I thought it was funny that the protagonist was way more upset to watch himself being castrated than to discover he had just been decapitated. (But then again, a "castration" scene in Fanny Fatale's "Phantom Knights" in On Our Backs had all the pomp of "he took his cock off, tossed it on the coffee table, and went to bed" -- so maybe the "horror" of it has to do with how regularly detachable cocks are written into your fantasizing to begin with.)

What I like about this one is how it plays around with dismemberment and objectification to make the fantasy-fantastic convergence so productive, and to indicate, with the story, how sexual representation can be read. The story is full of symbols that are a standard of BDSM fare; even the Victorian mansion tells you, more or less, how the rest of the story is going to go. But where it starts to get interesting is Michael's line to Bill, at the beginning of the role reversal scene, that "symbols are so important to both of us." He's referring directly to the leather arm band, but he's also summing up a series of prepatations to turn Bill into a head, a body, and a cock. Taken literally, it's a bit gory and objectifying, but by converting Bill's body to the symbolic Michael opens up multiple and simultaneous possible interpretations of his mind and sight, his body, his cock, multiple sites and forms of desire, and a whole host of possibilities for what it means to fuck. (I think we talked before about really weird contrasts between penises and dildos in lesbian literature, that essentially said dildos are open to interpretation while everybody knows penises are just that one thing, and I went hunting for better theorizations of 'the penis.' Well, here's one.)

And then it just gets wonderful. Bill's head's thought that he was masochist (his body), and sadist and voyeur (his head, watching his body) at once is a clue about how to look at porn, how to identify with and fantasize about the scenes (reminiscent of that Lisa Palac article I keep referring to, "How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life"). So Bill, thinking of himself as both voyeur and actor, gets to have this great experience eroticizing and admiring his own body:

The room whirled around - weightless again - then settled. Michael was standing over me, big cock slick and half-hard above my face. He had placed my head on the chair. I could smell steamy sweat, where his ass and thighs had rested on the wood.

"It will help," he said, "if you think of it as another man's body." He walked to the center of the room and circled the headless body immobilized there. I glanced around; the chair was set so that I couldn't catch a reflection of my face. But I saw my body in all four mirrors, in the round. There was no bloody stump where my head should be - only the smooth, natural depression inside my collarbone.

It was a beautiful body, I had to admit. I suppose anyone who has seen his body harden and fill out from hard work becomes a narcissist. It was crazy, something was wrong in my head that I could look at it and feel detachment. At the time, I did not realize that. I was where Michael had put me. Some strange psychic zone.

That body turned me on. The hairlessness showed off my muscles, as Michael said it would. Everything looked larger, fuller. Especially my pecs, big mounds of sleek muscle. The nipples, normally buried in swirls of hair, stood out from the edges like cones, begging to be touched. And my cock and balls - hairless and chained - they looked unbelievably huge, but not commanding; exposed and vunerable. Do it, I begged silently. I want to see it crawl. I want it.

I imagine that's what Travis intended his audiences to do, too: identify with the story in a way that helped them eroticize their own bodies. (This is also what I liked best about Pink Narcissus -- it eroticized male bodies in a way that I have not often seen in contemporary porn with men in it... Granted, I'm looking at straight porn on Porntube and stuff like Treasure Island Media, but those are what's making money right now, so I would guess that a lot of men are only ever seeing these relatively very flat and unfeeling images of themselves. [Unless I am missing something in contemporary pornographic images of men].)

What made me uncomfortable about this story, though, is that the men in it are impossibly built, like GI Joe action figures. So it eroticizes male bodies, which is great, but then idealizes them in a way that no actual human men can ever live up to. 

Thoughts about eroticizing male bodies reminded me to chase down an excerpt from this excellent fat theory post from One Girl Rhumba earlier this year:

the fact that “love your body” rhetoric shifts the responsibility for body acceptance over to the individual, and away from communities, institutions, and power, is also problematic.  individuals who do not love their bodies, who find their bodies difficult to love, are seen as being part of the problem.  the underlying assumption is that if we all loved our bodies just as they are, our fat-shaming, beauty-policing culture would be different.  if we don’t love our bodies, we are, in effect, perpetuating normative (read: impossible) beauty standards.  if we don’t love our individual bodies, we are at fault for collectively continuing the oppressive and misogynistic culture. if you don’t love your body, you’re not trying hard enough to love it.  in this framework, your body is still the paramount focus, and one way or another, you’re failing.  it’s too close to the usual body-shaming, self-policing crap, albeit with a few quasi-feminist twists, for comfort.

There is a lot of focus in current feminist activism on teaching individual men how to express their sexualities in consensual, non-violent ways (e.g., anti-rape education targeted directly to, say, post-secondary sports teams). I don't add this to devalue that kind of activism, because I'm as convinced as anyone that education for men is necessary and effective, much more so than yet another self-defence class for women anyway, but it is still interesting to contrast that individualized kind of message about how men should relate to their sexualities with the kinds of messages about male sexuality that are communal, institutional, dominant, etc.

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- Williamtype

I left the magazine at the archive, so I'll have to double-check tomorrow, but based on your suggestions, I think I want to look at the story again to see how it examines or exposes itself as writing, or as a fantasy in the process of dissemination. The premise of the story is that Daddy is making the author narrator (oops) keep a journal, and has given her a topic ("daily discipline," or something close to that). Her reflection on the topic forms the piece, and she signs off with a couple of sentences that I don't remember exactly, but they express that she hopes Daddy approves of her and thinks the assignment is going well. Since blurring the lines between personal and communal, private and public, inside and outside is a big part of the feminist project (or projects, plural, since by 1988 feminists were well into the sex wars), then it seems to matter whether and how a piece like this critiques itself as a part of that project, in addition to what the author and her readers say about it. 

I hadn't thought about this connection between fantasy and the fantastic before, and the association of gender play with unrealistic events might need more thought (clits get plenty hard, even if "hard on" was not intended to refer to them, so there is something in the association of hardness and masculinity that actually obscures what women's arousal looks and feels like, which is just an aside, and not to discount your point) but yeah, OOB definitely seems to have taken on both "fantasy" and "the fantastic" as themes, and as ideas that can be juxtaposed, compared, and contrasted via story placement. There are the "fantasies" column, various ideological statements in nonfiction articles and letters about fantasy (like Wertheim's that fantasies are not to be "judged" -- morally, I guess, but what about other kinds of judgment, like criticism?), and then there are stories about vampires that eat your period (sexy, but also seriously convenient!), incestuous invisible monsters that make your fantasies real, alien dildo space ships that fly off into vaginas to explore them. 

Thinking more about Wertheim's statement about fantasies, she seems to connect not only the materiality of arousal ("whatever gets you wet"), but also its visibility and externality (not "whatever gives you adorable butterflies in your tummy") to the immunity from judgment she desires. So maybe she is also suggesting a different ethical standard for disseminated -- purposefully externalized, stated, acknowledged -- fantasies, but one of rigorous neutrality or validation, rather than rigorous scrutiny. 

Mark, I am having a really tough time finding material in the AU library theorizing "fantasy" and "the fantastic." Todorov's book about the fantastic is only there in French, Cortàzar isn't there. I found a literature review of theories of the fantastic, but only a couple of the books are in the library (and not the ones that look like they'd be most useful). Can you make some recommendations? 

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- Capatin

Always rehfrseing to hear a rational answer.
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