Would You Fuck Me?
Hermaphroditism and rebirth within art, poetry, and histories.
Ripley Fletcher / @ripley.flet
the soil must long for your flesh
Oh how the soil must long for your flesh,
The worms to churn through your tender meat,
The moss, a little green thief in shadows,
Waits eagerly to ravage your crumbling bones,
How the cool wet earth will soon soak your feet,
A soured baptism into a lasting darkness,
How long will time’s soft hand take to paint your teeth yellow,
And to cast your stiffened curled fingers in shades of black,
Cold boney digits still grasping, clawing at bare palms,
Stale blood and dead skin thickened with dirt under your nails,
They crack, then split, then run from your hands one by one,
Oh how the soil must long for your flesh,
The damp and decay searching for you now, blossoms calling your name,
Rancid petals bloom unfurling from shrouded depths,
Each new bud an aching reminder, of warmth long lost,
In caverness chambers where even sunlight dare not dance,
Each moment stretches thin beneath a sky unbothered by loss,
Oh how the soil must crave your surrender,
Beneath layers of forgotten prayers, where the stench of memory festers,
The masses of maggots yearning to dance their ballet on skin turned grey,
And the mice with their insatiable hunger and tiny teeth square and sharp,
Their tails and stinking bodies tangle and tossel over each other,
As shadows stretch out and yawn around splintered wood,
Under faded jagged stones where nature swallows each broken morsel,
Your choked voice, a haunted chorus swell with calls unanswered,
In every farewell, there’s a blend to the whole,
Oh how the soil must long for your soul.
the birth of hermaphrodite
Hermaphroditus was the beautiful son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who lived in the foothills of mount Ida. One day whilst bathing in a secluded pool he encountered the nymph Salmakis, who resided in the pool’s waters. Upon seeing Hermaphroditus, the nymph became immediately overwhelmed by lust and love for the god, she swam into the waters wrapping her arms around his divine body in attempts to seduce him.
Amongst the struggle Salmakis called out to the gods in prayer, she pleaded that the two should never part,for she longed to be with him for all eternity. Zeus heard her plea from high on Olympus and granted her wish. Thus, there in the waters of the pool their bodies blended into one form, “a creature of both sexes”. Hermaphroditus emerged from the water as a new form. The hermaphrodite body was born.
The story serves as an etiological tale, or origin myth to explain the existence of gender non-conforming bodies in the ancient world. Read as a metaphor for the fluidity of gender, we understand that the transformation only enhances the character’s divine and ethereal beauty. The physical rebirth that is undergone is followed by an emergence from the deep waters of the pool to land, and can be understood as a symbol of transition and an acclimation to comfort and self-assurance within gender identity. Out of such murky chaos a new being is, in some ways, born again. Yet not completely, with newness and familiarity, the figure stands alone in complex beauty; naked and bare.
Our God is a union of the mundane, an animalistic norm that is intrinsically known by all, and yet is more intricate than these previous known forms. This journey of metamorphosis is strangely echoed in the 1988 novel “The Silence of the Lambs” by T.Harris.
In the psychological horror the character and antagonist Jame Gumb, known as Buffalo Bill, kidnaps and murders curvaceous women in order to flay them and use their skin to sew a female suit. Buffalo does this as they wish to appear physically female, particularly trying to emulate curvy and full figured women of 80’s pop culture. Buffalo’s descent to insanity and psychosis begins with a traumatic childhood rife with abuse, first at the hands of the foster care system, followed by an emotionally devastating breakup and then is finally repeatedly declined access to gender affirming healthcare.
Cumulatively, this pushes the character to a slow psychotic breakdown and leads them down a bitter and murderous path. “Our Billy wasn’t born a criminal, Clarice. He was made one through years of systematic abuse. Billy hates his own identity, you see, and he thinks that makes him a transsexual.”
The comparison between Buffalo and the myth of Hermaphroditus I draw through Buffalo’s signature calling card, a moth chrysalises left with the bodies of the victims. The cocoons symbolise transformation, the emergence of the moth into the world through a metamorphosis from one body to a new one, bearing similar notes to the hermaphrodite emerging from the waters as a reborn form.
Within the 1991 film, we follow Buffalo to their home where we watch them put on makeup and style their hair whilst smoking and listening to music. They then stand back looking at themselves in a tall mirror ( in this instance the viewer is positioned as said mirror) and open their robe revealing their smooth naked body with their genitals tucked hidden between their legs, the robe draped and hanging loosely from their open arms.
Then, gazing at their reflection, offer a question; “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me... I’d fuck me so hard.” In this moment we see an inescapable representation of the character; both buffalo’s and Hermaphroditus’. The thread is weaved; linking through time the imagery of the metamorphosis of the moth, to the patterned robe that’s draped over Bill, a striking resemblance of the open wings of a moth, changed and thus emerging from its chrysalis. To me, the visual storytelling here is comparable to the imagery of hermaphroditus stepping back onto land from the shallows and, to almost deny the hand the gods had in their molding; begs the world to bear witness to their new form.
Both characters experience a moment of self identification and realisation; manifested physically in their bodies, and to have this presented to the world through the effects of a yearning, gnawing desire is something that is undeniable for any viewer.
Do they desire rebirth, or wish for it to be embraced as the purest form of birth. We are abridged; through Salmakis and Bill, the notion of a “form” being an extension of a soul and a visceral need, and yet an unavoidable assignment in the physical sense brings forth a question ; what is it we desire when we gaze into our own mirroring pool?