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.
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 Personscontains 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 philosophyà 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My first post on Jill’s adventure abroad will be on the rather unusual use of a confessional for purposes of furthering a conspiracy.
Confession is a ritual surrounded in secrecy, and pretty much anything surrounded in secrecy will be the breeding grounds for inappropriate speculation and interesting narrative. This is something that the artist (and children’s book illustrator!) Rojan understood rather well.
Rojan, "Colored Drawing," ca. 1930
So as usual, I continue in the well-worn paths of artistic tradition.
I suppose I should ‘fess up that the whole idea of the giant spider was also inspired at least in part by The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist.
This panel is from the same “backstory” page that provided the panel in this post, which contributes to my understanding that both are meant as satire.
The linguistic appropriateness of a name like “Tondelayo” for a young woman from a bumiputera group somewhere on Borneo can certainly be questioned (although we should note that she tells us that it is not her real name). But I wanted a tribute to a particular steamy namesake, the character played by Hedy Lamarr in White Cargo (1942).
Hedy has gotten tributes in the Gnosis College world before, and she well deserves it. In Ecstasy (1933) not only did she do a very bold nude scene:
but she also created what might well have been the first depiction of female orgasm in a “mainstream” movie.
But were it just for those things alone Hedy might not deserve the multiple tributes. What really puts her over the top is that in 1942 she, together with bad-boy composer George Antheil, took out one of the first patents for spread-spectrum radio communications — the technology your mobile phone uses. (They were supporting the war effort by trying to create a torpedo that could be guided by wireless transmissions.) The government took the patent and sat on it, but at least in 1997 the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Hedy a special award in recognition of her pioneering effort.
I mean, can you think of any Hollywood sex symbol working today who you could see as an engineer? Talk about deserving tribute from Erotic Mad Science!
And never forget — the sexiest organ a woman has…is her brain.
Cleo’s adventures abroad invoke a different line of wishful thinking about possible abroads free from morality.
As far back at least as Denis Diderot‘s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (1772) the dream of a tropical paradise free from labor, free from politics, and largely free from clothes has loomed large in the imagination of Greater Europe. It is probably not hard to see why, above and beyond the fact that the tropics are fecund and also a place in which you can comfortably run around naked (indeed, might often be more comfortable if you are). They also had the advantage of being very remote, and therefore a convenient literary topos for writing a critique of your own miserable, prudish, Christian society — the more remote the place, the harder it would be for your beautiful theory to be slain by unpleasant facts.
Small wonder that Tahiti ended up being the place Paul Gauguin chose to flee to, and whence he provided us with some of the most beguiling art in service of the myth, even if the myth turns out not to really have had much going for it.
Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), "Annah, die Javanerin" (1893)
I didn’t construct this scene in Study Abroad with all that much foresight; it was just something that boiled up from the darker regions of my mind and onto the page. On looking back after writing I did think “By Great Cthulhu this one will annoy all sorts of folks.” (Among other things it is quite the act of blasphemy, against at least two major religions. Perhaps I shall soon be facing prosecution in Ireland.) I toyed with the idea of taking it out, but eventually decided that it made more sense to leave it in. Not only does it make a significant point (and prefigure menaces that will become more manifest in later scripts), but it draws on its own significant artistic tradition, whether people like it or not.
I have speculated before about the existence of an inner connection between sadistic spectacle and a certain kind of spirituality. And you needn’t take my own word for it; you can attend to those of Thomas Aquinas, that celebrated Saint and Doctor of the Church, who tells us in all seriousness “Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.” (See one F. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, I.15.) If that sentiment doesn’t disturb you more than anything else you see in the post, you might want to sit down and meditate quietly on your values for a while. (It’s possible that Nietzsche didn’t get the wording quite right but he was dead-on correct in diagnosing the sentiment. As he will remark later on, “…alle Religionen sind auf dem untersten Grunde Systeme von Grausamkeiten.”)
In an event, you can certainly look into art history and find images similar to what appeared in my scene, whether as images of pious martyrdom or voluptuous cruelty (or, if I am right if I am right about the connection between the two, both).
Since there is probably no image quite as broadly distributed as that of crucifixion in Europe (Catholic Europe especially), it is hardly surprising that it will crop up all over the culture, for example in the rumor of the Crucified Canadian that was common in British trenches in the First World War. And since it is a sacred symbol, it is hardly surprising that there were illustrators willing to repurpose it for especially transgressive pornographic purposes, e.g.
And that the idea would spread far in time, eventually all the way to Japanese cinema.
And, in the end, become an object even of eroticized satire, drawing on the artistic conventions of anti-Semitic caricature as in this part of Phoebe’s “backstory” from The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist. (And yes, based on the context in which the image appears, I really am sure it is meant as satire.)
And so now, with the help of Springer and O’Donoghue, I’ve blasphemed against all the Abrahamic religions.
But if I can’t be transgressive, then what am I doing here?
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?).
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.Là, là! Pour le dessert, troussez-moy cette cotte,
