Today’s post centers around another of those largish (and potentially disturbing) animated .gifs, so I’m running that below the fold.

Sometimes our inspirations run rather dark.  When I was a senior in college I walked into the back of the TV viewing room in the residence hall where I lived and stumbled onto a few seconds of what people were watching in there.  I’ve represented it here as an animated gif image, and you can see it also as fifteen seconds of flash video here.

Naked woman, tank full of water, writhing, steam, obviously something mad science going on here.  It went straight to some electric part of my brain, obliging me to withdraw promptly into the privacy of my own chambers, if you catch my drift.  (A more confirming moment of one’s own thaumatophila would be hard to find.)  And obviously something about the scene stayed with me, influencing the imagery of subsequent writings and commissions done decades later.

Only later did I learn the more exact provenance of the video clip.  It’s from a movie called SS Experiment Camp, which certainly is mad science, and also the sort of movie that motivates calls for censorship.  An example of Nazisploitation.  (Not that they’re hard to find.)  Oh, dear.

Finger-wagging moralists will doubtless appear to tell me that I need to feel really bad about myself.  (Or would, since I think anyone answering to the description of “finger-wagging moralist” who attempted to read this site would quickly have to retire with a case of the vapors.) But I think I’ll decline this invitation.   Instead I’ll take a lesson, and you should too.  Eros is an outlaw, a bandit, a scoffer at decencies.  That’s why so much of erotic fantasy takes place in settings that are beyond the reach of morality somehow, some of which are not at all nice:  the savage tropics, the oriental harem, the depraved convent, the women’s prison.  Nazisploitation is just a development of this.  If you embrace what you are, you’re going to find some things that will make other people pretty unhappy.  Face it, live with it, and flourish.