Video still from Masshole Love (2013)
dir. by and starring Rebecca Goyette as Lobsta Blue
I.
Marine biologist Marah J. Hardt has a particular fascination with the wet and wild sex lives of sea creatures, including lobsters, which, apparently, are more promiscuous than prawns and far kinkier even than crabs ...*
For example, in order to seduce a larger male lobster - which is an aggressive and territorial loner by nature - a female lobster will first moult her shell, releasing pheromones into the water as she does so, and indicating by her display of naked vulnerability that she represents no threat, but is only looking for a good time.
As the male comes closer to get a better look, the female lobster will then piss in his face, her urine acting as a potent aphrodisiac.
After playing this erotic game over a period of several days, the male lobster is completely smitten and the female lobster's scent has a transformative effect on his behaviour, turning him into an amenable lover desperate to get her back to his place - usually just a hole in the sand - so that they might mate in oceanic bliss.
During coition, the male lobster turns the soft-bodied female over, mounts her, and inserts a modified first pair of pleopods (known as gonopods) into the receptaculum seminalis of the lucky lady. Having double-dicked the object of his affection, the male then uses a hardened structure located on a second pair of pleopods to help push gelatinous globs of sperm into her semen-storing structure.
The male then deposits an additional gooey material to the outside of the female's receptacle which hardens within a few hours and effectively forms a plug, thereby ensuring no sperm will dribble out (this spunk plug falls off after several days).
Once the deed is done, the female flips her tail out from under the male and he releases her from his tender embrace.
II.
Inspired by the reproductive activities of our deep sea friends, New York based interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Goyette (aka Lobsta Girl) has produced an interesting body of work that she terms Lobsta Porn and which explores human sexual fantasy (and sexual violence) in light of the love lives of lobsters and from a feminist perspective.
In Masshole Love (2013), for example, a short film shot primarily in Provincetown (MA) - a favourite coastal destination of artists and members of the LGBT+ community - Goyette plays the role of Lobsta Blue, a woman who confronts a past history of sexual abuse by dedicating her life to erotic performance art whilst dressed in a bright blue lobster costume.
In this work, as in others, Goyette offers a magical mix of burlesque, street theatre, psycho-sexual therapy and lobstasexcitation, in order to encourage audience members to discover their own marine sexual identities within the deep blue sea (the latter imagined as a polymorphously perverse space or queer universe).
III.
Unfortunately, I have the same kind of concerns, philosophically speaking, with Goyette's lobsta porn as I have with the ecosexual project devised by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: click here and here, where I express these concerns in some detail.
In short, I fear that her sex radicalism, like theirs, is ultimately just another form of moral idealism and remains - no matter how you dress it up, be it with flowers or lobster claws - human, all too human ...
Having said that, if it makes Ms Goyette happy to produce and exhibit this faux-transgressive work and other people pleased to view and to buy it - and if no actual lobsters are harmed - then what do I really care?
I would like to know, however, what she plans on doing after the aquatic orgy ...?
* See: Marah J. Hardt, Sex in the Sea, (St. Martin's Press, 2016). Readers interested in listening to her 2019 TED talk on this topic can do so by clicking here.
