, either) he does the sensible thing, and takes out a classified ad.

Poor Professor Gibbs gets a stack of mail telling him what a crank he is (he would have been familiar with the sex-blogging experience long before there was such a thing), but happily for him there is one young woman who takes a different attitude.  Kitty Carroll, played by Virginia Bruce, takes one look at the ad and knows something she wants.  The look in her eyes when she receives an invitation from Professor Gibbs (who has no idea that she’s a woman, by the way) is priceless.

Her response to Gibbs’s letter:  “This is the call of adventure.”

So she shows up at Professor Gibbs’s mad-lab and promptly gets herself invisibled.  I should note, by the way, that Professor Gibb’s invisibility, much like the invisibility technology that Maureen will encounter at Gnosis, will turn a human being invisible, but not clothing, gear, etc.  (We’re talking mad science here, not magic!) You have to be naked for the invisibility to work.

Let’s reflect on what Kitty has implicitly gone for here:  “So, you want me to take off all my clothes, step into this machine that has hitherto never been tested on a human being, zap me with heaven-knows-what, and turn me invisibile?  Sure, I’m game!”

I think I’m in love.

Anyway, Kitty promptly uses her newly-established invisibility to scare the living crap out of her mean boss, the aptly-named Mr. Growley, played by Charles Lane (a character actor of extraordinary longevity whose career reached all the way into the 21st century).

Invisibility makes possible a fine ironic joke about striptease, by the way.  The point of stripping might be to see everything, but of course, if you’re invisible, then stripping means that you can see nothing.  Kitty, in the process of terrifying Growley, does indeed strip down, leaving only her lady-like gloves as a visual cue to the audience of her location.

A friend of mine commenting on Peter Weller‘s performance in RoboCop once remarked, “it must be tough acting with only your chin.”  It’s probably tougher acting with only your gloves.

There is a slight problem with Professor Gibbs’s invisibility technology, which is that it does tend to wear off, and this can lead to some ticklish situations.  Although if you’re in a movie after the passage of the Hays Code and titilation is rather thin on the ground. this can be a good thing, at least for the audience.

Certainly those bare legs were something that stuck in my juvenile mind!  Probably the erotic side resitered only dimly, but I did recall thinking how wonderfully naughty it would be to run around naked without being seen.

Invisible Jesus sex

Maureen Creel sure stumbles on something unorthodox when she tries to figure out who (or what) is shtupping Lola in the chapel.

As the distinguished proprietor of Bondage Blog has observed and as I have myself argued on occasion, there’s kind of a submission and suffering kink going on in Christianity.  Here are the first two verses of real hymn that neither of us is making up:

1.	Make me a captive, Lord,
	and then I shall be free.
	Force me to render up my sword,
	and I shall conqueror be.
	I sink in life's alarms
	when by myself I stand;
	imprison me within thine arms,
	and strong shall be my hand. 

2.	My heart is weak and poor
	until it master find;
	it has no spring of action sure,
	it varies with the wind.
	It cannot freely move
	till thou hast wrought its chain;
	enslave it with thy matchless love,
	and deathless it shall reign.

Full words along with a score and midi music available here, if you’re interested.

Unsurprisingly, someone is willing to push the metaphor, and not just weirdos like me.  There’ a real sex toy — honest! — called the Jackhammer Jesus, a crucifix in the form of the dildo, so I’m not making up some weird fetish just to advance the plot.

“Invisible man having sex with girls” is of course also a well-established trope — I had to throw in the anal Jesus thing just to give it a touch of originality.  You might well be familiar with it’s appearance in comics especially.  It shows up, for example, in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill‘s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a story of a group of late-Victorian characters (many with mad-scientist origins) who group together to fight the enemies of the British Empire.  The Invisible Man is one of them.  He is first “seen” in the series in a girls school, busily having his way with the students (some of whom, impregnated, interpret their experiences as divine visitations).

And of course there is also always that classic of European comic-book erotica, Milo Manara‘s Butterscotch, which has a merry time with the whole Invisible Man theme.

As with so many kinks, the roots of this one turn out to be ancient.  Remember that we have asked before the question about why people put so much energy into thinking about possible morality-free zones?  Well, as it turns out, people in fifth and fourth century B.C.E. Athens were thinking about this as well.    In Book II of Plato‘s Republic, Glaucon, a young companion of Socrates, challenges Socrates on the value of justice using — you guessed it! — a story about an invisible man.

According to the tradition, Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he beheld a hollow brazen horse, having doors, at which he stooping and looking in saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result-when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared.

So now Glaucon, who’s clearly been giving the matter a lot of thought, quickly jumps into the “invisible man having sex” theme, before swiftly moving into the more philosophical challenge.

Whereupon he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other;,no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

Whole text available here, in case any of you want to see how it ends.

Fair trade?

And of course, young Willie manages to step in it again when a (possibly ill-advised) experiment with his work-study supervisor, Professor Rebecca Waite,  runs off the rails.

I know that there are people who write stories about the possibility of erotic body swapping (examples here), and as a fetish this definitely shows up on Franklin Veaux’s sex map as part of the “Islands of the Imaginary,” just east of tentacle sex.

I wish I could point to some of this erotica as a precedent for the Willie/Waite experience, but I actually suspect that I was more influenced here by two other body-swap stories, both non-erotic in their content.  One is Mary Rodgers‘s story Freaky Friday, age-appropriate children’s novel about a one-day body-swap between a mother and her teenage daughter.  I read this and was fascinated by it when I was about eleven.  The other is the explicitly anti-erotic story by H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep,” which I first read and was equally fascinated by at age fifteen and which I attempt to honor in the name, “Rebecca Waite.”

A good part of the fun of writing scenes like the one herein discussed is not only do you get to play with an intrinsically titillating idea like swapping bodies with someone else, but you can indulge also the fantasy of crossing into a different gender, as both Waite and Willie do.  If you could “try on” being a different gender I would try it in a heartbeat, and I suspect most of you readers would as well.  Swapping bodies is a fine mad science theme as well because the imagined means by which it might be accomplished — brain transplants, for example — are something that a mad scientist would be eager to try.

Plus I got to indulge one other little trope that makes me squee, which is the nerd who is really a hottie but who covers it up because she (it’s usually a she, in these cases) realizes that as a hottie she wont be taken seriously for the right things.

Victoria Vetri in _Invasion of the Bee Girls_ (1973), looking about as nerdy as it is possible for her look.

“You try being taken seriously as a scientist when all your male students and colleagues are staring at your chest.”