Images used for the posts published on this date in
2013, 2018, and 2022
Sometimes - especially those times when, like today, I can't think of anything else to write about - it's convenient to be able to look back and see what one was thinking on this date in years gone by; voyeurs, naughty nurses, female nipples, and circus elephants, apparently ...
I suspect that way back on 29 April 2013, I was also stuck for new ideas, because both of these posts on Torpedo the Ark were essentially lifted from the queer little book Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse (Blind Cupid Press, 2010).
I assembled this text after finishing my PhD in 2000, but it has it's origins in work that can be traced back to the the late 1980s, when I first began to collect the cards left by prostitutes in London phone boxes and was concerned with issues to do with sexuality and the subject [1].
In the first of these fragments, I examined the way in which the imperial male gaze is taken to its erotic conclusion by the voyeur: By watching others fuck, he exercises his power to probe and master bodies, assigning meaning to otherwise insignificant sexual activity.
An often solitary figure, the true voyeur crucially has no desire to join in: For his pleasure derives exclusively from the fact that, like a god, he has mastered the art of immaculate perception. In other words, he can look at life and love without his tongue lolling out.
In the second of these fragments, meanwhile, I disussed how the figure of the nurse plays an important role within the pornographic imagination, where she is usually conceived either as a kindly angel who administers some form of erotic relief, or as the cruel representative of strict and punishing authority delighting in needles and cold latex gloves.
For the British, however, reared as they have been within a Carry On culture, the figure of the nurse also plays an important role within the comic imagination and so it's virtually impossible to take the sexual stereotype seriously for long: fetishistic medical fantasies are invariably undermined by fond memories of Hattie Jacques.
Five years later, and I was now concerned with the female nipple as the site of socially constructed meaning and a politics of desire:
For whilst the male nipple is just as sensitive to certain stimuli and can also be erotically aroused, it isn't subject to the same pornographic fascination or taboo within our culture and so can be freely displayed in a way that the female nipple cannot.
However, if I was sceptical with the Free the Nipple campaign back in 2018, I'm still not on board with it here in 2024. For it seems to me that what I wrote then is still a valid reason for concern now; there's a naivety in this campaign which fails to consider the law of unintended (or unforeseen) consequences:
Consider, for example, what happens when famous singers, actresses and models jump on board and start posting images of their perfect breasts and super-perky nipples. It doesn't result in a great leap forward for womankind; it leads, unfortunately, to greater insecurity and a new trend in plastic surgery - so-called designer nipples.
For it turns out that many women don't want to free their nipples; at least not straight away. They want first to have botox fillers injected into their areola so that their nipples might look like those of their favourite celebrities. Only when they have permanently erect-looking and symmetrical on-trend nipples do they feel confident enough to wear sheer dresses or see-through tops and make themselves subject to the world's gaze.
Thus, ironically, an attempt to emancipate women, make them proud of their bodies and further equality, ends in lining the pockets of already very rich and invariably male cosmetic surgeons. Idealism, it seems, always collapses into gross materialism; for such is the evil genius of the world.
There's a number of elephants lumbering throughout Torpedo the Ark, with posts on wild elephants, zoo elephants, ceremonial elephants, and, as in this post from 2022, circus elephants, as poetically imagined by D. H. Lawrence.
For Lawrence, it wasn't the clowns, the acrobats, or the showgirls on horseback wearing their sparkling costumes
and feathers that most thrilled him when he went with Frieda to the circus in Toulon (France) in December 1928: it was the elephants.
Whilst the magnificent tusker elephants in Kandy certainly left their
impression on Lawrence, it was the circus elephants plodding around the ring and performing their tricks that inspired a series of short verses that he termed pansies.
As verses go, they're amusing enough. But I was rather surprised that Lawrence wasn't more sympathetic to these ancient pig-tailed monsters; that he seemed to be of the view that elephants not only look old and worn out, but belong to a prehistoric world or time gone by, as if they were relics or living fossils, who have nothing more to offer than entertainment value (and ivory).
And I was disappointed that he would suggest that performing beasts are having fun:
For whilst I'm not an expert in elephant psychology and welfare, I very much doubt they enjoy exposing their vast bellies or find it amusing to balance on a ball or drum. Nor - I imagine - do they want to plod or shuffle around a ring, or crawl on their knees in utmost caution.
Does anyone really believe that the strange postures and poses they are forced to take up come naturally? Or that training doesn't involve cruelty and the brutal use of bull-hooks, whips, and electric prods?
And let's not even mention the physical and emotional abuse these poor creatures are subjected to when they are not in the spotlight; confined and chained for hours on end, or transported from town to town in the back of trucks and boxcars.
I would conclude now as I concluded two years ago:
Even if Lawrence was writing a hundred years ago and so can't be expected to share a contemporary view of zoos and circuses in terms of so-called animal rights, it's strange that a writer who was acutely sensitive to animals in all their wild otherness or mystery - and who hated the attempt by mankind to impose its will over the natural world - should have not been angered or outraged by the indecent sight of an elephant performing on command.
Notes
[1] I reflect on this book - its aims and necessity, etc. - in a post published on 1 October 2018: click here.
