Monthly Archives: March 2010

Nuns behaving badly

Well, young Willie sure manages to get himself into a complicated and interesting scrape through his illicit invasion of the Magdalene College facilities.

That he should do so is not too surprising in the context of the Gnosis College fictional world, which of course draws on ever pornographic tradition I can find that I find at all interesting.  And as I’ve noted before, anything involving closure, secrets, hiddeness is likely to provoke interesting erotic speculation and narrative.   And convents, and cloistering girls’ schools, doubly so.  In the near term, as many readers of this blog will already know, there is a tradition of movies called “nunsploitation,” which is exactly what it sounds like and even has entire sites devoted to its exploration.  Talk about kink!

The whole kink goes back much further than ’70s exploitation cinema, of course.  The Italian poet Pietro Aretino (1492 – 1556) is regarded by some as the inventor of modern pornography.  He wrote a famous dialog between a cortesean and her career-minded daughter, the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, the first part of which contains an extensive discussion of the putative sexual habits of nuns.  (For those of you who like that sort of thing, I am happy to report it is now available in English translation under the title The Secret Life of Nuns from Hesperus Press.)  And of course, we must also note that the immortal Diderot wrote (originally as a prank)  a book about a girl in a convent called La Religieuse, (French-language text here) in which simmering lesbian desire plays no small role.

But probably none of the sources surpass what when on in the imagination of the Marquis de Sade, whose Historie de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du Vice contains the following scene (the translation I use is taken from Camille Paglia‘s Sexual Personae, p. 241.  The original French text is taken from here.)

Les religieuses bolonaises possèdent, plus qu’aucune autre femme de l’Europe, l’art de gamahucher des cons …délicieuses créatures ! je n’oublierai jamais vos charmes…Ce fut là, mes amis, où j’exécutai ce que les Italiennes appellent le chapelet. Toutes, munies de godemichés et placées dans une salle immense, nous nous enfilâmes au nombre de cent ; les grandes en con, les petites en cul, pour ménager les pucelages. Une des plus âgées se mettait à chaque neuvaine, on l’appelait le pater ; celles-là seules avaient le droit de parler : elles commandaient les décharges, elles prescrivaient les déplacements, et présidaient généralement à tout l’ordre de ces singulières orgies. The Bolognese nun possess the art of cunt-sucking in a higher degree than any other female on the European continent…Delicious creatures! I shall ever sing your memor…It was there, my friend, that I executed what Italian woman call the rosary: all fitted out with dildoes and gathered in a great hall, we would thread ourselves one to the next, there would be a hundred on the chain; though those who were tall in ran by the cunt, by the ass through those who were short; an elder was placed at each novena, they were the paternoster beads and had the right to speak: they gave the signal for discharges, directed the movements and evolutions, and presided in general over the order of those unusual orgies.

“One hundred nuns linked by dildoes!” commented Professor Paglia, perhaps a little breathlessly.  “The style of Busby Berkely or the Radio City Rockettes.”

What a shame, really, that the divine Marquis was condemned to live in a world of only eighteenth-century technology and before science fiction had really been invented.  I mean, I guess I’m doing okay, using nuns and ropes and electric motors and natural young-man concupiscence to convert advernturous Willie into the core living component of a room-sized fucking machine.  There’s a decent mad-science feel there, I hope. But just think of what Sade might have done if he had had cyberpunk or steampunk or even just Frankenstein to read!

Whatever he came up with would surely have been worthy of inclusion in Lucien’s library, right up there with the score of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il re Lear and Shakespeare’s history play Richard Nixon.

Picking locks

Aloysius Kim is telling us a plausible story when he tells us that he learned about picking locks from something a guy at MIT wrote.  This is a real-world document, and you can find a copy of it in PDF form here.

I must confess it was  happy day for me when I stumbled on the idea of putting lock-picking into a script as a key idea.  It works as such a fine metaphor for the thaumatophile:

  • Lock-picking is a fine metaphor for penetration, not just in the sense that a pick fits into a lock, but in that it is a way of opening one’s way into unknown but desired spaces.
  • But it’s not just a crude penetration.  Merely ramming a pick into a lock will never do.  You must caress the lock, know, take your time learning its secrets, it, if you are to have any success in opening it.
  • Locks are a technology, and picking them a technological skill, so they fit well into the metaphor of mad science.
  • Entering forbidden spaces is not just a metaphor for sex, but the very aim of the scientist, the mad scientist in particular.  So sex and knowledge and technology all bind into one here.
  • And of course, in a place like Gnosis College, where a bizarre but sexy secret might lurk behind any locked door, it’s a hell of a useful device for advancing plots!

_Progress in Research_ now available

The third Gnosis College script, Progress in Resarch, is now available.  With this script, we return to campus and pick up a parallel thread of the story.  While Nanetta and Moira were busy giving their all for science, new mad scientists were budding among the students of Gnosis, generating tales of unrequited love, experiments with the safety off, ventures in hypnosis gone horribly wrong (or horribly right), nuns behaving badly, unlawful Jesus impersonation, and the appearance (if that’s really the right concept here) of Invisible Girl.  So enjoy, if you can….

Mad-lab encounter

Okay, a break for a while from all the heavy stuff, to say the solipsism of writing about my own writing.  Here:

In all candor I must say I sort of miss old-style sexploitation, a genre of movies that seems to have flourished between the mid-1960s, when people got tired of the nudie-cuties and mid-1970s, after which time when moviemaking seems to have fissioned into mass market movies, which due to their mass-market character reach for a lowest common denominator with respect to erotic content (meaning, not much) and outright porn.  I have nothing against outright porn, mind you, it’s just that as a thaumatophile I sort of like people who worked a bit, even at absurd pretenses, to get pretty girls out of their clothes and into peril, peril which often included mad science and its consequences.  I guess I’ll always just get more out of Invasion of the Bee Girls than a lot of other movies that have more explicit sexual content.   Oh where are the drive-ins and grindhouses of yesteryear?

Which is why I sort of have a soft spot for Fred Olen Ray, (personal site here) who seems to be busy keeping the sexploitation flame burning bright, sometimes even with mad-science overtones.  His movies might be utterly goofy, but they can be mined profitably for entertainment.  (Ray has made lots and lots of movies, including Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Bikini Drive-In, Bikini Hoe-Down, and the Bikini Escort Company.  We’re talking commitment here, people.) Here’s an example, from Ghost in a Teeny Bikini.

Christine Nguyen here plays “Muffin Baker,” who in turn is playing a character in a movie within the movie (which we will later learn is called Missing in Acting).  And she’s in trouble, tied to a table in the half-convincing-looking mad lab of a “Dr. Sin,” who I think I vaguely remember from graduate school.

Happily for our unnamed heroine she is soon rescued by a character named Bardo, sent straight from Central Casting’s “Weightlifter with a Machine Gun” division.  Bardo is played by Nick Manning, the most relevant fact about whom I could find is that as of this writing he has 460 acting credits to his name in IMDB, which include Anal Ballerinas and My Teacher is a MILF.

After a bit of sub-Homeric narration by Bardo of his travails in rescuing the girl, we are treated to this bit of sparkling dialog

Muffin

How much time do you think we have until they blow us all up?

Bardo

Let’s not talk about killing. We only might have thirty minutes left until we ourselves are killed by those who we seek to kill.

Now you or I, dear reader, might have a variety of reactions to this interesting revelation, among which might be

  • Professionalism.  Get busy killing those whom you seek to kill and who seek to kill you.  A job is a job, damnit!
  • Self-preservation.  Excuse me, but you didn’t happen to say “blown up,” did you?  You did?  In that case, would you excuse me for a moment?  I need to slip into a comfortable pair of running shoes.

But you or I, dear reader, clearly would not be following the cinematic logic of the situation.  Fred Olen Ray understands it however.

Muffin

Makes me melt when you touch me like that. Make love to me, Bardo.

Bardo

If we are to die, then let it be in each other’s arms.

Yep.  Makes perfect sense.

And I know that all dedicated readers of this blog will doubtless look at that last image and think:

That dingus over there in the far right-hand side of the image.  Is that the lab’s main power supply?  What is it running?  What is the experiment?  Please tells us, Mr. Ray!

But unfortunately we never learn, because at that point Muffin’s director-boyfriend yells “Cut!” ending the scene and getting on with the main, and even sillier, movie.

Oh well.  At least I understand that Fred Olen Ray has Bikini Frankenstein coming out, so maybe there’s something for us thaumatophiles to hope for.

Looking good enough to eat

I realize of course that there is no small squick involved in core scene about the adventures of Iris in the Club Cuisine, but that, too, was a scene that boiled up out of some corner of my mind that I saw myself as having no right to ignore.  And I realize that the squick seems likely to continue to pertain, even though Iris comes through hale and sound (or does she?).

That all this should have boiled up is perhaps no accident as well:  cannibalism has a long history of being both a marker of transgression and punishment.  In the long cycle of misdeeds the culminates in the Oresteia, Atreus kills and cooks the sons of Thyestes.  Who can forget the ghastly feast of Ugolino in Canto XXXII of Dante‘s Inferno?  Or a certain notorious scene in Shakespeare‘s, Titus Andronicus?

Where there is horror, someone is bound to exploit for purposes of eros.  It is no accident, surely, that one of the most successful movies of the last few decades features a cannibal who is no primitive, but a scholar so polished and formidable that he cannot but be magnetic, indeed, sexy.

How often have we described someone who looks sexually desirable as “yummy” or “delicious?”  And how often have we really thought about the metaphor that underlies what we have said?  Do perhaps our guts not move within as our eyes move without?

The phenomenon of cannibalism as kink goes back far.  A little recent digging on my part turned up a sonnet, attributed to François de Malherbe (1555 – 1628), discussed in a academic paper here.  I won’t attempt a full translation, since my attempts even at nineteenth-century French prose turn out to be a bit too disappointing to merit my trying my hand at sixteeenth-century French verse, but I’ll give the gist.  The poet invites a woman, in the midst of the meal, to undress and become “dessert,” perhaps not in an entirely figurative sense.  (His compannion is, needless to say, somewhat shocked.)

Là, là!  Pour le dessert, troussez-moy cette cotte,
Viste, chemise et tout, qu’il n’y demeure rien
Qui me puisse empescher de recoignoistre bien
Du plus haut de nombril jusqu’au bas de la motte.
Là, sans vous renfroigner, venez que je vous frotte,
Et me laissez à part tout ce grave maintien
Suis-je pas vostre cœur? estes vous pas le mien?
C’est bien avecque moy qu’il faut faire la sotte!
–Mon cœur, il est bien vray, mais vous en faites trop:
Remettez vous au pas et quitte ce galop.
–Ma belle, baissez moy, c’est à vous de vous taire.
–Ma foy, cela vous gaste au milieu de repas…
–Belle, vous dites vray, mais se pourroit-il faire
De voir un si beau C[on] et ne le [fou]tre pas?

No wonder certain things brew up from deep in the dark parts of my mind.

Personal identity porn

As an ardent thaumatophile, I cannot but love the idea of a person scanner, and so does Iris, apparently.

The idea of a scanner that can take your information for re-creation of you later on somewhere else out of new matter is one that has played an important role in thinking about the metaphysics of personal identity.  The beginning of Chapter 10 (“What We Believe Ourselves to Be”) of Derek Parfit‘s Reasons and Persons contains a famous example.

I enter the Teletransporter.  I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks.  The machine will send me at the speed of light.  I merely have to press the green button.  Like others, I am nervous.  Will it work?  I remind myself what I have been told to expect.  When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems like a moment later.  In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour.  The Scanner here on earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all my cells.  It will the transmit this information by radio.  Traveling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars.  This will create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine.  It will be in this new body that I shall wake up.

Happily this process works, and Parfit’s narrator goes through it many times, until one day…

 

Several years pass, and I am often Teletransported.  I am now back in the cubicle, ready for another trip to Mars.  But this time, when I press the green button, I do not lose consciousness.  There is a whirring sound, then silence.  I leave the cubicle, and say to the attendant, “It’ not working, what did I do wrong?”

“It’s working,” he replies, handing me a printed card.  This reads, “The New Scanner records your blueprint without destroying your brain and body.  We hope that you will welcome the opportunities this new technical advance offers.”

The attendant tells me that I am one of the first people to use the New Scanner.  He adds that, if I stay for an hour, I can use the Intercom to talk to and see myself on Mars.

“Wait a minute,” I reply.  “If’ I’m here I can’t also be on Mars.”

Someone politely coughs, a white-coated man who asks to speak to me in private.  We go to his office, where he tells me to sit down, and pauses.  Then he says “I’m afraid we’re having problems with the New Scanner.  It records your blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on Mars.  But it seems to be damaging the cardiac systems when it scans.  Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars, here on earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.”

The attendant later calls me to the Intercom.  On the screen I see myself just as I do in the mirror every morning.  But there are two differences.  On the screen I am not left-right reversed.  And, while I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.

Get all that? Ponder it in your head for a moment while you savor another EroticMadScience picture of a scanner at work (though this one is real, not fictional, as you’ll see if you click through on the link).

The point of Parfit’s example is to sharpen (and challenge) our intuitions about what it means to be ourselves and survive as ourselves.  There are many different possibilities, the most salient of which are physical continuity and psychological continuity.  Since normally your consciousness and your body don’t separate, we don’t experience challenges of this kind in reality.

But Iris is smart.  She knows that the two might be separated.  Being forced to decide between the two possible theories is at the core of her disagreement with Professor Gregg in the prologue to Study Abroad.  Gregg subscribes to a physical continuity theory of personhood, which is why he thinks that the permanently-vegetative “Tabitha Sibling” (fictitious, but arguably based on a real case) has the same moral status as “you or me.”   Iris advances contrary to this the psychological continuity theory of personhood.

There is a problem, of course, which is that if we take a hard line on psychological continuity we might end up with a rather big bullet to swallow, to wit, that if we are in the position of Parfit’s narrator, we shouldn’t at all regret the fact that we are about to die of heart failure in a few days, because the guy on Mars is us, psychologically continuous with us, will have conscious experiences like ours, will carry on our projects, love our spouse, rear our children and so on just like we would have done.

Head spinning yet?  Oh, but I’m not letting you off quite that easily.  The same issues are entertainingly discussed further in a brilliant short film by John Weldon, called “To Be.”  Watch at any time:  unusually for something here at Erotic Mad Science, it’s completely SFW.  As to whether it’s safe for your peace of mind, I make no warranties.

The awesome thing about Iris is that, unlike most philosophers, she is willing to put everything on the line, her very existence as a test of the theory she espouses.   She (with a little boost with tolmemazine, perhaps? — that in itself poses an interesting philosophical problem) shows herself to be an absolutely fearless bullet-biter.  This is experimental philosophy à l’outrance.

Just speculating here, but I’d bet that if in the real-world philosophers were half that courageous, philosophy would command much more respect.

ADDED 11 p.m. The woman in the scanner shot is apparently a hoax that appeared on both Gizmodo and Drudge Report so my “real” claim turns out to be wrong.  But I at lesat hope the entertainment value remains, and, I think, the larger philosophical point raised by the post is unimpaired.

A most unusual restaurant

As is so often the case, I’ve discovered that reality is pretty good at outrunning my imagination.

The “most unusual” restaurant in which Iris finds gainful employment was, as best I can recall, derived as a sort of X-rated version of the Weeki Watchee Mermaids, a phenomenon which I learned about by reading Jane and Michael Stern’s engrossing and entertaining Encyclopedia of Bad Taste (a book which you just had to know Dr. Faustus would own).    At the time I was writing the scene, I congratulated myself on coming up with a very cool concept, thinking “I bet decadenet rich men would pay a lot to go to a bar with naked girls swimming around behind glass, no?”

And then, as it happened, I was perusing another book in my extensive library by Joan Sinclair entitled Pink Box:  Inside Japan’s Sex Clubs (a book you know that Dr. Faustus could surely not resist) and discovered…that there apparently there really are such things are mermaid bars.  The caption in the actual book to the thumbnail image on the left reads:  “Mermaid hostess bar Fusion, Tokyo.  Businessmen pay a ¥40,000 entrance fee to drink and watch foreign women swim in a tank at this exclusive hostess bar.” (Click on the thumbnail to see a slightly larger image and many more as part of a flash presentation at the book’s website.)

Sometimes I wonder how a hard-working pornographer is supposed to make a living.  But at least Sinclair’s book doesn’t suggest that the mermaid bar serves…well, seafood.

“A total hate-fuck…”

Jill’s accidentally-on-purpose finishing off of the Generalissimo might seem over-the-top, but it too belongs to a long tradition of women who kill men through sex.

The human imagination…the male human imagination, surely? — has long created female monsters who kill men through sex, either draining them of their energy or otherwise.  It is this fear that doubtless underlies the myth of the succubus and perhaps a large part of that of the vampire as well.

Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944), "The Vampire" (1893-4)

And of course, it’s a theme that plays a lot in popular culture as well. I know of at least one rather obsessive internet compilation called “out with a bang” the lists appropriate scenes.  And a thaumatophile line?  Well, there are doubtless many, but we could begin with a personal touchstone, the plot of Invasion of the Bee Girls, which pushes the “kill men through sex” line so thoroughly that we even get a Bee Girl point-of-view at the fatal moment.

And there are doubtless many others — ponder for a moment, and by all means comment if you come up with any.

Training with machines

I recall that back when I was in college a lot of my fellow students were spending time I would have spent deep in the library instead working with various complex and expensive exercise machines with the aim of making their toned and fit selves even more toned and fit.  So it’s with no small pleasure that I can now pay tribute to their efforts by writing a scene in which Jill Keeney, already an athlete at Gnosis College,gets in training for her espionage mission with appropriate machines.

The sex machine is of course its own kind of thaumatophile vision, and it has inspired an entire site and at least one entire book, as well as coverage in Agnès Giard‘s Le sexe bizarre:

There’s even some fantastic video art on sex machines, such as “Noosphere,” by the sci-fi eroticist Yann Minh.

This topos too has a long and distinguished pedigree.  Dare we ever forget Duran Duran’s famous Excessive Machine, which was so singularly unable to overcome Barbarella?

Sort of the high point of Jane Fonda‘s career, if you ask me, so I am happy to be able to pay tribute to it.