“The German-speaking world of Kafka scholars hit out yesterday over a British academic’s claims that the writer had a penchant for hard porn. James Hawes, a Kafka expert and novelist, claims in his book Excavating Kafka, published in Britain yesterday, that the writer was a subscriber to upmarket pornography. Furious German academics reacted by accusing Hawes of prudishness, sensationalism and even antisemitism. ‘Hawes has given us a look through the keyhole of a Kafka with his trousers down … but to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald’s,’ wrote Anjana Shrivastava, a Kafka researcher on Spiegel Online, calling Hawes a ‘prude’… At the focus of Hawes’ investigation are pictures he stumbled across in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford of the pornography to which Kafka subscribed while in his twenties. They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg. But Hawes, an Oxford graduate who teaches creative writing at Oxford Brookes University hit back at his critics, claiming that none of them had read his book and accusing them of operating a ‘conspiracy of censorship’. He said he had made no claims to have discovered Kafka’s penchant for pornography and brothel visits, but had explored why Kafka scholars had chosen to virtually ignore the topic. ‘We’re talking about a writer whose psyche the experts have been so keen to decipher. They have pored over every memorandum he ever wrote, every insurance report he ever compiled, looking for clues. Yet they have chosen not to show this undoubtedly very dark stuff,’ he told the Guardian.” — Guardian (UK)

It’s an axiom. Nearly every male writer in the history of literature masturbated. Probably a good number of female writers too. Shakespeare? A wanker. James Joyce? Pulled his pud. Author of the Bible? Yeah, probably him too, whoever he (she / they) was. Should scholars be surprised that a twenty-something-year-old Kafka enjoyed a little pornographic stimulation now and then? No.

It’s hard to see why James Hawes’ book, Excavating Kafka, has created such a furor. In recent years there has been a movement to humanize Kafka anyway. Louis Begley’s 2008 biography, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, has also been accused of considering its subject from a familiar or even insolent vantage point. Furthermore, Hawes makes a good point. Kafka has been microanalyzed by scholars for the last fifty years. Seemingly every nook and cranny of his psyche has been put under the spotlight. How is it that this incredible thoroughness has hitherto excluded any consideration of the fact that Kafka subscribed to a magazine whose illustrations included a “hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio?” Somehow it makes you consider a story such as “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” in a different light.

Evidently it’s all a tempest in an academic teapot. Kafka’s taste in porn is interesting to consider, but it would be of even more interest were porn to develop a taste for Kafka. Imagine the possibilities for a Kafkaesque pornography — people turning into bugs while they fuck…

“Is there enough married sex shown or talked about on television? That intrepid defender of the nation’s video morals, the Parents Television Council, says no. ‘Sex in the context of marriage is either nonexistent on prime-time broadcast television, or is depicted as a burdensome rather than as an expression of love and commitment,’ a new PTC report concludes. ‘By contrast, extramarital or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with greater frequency and overwhelmingly, as a positive experience…’ Its new report, Happily Never After: How Hollywood Favors Adultery and Promiscuity Over Marital Intimacy on Prime Time Broadcast Television, laments that scripted references to out-of-wedlock sex outnumber the married kind by three to one. As for scenes ‘depicting or implying sex between non-married partners’ — well, as you might guess, they stomp the married scenes by a ratio of four to one. Even worse, however, is TV’s focus on ‘outré sexual expression’ … ‘Today more than ever teens are exposed to a host of once-taboo sexual behaviors,’ the PTC report warns, ‘including threesomes, partner swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, and sex with prostitutes, to say nothing of the now-common depictions of strippers, references to masturbation, pornography, sex toys, and kinky or fetishistic behaviors.’ I hope that my students don’t read this survey (I teach history at UC-Santa Cruz), because many of them cultivate the good habit of not watching TV. These revelations might make them get started.” — Ars Technica (US)

Gut response: Who the fuck cares? Perhaps there were grounds for caring back when two or three monolithic networks dominated the airwaves. But nowadays broadcast television is fast becoming irrelevant. If broadcasters are featuring increasing amounts of “outré sexual expression,” it’s for the obvious reason that they have to compete for eyeballs with cable networks and the internet. Given a choice between watching mom-and-pop lovemaking on tv or Asian S&M anal dwarf lesbians on the web, what are most people going to choose?

In the final analysis, it’s not about big media conglomerates forcing illicit sex down the throats of viewers. It’s about capitalism. It’s about supply and demand. It’s about creating content that people want to see. There are viewers who don’t want to see smut, and there are networks (often faith-based) that cater to them by providing wholesome programming. The rest of us are pigs, dogs, and Dirty Old Men, and we’re not going to watch the boob tube unless there are boobs — and threesomes, partner swapping, pedophilia, necrophilia, and the rest of that sordid list.

“When Becky Spraggs joined a social networking website, she hoped to keep friends up to date with family photos and news. But unfortunately her friends are not the only ones looking at her photographs. To her horror, the pictures and details she placed on Facebook have been copied on to a sex website. Images of the 22-year-old mother of three appear alongside shots of another woman of similar looks engaged in sex acts and a message which reads ‘I want to be used and abused’. A fake profile claims Miss Spraggs is prepared to ‘do anything’ to become a porn actress and invites admirers to contact her manager on a mobile phone number. The number actually belongs to Miss Spraggs’s former partner, Paul Farrow, 32, the father of her young children. He has fended off more than 50 calls. ‘It’s devastating that someone could do something like this to me,’ said Miss Spraggs at her home in Hertfordshire. She signed up to Facebook a year ago and posted photos of herself and her children, who are all under four. She has listed 167 ‘friends’ on the website but did not realise her profile could be viewed by nearly three million others who have joined the same ‘London’ network. Like many social networking website users, she did not know she could opt for more stringent privacy settings to stop others seeing her details. Four of her photos appeared on June 28 on FetLife, a Canada-based members-only sex website. ‘I feel totally exposed. I’ve got pictures of my kids in the bath and the perverts that did the porn site would have seen them,’ she said… When Miss Spraggs contacted police she was told it had nothing to do with them and was referred to the Internet Watch Foundation, the British body which deals with reports of illegal content online. It said it was unable to help as no laws had been broken.” — ThisIsLondon (UK)

Here is a non-pornographic picture of Ms. Spraggs. Here is another. Here is a blurry grab of the fetish site on which she appears.

Ms. Spraggs’ former partner suspects that this is all the work of a disgruntled admirer. He may well be right. However, there is a larger issue at play. Identity theft has proliferated in recent years, and clearly there is now another sort on the rise: appearance theft. It used to be that only celebrities had to worry about it, as when an advertiser would make unauthorized use of their image to sponsor a product. But nowadays the appearance of a “regular” person can be valuable too. Just think about all the amateur porn floating around out there. Appearances that seem authentic or genuine can have tremendous appeal. Why wouldn’t unethical webmasters start skimming real photos from social networking sites to entice users to join their amateur porn sites, their meet-a-fuck-buddy sites, and so on?

Some have criticized Ms. Spraggs for taking her fight to the media. After all, how many people are going to make the slightest connection between that random image on a web site and the real person to whom the appearance belongs? Not many. But evidently that is a risk Ms. Spraggs feels she can’t take. What if the person who posted the images also writes that the young mother is willing to engage in orgies with kids? She doesn’t want to risk having her children taken away by some government agency. In that sense, taking her fight to the media is the smartest thing she could have done. It publicly discredits the stolen images and reassociates her appearance with the “real” her.

Finally, let the incident serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who posts images — of any sort — online. If you aren’t comfortable with them being grabbed, copied, repurposed, recontextualized, then don’t put them online.

“A Fort Wayne man was arrested Monday for felony Public Indecency after police saw him standing naked in the window of his home.  Around 10:30 p.m. Monday evening, a Fort Wayne officer … noticed a naked man standing in front of a large picture window of his home with his genital region clearly visible to those on the street.  According to the officer, the blinds were not pulled shut and the front door was wide open, giving a clear view inside the home.  Together, with another responding officer, the two walked up to the home and found the naked man, then on the couch, conducting a lewd act with a claw hammer, plastic bag and motor oil. The man, Ronald Miller, did not acknowledge the officer’s presence until they addressed him and still did not say anything.  Officers arrested Miller for felony Public Indecency, at which time Miller asked the officer for another chance.  Officers declined and took Miller in double-locked handcuffs to the Allen County Lock-up instead.  Mr. Miller had a previous conviction for an unrelated public nudity incident.  A neighbor watching the scene, who wished to remain confidential, told police she had seen Miller walk around naked in his home with the front window and door open on several occasions.  She said, ‘He does it 24/24.  He’s not right.’” — Wane.com (US)

(Thanks to “Chris Finch” for the link.)

Here is a picture of Mr. Miller. When you look at his face, the neighbor’s comment that “he’s not right” echoes in your head. He looks a little off, and also a little sad.

Here is the juicy part of the police report, as posted on the Smoking Gun:

The male white, later identified as Ronald H. Miller, was lying on his sofa inserting an item, later identified as a claw hammer covered with a plastic bag, into his rectum while completely naked. We observed he had some type of lubricant on his genital area and buttocks which we later learned was motor oil.

Officers entered the home and observed Miller didn’t acknowledge our presence until we addressed him. He removed the hammer from his anus and sat upright but didn’t say anything. When I told him he was under arrest for public indecency, he asked me for another chance, that I give him a break.

Presuming that he had the handle and not the claw of the hammer up his ass, it’s not so weird. He must have wrapped it in a plastic bag so that he wouldn’t get splinters in his rectum, and also so that he wouldn’t have to smell his own ass when doing repair jobs around the house. On the other hand, using motor oil as a lubricant is kind of whacked. It is smelly and hard to wash off. You wonder whether this was part of some intricate fetish — sex with things you can find in a garage — or whether these just happened to be at hand when he felt the need to sodomize himself. “No KY? No baby oil? No lotion? Damn… Well, there’s that Valvoline in the garage…”

On the internet there is a forum or group dedicated to nearly every weird fetish. However, no amount of searching turned up one where guys who jerk off with claw hammers and motor oil can share their experiences. Doubtless that is why Mr. Miller pleasured himself with blinds up and door open. He must have been very lonely, and by exhibiting himself he may have hoped to attract like-minded individuals or to educate others in the joys of masturbating like a deranged auto mechanic.

“A police investigation in to the sexual assault and death of several sheep is hampered because the suspect has a twin brother. DNA found at the scene of the sick assaults in and around Tongs Farm, Botany Bay Lane, Chislehurst, could belong to either of the 27-year-old men. The molester left his clothes strewn across the fields from which police were able to extract DNA but if the twins are identical it will be the same. Two sheep are thought to have been killed and several others traumatised in the brutal attacks which happened between March and June this year. At first, only one man was arrested during a dawn raid at a property in Dulwich on July 17. He was arrested on suspicion of bestiality and possession of drugs with intent to supply. But the Times has discovered that a second man was arrested on suspicion of bestiality at his home in Sydenham on July 18. Both men, who have been bailed, are forbidden from entering farmyards and the borough of Bromley. According to a source, a key witness now has to pick out the suspect in an identity parade because although they are twins, ‘there are differences between them’. A police spokesperson would not confirm the men were twins or whether there would be an identity parade but said: ‘We can confirm that there have been two arrests and enquires are continuing.” — Bromley Times (UK)

(Thanks to Furpo for the link.)

Ever see the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers? It is based partly on the true story of identical twin brothers who became doctors — gynecologists, of all things — and proceeded to live about as decadent a life as they could. Eventually they died from barbiturate withdrawal. You hear about drug fiends dying from overdoses often enough, but from withdrawal? You can imagine how deeply addicted they must have been.

These twin gynecologists may now be outdone on the degeneracy meter by the “sheep abuse” suspects. The article speaks as though there is only one bestialist, and thus the problem is to determine which brother shtupped the sheep. But what if the assaults were committed by both brothers? Or why not one brother one night and the other brother the next? Then again, whether it was one or both, the story raises intriguing philosophical questions. Suppose only one of them rapes sheep. Could scientists do genetic profiles of the two brothers and perhaps isolate some gene that inclines a person toward sex with animals? If a zoophilic gene were discovered, would parents want to screen their children for it at birth? What would you do if you had a zoophilic baby? Euthanize it? Keep it away from the pet goldfish?

The whole story also possesses wonderful dramatic possibilities. Imagine each brother accusing the other of sheep fuckery. You’d never be able to figure out which was telling the truth. What could you do — keep them locked in a sheep barn until one gives in to the temptation to screw some woolly hole? Or what about the supposed ESP of twins? If one brother fucks animals and the other doesn’t, would the “normal” twin have to suffer through a vicarious, paranormal experience of an act that repulses him? The camera shows Twin B lying in bed, half asleep. Suddenly he is roused by the intensely realistic visions of sheep sex beamed to him from his brother… What a story. Somebody get David Cronenberg on the line.

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