Notes on an Essay by Stéphane Sitayeb: 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos'

Fragment of stained glass (19th century)

7.2 x 3.2 cm (whole object) 

Royal Collection Trust

 

 

I. 

 

Stéphane Sitayeb's essay on sexualised objects in D. H. Lawrence's short fiction [1] is a fascinating read if, like me, you are interested in such things. 

 

However, I'm not sure I share his insistence on giving material items an all-too-human symbolic interpretation. Sometimes, a white stocking is a white stocking and that's precisely wherein its allure resides for the fetishist and object-oriented philosopher, if not, perhaps, for the literary scholar keen to open a "new figurative level of reading".  

 

And his claim that Lawrence resolved to "awaken his readers' spirituality by inducing a shock therapy paradoxically based on physicality, with explicit references to sexualized items and licentious tendencies", is not one I agree with either. In fact, I don't think Lawrence gave a fig for his readers' spirituality. 

 

And, again, just because an object stands upright, that doesn't always mean it has phallic significance; even Freud recognised that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and doesn't represent anything, or always express unconscious human desire. Thus, when Sitayeb says that "Lacanian readings of Lawrence have fathomed the hidden meaning of phallic objects in his fiction", I want to beat him about the head with a large dildo [2].

     

 

II. 

 

Moving on, we discover that Sitayeb wishes to discuss objects in terms of Eros and Thanatos; i.e., as objects that lead to fulfilment on the one hand, and as objects that lead to self-destruction on the other. He rightly points out, however, that Lawrence's work demonstrates a complex connection between Love and Death and thus his fictitious objects "stimulate at once procreation and destruction, creativity and annihilation". 

 

The result is that death becomes sexy and sex becomes decadent and perverse; not so much tied to an ideal of love, as to numerous paraphlias, often involving objects or the objectification of body parts. Sitayeb mentions several of these, but by no means exhausts the number of kinky elements in Lawrence's work (elements which I have discussed elsewhere on Torpedo the Ark: see here, for example). 

 

 

III.

 

Sitayeb's reading of 'The Captain's Doll' in terms of agalmatophilia and pygmalionism is good. Perhaps not as good as mine in terms of dollification - click here - but good nonetheless. He certainly makes some interesting points, such as this one: "The interchangeability between subject and object is conveyed by an inversion of the invariable principles governing mechanic and organic matter." 

 

Similarly, his reading of 'Sun' is good, but not as good as mine: click here. Sitayeb still thinks Juliet's story simply involves an anthropomorphic type of sexuality and Lawrence's "conception of Nature as a macrocosm incorporating man", but it's far more important philosophically than that.   

 

As for 'The Thimble' - a short story that formed the basis of the 1922 novella The Ladybird - the ornate object in question is not first and foremost a symbol of unfulfilled sexual desire and Mrs. Hepburn's fiddling with it is not a form of symbolic masturbation. This lazy and old-fashioned psychosexual reading just bores the pants off me and I really can't fathom why Sitayeb bothers to refer to it.   

 

 

IV. 

 

Sometimes, Sitayeb says things that I do not understand: "Lawrence studied the escalation of desire for both objects and subjects in the presence of imitation and rivalry patterns." But that's probably due to my ignorance of theories to do with mimesis on the one hand (I've certainly never read a word of René Girard) and my suspicion of the concept on the other (I have read a fair deal of Derrida and Deleuze). Nevertheless, I enjoyed Sitayeb's reading of the love triangle in The Fox [3]. 

 

I also enjoyed his excellent reading of 'The White Stocking' - another story involving a love triangle, but this time one "not only composed of human objects of desire", but also including a material item "sexualized to express an unsatisfied ambition such as an impossible sexual act" (i.e., the white stocking). Sitayeb says that this is more precisely termed a split-object triangle and I'll take his word for that. 

 

Sitayeb also notes:    

 

"In the absence of Elsie’s secret lover [...] the eponymous object acts as a reminder of a passionate adulterous dance and a catalyst reactivating the ecstasy of forbidden desire. In the presence of the object, Elsie is invested with a sexual energy, even away from her lover." 

 

And that's true, although I'm not sure I think Elsie vain and superficial simply because she likes silk stockings and jewellery; I mean, who doesn't? But then, having said that, I did call her a 'pricktease with pearl earrings' in a case study published on Torpedo the Ark four years ago: click here.

 

 

V.

 

Ultimately, what Sitayeb wants to suggest is that within consumer society, objects - be they directly or indirectly eroticised - become dangerous shape-shifting agents, as commodity culture becomes increasingly death-driven. And he thinks that's what Lawrence illustrates in 'Things', a tale which tells of the syllomania of an American couple addicted to collecting beautiful objects:

 

"Through their syllomania - the pathological need to acquire and hoard objects [...] - the couple [...] indirectly socializes and sexualizes the various objects that they have purchased to decorate their home by replacing their usual libido sexualis with a libido oeconomicus, thus linking Eros to Thanatos."

 

Sitayeb continues:

 

"Owning or consuming objects procures an immediate and transient feeling of satisfaction verging on ecstasy [...] which is nonetheless quickly replaced by an impression of void when their desire for objects becomes insatiable."      

 

Again, that's an insightful take on Lawrence's work and I was intrigued to see how Sitayeb related this to Baudrillard's thinking on the collusion between subjects and objects, the latter being an author of special interest to me, as torpedophiles will be aware:

 

"Baudrillard's main three arguments to account for men's attraction to trinkets are staged in Lawrence's short story. Both philosopher and author highlighted 1) the escapist function of objects of desire, since they represent a spatial and temporal vehicle transporting their owners into the past of various regions and cultures; 2) the feeling of conquest through the act of collecting, as the collector becomes conqueror; and 3) the access to higher social classes, a pose that D. H. Lawrence evokes with satirical overtones through the detached heterodiegetic narrator of 'Things'."

 

Expanding on this, Sitayeb writes:

 

"Far from attractive to the reader, the couple's bric-à-brac is presented as an overload of useless items due to an accumulation where all the objects are juxtaposed in a concatenation of long compound substantives preceded by adjectives evoking several national origins with little coherence. Just as every decorative item is deprived of real functionality, the words to name them also consist of mere signifiers for the reader, which confirms Baudrillard's idea that the difference between simple objects and objects of desire lies in "'the object's detachment from its functional, experienced reality'." [4]

 

Sitayeb concludes:

 

"Although Lawrence's ideology in 'Things' is comparable to Baudrillard's, the former interpreted the phenomenon as collective, not personal, warning his contemporary readers against the loss of identity resulting from the vain desire for objects, which he perceived as a post-traumatic stigma of a World War One."

 

 

VI.

 

The problem, ultimately, that I have with Sitayeb's reading of Lawrence is that he seems to subscribe to a notion of what Meillassoux termed correlationism - i.e., the idea that "we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" [5].

Why do I say that - and why does it matter? 

Well, I say it because Sitayeb posits a two-way process wherein the desiring human mind shapes the material universe or world of objects, whilst the latter either fulfil or destroy us, and this permanent and privileged relationship is a form of correlationism, is it not? 

 

And this matters because it serves to make reality mind-dependent and I find such anthropocentrism not only untenable but objectionable - be it in Lawrence's work, or readings of Lawrence's work.     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Stéphane Sitayeb, 'Sexualized Objects in D. H. Lawrence’s Short Fiction: Eros and Thanatos', Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 71, (Autumn 2018), pp. 133-147. Click here to read on openedition.org. All lines quoted are from the online version of the essay.

 

[2] It should also be noted that the phallus is not the same as an erect penis; a confusion that we can trace all the way back at least as far as Kate Millett, who claims in her Sexual Politics (1970), that Lawrence is guilty of transforming  his own model of masculinity into a misogynistic mystery religion founded upon the homoerotic worship of the penis. That's unfair and mistaken, as Lawrence himself emphasises that when he writes of the phallus, he is not simply referring to a mere member belonging to a male body and male agent. For Lawrence, the phallus is a genuine symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge not only between lovers, but to the future. Thus fear of the phallus - and frenzied efforts to nullify it in the name of a castrated spirituality, not least by confusing it with the penis - betray a great horror of being in touch. 

      Writing fifty years after Millett, one might have hoped Sitayeb would've not made this same error. I would suggest he see my Outside the Gate (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), where I discuss all this in relation to the case of Lady Chatterley, pp. 233-246. 

 

[3] My recent take on this novella by Lawrence can be found by clicking here. 

 

[4] Sitayeb is quoting from Baudrillard's Le Système des objets (1968), trans. James Benedict as The System of Objects, (Verso, 1996). 

      For me, Baudrillard's later work on objects (in relation, for example, to his theory of seduction) is far more interesting; here, he is still too much influenced by Marxist ideas and basically offers a political critique of consumer capitalism - as if, somehow, the subject might still differentiate themselves from the world of things and resist the evil genuis of the object.

 

[5] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude,  trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2008), p. 5.

Chase Me - Catch Me - Kill Me - Eat Me!

 

The leopard will never lie down with the antelope. 

Whilst the leopard is leopard, he must fall on the antelope, to devour her. 

This is his being and his peace, in so far as he has any peace. 

And the peace of the antelope is to be devourable.

 

 

I. 

 

Those readers familiar with Luc Besson's sci-fi thriller Lucy (2014), starring Scarlett Johansson as a woman who gains superhuman powers - including massively enhanced cognitive abilities - thanks to a (fictional) nootropic (CPH4), will doubtless recall the terrifying opening scene at the hotel when she delivers a metal briefcase to Mr. Jang (a South Korean crime boss played by Choi Min-sik) containing bags of the designer drug in blue-powdered form.

 

As she waits nervously in the lobby, scenes of a cheetah stalking an antelope flash on the screen, indicating the mortal danger she is in. When she is brought before Jang by his henchmen, she desperately pleads for her life as images of the cheetah having caught its tender young prey, carries it away to be eaten [1]. 

As a visual metaphor, it's hardly subtle and is perhaps something of a cliché, combining elements of the lurid and the banal that remind one of the kind of pornography that appeals to those men who enjoy the thought of commiting acts of savage sexual violence against vulnerable-looking doe-eyed girls, or to those who desire to swallow others, or fantasise about being devoured by a large predator, red in tooth and claw. 

 

 

II. 

 

The scene also reminds me, however, of a memorable passage in D. H. Lawrence's essay 'The Reality of Peace', that I'd like to share with readers:

 

"Look at the doe of the fallow deer as she turns back her eyes in apprehension. What does she ask for, what is her helpless passion? Some unutterable thrill in her waits with unbearable acuteness for the leap of the mottled leopard. Not of the conjunction with the hart is she consummated, but of the exquisite laceration of fear, as the leopard springs upon her loins, and his claws strike in, and he dips his mouth in her. This is the white-hot pitch of her helpless desire. She cannot save herself. Her moment of frenzied fulfilment is the moment when she is torn and scattered beneath the paws of the leopard, like a quenched fire scattered into the darkness. Nothing can alter it. This is the extremity of her desire, this desire for the fearful fury of the brand upon her. She is balanced over at the extreme edge of submission, balanced against the bright beam of the leopard like a shadow against him." [2]  

 

For Lawrence, these two types of animal - predator and prey - exist by virtue of juxtaposition; to negate the being of one would be to negate the being of the other. Similarly, any ideal attempt to reconcile the cat and the rat, the wolf and the lamb, or the leopard and the antelope, "is only to bring about their nullification" [3].

 

That's arguably true, but what's interesting is how Lawrence eroticises his philosophy - and does so in a manner that many commentators also find porno-lurid and clichéd. 

 

Michael Black, for example, notes how, in the above passage, the deer is female and the leopard male and he wonders what this tells us about Lawrence's sexual politics. It is one thing, writes Black, "to contemplate predation as a fact of nature; it is another to elevate it to a mystic principle" [4] which eroticises violent death and being devoured. 

 

He has a point, but I suspect Black fails to appreciate just how perverse Lawrence's writing is. 

 

For despite Lawrence's sexual politics mostly oscillating between the romantic and the reactionary, his work also provides us with an explicit A-Z of paraphilias and fetishistic behaviours, obliging readers to think about subjects including: adultery, anal sex, autogynephilia, cross-dressing, dendrophilia, female orgasm, floraphilia, gang rape, garment fetishism, homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, naked wrestling, objectum-sexuality, podophilia, pornography, psychosexual infantalism, sadomasochism, and zoophilia. [5] 

 

It's neither shocking nor suprising, therefore, that Lawrence should also allow an element of vorarephilia to enter his text ...    

   

 

Notes

 

[1] This scene can be watched on YouTube thanks to Universal Pictures All-Access: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 50. 

 

[3] Ibid. 

      I discussed Lawrence's philosophy of anatgonistic opposition - or what he likes to call polarity - at greater length with reference to 'The Reality of Peace' in an earlier (related) post: click here.

 

[4] Michael Black, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Philosophical Works, (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 440. 

      

[5] I'm quoting from my post on Torpedo the Ark entitled 'D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink' (19 July 2018): click here. 

Piquerism and Notes on Knife Play

The Ballard of Jazz the Knife 

(c. 1992)

 

 

I. Opening Remarks 

 

Piquerism - for those of you unfamiliar with the practice - is a perverse sexual interest in penetrating the skin of another person with sharp objects, including pins, razors, and knives. 

 

Most often, the targeted areas of the body are the breasts, buttocks, and genitals and whilst for many lovers it's a form of edge play or risk-aware consensual kink, for the true sadist - who laughs at the idea of obtaining permission or that libertinism should conform to a code of health and safety - piquerism only becomes interesting when it results in extreme suffering and death or is performed post-mortem.   

 

 

II. Biofictional Remarks

 

As a young child, I might be said to have had something of a piqueresque liking for sharp objects myself. I far preferred, for example, pricking balloons with a needle, than inflating them. And once, at school, I placed a drawing pin on a fat girl's chair in order to see if she too would explode with a bang [1].  

 

And whilst I had an extensive range of toy guns, my favourite thing to play with was a plastic dagger with a retractable blade with which I could create the illusion of having stabbed myself through the heart (or knifed a friend in the back).    

 

 

III. Literary Remarks

 

I don't know how D. H. Lawrence felt about this subject, but the following scenes are worth noting:

 

(i) Women in Love (Ch. VI) [2]

 

Pussum has confessed that she's not afraid of anything except black-beetles. She's certainly not afraid of blood ... 

 

So when a man with a pale, jeering face laughs at her, she suddenly jabs a knife across his hand, causing him to leap up, cursing. He glares at her with sardonic contempt as the blood begins to flow from the wound inflicted by this feline young woman. 

 

Birkin looked on with obvious displeasure, but Gerald is aroused by the girl's action. Later, in the taxi home, she sits close to him and grasps his hand in hers; "rapid vibrations ran through his blood and over his brain [...] and all his nerves were on fire, as with a subtle friction of electricity".     

 

(ii) The Plumed Serpent (Ch. XXIII) [3] 

Cipriano strips and publicly executes a group of prisoners with a bright, thin dagger ...

"'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he said in a loud, clear voice. 

      And swift as lightning he stabbed the blindfolded men to the heart, with three swift, heavy stabs. Then he lifted the red dagger and threw it down.

      'The Lords of Life are Masters of Death,' he repeated." 

Later, Cipriano and his fellow revolutionaries indulge in a little fetishistic blood play, dipping their hands into blood collected from the bodies of the executed men in a stone bowl and raising wet, red fists. They then sprinkle some of the blood on a fire in a neo-pagan religious ritual.   

(iii) The Woman Who Rode Away [4]

 

A bored, middle-class white woman goes in search of adventure and to give her heart to the god of the Chilchui Indians ... 

 

Two men grip her arms whilst two others "with curious skill slit her boots down with keen knives, and drew them off, and slit her clothing so that it came away from her". 

 

They also remove the pins from her hair and touch her on the breasts and back. Then they drug her and groom her over the course of several weeks into the role of sacrificial victim. Her captors, the Indians, are superficially kind to her; gentle and considerate. Yet she sensed their cruelty underneath and when the time comes for her to die, they show no hesitation in killing her:

 

"When she was fumigated, they laid her on a large flat stone, the four powerful men holding her by the outstretched arms and legs. Behind stood the aged man [...] holding a knife and transfixedly watching the sun; and behind him again was another naked priest, with a knife."

 

They are waiting for the right moment, when the red sun is about to sink: Then the old man will strike with his flint blade and accomplish the sacrifice ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] She didn't. And rather than encouraging my scientific curiosty, the teacher, Mrs. Horncastle, gave me a telling off in front of the class and made me apologise to poor, red-faced Mandy Howard.    

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 73. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 380.

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Woman Who Rode Away', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Lines quoted are on pp. 55 and 70. 

 

For another post involving knife play (and with reference to the case of Sid and Nancy), click here.

D. H. Lawrence: Priest of Kink

Ooh, he was awful - but I like him!

In a famous letter written to Sallie Hopkin on Christmas Day, 1912, Lawrence insists that once you know what love can be, then - even if the skies have fallen - "there's no disappointment anymore, and no despair". He then announces that his future task as a writer will involve "sticking up for the love between man and woman".

And, in the years and books that followed, he did indeed posit heterosexual coition as central to his erotics and defend what he called in his late work phallic marriage, i.e., marriage founded upon complimentary gender opposition, the seasonal and sacred rhythm of each calendar year, and a penis that only ever ejaculates inside a vagina.  

However, despite his own sexual politics forever oscillating between the romantic and the reactionary, Lawrence's work also provides us with an explicit A-Z of perversions, paraphilias and fetishistic behaviours, obliging readers to think about subjects including adultery, anal sex, autogynephilia, cross-dressing, dendrophilia, female orgasm, floraphilia, gang rape, garment fetishism, homosexuality, lesbianism, masturbation, naked wrestling, objectum-sexuality, podophilia, pornography, psychosexual infantalism, sadomasochism, and zoophilia.       

One is almost tempted to suggest that Lawrence was, in fact, a priest of kink ...

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 492-3. 

See also Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, (Oxford University Press, 1991). I am very much in agreement with Dollimore when he writes that there is a perverse dynamic at work within Lawrence's text and that he audaciously eroticises (and queers) Western metaphysics. Certainly, Lawrence is far more than a prophet of heterosexual experience conceived in a conventional manner and ultimately he deconstructs his own phallogocentrism; thus his continued importance and interest as a writer. 

Entomophilia 2: Crush Fetish

Crush20 by Unknown 1886 (2017)

deviantart.com

Although some men (and, let's be honest, it is mostly men) enjoy watching women crush larger animals including live rodents, birds, fish, and even kittens beneath their feet (a practice that is illegal in many countries, including the UK and US), most devotees of crush porn are content with the so-called soft version that makes do with sexually sacrificing invertebrates; insects, arachnids, crustaceans, molluscs, etc. (a practice against which there are no laws and creatures about whom even many animal rights activists don't seem to care).

As Jeremy Biles notes in an essay on Georges Bataille and those he likes to term (after Jeff Vilencia) crush freaks, the latter are:

"sexually aroused by the sight of an insect exploded beneath the pressure of a human foot - usually, but not necessarily, a relatively large and beautiful female foot. Sometimes the insects meet their demise under the force exerted by a naked big toe. Other times, it is the impaling heel of a stiletto or the raised outsole of a platform shoe that accomplishes the extermination."

Crucially, as Biles goes on to say: "the crush freak typically fantasizes identification with the insect as he or she masturbates, and savors the sense of sudden, explosive mutilation attendant upon the sight of the pedal extrusions". This is why crush fetishism cuts across both podophilia and macrophilia, although Biles himself - rather unconvincingly - prefers to relate crush fetishism to technophilia, i.e. sexual arousal associated with machinery, rather than the feet of giant women.

I suppose the key is that lovers of crush porn feel shortchanged by the usual money shot of an ejaculating penis - they want to see (and need to imagine) a whole body exploding in every direction at once; the agony and the ecstasy of bursting bodies is the ultimate transgression of boundaries, making the values of society go splat via a perverse act of sexual violence. 

Diminutive former child star Mickey Rooney may have disapproved - although his concern was more for the children of America than the creatures being stepped on - but crush fetishism, like most other perverse forms of love - including philosophy - has something important to teach us; not least the absurdity of insisting upon an essential connection between Eros and morality.


See: Jeremy Biles, 'I, Insect, Or Bataille and the Crush Freaks', Janus Head, 7(1), pp. 115-31 (Trivium Publications, 2004). Click here to read online.

See also: Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, (Vintage Books, 2010); particularly the chapter entitled 'Sex', pp. 267-90. 

In the above, Raffles points out that most crush fetishists don't give a damn about insects, even though they may intensely identify with them during a moment of "wildly disorienting arousal". And neither do they attempt some kind of becoming-insect in order to escape the limits of their humanity. They just want to get off by pretending to be in the position of a bug underfoot; i.e., they just want to feel themselves worthless, disgusting, and vulnerable. For crush fetishists, the insect is merely a means to an end.       

Those interested in reading part one of this post on insect fetish should click here.  

On Ecosexuality

Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle

Here Come the Ecosexuals

For those of you who don't know, Elizabeth Stephens is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and academic whose work explores themes of sexuality, gender, and politics.

Former prostitute and porn star Annie Sprinkle, meanwhile, played an important role in the sex positive feminist movement during the 1980s and has since built up over thirty-five years of experience in erotically charged entertainment, education, and performance art. 

Today, Sprinkle and her partner Stephens are committed to queering the environmental movement and to this end have declared themselves to be ecosexuals. They have also written an ecosex manifesto and established a new field of research and aesthetic practice called sex ecology.

Central to their philosophy is the notion of replacing the metaphor of Earth Mother with that of Earth Lover, in the hope that this might "entice people to develop a more mutual, pleasurable, sustainable, and less destructive relationship with the environment". This means not only treating the Earth with kindness and respect, but also engaging in libidinal relationships with the material world; hugging trees, caressing rocks, being pleasured by waterfalls, etc.

Now, you might be thinking at this point that, as someone who has written enthusiastically on floraphilia, I would happily and unconditionally offer my support to Stephens and Sprinkle - but you'd be mistaken. Unfortunately, I have a number of problems with their project, but these might, for the sake of convenience, be boiled down to just two: firstly, I don't share their idealism and, secondly, I don't like the way they attempt to impose a unified and recognisable sexual identity upon a diverse range of paraphilias and polymorphously perverse practices.

Let's examine each of these points in a bit more detail ...   

1. Like many others before them, including nature worshipping Romantics and blood and soil loving Nazis, Stephens and Sprinkle quickly fall into idealism and, related to this, anthropocentric conceit as they project their own egos (their own politics, their own prejudices, their own peccadilloes) into everything; not just the Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the Stars to boot. Their ecosexuality is thoroughly - and disappointingly - allzumenschliche.

They would do well, in my view, to learn from Lawrence on this, who, with reference to the case of Thomas Hardy, warns that to try and subject the earth to your own idealism always ends badly - not least of all for you as an idealist. He writes:

"What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you ... that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist.
      Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother-earth. ...
      You can't idealize mother-earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons [or, in this case, daughters]. None.
      If you are a child of mother-earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self ... as you discard your clothes at night."

Put simply, the Earth doesn't want to nourish you like a child nor accept you as a lover or spouse; it is massively and monstrously indifferent to your existence and your longings.

2. One of the joys of floraphilia is that it's a paraphilia and not a legitimised form of love; the prefix para implying not only that it exists alongside the latter, but that it's abnormal. And that's how I like it and want it to remain. To be pollen-amorous is to allow one's desire to free float on the passing breeze; it is to become-flower, which is to say, beautiful and soulless. It's not about constructing some new form of sexual identity and of tethering the latter to an essential truth.

Foucault, of course, brilliantly analysed the dangers and disadvantages of this with reference to the birth of the modern homosexual, arguing that homosexuality only "appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" subject to an entirely new discursive regime.

I'm sure Stephens and Sprinkle are aware of all this and so it surprises me to say the least that they insist on positing ecosexuality as a primary drive and identity, or some sort of ontological category into which all other sexual positionings - GLBTQI - can ultimately be collapsed (because we are all natural beings and all sex is ecosex).

I wish them well, but I also wish they'd exercise a little more philosophical caution and nuance ...       


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Dana's "Two Years before the Mast"', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley, (Penguin Books, 1998). 

Readers interested in knowing more about the work of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle and reading their ecosex manifesto can visit: sexecology.org

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Splashback (An Exchange of Views on Urine Therapy)

Following a recent post on undinism and the value of sentiment within a post-Romantic world [click here], I received the following email from someone describing himself as an alternative-thinking Lawrentian:

"Thank you for a fascinating piece. Around fifteen years ago, I became a vegan and started to think seriously about questions concerning nutrition and well-being. I was eventually introduced by a friend to urine therapy and have since gained a significant insight into this particular subject.
      Might you not publish a future post that discusses the amazingly beneficial properties of urine? I believe your readers would benefit greatly if they were to discover how pee is good for hair, skin, eyes, nose, throat and ears and can be used to treat all manner of minor cuts, bruises, and stings thanks to its practical healing powers. There's nothing magical about this - it' simply that urine is rich in nutrients which the body has been unable to absorb.
      Finally, can I just add that your pee is only as good as your diet; I wouldn't recommend meat-eaters, sugar-addicts, or consumers of salty junk food to practice urine therapy. The pee produced mid-flow by a healthy, clean-living, organic vegan is ideal - rather lovely tasting, in fact, and it makes a marvellous mouthwash (don't worry either about getting it on your face and hands, as it makes a perfect moisturiser)." 

Now, as anyone familiar with this blog will know, this is the kind of tosh that I'm increasingly impatient with. Not only do I think it nonsense, I also think it potentially dangerous nonsense; when, for example, such alternative therapies are not only used to (ineffectually) treat minor ailments, but are also promoted as ancient and natural miracle cures for serious conditions including cancer.

And so, politely, I replied to my correspondent, explaining that whilst I was perfectly happy for him to gargle with piss each morning, I didn't share his beliefs and wouldn't be writing a post promoting urotherapy anytime soon. This brought forth the following:

"May I say how disappointed I am with your ignorant rejection of urine therapy, which betrays prejudice and puritanism on your part. I fear you have swallowed one too many conventional lies and simply don't understand.

      Remember, a large and unscrupulous element in the pharmaceutical industry don't want you to be self-reliant and to treat yourself. It's bad for their business. They, and those involved in cruel and unreliable animal research, will do anything to rubbish vitally important alternative therapies and it's only too easy for them to find skeptics like you who will sneer and try to trash uropathy. But before you say something insulting, I would ask you, as one Lawrentian to another, to consider his hostility towards modern medical science and mainstream thinking."

Ok - let's consider Lawrence's position ... It's true that he subscribed to all kinds of crackpot ideas himself and spent a lifetime ignoring the advice of doctors. But it's also true that Lawrence keenly differentiated between bodily flows which, whilst complimentary, are nevertheless utterly different in direction.

Thus, for Lawrence, there are vital forces and creative libidinal flows and, in stark contrast, excrementory functions that result in flows of waste toward dissolution:

"In really healthy human being the distinction between the two is instant [and] our profoundest instincts are perhaps instincts of opposition between the two flows.
      But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead, and then the two flows become identical. This is the secret of really vulgar people and pornography: the sex flow and the excrement flow is the same thing to them."

This is why Lawrence was vehemently opposed to coprophilia and urophilia (or hardsports and watersports) and why he would also, I believe, have had little interest in coprophagy or urophagia (shit-eating and piss-drinking) - whatever the supposedly therapeutic benefits of the latter.


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lines quoted are on p. 242. 

Note that whilst my correspondent requested anonymity, he kindly gave me permission to quote from his emails, thereby presenting his side of the argument in his own words, for the purposes of writing this post. 

Having said that, readers are reminded that all characters portrayed in this post are fictitious: no identification with actual persons outside of the text should be inferred. For a further and fuller disclaimer click here.

Vajankle

 The vajankle designed and sold by Sinthetics

The vajankle - as the name suggests - is a sex toy designed for podophiles; a synthetic foot that comes complete with an inbuilt vagina. And a French pedicure. Whilst I'm sure it was developed with good intentions (i.e. to give pleasure), I think it fails for two reasons. 

Firstly, due to its almost-but-not-quite natural appearance it triggers an uncanny valley response (i.e. a feeling of revulsion). Thus the vajankle is aesthetically disturbing; it makes one think of heavy-footed zombies stumbling about or corpses lying in a morgue, rather than bare-footed beauties with dainty feet and lively little toes. 

Doubtless there are necrophiles aroused by the former and by fantasies of mutilation, but most foot fetishists love the vitality and playfulness of pretty feet as they dangle on the end of lovely legs; they wish to kiss and caress the objects of their desire, not chop them off.

Secondly, the vajankle completely misses the point of a fetish for a genuine devotee; it isn't merely a substitute for something else or a type of foreplay before the real event - i.e. genital penetration. Podophiles love feet and have no interest in sexual intercourse as traditionally conceived; they're not looking to ejaculate within a vagina, be it real or otherwise. 

In other words, they subscribe to an entirely different economy of bodies and their pleasures than those who automatically insert their penises where they've been instructed to put them. Foot fetishists, like paraphiliacs in general, want to find new uses for old organs; transforming sex into an exploratory ordeal in which, as Ballard puts it, the body becomes a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities. 

Placing a fake pussy into a rubber foot is, therefore, a banal and laughably naive gesture; both unimaginative and reactionary. There's nothing depraved or deviant about it. It's an attempt to bring the fetishist back into line by reinforcing the view that nothing is more gratifying or exciting than the membrane of a vagina (an orifice designated as the only legitimate and natural place of orgasm). 

Ultimately, what makes perverts philosophically interesting is the fact that whilst they may want to masturbate at every given opportunity, they also want to build bodies without organs and to have done with the judgement of God ...   

In an Age of Courtship Disorder

Kurt Freund (1914-1996)

Courtship disorder is a theory first put forward in the 1980s by Kurt Freund; a sexologist who, until then, was best known for his pioneering work in the field of phallometry or PPG.

According to the theory, certain paraphilias are best understood when viewed as related forms of aberrant courtship behaviour in human males. In other words, they should not be examined independently of one another as conditions in their own right, but rather as symptomatic of a single underlying syndrome. These paraphilias are voyeurism, exhibitionism, frotteurism, and biastophilia (or what Freund terms preferential rape) and they can be seen as anomalous expressions of the following species-typical courtship phases: 

(i) looking to find someone to love and making an initial appraisal of their suitability as a partner 

(ii) attempting to catch the eye of the one you fancy via pre-tactile interaction (smiling, flirting, etc.)    

(iii) becoming physically intimate (kissing, cuddling, petting, etc.) 

(iv) engaging, finally, in full sexual intercourse. 

Now, whether perverts with a penchant for the above paraphilias lack the skills to participate in what is often a long and sophisticated game of seduction played between would-be lovers - or simply lack the patience - I don't know.

It might even be that they regard conventional courtship rituals as a form of dishonesty and deceit and therefore see their own behaviour as an attempt to openly bypass social hypocrisy; cutting to the chase by, ironically, cutting out the chase. Again, I don't know.

However, it should be pointed out that their activities are not merely forms of impatience and anti-social behaviour, but also illicit and lacking in any consideration of those whom they perv upon non-consensually and - in the case of the paraphilic rapist - violently.

Having said that, it might be argued that within our pornified culture of Tinder, twerking, and Chatroulette, courtship disorder is now the new norm ...