The abyss, gazing also.
Well, her links are bloggered, but Emma’s got a fun post comparing the right wing’s Clenis™ fixation with a certain Johnathon Harker—
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one’s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer, nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
Which doesn’t sound terribly dextrous yet, but! As Emma points out:
Then, of course, having survived the seduction and properly recoiling from all that sexuality, Jonathan becomes a vampire hunter. He’s going to destroy that which nearly had him enthralled. Under the tutelage of old Van Helsing, he goes on to destroy Lucy Westenra (a not-so-good girl who really, really enjoyed it and therefore deserved death), and finally to the count’s coffin and the final stake. Now safe in his bloodless daylight world, Jonathan can go on to become the perfect proper Victorian gentleman.
Thing is, I have a sneaky suspicion that Jonathan always regretted, just a little bit, his vampiric coitus interruptus…
Now before somebody starts gibbering, let me say that I am not suggesting that Limbaugh or O’Reilly are repressing unhealthy lust for Bill Clinton (please God, help me get that picture OUT OF MY HEAD!). I think Bill Clinton represents the Dionyssian side of Western culture to them, and they fear that as much as they fear Hell and hope for Heaven. Bill Clinton’s unrestrained appetites, his ability to break the rules and “get away with it,” his appeal to common folk, his simple joy in the business of day to day living, threaten their sense of propriety and social structure, not in a cold intellectual fashion, but in a visceral gut-twisting revelation of their own limitations. And I think that, deep in the darkest places of their souls, they envy him.
Which dovetails in an unexpectedly neat fashion with some things Dirk Deppey’s been saying about the X-Men (the movie, yes, but also Grant Morrison’s guilty-pleasure rethink of the venerable comic book itself)—
It was from this environment that the first two successful gay support groups—the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco, the men’s Mattachine Society in New York—began their operations. Our correspondent is quite right to point out the bravery involved in running such outfits. That said, I don’t think I mischaracterized the DoB’s early outlook in my previous statement. In my mid-20s, I spent a fair amount of time in Arizona State University’s library, reading from their hardbound collections of the newsletters these two groups produced for their members. The people writing in DoB’s newsletter, The Ladder, did indeed see their ultimate goal as helping the rest of the membership secure their privacy through subterfuge—the “ladder” of the newsletter’s title represented the steps necessary to do this, with the top rung ultimately depicting a healthy and secure lesbian couple, cohabitating peacefully in the knowledge that the neighbors suspected them of being nothing more than spinsters sharing the rent.
Trust me, there’s a mutant angle in that. But! I think maybe the dovetail is as yet only visible to me. Hmm. —Making more overt the mutants-as-gay metaphor; mutants as things to be feared, outside the normal, controlled, Apollonian mainstream (add a dash of willful ignorance re: mutants, mutation, and genetics, but that’s a) taking the metaphor far too literally and b) risking conceit crash); homosexuality as something so terribly feared that the only safety is to be found hidden under mainstream trappings by industrious Mattachine Bilitians—waitaminute, it’s around here somewhere—
It may be in this case as it is with waters when their streams are stopped or damned up: when they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance, than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels. So wickedness being here more stopped by strict laws and the same more nearly looked unto, so as it cannot run in a common road of liberty as it would and is inclined, it searches everywhere and at last breaks out where it gets vent.
That’s Alan Bray in his excellent book Homosexuality in Renaissance England quoting Governor Bradford’s reflections on why it is, exactly, that “sodomy and buggery (things fearful to name)” have broken out more than once in the brave New World. “At last it breaks out,” Bray says of Bradford’s conceit;
the same assumption and the same symbolism appear in David Lindsay’s description of homosexuality in the antediluvian world, which he held responsible for the Universal Deluge, its counterpart in the world of Nature. It was also the rationale of the claim that the celibacy of Roman priests was the cause of their alleged homosexual sins: the bulwark against sexual debauchery, in the minds of the Protestant reformers, was marriage; that gone and all manner of sodomy and buggery would break forth.
Which would drag Rick Santorum’s “dogs and cats living together” moment from last month. —What, don’t you remember your Ghostbusters?
PETER
Or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
MAYOR
What do you mean, biblical?
RAY
What he means is Old Testament biblical, Mr. Mayor. Real wrath-of-God-type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
EGON
Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes!
WINSTON
The dead rising from the grave!
PETER
Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Mass hysteria; breaking out; streams stopped or dammed up, overflowing their banks with noise and violence; the damning, irresistable embrace of a lamia. Gay marriage advocates standing up for their rights (drag queens in feather boas; topless diesel dykes on a gay-pride float); heroic X-Men saving the world with their mutant powers (Wolverine skewering soldiers with his adamantium claws; Cyclops’s uncontrollable optic blast blowing a hole in the ceiling of the train station); Bill Clinton blowing the sax on Arsenio Hall (breaking the rules and daring to enjoy himself as he gets away with it).
—And now I’ve gotten wherever it is I am I have no real idea what I’m doing with it. Beyond stating the frightfully obvious: it’s a terribly old, illogical fear, this fear of losing control, this projection onto others of the abyss into which we’ve gazed. It’s one we will always have with us, idealistic optimism notwithstanding. Bray wrote Homosexuality in Renaissance England in 1982, which is something I want you to keep in mind as I go back to the end of the passage I quoted above. I left off the last line, you see:
...the bulwark against sexual debauchery, in the minds of the Protestant reformers, was marriage; that gone and all manner of sodomy and buggery would break forth.
Such a mental universe is alien to us now.
Oops.
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Heh, you ol' Libertarian you! *8)
http://www.reason.com/0305/cr.ng.make.shtml
Yeah, well, David, I'm as much a libertarian as you are a liberal. (You must imagine a wry smirk as I say that; I'm not much for emoticons.)
Insofar as Gillespie's theories re: the success of Daredevil and Marvel's climb out of receivership, Dirk Deppey has had much to say about how dark the woods still are and how deeply Marvel's still in them. --I like his basic thesis about the appeal of the Marvel characters (despite the fact that I was always a DC man, growing up): Marvel has always been more egalitarian in their superheroes, more everyperson, while DC's have more of a mythic, difficult-to-approach sheen to them. Too bad Marvel's business practices suck eggs.
The Wise and Witty Debaters of South Dakota
Crime is up, unemployment up, and kids are having more and more unprotected sex under the influence of intoxicating substances when they're not busy bringing to school. This moral wasteland has but one cause, my friend, Clenis.