“Whole, a riveting new documentary by Melody Gilbert that recently premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and will soon be shown at festivals in Calgary and London, is about an increasingly visible group of people who call themselves ‘amputee wannabes.’ Wannabes desperately wish to have their healthy limbs removed, and some have succeeded in having it done… Oddly, the film also glides past the sexual aspect of the condition and views it as a problem of identity, like gender identity disorder. (A rare exception is a moment in which Boyer points to a sketch of a boy amputee and says, obliquely, ‘I could even get turned on by that.’) In the few medical articles where the condition has been discussed, it is known as ‘apotemnophilia,’ because clinicians view it as a paraphilia — a displaced sexual desire like transvestism, voyeurism, and pedophilia. This is because many wannabes are attracted to the idea of themselves as amputees, and some are attracted to other amputees.” — MSNBC (US)

One day in about 1990 a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young innocent was walking down St Marks Place in New York City. He was looking at all the junk — used CDs, stolen books, magazines pulled from garbage cans, God knows what else — that the scuzzy quasi-homeless punks were selling on dirty blankets on the sidewalk. Suddenly, amid a pile of ragged old pornographic magazines, he spotted a title that screamed out to him: Amputee Times. “What the…?” he thought to himself. Picking up the magazine, which appeared to date from the 1970s, he saw poorly scanned snapshots of amputees. He saw women leaning on crutches and artfully trying to hide a leg while posing nude. He saw reader-contributed drawings featuring hot amputee chicks in wild sexual positions. He saw stories and fantasies about amputee sex.

He gave a five-dollar bill to the scummy kid who had probably pulled the magazine from a dumpster somewhere — and he was never the same afterward. He had stumbled upon a new world of freakish perversion, one that he never knew existed. Who in 1990 had ever heard of apotemnophilia, the sexual condition in which people fetishize amputation? And who knew that there were actually pornographic magazines that catered to it?

For years afterward he would sometimes think about it. He would try to imagine his way into the mind of a man for whom a woman with no legs was the ultimate sex object. He would try to figure out how a person would conceive such a fetish. Was it a weird version of S&M? Was it some kind of anti-foot fetish, i.e. a case of someone so latently repulsed by feet that he could only have sex with a woman if her feet had been chopped off? Was it something that originated in a primal trauma? He could imagine Freud stroking his beard, puffing his cigar… “Ze feet and ze legs are ze first ding vas ze baby zees ven he come from ze birth canal. Ze experienz of ze birth is zo traumatic, he tranzferz hiz pain and hiz hatred to ze mudder’s legz, and voila. He developz a feteesh for ze amputeez.”

Then a few years back there emerged this new variant of apotemnophilia — amputee wannabes. People who fantasize about severing a leg. (Usually it seems to be a leg. Is this significant somehow?) Sometimes these frustrated fetishists take matters into their own hands to satisfy their weird need: one guy froze his leg in dried ice till it was so damaged a doctor agreed to amputate it. Others have used shotguns, chainsaws, homemade guillotines. Still others have begged doctors to perform an elective amputation — and, weirdly enough, some doctors have started agreeing to perform it. It’s like a sex change, they argue. It may not be physically necessary, but if you say it’s psychologically necessary, and if you’re willing to pay for it, well then — why not do it?

There is a certain logic to the argument, and yet the prospect of doctors performing elective amputations must still leave the average legislator feeling squeamish. After all, what if you developed a fetish for having your head amputated? Would a doctor do it? On one hand, it’s just an extension of this amputee phenomenon. It’s just cutting off a head rather than a leg. On the other hand, to decapitate someone is to kill him, and of course in most places it is still illegal for doctors to help someone kill himself. But then if that’s the case, if it’s illegal for doctors to help someone kill himself, how can they rationalize helping someone mutilate himself?

That is the crux of the issue: how do you define mutilation? Beauty is relative to the eye of the beholder, so the saying goes, and it has never been truer than today. Plastic surgery, piercing, scarification, rhinoplasty, steroids, Botox — there are so many methods of modifying the body, how do you draw the line between what is and isn’t acceptable? If beauty is relative, then so is ugliness and mutilation. And yet, if that’s true, then someone could shoot himself in the face and say he’s doing it for aesthetic reasons. Is that acceptable? Should a man be allowed to enucleate an eyeball or cut off his ears in order to modify his appearance in a way he claims is pleasing? Or is that just plain crazy behavior?

Mutilation has become a twilight zone, a no-man’s-land where no one is quite sure what constitutes taste and what constitutes derangement. Death, it would seem, still forms an absolute of some kind. You can’t “modify” the body to the point where it kills you without thereby breaking the law. But for how long will this remain true? As the right-to-die movement gains in popularity and assisted suicide is gradually legalized, might death become a no-man’s-land as well? In the future, will surgeons service decapitation fetishists who complain of feeling stifled in their current bodies? “Doctor, help! I’m a headless man trapped in the body of someone with a head on his shoulders!”

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