SEXIS WRONG

Necrophilia
Nick Adams
It’s a damn shame what we’ve done to necrophilia. Not the
concept. The concept has, I think, been properly demonized
and swept under the rug in our society. I mean the word
necrophilia itself. Taken purely at face value, it is one of the
more poetic and beautiful words in the English language. In
fact, it’s too good to be English. It’s worthy of one of the Romance
tongues. Example (imagine this in Italian):
“And then we went on a romantic gondola ride
through the canals of Venice. We marveled at the
amazing architecture of the buildings and the
sweeping necrophilia that adorned the sides of
the bridges.”
Unfortunately, necrophilia is a term that is used to describe
one of—if not the—most distasteful acts that a human being
can carry out. As you may or may not know, necrophilia
means having an erotic attraction to or sexual contact with
corpses. That’s how repulsive and depraved human beings
are. We had to come up with a word to describe that. If it
was just the one crazy guy living in Florida, we could laugh
it off with, “Oh, that Earl. He sure is an odd bird!” But, no.
Apparently, there have been more than a handful of people
throughout time who have been fascinated with this concept;
at least enough to warrant a dictionary entry.
As crazy as it sounds, there is a segment of our species who
would eschew all of the various and sundry ways there are to
pleasure oneself—with a person of the opposite sex, a person
of the same sex, yourself, or an inanimate object—and
instead choose to seek the dry, dusty pleasures of the dead.
Remember that the next time you climb up on your Homo sapiens
high horse. Your dog might drink out of the toilet bowl
and hump your leg, but would he fuck the rotting corpse of
the Shih Tzu across the street? I think not.
I can’t help but wonder what the process was like choosing
the word. I can’t imagine the intellectual elite of long ago ever
thought they’d come across something as perverse as this.
Fuck a young boy? Sure. Sell your enemies into slavery? Why
not? March human beings into ovens? If need be. But getting
it on with a dead body? I can only imagine what that first
conversation was like.
“Looks like another guy whipped it out in the mausoleum
last night. What are we going to tell the reporters when they
show up?”
“Beats me. We don’t even have a name for this yet.”
“How about dead fuckery?”
“It’s catchy but a little too literal.”
“Corpsilingus!”
“I think you’re on to something, but it’s too close to cunnilingus.
We don’t want to discourage people from tasting a bit of
the bearded clam from time to time, now do we, Cyrus?”
“Well said, Winthrop.”
“I’ve got it. We shall call it necrophilia!”
“Brilliant. Now let’s pull this cadaver’s pants up and go get
some lunch.”
How does one become a necrophiliac? Obviously, these
people didn’t just start out that way. You can’t take a dead
body to your junior prom without raising some suspicions. If
you’re a teenage necro-virgin, you probably just started out
by dating really thin girls. Then you progressed to dating re-
NECROPHILIA 131