Medical definitions: Dorland’s Medical Dictionary for Health Consumers (2007) defines necrophilia as ‘sexual attraction to or sexual contact with dead bodies.’ The American Heritage Medical Dictionary (2007) as ‘An abnormal fondness for being in the presence of dead bodies and sexual contact with or erotic desire for dead bodies.’ Whereas Mosby’s Medical Dictionary, 8th edition (2009) describes it as ‘a morbid liking for being with dead bodies and a morbid desire to have sexual contact with a dead body, usually of men to perform a sexual act with a dead woman.’ The McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine (2002) puts it more succinctly: ‘A paraphilia in which sexuoerotism requires a corpse, which may involve engaging in sexual activity with same’ or ‘getting a stiffie with a stiff.’
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies necrophilia as a paraphilia or ‘recurrent, intense sexual urges, fantasies, or behaviours that involve unusual objects, activities, or situations and cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.’[31] Wilhelm Stekel—Sigmund Freud’s ‘apostle’—coined the term paraphilia in 1920; and sexologist John Money, author of Venuses Penuses: Sexology, Sexosophy, and Exigency Theory (1986), Vandalized Lovemaps: Paraphilic Outcome of 7 Cases in Pediatric Sexology (1989) The Breathless Orgasm: A Lovemap Biography of Asphyxiophilia (1991) and Reinterpreting the Unspeakable: Human Sexuality 2000 (1994) popularized the term.
Michel Foucault has argued that it is the multiplicity of our sexual practices that constitute sex; that is, our formative sex lives comprise a complexity of habits, obsession, fantasies, and fetishes. ‘Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and power.’[32]
The hierarchy of habit, in some cases, leads to paraphilia. Sexual habits: one might prefer oral sex in preparation for orgasm rather than full intercourse. Some prefer intercourse in the missionary position, some reverse cowgirl. A narrative representation of this is enacted in the majority of pornographic films: kissing, undressing, breast fondling, masturbation of the female, masturbation of the male, oral sex with female, oral sex with male, missionary position, cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, doggy-style, anal missionary, anal cowgirl, anal reverse-cowgirl, anal doggy-style, exterior male orgasm. The transferability of desire from a living sexual partner to a corpse is a progression of perversity. A redetermination—recombination—of molecules appears normal. ‘Yes, all becomings are molecular: the animal, flower or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or form that we know from the outside and recognize through experience, through science, or by habit.[33] These perverse progressions, these narrative sexual successions show formalized habits apparent (with variations) in most pornographic movies. The final act—the male orgasm—is closure, the secession of habit. ‘Habits are the very stuff our identities are made of. In them, we enact and thus define what we effectively are as social beings, often in contrast with our perception of what we are.’[34] Or as Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole would argue, ‘There is a pattern. There’s always a pattern. Not because you plan it, but because all humans are creatures of habit, there’s no difference between you and me and the rapist.’[35]
Replacing Žižek’s ‘social’ with ‘sexual’ creates obsession, the next stage in the hierarchy of habit. In recent years, the celebrity-obsessed stalker has become a media stock villain. However, the most common form of stalking divides into two main classifications—psychotic and non-psychotic—and five sub-groups: ‘Rejected stalkers pursue their victims in order to reverse, correct, or avenge a rejection (e.g. divorce, separation, termination). Resentful stalkers pursue a vendetta because of a sense of grievance against the victims—motivated mainly by the desire to frighten and distress the victim. Intimacy seekers seek to establish an intimate, loving relationship with their victim. To them, the victim is a long-sought-after soul mate, and they were ‘meant’ to be together. Incompetent suitors, despite poor social or courting skills, have a fixation, or in some cases a sense of entitlement to an intimate relationship with those who have attracted their amorous interest. Their victims are most often already in a dating relationship with someone else. Predatory stalkers spy on the victim in order to prepare and plan an attack—usually sexual—on the victim.’[36] Only the predatory stalker is psychotic and obsessed with sex—Sergeant Bertrand fits into this category. But sexual obsession takes other forms. Sexual obsession is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder in which the person obsesses either about a person, his/her sexuality, or a means by which he/she achieves sexual gratification—a ritualized habit to distinguish it from fantasy—fabricated habit. Person ‘A’ may be obsessed with Japanese women. ‘B’ with hairy, overweight men. ‘C’ with seamed stockings. ‘D’ with studded butt plugs. The ritualized habit is a means towards orgasm but not the sole means. Habit plus obsession leads us to a Balkanization of sex within the pornographic industry—films and magazines that cater for many different needs: women over 50, hairy men, dwarves, ladyboys, redheads, Asian girls, twinks, BDSM, etc. Fantasy, then, becomes another component in the hierarchy of habit.
A sexual fantasy or erotic fantasy (fictionalized habit) as a means of heightening sexual feelings; an eroticized mental image or scenario used for a number of reasons—to pass the time, to achieve erection in men or vaginal-clitoral arousal in women, or to achieve orgasm. It may be a refiguration in the mind of past events—memerotic—or as wish-fulfilment projection. The fantasy itself need not be reified, in fact, most fantasies move towards a taboo subject/action—paedophilia, rape, group sex, bondage. They can be prosaic fantasies: sex with the milkman (now pool boy), sex slave of Mr Darcy, aliens, or octopuses—as in Katsushika Hokusai’s famous shunga The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife (circa 1820). Fantasies are also solitary pursuits, aids to masturbation. Mental role-playing that may lead to future erotic actualities. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair a man watches his wife in the bedroom while fantasizing about watching himself having sex with his wife in the bedroom while watching the act—a sort of Quaker Oats box of fantasy and voyeurism. One might fantasize about one’s work colleagues, people who share our morning or afternoon commute, schoolteachers, schoolgirls, nurses, doctors, plumbers; one may fantasize about having a 12-inch cock, a threesome with members of the Wu-Tang Clan, of being tied up and abused, there is no limit to the sexual imagination—but it is a mental image or a mental narrative not an actual act, it is an act of an act. For the actual, we need to move on from habit to obsession to fantasy to fetishism. ‘As Hegel was already aware, there is something violent in the very symbolization of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies a designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it.’[37] ‘They were just men—and women, very occasionally—who did unacceptable things, as a factor of neurotic obsession. It was not a binary of good or evil, but a spectrum also inhabited by people who had to check their locks ten times at night, or who could not rest until the kitchen was tidy after each meal.’[38]
30
Charles Baudelaire, ‘A Martyred Woman,’ from
31
American Psychiatric Association,
32
Michel Foucault,
36
See Paul E. Mullen Michele Pathé, and Rosemary Purcell,