On Piss Play and the Revaluation of Values

Mario Tauzin (c. 1930)

I recently read that English sexologist and social reformer Havelock Ellis was impotent until the age of sixty when, to his surprise, he discovered he could be aroused by the charming sight of a woman pissing. 

He was so delighted with this discovery, that he gave his own perverse pleasure the scientific-sounding name of undinism and, after the death of his wife, the openly lesbian writer and feminist, Edith Lees, Ellis formed a relationship with a French woman, Françoise Lafitte, who, apparently, was more than happy to indulge her man's penchant for watersports.

Today, undinism is more usually known as urophilia or urolagnia. Either way, it refers to an erotic fascination with urine and watching someone piss, or, indeed, having them piss on you and perhaps consent to be pissed on in turn. Like most paraphilias, there are many variations on a basic idea. Some like the sight, some like the sound, some like the smell of urine. And some even like the taste. 

Other illicit lovers find something joyous and liberating in the thought of an amorous object with a particular propensity to pee. To paraphrase Roland Barthes and thereby allow a little queer sentimentalism into the text: 

By releasing the contents her bladder without constraint, hers is a body in liquid expansion, a body showered in gold. To wee together, to play together, to come together, is to rediscover the innocence of early childhood.

Autogynephilia (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2016)

Garry Shead: The Dancing Lesson

There's been a significant amount of discussion around the question of D. H. Lawrence's sexuality.

Unfortunately, most of it has been conducted in boring, restrictive and ultimately untenable binary terms. And so, despite all the heat generated, there's not been much light shed on the subject. Frequent accusations of misogyny, homophobia, and phallocentrism haven't helped matters either.       

Not that these accusations are entirely unjustified. With reference to the latter charge, for example, it's true that Lawrence privileges, fetishizes, and wants to be penetrated by the phallus. But what's most interesting - to me at least - is that he expresses a genderqueer desire in his final novel to be penetrated as a woman, not as a man. 

In other words, Lawrence shows signs of anatomic autogynephilia and is clearly excited by the thought of having a female body so that he might experience vaginal as well as anal penetration. He doesn't want to be Mellors, he wants to be Connie and in Lady Chatterley's Lover he is able to intimately describe a woman's lusts, fears, and hopes not because he was in some ways a bit womanly or had a feminine eye for fashion and rugged gamekeepers, but because he's unafraid of exploring an eonistic fantasy of sexo-aesthetic inversion, regardless of the ridicule or opprobrium this would inevitably result in.

This makes him not only a courageous and transgressive writer, but also one who still has something to say to us today - after the orgy - in a transsexual age of gender fluidity and gender flux. Lawrence, it seems, the kinky crossdreamer, wasn't as committed to essentialism as many critics believe; he often uses terms such as 'male' and 'female' metaphorically and knows very well how these things are constructed, stylised, and performed.   


Notes

Autogynephilia is a term coined by the sexologist Ray Blanchard, to refer to "a man's paraphilic tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman". See 'The concept of autogynephilia and the typology of male gender dysphoria', in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 177 (10): 616–623 (1989).

Eonism is a term coined by the sexologist Havelock Ellis, which he derived from the name of the 18thC French spy and diplomat, Chevalier d'Éon, who claimed to be a woman in a male body and spent the second half of his life dressed in female clothing. For Ellis, eonism is an extreme form of mimetic identification by the male with the admired object (woman) on what may be a neurotic basis. See Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Volume VII: Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (1928).