“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.

Abuse of the confessional

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.

Steamy locales

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)

Of course in time this tradition of “tropical paradise” would be given a sick twist in cinema in the form of the Italian jungle cannibalism film: a subject which I’ve written on briefly before. Here the morality-free zone once imagined as a Rousseauian paradise is replaced with one imagined as a Sadean hell. Witness for example Janet Agren here in deep erotic peril in Mangiati vivi (1980).

No cannibalism for lucky Cleo, though. The people she meets are altogether more benign.

Being eaten has to wait for another character entirely…

I was inducted into a harem…

What does it say about morality that so much human energy is put into imagining someplace where we are rid of it? All four of the stories in Study Abroad involve a certain leap into some realm beyond good and evil. and Bridget’s involves one into an imagined world that has had a pretty deep grip on the erotic consciousness — at least of Christian Europe and its cultural offshoots — for hundreds of years. In the age of Google, it takes a matter of seconds to peer back into the artistic record and see the story. I make a tiny, tiny nod to political correctness in imagining that Bridget goes there of her own “free will,” (or does she? — there are layers of complicating detail), but otherwise, I simply indulge the story whose record is so abundantly available. The visual image of nubile slaves, up for sale, voyeristically inspected:

Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 - 1904), "The Slave Market"

That of the odalisque, a subject so popular in European painting that there must be hundreds of examples, of which this is perhaps the most famous:

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780 -1867), "La Grande Odalisque"

The image of life in a place of sensual indulgence:

Gérôme again, "The Harem Baths"

And I must of course note, that this visual tradition continues in cinema, and interestingly not just as male voyeurism. Perhaps the first important male sex symbol in film, Rudolph Valentino, really broke into the public consciousness in The Sheik, a story of the abduction and seduction of an aristocratic white woman in the mysterious orient.

And the whole theme continues onward. See related Erosblog posts here, here, here and here. Who am I, humble scrivener that I am, to decline to expropriate such a tradition?

Best (and worst) initiation ever

Now one might reasonably wonder why, in a site devoted to erotic mad science, why I would bother writing a scene like the Omega initiation. There’s not that much θαῦμα here, no wonder technology of the sort that Joseph Corwin trades in. You could stage the scene yourself with about twenty dollars’ worth of supplies from your local Walmart, assuming of course that you have a circle of actor friends who are, uh, very serious about the craft.

But of course, initiations of almost any kind are of great social science interest. It is a puzzle why anyone would willingly subject themselves to something difficult, painful, and possibly publicly humiliating (like getting naked and being beaten up by a girl in front of all your potential fraternity brothers), until you realize that groups like fraternities provide indivisible goods for their members, and are thus vulnerable to free-riding. Would-be members thus need a way of signaling that they will not free-ride. Just saying “I won’t” isn’t good enough, because anyone can say that. But being willing to put up with something costly — such as showing oneself willing to endure pain or ridicule by actually doing so, is a costly signal and therefore a credible one. Fraternity initiations are like this, and therefore can be analyzed using an economic framework similar to that which Laurence Iannaccone uses to analyze the various “strange” behaviors used by members of New Religious Movements (pejoratively, “cults”) — you can hear Professor Iannaccone’s explanation done very lucidly in his EconTalk interview with Russell Roberts.

If you have an understanding of signaling, economics, especially the economics of non-market behavior, will become a much richer and deeper subject. This point is stressed perhaps best of all by Robin Hanson (you can hear an EconTalk interview with Hanson on signaling as well), who makes it a a key theme in his blog Overcoming Bias. Hanson has, in addition to an interest in signaling, a keen interest in speculative technologies. So perhaps there is a mad science angle here, or at least a mad social science angle, and…

Aw heck, who am I trying to fool? The fact is, I had a whole damn third act to write with very little sex until Nanetta and Moira’s shades-of-Tosca dénouement, and since you can only go so far on police-procedural hijinks I had to come up with something, so why not appeal to a long and venerable pornographic tradition?

Jean Veber (1868 - 1928), "Women Wrestling in Devonshire" (ca. 1898)

Emmanuel Croisé (b. 1859), "The Girls of Sparta" (ca. 1903)

Now perhaps the something wasn’t the most creative, even if it does provide a rivet for holding different parts of the plot of Apsinthion Protocol together. Naked combat has been picked up and gone a long way in popular culture. We see this, for example, in the one scene that made the movie for me in what was otherwise a pretender to the role of supreme campus hijinks movie:

A K-Y jelly wrestling match. Great idea, guys! And certainly a good plot inspiration for me, although perhaps somewhat disappointingly it results in only one death.

If you want to go more sanguinary in the naked-girl fight thing, check out a scene just about twelve minutes into a 1973 movie called 不良姐御伝猪の鹿お蝶, Furyō anego den: Inoshika o-Chō (in English, Sex and Fury) in which the heroine, played by Reiko Ike, gets roused out of her bath for a naked swordfight in which she manages to finish off quite a few assailants.

Sublime.

Now I don’t quite know of any popular culture scenes that quite parallel what Laura submits to (or connives at, perhaps?) in the Omega initiation, even if perhaps the thought of it forms the subtext of things like the Old School KY fight. The idea does come up in gay porn. There is a site, called NakedKombat.com, about which Bacchus at ErosBlog wrote about a year ago, where the combaants really are aiming to see who comes out on top, so to speak. Like I wrote, many precedents.

Ashley’s transformation and mine

When I was perhaps twenty I had a fantasy of a beautiful woman turning, at least quasi-voluntarily, into a statue. It was satisfying to have, but at the same time I thought, “This is too weird. Surely almost no one else thinks like this.”

I was wrong about that. But productively wrong. Because not only could I write Ashley Madder into a version of that fantasy into The Apsinthion Protocol, but I also had an opportunity to find out that there seem to be a lot of people — some of them rather talented — out there on the Internet thinking along the same lines.

The general school is called “A.S.F.R.,” initial taken from an old Usenet newsgroup called “alt.sex.fetish.robot,” and perhaps more specifically “pygmalionists” or “agalmatophiles.” And for them, the idea of transformation into a statue sounds deep erotic notes. If you are interested in such things, a good place to start looking would be the The Technosexuality FAQ. Large galleries of fan-art for this kink can be found at The Medusa Realm.

Some specific artists who merit mention: there is Naga at Naga’s Den, creator (I believe) of the cute and thematically apropos animated gif to the right (it appears originally on the Technosexuality FAQ) and another creator who works under the name of Drake, and puts out vis own self-published web comic (lots and lots and lots of scenarios and illustrations, in which almost all the characters are female) called Medusarrific. An example of vis work:

From Medusarrific #42, p. 17

,

Not quite the same as the Ashley Madder experience hedonically, even if it similar thematically.

If you like stories rather than pictures, I can point you to at least one exquisite one, “Sara’s Self-Portrait,” by RM, although you can find many others at the Medusa Realm’s story index page.

And what was my own transformation? It was that, in finding so many other people who were into the same strange fantasy I once had, that I realized that in the age of the Internet, no one is ever really alone.

The inevitable tentacle sex post

Sensitive readers of The Apsinthion Protocol will probably have thought it more or less inevitable that once Moira Weir saw this picture in one of Professor Corwin’s publications

she would soon be in for a very wild ride.

There’s a certain element of controversy about tentacle sex. Most people associate it, if they associate it with anything, with Japanese animation that many people find nasty. This isn’t an entirely wrong association: there are some good reasons why tentacle sex is so prominent in anime, which go beyond the fact of an artistic tradition of which artists like Hokusai were a part. Helen McCarthy and Jonathan Clements, in The Erotic Anime Movie Guide, write as follows:

The visual grammar permitted by the tentacle is extremely useful to the pornographer. With no restriction on length, it permits penetration without blocking the view. It can be used as a form of restraint, permitting multiple penetration, sexualized bondage, and ease of camera access. Best of all for the tentacle as a pornographic device, while it may often look suspiciously like a penis, to the extent of possessing a foreskin or glans, or even ejaculating upon climax, it is not a sexual organ by definition. The Japanese film-maker can thus show as many as he likes, doing whatever he wishes, without falling foul of the usual censorship restrictions. The only problem with the tentacle is that the film-maker must find an excuse for its appearance. This is best accomplished by making monsters a feature of the storyline, be they demons, invading aliens, or creatures from the id. And since such creatures are evil by nature, it is a logical step in such porn to accentuate the incidences of rape and sexualized violence.

And that’s certainly a possibility, one that seems to fit into the conception that most people have of tentacle sex. If you’re so inclined you can go out and find whole blogs devoted to anime tentacle sex, a lot of which doesn’t look all that consensual, with names like tentaclehettaisex.com (enjoy if that’s what you’re into, disdain if that’s what you think tentacle sex necessarily is).

There are, naturally, alternatives, some of which have been explored by my blogging mentor Bacchus over at ErosBlog. A while back he posted on this image

Youren by Toshio Saeki

Which suggests a very different idea of tentacle sex than the idea most people have. (More of Bacchus’s interesting blogging on the subject can be found here and here.)

Looking at these images makes one wonder (it certainly made me wonder) whether there couldn’t be tentacle seduction or, for that matter why the id of which the tentacles are supposedly the projection need necessarily be the male id. Why not the female id?

Amanda Gannon, in a post at Tor.com entitled “Sucker Love: Celebrating the Naughty Tentacle,” advances a congruent point.

There’s a particular detail in The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife that convinces me that hers is a dream of such ecstasy. As the enormous octopus sprawls between her thighs, she has reached down and wrapped her hands tight around two of its embracing arms. She is drawing it toward her, not pushing it away. I don’t hesitate to say that gesture is familiar to me.

That passion is the same fantasy of every person who has ever dreamed of being carried off by pirates and ravished into a state of perpetual ecstasy, the same passion of the vampire’s orgasmic embrace, the werewolf’s bestial lusts, and so many more. The tentacles may be exotic, but the theme is familiar.

Think about that enough, and scenes like Moira’s encounter just sort of write themselves.

Go green

Where does the name “apsinthion protocol” come from?

Well, from ἀψίνθιον (apsinthion) of course. It’s the Greek word for wormwood, Artemisia absinthium. which among other things, is the key ingredient in the spirit known as absinthe. Professor Joseph Corwin, though nominally some kind of psychologist, is also a bit of a Hellenist >manqué who knows that sort of thing. So it’s not surprising that he should apply the name to his process for reducing a girl into “the most precious of liquors.”

Now it’s hardly surprising that a mad scientist should focus on absinthe as the spirit of choice. Wine and beer are probably both older than recorded human history itself. Whiskey and brandy are probably of medieval origin, while gin is an early modern, most likely seventeenth-century product. But absinthe is a product of the early industrial age, probably first produced in 1792 by a physician. It’s creation is thus closely contemporary with the work of Alessandro Volta on “animal electricity” and thus with Mary Shelley’s inspiration for Frankenstein. Only connect…

But beyond that association, there’s a close connection between absinthe and both erotic and poetic inspiration, and that perhaps represents my own point of view more than Corwin’s. To an extent I have not seen for any other spirit, absinthe was personified as la fée verte, the Green Fairy. She was a potent (if dangerous) spirit:

with no small appeal.

Pleasure à l’outrance, even at the risk of self-destruction. An appropriate name in erotic mad science indeed!

The Green Fairy was banned for a long time, even in the countries was distilled. The wormwood used to make her allegedly contained a dangerous narcotic, but more likely the ban (at least in France) was a form of industrial protectionism for French winemakers. (That’s the way it so often is, isn’t it? “For our own good” is a way of lining others’ pockets.) The ban itself at least was an occasion for some interesting art lampooning authoritarian politics, as in the example to the right, commemorating the ban in Switzerland, which followed that in France. Here the Green Fairy is burned at the stake (her French sister awaits her in heaven).

But there’s a happy ending here, which is that the Green Fairy is now legal again in most juristictions, even the United States. So I’ll note in passing a favorite brand, “La Capricieuse,” distilled by Claude-Alain Bugnon at Artemisia Distillerie Artisanale, which combines not only wicked potency but one of the most beautiful labels in the spirits world.

Not available (yet?) in the United States, although her milder (but still sexy) sister La Clandestine is. Santé!

Why liquid girl?

“You get warmer and warmer, and then you melt.”

If you had to come up with the genesis of the strange fantasy of Li Anwei and Nanetta Rector and eventually others orgasmically turning to liquid, a conceit on which The Apsinthion Protocol turns, you might do worse than that, a description of what orgasm felt like, given to 18 year-old me by a female companion.

But there’s doubtless some reason why this particular metaphor stuck so soundly in my mind. Could it be, perhaps, that liquids, and water especially are such erotic elements? Venus is intimately connected with the sea: she was neither gestated in a womb nor constructed as a piece of technology like Pandora, but emerged from the sea foam, the product of sea-water and the blood from the castrated genitals of Ouranos. Her emergence is commemorated in perhaps the greatest masterwork of the early Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

It is a subject painters will return to again and again. Consider Odilon Redon’s twentieth-century symbolist version of the same, which I find particularly striking.

But the association of women and water and eros is not limited to Venus. Consider also, as just one example,Gustave Courbet’s Woman in the Waves.

Women, eros, liquid. So powerful an association that there’s even a genre of erotica (printed in water resistant volumes, like that depicted at the left) devoted to it. And if you survey photographic erotica, you’ll find that it’s a prominent theme — so much is shot in our around water — on beaches or in oceans or near waterfalls or ponds. Or in baths or showers or hot tubs. Surf over to a frequent poster of tasteful female nudes — GoodShit for example — on any day of the week and count the number of young lovelies who are in, or near, or covered with water.

And so I suppose it is hardly an accident also that some odd person like me might drive the metaphor into a more literal sort of fantasy…