The Sexy Shadows in Innsmouth

[CalMeacham]

H.P. Lovecraft’s horror story the Shadow Over Inssmouth is a classic, although its xenophobia is more than a little troubling these days. Undoubtedly one of its more disturbing implications was the idea of the sea-dwelling Deep Ones having sex with humans. It’s kinda like The Dark Side of Mermaids.
More recently, the idea of Fish Sex – especially women having sex with Fish-Men – has started to be seen in a more positive light. One of the stories in the 2001 anthology Shadows Over Innsmouth implied that at leasty some women really did enjoy Deep Ones sex

Shadows over Innsmouth: Jones, Stephen: 9780345444073: Amazon.com: Books

This past year the Shape of Water won Best Picture and two other Oscars, and has been nominated for or won a whole slew of awards. And now a book, Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, gives us even more woman/fish sex.

Why Is Fish Sex So Hot Right Now? An Investigation

Why fo? The HuffPo article suggests a reason:

Time for the easiest game of “if you loved this movie, read this book” ever: If you loved “The Shape of Water,” a movie about fish sex, you should definitely read The Pisces by Melissa Broder, a book about fish sex. The cover literally shows a woman in an amorous clinch with a fish; the novel actually tells the story of a woman who has a torrid love affair with a merman.
Now, one fish-fucking opus in the space of a year might be a blip. Two seems very much like a trend. (We might even call it three, considering last summer’s Made for Love by Alissa Nutting, in which a male romance scammer, after a fantastical sea-bathing accident, becomes exclusively attracted to dolphins. Though, to be clear, dolphins are not fish.)
So what’s going on here? One can never discount the ongoing power of “The Little Mermaid” in the American cultural imagination, sure. Who among us could claim to be immune to the charms of Ariel and/or her buff dad, King Triton? Plus, the past five years have seen the release of not one, but two documentaries about humans who had sexual relationships with dolphins back in the ’60s and ’70s, perhaps reintroducing the idea of aquatic sex with nonhumans into artists’ minds.
But The Pisces and Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water” also seem to have arrived during an inflection point for heterosexual relations, as some straight women have thrown their hands up in despair at the prospect of dealing with straight men. These men, who grope us and talk down to us and consistently fail to clean the bathroom ― we’re supposed to make lives with them? Let them touch us?
Women woke up one day to find that their husbands voted for Donald Trump and their sons have been shitposting on incel boards. Even before we heard the claims about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment and assault and the ensuing avalanche of other horrifying Me Too allegations, we heard about our president grabbing women “by the pussy,” Bill Cosby feeding women roofies, and R. Kelly allegedly sexually exploiting young girls. So many straight men, we have been forced to accept, are bad to and for us. Why would we take the enormous risk of loving one of them?

Whaddaya think? Innovative new sex kink, or metaphor for entitlement-free men?

[furryman]

In the movie Dagon the main character meets a woman who’s half octopus, at least implying there were some pretty weird things going on in that village. The first thing I thought of was hentai.

[Malthus]

Heh, I’m trying to think of how well an essay setting out that straight men love to fantasize about having inhuman sex because human women are just so damned horrible would fare …

[Dropo]

Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

“A race of scientifically created half-human, half-salmon monstrosities lay siege to a Pacific Northwest fishing village. In horrific fashion, the mutated creatures kill the men and mate with the women in order to reproduce. Can the Humanoids From The Deep be stopped before they destroy mankind as we know it?”

Humanoids from the Deep (1980) - IMDb

[dropzone]

@Malthus

Heh, I’m trying to think of how well an essay setting out that straight men love to fantasize about having inhuman sex because human women are just so damned horrible would fare …

I see what you are saying but we can safely ignore the woman who wrote that piece because she’s, well, let’s just say she’s not a man.

I tried to imagine how a woman having sex with a fish would work and all I’m getting is thoughts of bukkake.

ETA: If you don’t know DON’T look it up! :eek:

[mbh]

Robot Chicken.
The Little Mermaid.
Her wedding night.

Robot Chicken - Eric and Ariel

[asterion]

“Why couldn’t she have been the other kind of mermaid, with the fish part on top and the lady part on the bottom?”

[burpo_the_wonder_mutt]

^ You mean like “Lindemann’s Catch”?

[Acsenray]

Lovecraft was obsessed with the horror he perceived in miscegenation. All his stuff was a metaphor for black and other kinds of horrific men violating white women. Maybe we as a society are starting to over it.

[furryman]

@Acsenray

Lovecraft was obsessed with the horror he perceived in miscegenation. All his stuff was a metaphor for black and other kinds of horrific men violating white women. Maybe we as a society are starting to over it.

:rolleyes: Do you have a cite?

[Lasciel]

@furryman

:rolleyes: Do you have a cite?

Have you read ANY scholarly research on the man? It’s not a secret, and it’s not a niche theory. He was a virulent racist and misogynist, admittedly so in his personal letters (of which there are sooooo many) and his own writings and correspondence with editors and fellow writers.

There’s this website called Google, and another one called wikipedia, and you may even have this specialized building in your town called a library where you can request copies of all these things to read on your own at your leisure.

[dropzone]

That was easy. Spoilered for offensive language.

[spoiler]On the Creation of Niggers (1912)
by H. P. Lovecraft

When, long ago, the gods created Earth
In Jove’s fair image Man was shaped at birth.
The beasts for lesser parts were next designed;
Yet were they too remote from humankind.
To fill the gap, and join the rest to Man,
Th’Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan.
A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,
Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Creation_of_Niggers [/spoiler]

[Acsenray]

D. Simmons, ed., New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Miscegenation
Miscegenation runs through Lovecraft’s work as a truly disgusting terror to which women contribute in producing the spawn of monstrous beings—fish folk, the son of the devil—threatening relative normality. Here, Lovecraft’s notorious racism intersects with his sexism, so that the racial degeneration is seen as an effect of sexual acts.

…

Lovecraft’s general disgust at the foreign Other and at miscegenation surfaces as a lurking horror of the foreign—the fishy folk of Innsmouth who sacrifice their youth to ensure good trawls and who themselves then live to an indeterminate great age, transforming from the semi-human into the fishlike at some point as reward/punishment.

New Critical Essays on H.P. Lovecraft

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: Volume 2: The Modern Gothic (Routledge 2014)

The appalling feature of this aspect of Lovecraft’s writing is that, reading through not only his fiction but also his letters, one realizes that the terms which he applies to his invadingnon-humanmonstrosities are precisely the same as those in which he describes members of all American ethnic groups with the exception of the caste of East Coast ‘Old Americans’ to which he belonged. It is unnecessary to document the point here; the biography of Lovecraft by L. Sprague de Camp contains page after page of outpourings about the dangers of racial pollution, focusing on Jews, Mexicans, blacks and every variety of European. Lovecraft regarded himself as unable to survive in New York because of the effects of this pollution, which he claimed, produced in him feelings of uncontrollable revulsion, which are identical to the feelings which his heroes experience when confronted with the ‘unnatural’.

The Literature of Terror: Volume 2

Sean Eaton, “The Horror and Hope of Miscegenation,” The R’lyeh Tribune (Aug. 14, 2016), accessed May 5, 2018, The R'lyeh Tribune: The Horror and Hope of Miscegenation

In stories like “The Lurking Fear” (1923), “Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family” (1921), and late in his career, “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1936), H.P. Lovecraft used the concept of miscegenation—the marriage and cohabitation of Caucasians with members of other races, and more broadly, the intermingling of different races, social classes and cultures—as an engine of horror. He may have done so intentionally or perhaps unintentionally, channeling his unconscious fear of being overwhelmed by “the other” into his moody, dark fiction.

[Acsenray]

The short story “Medusa’s Coil” (1939) is about the heir of a wealthy family returning from the Sorbonne with a new wife, Marceline. Eventually it is revealed that Marceline is some kind of supernatural monster, but there was one final horror, revealed at the very end:

It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside, the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist’s skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation, . . . for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.

[Acsenray]

H.P. Lovecraft: Genius, Cult Icon, Racist

Lovecraft’s ascendance has also brought an uncomfortable truth into the spotlight: He was a virulent racist. The xenophobia and white supremacy that burble beneath his fiction (which may have gone unnoticed, had he remained anonymous) are startlingly explicit in his letters. Flip through them and you’ll find the author bemoaning Jews as “hook-nosed, swarthy, guttural-voiced aliens” with whom “association … was intolerable”; New York City’s “flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering niggers”; and New England’s “undesirable Latins—low-grade Southern Italians and Portuguese, and the clamorous plague of French-Canadians.” In 1922, he wrote that he wished “a kindly gust of cyanogen could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion” of New York City’s Chinatown, which he called “a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh.”

[Acsenray]

@furryman

:rolleyes: Do you have a cite?

Are those sufficient to cure your oculogyric crisis?

[Sefton]

I remember the uproar when Splash came out. A few morons thought it was a comedy, but most understood that it was a searing indictment of American women.

[Kron]

I love Lovecraft, but the dude was definitely a racist, far beyond even the “norms” of the time, and commonly called out as such by his contemporaries.

He was also anti-Semitic, despite marrying a Jew.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Acsenray

Lovecraft was obsessed with the horror he perceived in miscegenation. All his stuff was a metaphor for black and other kinds of horrific men violating white women. Maybe we as a society are starting to over it.

A lot of miscegenation, especially during slavery, was really white men raping black women. Fortunately, the Innsmouth scenario can help explore that reality, as in the game Fish Fuckers, whose cover font really has to be seen to be believed.

Edit: gonna spoiler that link in an abundance of caution.

[dropzone]

@Sefton

I remember the uproar when Splash came out. A few morons thought it was a comedy, but most understood that it was a searing indictment of American women.

I thought it was a commercial for spirit gum. It wasn’t funny enough to be a comedy, but the spirit gum stuck far too well.