On Human Nakedness as Seen by Animals

Giovanni Lanfranco:  

Giovane nudo sul letto con un gatto (c. 1620-22)

Oil on canvas (112 x160 cm)

 

I often ask myself who I am at that moment when I'm caught naked

by the silent gaze of an animal; for example, the eyes of a cat ... [1]

 

 

Do animals understand that we are wearing clothes? Or, to put it another way, do they know when we are naked? 

 

D. H. Lawrence suspected his favourite brown hen would, if she could, address him as Mr. Skinflappy: 

 

"Skin-flappy, of course, would refer to my blue shirt and baggy cord trousers. How would she know I don't grow them like a loose skin!" [2]

 

How indeed, being only a chicken? 

 

But what about a cat? For I'm assuming that a cat is more insightful than a chicken when it comes to this question [3] and must surely sense the difference between skin and cloth and know when its human is in the nip? 

 

Didn't Derrida discover this for himself when his cat [4], having wandered into the bathroom, exposed the philosopher's nakedness and caused him to experience a feeling of embarrassment or shame? [5]

 

As Derrida points out, at such moments we are transported back to that moment in Genesis [3:7] when, post-Fall, Adam and Eve know themselves to be naked not only in the eyes of God and each other, but the serpent and all the other animals that inhabited the garden (and so quickly cover themselves with fig leaves). 

As Nietzsche concludes, when the animals look at man - particularly as he stands naked before them on two bare legs - they do not see a creature that is separate and superior; rather, they see "a being of their own kind which has in a most dangerous manner lost its sound animal reason" [6] and is physically maladapted to the world (lacking in speed, in strength, in sharp teeth and fur). 

That's man: the mad animal, the vulnerable animal, and the naked animal ill at ease in its own skin ...

   

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm quoting from memory (so have doubtless not quite got it right) a line by Jacques Derrida in 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2, (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 369-418. Click here to access on JSTOR.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Him With His Tail in His Mouth', in Refections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 316. 

 

[3] Actually, my love of cats might be causing me to be unfair to chickens. For according to a study into their intelligence by a professor at Bristol University in 2013, chickens can not only outperform cats and dogs in several tests of cognitive and behavioural ability, but even four-year-old children.

 

[4] Like Foucault and Deleuze, Derrida had a much-loved feline companion; see my post from January 2018 - 'When I Play With My Cat' - click here. In 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', Derrida is at pains to stress that when he speaks of a female cat staring at his nakedness in the bathroom, he is referring to an actual creature in all its unique singularity: 

      "I must make it clear from the start, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn't the figure of a cat. It doesn't silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables." [374]  

 

[5] Again, see Derrida's 'The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)', op. cit., where he confesses: 

      "I have trouble repressing a reflex dictated by immodesty. Trouble keeping silent within me a protest against the indecency. Against the impropriety that comes of finding oneself naked, one's sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see. The impropriety [malséance] of a certain animal nude before the other animal [...] the single, incomparable and original experience of the impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant. [...] It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed." [372]

 

[6] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book III, §224. This is my translation of the line. The section, entitled Kritik der Thiere ['Critique of the Animals'], reads in full and in the original German:

      "Ich fürchte, die Thiere betrachten den Menschen als ein Wesen Ihresgleichen, das in höchst gefährlicher Weise den gesunden Thierverstand verloren hat, - als das wahnwitzige Thier, als das lachende Thier, als das weinende Thier, als das unglückselige Thier." 

 

 

Sinister Writings 2: On the Sexual Politics of Adam and Eve

Theodor Harmsen: Hermaphrodites (2017) 

The Book of Adam and Eve 

theodorharmsen.com

 

 

What do you call the layer of excess fat surrounding the vagina? 

Woman.  

 

If ever there was a joke written to offend feminists concerned with the sexual objectification of women - particularly their reduction to a body part - it's this one. 

 

And yet, if certain midrashic interpretations of God's creation of man in terms of what we would now call intersexuality are to be believed, then we might well ask what is woman if not merely a monstrous personification of cunt given an autonomous life of her own once separated off from the body of Adam.

This is not a question that escapes the attention of Abel Tiffauges:

"Reading the beginning of the Book of Genesis, one is pulled up short by a flagrant inconsistency that sticks out like a sore thumb in the venerable text. 'So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them ...' This sudden transition from the singular to the plural is downright unintelligible, especially as the creation of the woman out of Adam's rib does not occur till much later, in the second chapter of Genesis. But all is clear if one retains the singular throughout ... 'So God created man in his own image, that is, at once male and female ... And God said to him, be fruitful, multiply ...' etc. Later he sees that the solitude implied by hermaphroditism is undesirable, so he puts Adam to sleep and takes from him not a rib but his ... womb, i.e. his feminine sexual parts, and makes these into an independent being." [14-15]

 

That's interesting: for not only does it mean that Adam was originally created as an intersexed being, but - made as he was in God's own image - that God too is therefore both male and female (or, if you prefer, neither male nor female). 

 

Exactly how Adam was physically constituted is something that rabbis and Christian theologians who have bought into this idea have long debated; was he a true hermaphrodite or simply one half of a conjoined male-female twin assemblage (i.e., a single bi-sexed body)?   

 

Fascinating as it is to think of the Old Adam "armed with all his reproductive apparatus, [...] a constant prey to amorous transports of unimaginable perfection, in which he is both possessor and possessed, except - who knows? - during the periods when he was pregnant by himself" [15], this is not my main point of interest. Nor am I concerned here with the (potentially liberating) implication of this myth for those who identify as trans, queer, intersex, or non-binary. 

 

Rather, my concern is for the daughters of Eve and how this myth enables the kind of sexism contained in the joke with which I opened this post, by encouraging men to think of woman as not only a walking, talking sex organ, but a sex organ which originally belonged to Adam before God decided that the hermaphroditic model was not quite working and tore the sexes asunder.

 

If, technically speaking, woman has no sexual parts of her own - but is herself merely a sexual part of the original man "deposited outside himself [...] and taken up when needed" [15] - then why, for example, should a man worry about the ethical issue of female objectification, or wish to ensure female pleasure and fulfilment; particularly when he is "naturally out of step with woman's slow, vegetative ripenings" [8] ...?   

 

See: Michel Tournier, The Erl-King, trans. Barbara Bray, (Atlantic Books, 2014). All page references in the text refer to this edition. 

 

For sinister writings on angelic oppression, click here. 

 

For sinister writings on cadent euphoria, click here. 

On the Dog's Bollocks and the Loss of a Penile Bone in Human Males

One of the things my friend Catherine loves most about her new puppy dog is the soft, subterranean nature of his penis, which she characterizes rather nicely as rhizomatic.

"It runs parallel to and just under the surface of the skin (you can see the bulge), with just the very end of it projecting out into the world, like a lipstick."

She adds: "The balls are also mainly under the surface, just at the far end of the semi-submerged penis", though I think she may have mistaken the spherical knot of erectile tissue known as the bulbis glandis for the dog's testicles (not that I'm an expert in canine genitalia).

Catherine concludes with a confession of aesthetico-sexual preference: "I think it so much nicer to have a secret, shy little organ hidden away, rather than a perpendicular penis."

Were I female, I suspect I might very well feel likewise; there is something displeasing about a large dangling dick. But, being male, what really fascinates me about a dog's penis is the fact that it contains a bone (the baculum); a feature common to many placental mammals which provides sufficient stiffness to enable non-erect penetration and allow for an extended period of coition.

Unfortunately, the so-called os penis is absent in man, although present in other primates including chimpanzees and gorillas. Thanks to a malevolent and mocking God removing such from Adam in order to make Eve, human males have never known the joy and reassurance of a true boner and have had to rely on haemodynamics and the vagaries of desire for hardness.


Note; I am grateful to Catherine Brown for suggesting the subject of this post and for allowing me to quote from her correspondence in which we discussed it. Readers interested in Catherine's further views on man and dog should click here.