Loving the Alien (Notes on Exophilia)

Dream-sketch by Zena
(untitled, undated)

As Roland Barthes once pointed out, the art of love has no history. And so there's no progress in pleasures - nothing but mutations and perverse deviations. So it can't be said that exophilia is simply an unearthly development of xenophilia; loving the alien is not merely a substitute for loving foreigners.

Rather, it's a unique form of desire that deserves to be considered in its own right, even if its devotees share traits with other paraphiles who have a penchant for inhuman and non-human lovers and long for a sexual experience that is truly out of this world (what the journalist Annalee Newitz charmingly describes as an alien fuckfest).   

What, then, is exophilia, in essence, if you will ...?

Obviously, such a question is difficult - perhaps impossible - to answer; who can truly say what love is (particularly forms of love that are by their very nature queer and which often involve extreme as well as abnormal activities)? 

However, for those who imagine the phenomenon of alien abduction to involve human test subjects being taken secretly and against their will by extraterrestrial biological entities in order to be experimented upon in ways that include a non-consensual sexual component, I suppose exophilia might be said to be primarily a sci-fi rape fantasy or close encounter of the kinky kind. 

Procedures such as vaginal and anal probing, the collection of semen and harvesting of ova, etc. all speak of medical fetish transplanted out of the lab or hospital and projected into the still more sterile and even more hi-tech environment of a spacecraft. It's intergalactic masochism in which submission is made to an alien overlord rather than a woman in furs.            

Of course, not all exophiles are so passive in their pleasures; some dream of violently penetrating alien bodies and inflicting a maximum amount of pain and suffering upon creatures from outer-space ...

Supervert, for example, is the author of a philosophically-informed, pornographic work entitled Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, in which the protagonist, Mercury de Sade, is a serial-killer looking to make contact with EBEs - not to befriend them, learn from them, or submit to them; but so that he might rape, torture and murder them. 

It's a deeply unpleasant read. But it's also a necessary counternarrative to the moral idealism of Star Trek in which humans and non-humans all rub along together in a kind of rainbow alliance; or, again to paraphrase Annalee Newitz, the playful cosmic permissiveness of Barbarella in which everyone fucks, but no one is ever fucked-up or fucked-over.                    


Notes

Those interested in knowing more about Supervert's Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish (2001) can click here. Or, to read a sample chapter, here. 

Those interested in reading Annalee Newitz's review of the above as it appears on AlterNet (18 Aug 2002), can click here. 

This post was inspired by (and is dedicated to) Zena, who provided the lovely illustration above.  

Mind the Gap (Notes on Heidegger and the Japanese Concept of Ma)

As much as I love objects, it's the pathos of distance between them which fascinates the most; that gulf of negative space and suspended time in which relations are conceived (for even love is a product of the void). 

The Japanese have a word for it: ma - sometimes translated into English as interval or gap, though I doubt very much the verbal injunction to mind the gap issued by London Underground invites us to consider the play between being and non-being (or form and formlessness). But then, to be fair, London Underground are more concerned with passenger safety when leaving the train, than opening ontological doors through which a black sun might shine.   

However, despite the prosaic nature of rail bosses, there are thinkers in the West who have shown a sensitivity to the concept of ma. Heidegger would be an obvious example, who, in a meditation on the thingness of things, has this to say about the essence of a jug: the jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel. That is to say, it's the holding nature of the jug that is crucial. But this holding nature belongs to the emptiness of the jug - it's not a physical property of the clay as such.

In other words, Heidegger is arguing that although the sides and bottom of the jug appear to hold the liquid contents, at most they merely contain the fluid. We pour the wine, for example, between the sides and over the bottom of the jug and whilst they are obviously crucial to the operation, they are not essential; the wine flows into the empty space and it is this void that does the vessel's holding.

It's for this reason that the potter who is credited with making the jug, doesn't really make it at all; he simply shapes the clay on the wheel. Or, more precisely, he shapes the void, which ultimately shapes the jug, the potter and all things (including music, language, flower arrangements and peace of mind).  


See: Heidegger, 'The Thing', essay in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1971), pp. 163-80.

The Southend Venus (Alternative Version)

Stephen Alexander: Birth of a Southend Venus (2016)

Lawrence writes that the gods exist according to the soul's desire. Which doesn't mean they are merely imaginary or mind-dependent, but that their becoming-manifest does require a creative act of attention on our part; what some might call an act of faith.

In other words, in order to experience their presence - in order to glimpse them in the limbs and bodies and faces of men and women (in their movements, gestures and expressions) - then one must learn to see that which the camera cannot capture. 

And so to the young woman I'm describing as a Southend Venus ...

Seen as a low resolution image snapped on a smartphone, it's true that she looks quite ordinary and anonymous; just another pretty teen in the universal outfit of denim shorts and t-shirt.

But, seen with an eye that is free from optical complacency and which is sensitive to far more than light, her flesh suddenly gleams with transcendent loveliness and she embodies that innocence and forgetfulness that betokens an Essex Aphrodite.            

 

The Southend Venus

And what's the good of a woman 
unless she's a glimpse of a goddess of some sort?

For Lawrence, women in whom one cannot glimpse something immortal  - that is to say, a transcendent loveliness of being, unfolding like a rose in the fourth dimension - are little more than animated lumps of clay.

Such women may be very attractive. And may even have winning personalities. But if their flesh lacks a divine gleam or sparkle, then they'll ultimately fail to engender any true sense of awe in a man. 

I thought of this when I watched a friend's teenage daughter emerge from the grey sea at Southend and stroll along the shoreline holding a phone to her ear like a shell, softly laughing and chatting, and pushing her wet hair from her face.

At that moment, her bare limbs pallid with light from the silent sky behind, she embodied Aphrodite far more perfectly than Ursula Andress or Pamela Anderson ever could.

For despite all their Hollywood glamour, they fail to manifest the purity and the stillness that speaks of the sacred and all the lovely morning-wonder that can be found even on a beach in Essex. 
      

See: D. H Lawrence, 'Glimpses' and 'The Man of Tyre', The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 

Note: An alternative version of this post can be read by clicking here.

Love in the Sixth Form (In Memory of Dagmar Starkey)

Me and Miss Starkey (Xmas 1980)

Dagmar Starkey wasn't the first (or even the only) girl I had a crush on in the sixth form. But she was the one, looking back, I remember with most fondness.

She not only had a non-Essex face (her mother was German), but one that was a bit inhuman - like a sly and rather satanic-looking cat. She also had something of a bad reputation; as a troublemaker and a tease. No one seemed to trust her. And no one seemed to much like her. But I did: I liked her very much - ever after her teratophilia came to light. 

Indeed, I think my own xenophilia can be traced back to my adolescent love for Dagmar Starkey: for if today east European girls are working in every local shop, pub, and restaurant, back in the late '70s she and her sister Inge were the nearest thing to foreign bodies found on Harold Hill.

I remember once she got jealous when I expressed an amorous interest in a young teacher called Miss Davies, who, like Toyah Willcox, came from Birmingham, spoke with a lisp, and was sort of sexy in an unconventional manner. "I don't want you to have feelings for that old trout," she said.

Later on, however, I discovered to my chagrin that she'd been having a secret affair with my history and politics teacher; a committed Marxist who helped fuck up my 'A' level result by convincing me to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet Union.

Before entering the teaching profession, Mr Long had briefly worked in a factory where he'd suffered a nasty mishap, badly maiming his hand in a piece of machinery - much to the fascination and horror of his students. When I asked Dagmar about the relationship, she told me she'd only got involved with him because she wanted to know "how it would feel to be fingered by someone with a deformity".  

You have to admire such perverse curiosity, such willingness to be touched by monsters. It shows a very special nature; one that doesn't allow conventional feelings of disgust or shame to interfere with a desire for experience. Like the more interesting of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun, I think Dagmar understood love to be an exploratory ordeal in which the body is the site of more than mere pleasure ...

We're All Going on a Summer Holiday (Notes on the Photography of Bernard Faucon)

Bernard Faucon: Les Grandes Vacances (1976-81)

bernardfaucon.net

Doesn't time fly?

It's now forty years since the scorching hot summer of '76, when French photographer Bernard Faucon first began assembling material for a five-year project that combined the ravishing, short-lived beauty of actual boys, with the rather more unsettling - though equally mythic - beauty of synthetic beings (in this case mannequins) into a queer form of tableau. 

A project which came to be known as Les Grandes Vacances and that might best be described - borrowing if I may from the clinical language of paraphilia - as a work of paedopygmalionism, although I'm fairly certain that the perverse love of boys, be they real or artificial, isn't really the point of these pictures.

What then, one might ask, is the point of these disconcerting images taken from a summer camp pitched deep in the Uncanny Valley? 

To be honest, I'm not sure I can answer this question. Even Roland Barthes recognised that the puzzle they pose and leave dangling before our eyes - "which cannot look away and yet cannot pierce their mystery" - is a genuine one and thus never fully solvable. 

Ultimately, no photograph, if it's any good, can ever be explained; if we could always articulate what we wanted to say, then no one would bother taking pictures which, far from speaking a thousand words, present an enigmatic, silent, and still form of truth.    

It's interesting to note, however, that Faucon - a philosophy graduate of the Sorbonne who initially worked as a fine art painter - gave up photography in the mid-1990s and began to reinvent himself as a writer, suggesting that the pen remains not only mightier than the sword, but the camera and the paintbrush too.  

See: Roland Barthes, 'Bernard Faucon', in Signs and Images, trans. Chris Carter, (Seagull Books, 2016). 

On the History and Politics of the Bikini

A bikini-clad 19-year-old Brigitte Bardot 
at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953

Someone writes to say that my recently published post discussing the French burkini ban [click here] left them feeling irritated and disappointed:

"You not only failed to condemn the actions of the mayor of Cannes, but you also missed the opportunity to put on record your opposition to all forms of racism and Islamophobia. Instead, by placing a serious issue within the context of a song from a Hollywood musical of all things, you turn it into something that can be treated in a lighthearted manner. Let me assure you it isn't funny for those Muslim women affected by the ban." 

Apart from the slightly worrying fact that I seem to irritate and disappoint a lot of people these days - and not just readers of this blog with a proverbial bee in their bonnet, chip on their shoulder, or stick up their arse - this criticism essentially leaves me cold. Cold with contempt, rather than in the sense of being unmoved or indifferent. For not only is it presumptuous, but it's ultimately an attempt to force me into taking a position in line with the speaker's own. And - for the record - I'm not sure I share my critic's ideological interpretation of events, or political worldview.

First of all, I don't think in oppositional or dualistic terms. Nor do I subscribe to any form of ascetic militancy or militant asceticism that seeks to pass judgement. So I didn't fail to condemn the actions of David Lisnard - I chose not to.

What's more, I sympathise with the mayor and, whilst not wishing to endorse his actions, I understand where he's coming from. For he's not simply reacting to the terrible events in Nice, so much as actively defending the values of Western modernity; values which, for the fashion-conscious, sexually liberated inhabitants of the Côte d'Azur, are embodied forever in the ideal figure not of Marianne, but a bikini-clad Brigitte Bardot.

In order for this to be appreciated, perhaps a brief history of the bikini is in order ...

Whilst the two-piece swimsuit existed even in classical antiquity, the modern itsy-bitsy bra-top and teenie-weenie bottoms combination as we know it today was designed by a Frenchman, Louis Réard, in 1946. He named it after an atomic bomb test site in the Marshall Islands, Bikini Atoll, and hoped that his revealing outfit would create "an explosive commercial and cultural reaction".

Made from just 200 square centimetres of material, the bikini was advertised as smaller than the smallest swimsuit and came packed in a little box measuring 5 x 5 cm. When Réard had difficulty finding a model willing to showcase his daring and devastating design for the atomic era, he hired a 19-year-old nude dancer, Micheline Bernardini, from the Casino de Paris. Following her appearance at a press launch on July 5th, 1946, held at the Piscine Molitor, she received over 50,000 fan letters.         

Although initially banned in Catholic countries including Spain, Portugal and Italy, following the Vatican's declaration that it was sinful, the bikini soon became a must have item of beachwear among young women; particularly after fashion models and film stars, such as Brigitte Bardot, posed in them for glamorous photo shoots. I think a reporter writing for Le Figaro understood best what was going on:

"People were craving the simple pleasures of the sea and the sun. For women, wearing a bikini signaled a kind of second liberation. There was really nothing sexual about this. It was instead a celebration of freedom and a return to the joys in life."

That surely is the crucial point: the bikini is not merely a skimpy swimsuit. Rather, it's a symbolic garment and a vital form of self-expression within the post-War Western world; a sign that we belong and want to belong to a more liberal and more secular form of society in which - rightly or wrongly - truth loves to frolic semi-naked on the sand.    

And that's why I don't think it's being culturally insensitive to ban women in burkinis from the beautiful beaches of the French Riviera. Au contraire, I think it's arrogant that some Muslim citizens display such wilful ignorance of the history, politics and fashion of modern France that they fail to see why the burkini is likely to cause offence; it's an affront to the European way of life and to French joie de vivre.  

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Let's Call the Whole Thing Off ...?

Sadly, it seems that things have come to a pretty pass in the South of France, where the mayor of Cannes has recently ordered a beach ban on women wearing sharia-approved swimwear.

Whatever one may think of this, it's obvious, is it not, that the relationship between the West and Islam is flatlining. They wear burkinis, whilst we love bikinis and one wonders if it isn't time to abandon the great social experiment of multiculturalism. For if the Muslim populations of Europe cannot integrate - and will not assimilate - then something must be done. Or goodness know what the outcome will be.

In the wise words of Ira Gershwin, let's call the whole thing off ...

But, having said that, it's worth remembering that Gershwin's wonderful song also includes the following verse:

But oh, if we call the whole thing off

then we must part.
And oh, if we ever part,
then that might break my heart.

Perhaps, in the end, we need each other. So maybe we'd better think twice before calling for something we'd come to deeply regret.


Note: "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" was written by George and Ira Gershwin for the musical comedy Shall We Dance, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (dir. Mark Sandrich, 1937). Get your skates on and click here.

Him With His "Tail" in His Mouth

"This said, his guilty hand pluck'd his piece, 

and as the grim Ouroboros he did feast."

I can understand Lawrence's philosophical dislike for the ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail. For eternal cycles, in which origins and ends are revealed to be one and the same, are abhorrent to many of us. And, like Lawrence, I prefer my serpents to have sharp fangs, moving about on the alert, heads held aloft, experiencing the world with a gentle flick of a forked tongue and dancing round the heels of Woman, not coiled up into endless self-reflexivity.

And it's this latter aspect of the ouroboros - the suggestion of self-absorption and self-satisfaction - that really troubles Lawrence I suspect. For what this ancient Egyptian symbol ultimately refers us to is not a model of infinity or primordial wholeness, but the divine practice of auto-fellatio.

In other words, him with his tail in his mouth is really a god with his cock in his mouth and I can imagine Lawrence - to whom all forms of masturbation are anathema - finding that extremely hard to swallow. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there are numerous ancient texts describing acts of oral self-stimulation; a practice favoured not only by Egyptian deities, but by those mortals devoted, flexible and well-endowed enough to also enjoy such.              

For example, in a document held by the British Museum, one can read a short poem embedded in a prose account of creation which narrates how the sun god Ra created the sibling deities Shu (god of air) and Tefnut (goddess of precipitation), by sucking himself off and spitting his semen onto the ground. Never in a million years is Lawrence going to feel comfortable with this queer act of generation.

Indeed, I think he'd sooner accept that in the beginning was the Word, than that in the beginning was a self-administered blowjob.


Notes

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

The document I refer to held by the British Museum, is the Papyrus Bremner-Rhind, written c. 4th century BCE. Obviously, I haven't read the original - nor could I - but I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the translation and reading by Egyptologist David Lorton, whose essay Autofellatio and Ontology (1995), can be read by clicking here.

Hot Dog (Another Postcard from Southend)

If anything symbolizes the soul of Essex Man, it's this grotesque anthropomorphic hot dog figure located in Southend-on-Sea: crude, greedy, infantilized, self-satisfied and, ultimately, self-cannibalizing.

It's meant to be amusing: but it isn't funny. It is, however, despite its obscenity, an authentic work of art in that, like Basil Hallward's notorious portrait of Dorian, it records the truth of human corruption.

If the locals had any shame, they'd hide this hideous thing out of sight, or toss it off the end of the pier. But, brazenly, they erect it on Marine Parade as a form of challenge and provocation; a passive-aggressive response to the culture of endless consumption that made them what they are.