In medieval times, Europeans assumed that mermaids were as common as fairies or sprites. They had magical powers, and lived long, but were mortals without souls. During the seventeenth century, fishermen frequently sighted mermaids off the coast, and travelers returned from foreign lands with much corroborating evidence. One of the most famous sightings was reported by Henry Hudson, and it caused quite a stir when it was published in London in 1625. While searching for the Northwest Passage, he jotted down the following in his diary:
This evening [June 15] one of our company, looking overboard, saw a mermaid, and, calling up one more of the company to see her, one more of the crew came up, and by that time she was come close to the ship’s side, looking earnestly on the men. A little after a sea came and overturned her. From the navel upward, her back and breasts were like a woman’s, as they say that saw her; her body as big as one of us, her skin very white, and long hair hanging down behind, of color black. In her going down they saw her tail, which was like the tail of a porpoise, speckled like a mackerel. Their names that saw her were Thomas Hilles and Robert Rayner.
Despite the eighteenth century’s passion for reason, people adored mermaids, which captains were forever encountering, and monarchs believing in. Each age adapted the mermaid to fit its notion of femininity. In the age of chivalry, the mermaid was depicted as a princess; in the early nineteenth century, a romantic ideal; in the twentieth century, a femme fatale.
European mermaids are often shown carrying combs and mirrors, because they pass endless hours sitting on the rocks and combing their long hair in the sunlight. Hair has always been a sexual symbol, one of the mermaids’ lures, and by letting it fall loose and ostentatiously combing it out in front of men, they are advertising their sexuality. They rarely speak, but they can sing sounds more emotional and penetrating than mere words. In some Celtic legends, they grow monstrously large. They delve in magic herbs. They crave human lives, frolicking near coastlines and ships to provoke humans who cannot resist their sensuality. As a result, sighting a mermaid came to be an omen of storm or disaster. How to overpower a mermaid: steal one of her possessions—a comb or belt will do. Then hide it; the mermaid will live subserviently with you. But if she locates her lost belonging, she will regain her powers and return to the sea. In myths, she rarely stays with a man, because neither can live in the other’s world, far from friends, families, and familiar ways.
There have been mermen, as well, especially in the legends of Scottish fisherfolk, who called them “Silkies.” The Arabian Nights offers “The Tale of Abdullah and Abdullah,” in which a poor fisherman named Abdullah finds a benefactor in a merman also named Abdullah. Legends from such unrelated places as Ireland and Syria tell of mermen who came ashore to take human wives. In Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Forsaken Merman,” the wife dooms him to the utmost despair. Queen Atergatis had a male consort, Oannes, who was also half-fish, half-man. As an outsider, he had the perspective to teach humans how to be more human. He was generous enough to give humans insight into their arts, sciences, and letters. At first, he was depicted with a man’s head beneath a fish-head cap, and he wore his fish scales as a cloak; but that representation soon evolved into a creature that was man from the waist up, fish from the waist down. In early myths, he was associated with the sun, an important deity for Paleolithic people. He crawled onto the land at dawn and plunged back into the sea at night. In between, he offered civilization. But Oannes was worshiped in a godly way by the ancients, not pictured as a love object. Historically, women have not been much turned on by the idea of fish-men. Men, on the other hand, have been obsessed with fish-women. In the mermaid fantasy a man can penetrate a beautiful woman-child, and through her the entire ocean, which she represents. He can step outside human manners and society, which play no role in her world. She will believe everything he tells her, do whatever he asks, be his sea-geisha. As innocent-looking and beautiful as a mermaid is on top, she is a wanton animal below, untroubled by guilt or inhibition, eager for his pleasure.
Drawn on maps, tattooed on sailors’ arms, printed on cans of tuna, carved on figureheads, painted on pub signs, the mermaid blurs the distinction between human and animal. Strictly speaking, she offers little reward: not enough woman to love and too much fish to fry. In a sense, she is monstrous, but hers is a sweet monstrosity, like love. For men of the sea, mermaids combine the self-destructiveness of the ocean, to which they are nonetheless wedded, with their loneliness for the women they’ve left behind. They find the ocean—fertile, curvy, womblike, velvety, tempestuous—all female. Its rhythms are ancient and mysterious, as are a woman’s. It has monthly tides and an eternal languorousness. Rolling its hips, first one way then another, it turns gently as a sleeper does: the ocean is a woman dreaming. A man enters the water as he enters a woman, giving himself up to the liquefaction of her limbs, losing himself willingly to her soft, lucid grip. The ocean becomes mortal and embraces him, just as a loving woman, when she embraces him, in that moment becomes horizon-less as the sea.
SEXUAL CHIC: PERVERSION AS FASHION
Many lessons about whom and how to love, and what’s sexually chic, bombard us from the media. Whenever I open a magazine these days, I half expect steam to rise from the pages. Perfumes war in the visual Amazon of the ads. To make their zest more potent, one rips a slit open, smears the all-but-invisible, exploded beads of scent along one’s wrist or inner elbow, and inhales the aroma. We crave sensory experiences. In that, we’re no different from most peoples. Locals visiting the voodoo market in Beiern, Brazil, would feel at home on the first floor of Bloomingdale’s. True, they wouldn’t find heaps of river-dolphin vulvas, or rhinoceros-beetle horns (indeed, they wouldn’t be able to identify much of what they saw), but the phantasmagoria of color, smell, and texture would delight their senses; and the bustling crowd caught up in the idea of “market day” would be perfectly familiar. World is extravaganza enough, one might think. Why add to the sensory uproar? Yet humans do, obsessively, creating art, cuisine, fashion, myths, and traditions, adding even more sensations to the spectacle of living. Advertisements are only flickers amid that mania.
But what is one to make of all the recent ads offering unsubtle sex and bondage? Opening up an issue of Details, for instance, I find an ad showing phallic-looking shoes, and a woman down on all fours, tongue out, getting ready to lick them. In another ad, a tattooed man wearing a leather bracelet is performing oral sex on a woman outside a city building. Then the same pair are shown apparently having intercourse on the rooftop. What product is the ad selling? Shirts? Skirts? At the end of the magazine, a forty-six-page advertising pamphlet is devoted entirely to Request jeans. Most of it shows sultry, sneering, half-naked men and women caught in a film-noir escapade while enjoying miscellaneous erotic encounters with one another—straight sex, bisexual, ménage à trois, violence, bondage. Jeans don’t appear in all the photos, but we do find lots of stiletto heels, fishnet stockings, leather, skirts with whiplike fringes, and phallic champagne bottles. In one shot, a man wearing underpants, boots, open shirt, and a cowboy hat sprawls on a bed with his legs wide apart, a bottle arranged like a huge erection at his groin. He is grasping it suggestively with his left hand. One full-page photo shows the back of this same man, his face turned to us in a savage snarl, as he urinates. You can see that his trousers are open and the ground in front of him is damp. In the final photo, the bare-chested man (wearing Request jeans, of course) is pegged out with ropes, his face contorted by pain, his crotch offered to the viewer, as he prepares to die in the desert sun.
Shot entirely in black-and-white, the photographs reveal a world of vice and shadows, a film-noir landscape held at a safe distance from the Ektachrome reality of everyday life. Their sex is as separate from love as it can be. The advertising sex is angry, mean, and sad. Everyone looks bitter, as if recoiling from something too horrible to name. Heavy, stylized, vulgar, the ads are perversely attractive in a slick way. But instead of the buoyant, life-affirming free
-for-all sex of the sixties, one finds in this “erotica” a deadness.
Even subtle sexuality sells completely unrelated products. So, why these extremes? One answer is that, as subtle sex has become more prevalent, and even unsubtle sex appears regularly in respectable magazines, the sexual sell has had to become less subtle, too—or so advertisers assume. Hence the sex on display has become tougher and more perverse. As with real sex, a surfeit leads to a search for fresh stimulation, more exotic kicks. It used to be that gas stations offered drinking glasses or ice scrapers and snow brushes as lagniappe, a small gift to lure customers. The gas station may have been across town, but we couldn’t resist getting “something for nothing,” even if it really wasn’t for nothing, since it cost more to drive farther and the cost of the “free” premium was factored into the price of the gas. Makeup companies do that today, and it works nicely. If you buy some products, you receive sample sizes of others. Self-esteem is now being used in the same way. If you purchase a “green” product, you can think of yourself as morally responsible. If you buy certain athletic shoes, you can think of yourself as self-confident and strong. If you Guess right or Request the right jeans, you can think of yourself as sexually desirable. The bonus is a small infusion of worth, a homeopathic remedy for self-doubt, which may indeed make one feel good—or may simply disappear into the bottomless drawer of the psyche, along with other elixirs. The question is why we find sadomasochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and other so-called perversions so attractive right now.
Perhaps, in part, this comes from our meandering return to Victorian morals. In that era, society was so repressive and filled with mother-worship that men felt guilty about defiling the “angel” at home, and were driven to subterranean avenues of pleasure and perversion. When societies try to stifle sexuality, they often produce a yen for acting out. In our own turn-of-the-next-century culture, as magazines remind us, soft-core pornography has gone mainstream. Fashion is filled with naked sex and bondage images. Tattoos, once associated with rednecks and underworld characters, are worn by models. (Women sported them in the twenties also, but mainly as permanent makeup—tattooed lipstick, eyebrows, and rouge—although tattoos of scarabs and other Egyptiana became popular when they were discovered on a mummy in one of the tombs.) Calvin Klein ads offer dream-scene sex at the level of slow-motion libido. Remember, these are magazines read in waiting rooms and libraries, subscribed to by teetotalers and wine tasters, delivered to one’s doorstep, devoured in the agreed-upon sanctity of one’s home, read in bathtubs and over coffee, left lying around the house for guests to riffle through and children to scissor up for school projects.
We are a fin-de-siècle culture, confused about our morals, with one foot planted squarely in our puritanical past and the other feeling its way into the future. We lust for extremes, a perfectly human trait. People always want some scandal beyond the scandal they’re allowed. Rock stars perform fellatio on the microphone and, by extension, on the crowd, which responds in waves of screams. Porn stars show up at charity events and model clothes on haute-couture runways. Now that sex has risen to the surface of society, what does this suggest about our private habits? I suspect they may seem mild, even boring, by comparison. Private has become public; but public has not become private.
Why? In these plague years, when we cannot be promiscuous without worry, voyeurism has hit an all-time high. The ultimate safe sex is abstinence, we’re warned. “Ecstasy,” the current drug of choice at discos, is a sexual depressant. “The nice thing about masturbation,” a cynical female friend once confided, “is that you meet a nicer class of men … and you don’t need to dress up.” Sex shows may make one think of the tenderloin area of a city, frequented by moral vermin. But, to some extent, we’ve taken sex shows on the road, polished them up, and made them fashionable. It’s as if we were all watching the same peep show on television, in the separate cubicles of our lives, unobserved. This version of safe sex caresses the optic nerve, giving everyone a small taste of soft-core pornography. Sometimes it crosses boundaries into sadomasochism and exhibitionism. Sometimes it toys with the definition of gender. Sometimes it challenges the notions of taboo and scandal. Some of the most blatant sexual acts have nothing to do with sex per se, but rather with power, anger, and domination. Rape is an extreme example. A milder one is rock stars grabbing their genitals onstage. Look at the way we use sexual defilement as a socially acceptable threat. I’ve heard many heterosexual men and women say they fear prison not because of its isolation but because of rape. In their minds, prisons exist to punish heterosexuals in a homosexual way—by forcing them to change their sexuality and endure the horror of countless rapes. But public perversion always aims to shock. If you want to sell someone a CD or an idea, first you have to get their attention.
Habit is a great deadener. Nudity is so familiar that it takes wilder and wilder ways to excite us. Still, it is possible to shock us, to push the edge of the envelope, as test pilots say. And then to lick the envelope and savor the piquancy of the glue. Consider Madonna’s much-publicized masturbation scene in Truth or Dare, performed in front of multitudes, and, perhaps more important, as her father watched. After seeing the film, I thought of the bad-girl syndrome, of the need to do outrageous things, and, when those are condoned, to find ones even more outrageous, questing for some absolute acceptance, asking in effect: Will you love me now? Even if I’m a holy terror? Oh, yeah? How about now? Madonna’s follow-up book, Erotica, includes sexually explicit stills.
For perversion to be erotically exciting, the person has to feel like he or she is committing a sin. Some moral code has to be transgressed, someone has to be hurt or humiliated, physically abused or degraded, or reduced to an inanimate object. A shoe. A breast. A knife. Most perversion is heterosexual, and practiced by or for men, using women as sex objects. Some women are fetishists, exhibitionists, or voyeurs, but they seem to be rarer. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who spent his clinical life studying perversion, interviewing and observing the habits of a great many people, including a New Guinea tribe obsessed with semen, learned that the crucial ingredient that “makes excitement out of boredom for most people is the introducing of hostility into the fantasy.” A tincture of hostility works very nicely during sex—a little slap on the bottom, a pretend rape, perhaps even a pair of easily removable scarves binding the wrists. The merest pretense suffices.
Why human beings require taboos—which almost always involve eating; eliminating; death; covering the sex organs; whom to associate with; and where, when, how, and with whom to have sex—is a subject for endless contemplation. Presumably, taboos are intended to guide us (especially the young) to act in ways that are healthy or socially expedient. Once, priests were the taboo-police. Guilt, shame, and blame for supernatural revenge was the punishment that kept people in line.
Everyone has seen two-year-olds happily eating sand. Yet “Dirty!” is a negative term that can be applied equally to persons, words, ideas, or even jokes. Why don’t we like dirt? We are far from biologically pure. Quite the contrary—our bodies crawl with mites, bacteria, and other organisms. Why do we worry about polluting, soiling, dirtying ourselves? And, given that fanaticism, what inspires some people—whom we recoil from and call “perverts”—to be coprophiles? In various cultures, mothers used to clean their babies by licking away the urine and feces, as other animals do. Balinese mothers carry their babies in cloth slings and frequently have a pet dog whose job is to provide “diaper service” by licking the baby and mother clean after the baby soils. The Masai drink cow urine as part of their diet, and several cultures dress their hair with dung. According to sex researcher John Money, somewhere in our primitive wiring lies the memory of drinking urine and eating feces as a natural part of behavior; and in a few people—the ones we call coprophiliacs—the wiring gets crossed with sexuality’s.
Sex may seem spontaneous, raw, true, and of the moment, because the sensations are so hotly felt that the body screams out its own versi
on of Eureka! But every sex act, no matter how casual, is a tangled drama, a piece of pure “theater,” says Stoller, “the result of years of working over the scripts in order to make them function efficiently—that is, to ensure that they produce excitement… rather than anxiety, depression, guilt, or boredom.” One grows more excited the more one is at risk, or pretends to be at risk. Stoller speculates that excitement happens only when we perceive two opposite possibilities—alive/dead, love/hate, strong/weak, control/out of control, succeed/fail, and so on—and manage to navigate between them:
The poles … are markers limiting a territory within which the energy vibrates. Beyond the poles are experiences not of anticipation but consummation, either present or guaranteed. Excitement is uncertainty; certainty brings pleasure, pain, or no response, but not excitement.
This echoes Oscar Wilde’s observation that “the essence of romance is uncertainty.” Ultimately, the two poles one steers between “are risk and safety.” In fantasies, pornography, or perversions, Stroller says,
the whole business is a fraud, an act, a performance, a masquerade, a disguise—no matter how much the author … proclaims about truth…. What shall we do with daydreaming, where we know that one is quite consciously deceiving oneself, inventing a story known to be untrue, embellishing it…. Yet for all that falsity, tissues swell. Fantasy converts to physiology…. Excitement, then, is a continuum of anxiety/fear into which has been poured the possibility of pleasure, especially mastery…. True excitement … occurs when we are weighing the odds between danger (trauma) and safety.