If sexual fetishism is fuelled by forbidden and unattainable desires, then the ultimate sexual thrill must be love for the extraterrestrial, literally that which is not of the earth. Mercury de Sade, “male, Caucasian, thirty years old, unmarried, computer programmer”, suffers from such a condition, pathologised as Exophilia. From the fact that this condition exists, and that the tabloid papers regularly contain stories of Earthlings being molested or worse by little green men, but there is no record of the reverse, the author concludes that one of three things must be true:

1. Extraterrestrials do not exist.
2. Extraterrestrials exist, but they do not visit Earth.
3. Extraterrestrials exist, and they do visit Earth, but they avoid exophiles.

Such is the kind of thinking that characterises the extraordinary, brilliant Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish from the creator(s) of Supervert, which marries centuries of thinking about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life with Sadean wit and imagination.

Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish is not a novel, but a collection of interleaved case histories, categorised according to the methods of set theory, and consisting of Alien Sex Stories (ASS), Methods of Deterrestrialization (MOD), Lessons in Exophilosophy (LIE) and Digressions and Tangents (DAT). It can be read linearly, or reordered according to the will of the reader, in the manner of BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates.

ASS is a stream of sexual vignettes: Mercury de Sade’s encounters with imaginary, potential lifeforms, such as the cunnilinguistic beings of Pi in ASS 16, whose females are both sexual and semantic objects. Each female stands for something, and communication is achieved by fucking the desired symbol. “In this way, a simple statement such as ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ required at least a threesome, and heated arguments would culminate in orgies that bordered on senseless babbling.” But their vocabularies are necessarily limited by the availability of sexual partners, and exophiles such as Mercury de Sade would be rewarded for introducing new lexical objects by being allowed to frolic in the pastures of speculative discourse, a joy for the exophile “insofar as metaphysical propositions were formulated through acts of creative sodomy and abstruse areas of aesthetics were illuminated by variations in the sadistic treatment of nubile alien girls.” Mercury de Sade plunders the constellation camps of a horoscopically divided Earth to bring fresh Virgo girls to Pi, arranging them in increasingly distorted positions to educate the Pis in the concepts of art and literature.

In the MOD set, Mercury de Sade befriends a young woman, Charlotte, and we follow his frustrated attempts to turn her into Ninfa XIX, the 19th in a series of alien substitutes which he uses to satisfy his cravings for extraterrestrial sex. Such endeavors are ultimately unsuccessful, because Charlotte is incontrovertibly human, and the logical conundrums that result serve only to deaden Mercury de Sade’s passions. “Does Mercury de Sade not intend to make an alien out of her somehow? Well, but how? Where do you begin? You can’t saw off her hands and replace them with tentacles - or rather, you can, but how do you know aliens have tentacles? If you attach tentacles to her arms, might you not just succeed in making her into an octopus? Isn’t there a tremendous failure of imagination here?” Still, Mercury de Sade can perhaps gain some benefit from the fact that Charlotte’s abusive, hated father is the billionaire owner of a flotilla of satellites, their positions and access codes stored in the computer in an office to which she has access…

LIE contains the author’s meditations on the history of exophilosophy, beginning with the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras’ theory of the plurality of worlds. Anaxagoras believed that the moon was inhabited and that the first life fell to earth from space, riding in on comets and asteroids, a concept that later scientists would christen panspermia. The notion of the plurality of worlds originates in the concept of mind or nous existing independently of matter, and since mind gives order to the universe, it must be coextensive with it. Exophilosophy moves on, through, inter alia, the theories of John Locke, who introduced the question of whether aliens and man could communicate as one of the tests of his assertion that all ideas derive from experience, and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose characteristic pessimism admitted the possibility of extraterrestrial life, but concluded that if it exists, it must be “as despicable, boring and inane as life on Earth.” Ultimately, the author sees exophilosophy, like its less exotic brother, falling out of favour to be superceded by the exosciences, in a line that stretches from Galileo and Kepler to Carl Sagan and beyond, and by the relatively modern psychological doctrines of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich, who devoted whole books to the consideration of flying saucers. Ze notes, however, that, much as theology does not require a deity in order to thrive, so exophilosophy may continue regardless of contact. (One of the benefits of reviewing a book of interrelated, endlessly rearrangeable texts is that the reviewer cannot commit the sin of the ’spoiler’: all endings, all climaxes, are but starting points for new and different readings.)

DAT, finally, sprawls out along non-aligned pathways of exotheory; here contemplating the novelty of extraterrestrial intelligence and the potential for the introduction of entirely new political systems and philosophical enquiries that are not merely extraterrestrial but altogether extra-planetary, there examining the cognitive theories of brain vs. computer, and the argument that the brain of the programmer, the future brain, slowly becomes a computer as it strives to eliminate all error, even that of thought and action.

Extraterrestrial Sex Fetish, as literature, is an attempt to attain escape velocity, to blast off from the dead lands of Western writings to explore new realms of intellectual and sensual endeavour. A treatise on UFOlogy, a novel of ideas, a radical reconceptualising of science fiction (which the author terms truth falsified), an overview of all Western thought, an extremely dirty and occasionally violent book, and much more besides, it is one result of Supervert’s stated aim to evoke a “unique combination of intellect and deviance. Perversity for your brain. Vanguard aesthetics, novel pathologies.” We look forward to reading the next instantiation, Necrophilia Variations, whose interests are perhaps encoded in the closing passages of ESF: “The vast distances of interstellar space can only be crossed by a being with incredible endurance and longevity… does this not also mean that, if exophilosophy ever does achieve contact, extraterrestrial life will not be living?”

“…this time however I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will turn the world into a holiday…Not that I have much time…”

- Nietzsche (from his last “insane” letter to Cosima Wagner)

We had planned an extensive post on the fascinating Islamic Homosexualities of Messrs. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, and perhaps carry on the discussion with reference to the work of Peter Lamborn Wilson, a.k.a. Hakim Bey, but as we depart today for another voyage into the lands of the Musselman, once again taking our pleasures in places where we don’t even dare to book a double room, it’s going to have to wait. Apologies for the hiatus, and we shall see you soon. Don’t go on any drug trials (apart from the self-administered ones, obviously).

“… one can offer to Venus in many a temple; I will be content with the most mediocre; you know, my dear, near the Cyprean altar, there is situate an obscure grot into whose solitude Love retires, the more energetically to seduce us: such will be the altar where I will burn my incense… Nothing can betray a girl from this quarter, however rude or multiple the attacks may be; as soon as the bee has left off sucking the pollen, the rose’s calix closes shut again; one would never imagine it had been opened… in one word, ‘tis the mystery’s asylum, ‘tis there where it connects itself with love by ties of prudence… Need I tell you further that although this is the most secret temple it is howbeit the most voluptuous; what is necessary to happiness is found nowhere else, and that easy vastness native to the adjacent aperture falls far short of having the piquant charms of a locale into which one does not enter without effort, where one takes up one’s abode only at the price of some trouble… and those whom reason compels to know this variety of pleasure, never pine after the others…”

So believes the Marquis de Sade, writing in Justine, and so too does Toni Bentley in The Surrender. Bentley is a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, author of Winter Season: A Dancer’s Journal and several other well-recieved, if minority interest, books about ballet and ballet dancers. Suffice to say that noone was expecting her to pen a 200-page hymn to anal sex, but that’s what she’s done.

Bentley gives us a potted history of her life and her sexual history - boyfriends, breakdowns, and the occasional breakthrough. She details threesomes and her collection of crotchless panties (“It is perhaps no surprise, given my theatrical background, that props, costumes, and ceremony became increasingly essential components of my newly expanded private life”). But nothing compares to the arrival of A-Man, and the transcendence that follows: “Bliss, I learned from being sodomized, is an experience of eternity in a moment of real time.”

Bentley does not shrink from addressing the thornier issues of her predilection: the book is awash with tips for following in her footsteps, which, while interrupting her rapturous tone, are a worthy inclusion: “I know that when some of you hear anal sex you see nothing but shit - shit, shit everywhere. Shit on the bed, shit on his cock, shit on your ass. I am here to tell you it just isn’t like that.” This is necessary stuff: when homophobes and other sexual reactionaries respond to increasing sexual freedoms with words like ‘buggery’ and ’sodomite’ they are reacting specifically to the idea of filth, dirt and sin we connect with the anus. Bentley explicitly refutes this, finding, not shit, but God in her ass.

Proselytising aside, Bentley includes such gems as Kenneth Tynan’s observation that it’s “Odd how nineteenth-century literature is sealed off at both ends by an anal scandal: Wilde up Bosie’s bum, Byron up Annabella’s”, and plenty of her own blasphemies: “Like Sir Richard Burton entering Mecca, he is the first Westerner to have infiltrated the tangled jungle of my bowels, my uncharted territory, the heart of my darkness.”

For Bentley, anal fucking is about submission; her total emotional enslavement to A-Man and, more specifically, “his cock, his balls, his asshole”. Unlike Catherine Millet’s Sexual Life…, whose similarity lies in its explicit intimacy and lack of titillation as well as its emphasis on freedom in all its forms, Bentley adores A-Man above all others, despite the loud protestations of non-monogamy and the sharply circumscribed bounds of their relationship. In fact, the book far more closely resembles Anita Phillips’ A Defence of Masochism in its attempt to ‘top from the bottom’; to restore to submission its exalted, religious meaning.

Ultimately, The Surrender is as much about obsessive love manifested in obsessive sex as it is about ass-fucking. But Bentley fervently believes that this is necessary: “I feel every one could be the last, and so every one contains all I have. Fuck on the edge. Suck on the edge. All ways.”

So, farewell then, Peter Benchley. You assured that generations of us can never, ever swim in the sea without a nervous tremor in our stomachs, turning to pant-shitting terror if we so much as brush up against some kelp. Ta for that.

Then again, you also gave some of us our first taste of literary lovin’. In STML’s school library, the most thumbed books were a copy of Benchley’s classic Jaws and some appalling James Bond ‘tribute’ wherein 007 had his balls coated in pig fat and hung out for wild dogs (please, someone else remember this).

Benchley’s original novel concerns itself more with the amorous adventures of Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie) and Chief Brody’s wife Ellen. His clumsy seduction (“Some women have really tight ones.” “You sound like a comparision-shopper.”"Just a conscientious consumer.”) is not exactly unwelcome (“That’s supposed to be every schoolgirls fantasy… To be a… you know, a prostitute”), leading quickly to a somewhat disturbing climax in a nearby “Kleenex and spit” motel:

A vision of Hooper, eyes wide and staring - but unseeing at the wall as he approached climax. The eyes seemed to bulge until, just before release, Ellen had feared they might actually pop out of their sockets. Hooper’s teeth were clenched, and he ground them the way people do during sleep. From his voice there came a gurgling whine, whose tone rose higher and higher with each frenzied thrust. Even after his obvious, violent climax, Hooper’s countenance had not changed. His teeth were still clenched, his eyes still fixed on the wall, and he continued to pump madly. He was oblivious of the being beneath him, and when, perhaps a full minute after his climax, Hooper still did not relax, Ellen had become afraid - of what, she wasn’t sure, but the ferocity and intensity of his assault seemed to her a pursuit in which she was only a vehicle.

Hooper’s frenzied intensity carries the others repeatedly out to sea, until the moment when Brody is given his last chance to look in the eye the man who cuckolded him:

The fish broke water fifteen feet from the boat, surging upward in a shower of spray. Hooper’s body protruded from each side of the mouth, head and arms hanging limply down one side, knees, calves, and feet from the other.

In the few seconds while the fish was clear of the water, Brody thought he saw Hooper’s glazed eyes staring open through his face mask.

Benchley aspired to higher literary ideals than the airport thriller, and the book shades in the grey areas that summer blockbusters bleach out. In the film, Quint (Robert Shaw) goes down for his cruel and unusual attitude to life (which, given the whole Indianapolis thing, seems a bit harsh), and cheery, beardy Hooper lives to dive another day. In the book, Hooper gets his righteous comeuppance, Quint is the victim of cruel, black fate, and only Brody, the one good man in Amity, gets to swim home.