Even the incidental characters are sexlexic. Chaz (the mayor’s aide) is an arrogant, self-important, egotistical phony who can’t imagine how his nastiness toward orphans might impede his chances to bed the erstwhile orphan Leela. Similarly, Adlai is so obsessed with the ideal of normalcy that he’s oblivious to the notion that rejecting physically imperfect orphans like the triaural Sally (unless surgically altered) might again offend the monocular Leela. And Alcazar doesn’t realize (or care) that treating Leela like an inferior servant, dressing her “trashily,” and demeaning her publicly might be a mild turn-off. They’re all sexually and amorously stunted.
The epitome of bureaucratic anal-retentiveness, rigidity, order, and obsessive-compulsive hygiene, Morgan Proctor loses her mind and all sexual control when she sees the curdled milk, offal, and flies in Fry’s locker, and again when she sees his bed littered with milk and debris.
Admit it, Fry: You’re a slob. [She kisses him.] A dirty, filthy slob. [She kisses him again.] Dirty boy! Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! . . . There’s nothing kinkier to me than a filthy slop-jock like you.
Meanwhile, the crustaceans on Zoidberg’s homeworld have no concept of love apart from intercourse, and of course, neither does Fry, though he considers himself the love-meister who’ll instruct his chitiny chum on l’amour. This bears closer examination:
FRY: Okay, you’re on a date. What’s the first thing you do?
ZOIDBERG: Ask her to mate with me.
FRY: No. Tell her she’s special.
ZOIDBERG: But she’s not. She’s merely the female with the largest clutch of eggs.
FRY: Well, tell her that. And then?
ZOIDBERG: Then mating.
FRY: No. Make up some feelings and tell her you have them. [Zoidberg raises his hand.] Yes?
ZOIDBERG: Is “desire to mate” a feeling?
FRY: You’re not even trying!
[Zoidberg buries his head in his claws and groans.]
ZOIDBERG: It’s all so complicated with the flowers and the romance and the lies upon lies.
FRY: Okay, okay, don’t worry. The love-meister will take you under his wing.
ZOIDBERG: What? Now there’s a bird involved?
[Outside Edna’s Apartment Building. Zoidberg stands outside the sand building and Fry hides under a giant shell with his back to the building.]
FRY: Okay, go ahead.
[Zoidberg throws an octopus at Edna’s French window. She opens it and walks out onto the balcony.]
EDNA: What the—Dr. Zoidberg, your mating display failed. Why are you trying to talk to me?
[Zoidberg shrugs.]
ZOIDBERG: [shouting] I have no idea.
FRY: [whispering] You just wanna talk.
ZOIDBERG: [shouting] I just wanna talk, it has nothing to do with mating. [whispering] Fry, that doesn’t make sense.
Despite donning the love-meister moniker, Fry is unsurprisingly clueless as well:
ZOIDBERG: I’m confused, Fry. I’m feeling a strange new emotion. Is it love when you care about a female for reasons beyond mating?
FRY: Nope. Must be some weird alien emotion.
Edna may certainly beg Fry to “teach me to love, you squishy poet from beyond the stars!,” but it’s not like Fry has much to teach this freaky mud bug or any other woman, no matter how much she drips with caviar. What is love? In moments of heartwarming (or saccharine) sentimentality, Futurama shows us that its protagonists are capable of honest tenderness and compassion. More ruthlessly (and far more often), the show deconstructs love as gullibility, ridiculous ruses, and blatant nincompoopery.
Beneath the naive fantasy of love we find the ridiculous lies upon lies upon lies told just to fool someone into having sex. Futurama instructs us mostly on what love is not, while exposing us to pandemic sexlexic ineptness.
Reflections on Our Tragic Sexlexia
Though I mentioned earlier that Fry lacked the Delta brain wave, his idiocy isn’t merely the result of doing the nasty in the pasty and becoming his own grampa. Sure, that helps, but one of the genius elements of Futurama is its incisive and raucous social commentary. The reason so much of this is hilarious is precisely because it applies to us. Futurama shows us our ubiquitous foolishness.
We’ve met the doofus and it is us. We need not be swaggering spaceship captains or insufficiently pungent crawdads. We can certainly be oblivious, obsessed, dishonest, gullible, foolhardy, selfish, self-satisfied, self-absorbed sexlexics. This applies to the typical clueless yet conceited guy using painfully embarrassing lines on women at bars, to the cringe-worthily insensitive man who blunders obliviously and pathetically, to those who fall for the wrong people (no matter how obvious it should be), and to those of us who fall for such awful lies, machinations, and seductions (again, no matter how obvious it should be).
You want a social commentary on male insensitivity? Just recall the scene in “Love and Rocket,” where a chickenwire mannequin says “my two favorite things are commitment and changing myself.” If a woman who hurls herself at a chickenwire automaton seems silly for falling in love after hearing such a line (which would most likely be “a line” if said in the real world), consider what that says about how gruff and tactless men must be. When Bender decides to break up with the Planet Express ship at the precise moment when the Omicronians are firing their missiles, she suffers cybernetic heartbreak, while he lounges on a hammock singing “Bender is great! Oh, Bender is great! Bender Bender Bender. . . .” He may only be a robot, but his callousness and bendless narcissism are all too familiar. Futurama mirrors our own sexlexia right back at us.
Perversion: Once More Unto the Breach (Beach)
What of all those velour and spanking fetishes mentioned earlier? What of those creepy voyeurs licentiously watching the seaside mating display with binoculars on planet Zoid, their jelly-crammed wazoos all a quiver, their carapaces covered by ill-fitting raincoats as the langostinial leches utter disturbing onanistic sounds? Surely this falls into an entirely different, more perverse category of sexlexic phenomena. But here’s the problem. How do we define perverse? How do we distinguish acts that we find creepy and gross from those that are somehow symptomatic of some kind of pathologically deviant sexuality?
It cannot be that it just seems “weird” (or creepy, or gross, or unnatural) to us. The fact we find something freaky, gross, or unnatural only means that we’re freaked out. It’s hardly an indefeasible measure of innate depravity, and neither is weirdness a criterion for insanity, pathology, or dysfunction. In any given culture, there’re acts deemed “normal” and “abnormal,” or “deviant,” but none of these equal insane or immoral. To see this, let’s examine acts that we consider perfectly normal, healthy, and ethical in certain liberal segments of American culture, such as romantic love, premarital sex between consenting adults, and even masturbation.
Many cultures would find the notion of romantic love patently absurd. Others would find the notion of sexual equality ridiculous, if not sacrilegious. Even in America, some would deem premarital sex and masturbation sinful, unnatural, perverse, and in all ways loathsome and disgusting. Only a century ago medical authorities believed that masturbation could cause blindness and dementia. Let us consider what Immanuel Kant, a towering figure in the history of philosophy, has to say on the subject. In The Metaphysics of Morals, Kant actually touches on the act of masturbation, which he calls “self-abuse.” He writes:
A lust is called unnatural when a man is stimulated not by an actual object but by imagining it, thus creating it himself unpurposively.
For his fancy engenders a desire contrary to an end of nature and indeed contrary to an end more important even than that of the love of life, since it aims only at preserving the individual, while sexual love aims at the preservation of the whole species.
That such an unnatural use (and so misuse) of one’s sexual attributes is a violation of one’s duty to himself and is certainly in the highest degree opposed to morality strikes everyone upon his thinking of it.
. . . The ground of proof surely lies in the fact that a man gives up his personality (throws it away) when he uses himself merely as a means for the gratification of an animal drive. But this does not make evident the high degree of violation of the humanity in one’s own person by the unnaturalness of such a vice, which seems in its very form (disposition) to transcend even the vice of self-murder.
Thus Kant paradoxically calls masturbation both bestial and unnatural, a form of self-abuse more perverse and illicit than murdering oneself. A more astute student of philosophy (or anyone else for that matter) might recognize the contradiction in calling something unnatural and bestial at the same time, and might well note the arbitrariness of evaluating a sexual act on the bases of whether it’s purposeful, preserves the species, violates a duty to oneself, or is animalistic. Ay, there’s the rub: Kant doesn’t provide a sound argument. He hasn’t proved that the instincts are immoral, nor that it violates human dignity to experience pleasure for its own sake. He simply equates what he doesn’t like with ‘immoral’.
This is why Nietzsche could criticize the history of Western morality as a litany of prejudices and passions, expressions of fear, envy, spite, rage, and disgust, all projected on others as though they were innately evil, despicable, and loathsome. Morality is too often a fantasy, a reflection of our own raging terrors spewed onto those we despise. A misogynist deems women inherently inferior and despicable, and would be mortified and enraged by the notion that he suffers from excruciating fear and envy of women, female sexuality, or feminine power. The mighty V-GINY indeed! The last thing one can usually do is comprehend or admit that the despised other is often the victim of our own inner fright and perversion.
So much of what has been considered perverse is merely a prejudice, a reflection of indoctrination and dogma inculcated through shame, threat, fear, and coercion. We’re left with the impression that “perversion” is just a normative descriptor (that is, an arbitrary judgment that depends on cultural bias) and merely a reflection of what is considered “deviant” in any given culture, but not an index of some tangible psychosexual symptom or dysfunction. Hence, Zapp may be amusing in his mildly masochistic spank-o-philia, macro-philia, or incipient fur-suitism, but it’s only comedic satire, right? Is there any basis for believing that Zapp is any more erotically aberrant than the other sexlexic characters, aside from having desires deemed funny and perverse in our arbitrary cultural estimation?
The Monsterpus Is a Monsterperv
Freud described perversion as a psychological phenomenon, reflecting a mode of pathology whereby a person would try to escape sexual anxiety by finding a symbolic substitute that could bring pleasure. Thus a shoe might (hypothetically) substitute for a vagina if the encounter with a female body aroused terror or conflict. Perversion was no longer a moral judgment about what was wrong or depraved, but a symptom of the flight from fear that brought human sexuality into the symbolic realm.
This doesn’t mean that sexual arousal by shoes, or velour, or other fetishistic pleasures must be considered inherently pathological. Freud is suggesting that sexuality emerges from an irrational dimension beyond our conscious understanding or control. We don’t understand what makes us hot and bothered, we don’t fathom why certain things get us off, we are unconscious of the meaning of our sexual acts, and the reasons we give are usually rationales for desires entirely opaque to us even if we think we understand ourselves. It’s no accident that the universal translator renders Zapp’s seemingly meaningless croaking as “I’d like to spank your sister with a slice of baloney.” For it only seems meaningless. . . .
The psychoanalysis of the paraphilias (or perversions) has evolved considerably since Freud. Robert Stoller, for instance, sets out to de-stigmatize acts deemed perverse. (He even suggests that we should hesitate before judging someone who couples with a sheep.) It’s not what you do, but why you do it. So let’s momentarily postpone judgment on sundry sexlexic acts, even if human-crustacean copulation seems sea-sickening. Stoller explains how human beings invent a variety of sexual scenarios that replay the terrifying, shameful, humiliating, and traumatic events in our lives in an attempt to magically undo them. Stoller isn’t substituting the subtle art of pathologizing for the former stigma of moralizing. Rather, his clinical work allowed him to see that we all suffer from all-too-human fears and vulnerabilities that are sometimes re-enacted in sexual scenarios, as we often inflict our pain and anger on others erotically (whether we realize it or not).
Similarly, psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall illustrates how these neosexual scenarios (she avoids the word perversion) are theatrical attempts to transform abjection and anguish into orgasmic release, and that many of these performances rescue us from helplessness and the dread of emotional annihilation. And thus sexuality becomes a form of salvation for us, sometimes as a poignant means of forming intimate connections and bridging the painful distance between individuals, sometimes even pulling us from despair, misery, and the dread of death; but sometimes unconsciously revisiting and inflicting trauma, humiliation, and suffering on others.
The reason why the Monsterpus of The Beast with a Billion Backs really is a monster perv is because multi-tentacle intercourse is a dark reflection of the sinister and pathological fantasies of violation that thrive in the real world. It’s funny in this context, but horrific as well. Further, the intimate eroticism seen in The Beast with a Billion Backs also illustrates a feeling of sexual perversion that comes with being merged with God. It may even intimate the eroticism and sexual perversity of feeling merged with God, a disturbing indictment of something deemed pure and innocent, but perhaps more lascivious and pathological than we like to imagine.1
The Profound and Perverse Depths of Futurama
If there’s a deeper dimension of perversion deriving from these psychological wounds, conflicts, and scenarios, does this actually mean that Futurama’s sexlexic characters reflect a profound sexual psychopathology? It’s true we can’t assume that just because a fictional character enjoys spankings, velour, or the tactile sensation of tentacle suckers, he must suffer from some childhood trauma or inner conflict, but without using a probulator to delve into the psyches of our perplexing Futurama writers, or assuming that sexlexics must manifest the same psychopathologies as those squidophiles in the real world, we seem to be at a loss. However, besides the obvious humor that results from the perverse, freaky-deaky sexual buffet, Futurama is actually quite psychologically astute.
Consider the scene in “Lethal Inspection” when Bender suffers an existential crisis after discovering that he is mortal because he possesses no backup unit.
BENDER: Dying sucks butt! How do you living beings cope with mortality?
LEELA: Violent outbursts.
AMY: General sluttiness.
FRY: Thanks to denial, I’m immortal!
BENDER: Damn it, I’m supposed to be perfect. Inspector 5 gave me his blessing! [He pulls out his scrap of paper and looks at it.] How could he bring me into this world knowing I’m gonna die?
ZOIDBERG: So you wish you were never born, maybe?
BENDER: Yes, anything less than immortality is a complete waste of time!
ZOIDBERG: Then suicide it is. Step into my office. I’ll give you a nice Kervorking.
This briefest of satiric exchanges traverses some of the most incisive philosophical and theological concerns and debates of the last three millennia. How do we cope with death? What is the point of life if everyone dies? Why would a creator bring us into this world if we are only going to become wormfood?
Indeed, the Futurama writers show immense insight when suggesting that the despair of death can give rise to suicidal thoughts, to the delusional belief in immortality, to violence, and to sexual promiscuity. (For those of you who are interested, and I know you are; I provide a short list of resources at the end.) Since we’re focusing on sexlexia in this chapter, let’s focus on Amy’s response. Is general sluttiness always an index of the dread of death? How w
ould we know what “normal” libido is? Isn’t the term ‘sluttiness’ just another arbitrary social construct devised by malicious people suffering from their own prudish definition of what is “normal” and what is somehow “depraved” sexuality? Well, yes, if we’re speaking of what any given person or culture deems slutty. But, philosophically and psychologically, perhaps we can leave aside the stigmatic prudishness of sexual insults and, rather, discern whether there might be motives for sluttiness.
Determining “normal” libido would depend on hormone levels, genetics, and the psychology of the individual. A healthy sexuality could still motivate a more intense sexual desire than a given culture deems “normal.” But whatever genetic sexual impulses we have are also filtered through our emotional experiences. Desire is always adulterated by the impact of culture—by all the influences of shame, guilt, fear, and disgust that may inhibit or thwart one’s sexuality, as well the nurturance, love, and support that may lead to a healthy body image and the capacity for love, respect, and affectionate sexuality. Let’s not forget all those stimuli that may actually arouse and titillate sexual desires, such as our commercials, films, and the internet.
Hence, even in our sexually-tolerant, liberal culture (wherever it is found), our so-called liberated sexuality may not be liberated at all, but rather the consequence of all sorts of influences. A powerful sex drive may be “normal,” but it may also be many other things, such as a compulsive need for love, a way of attaining self-esteem when one was previously rejected or had a negative body image, a way of convincing oneself that one is lovable, or a means of attaining pleasure and oblivion that momentarily blots out anxiety and misery. And indeed, the desire for orgasm can be a way to crush the fear of death, as one flees from terror and despair into physically and emotionally intense, time-destroying, thought-obliviating ecstasy.
Sexlexia, then, isn’t merely cluelessness or a sexy learning disability, but a manifestation of the deep abyss of existential pain and terror that gives rise to our sexualities. Remember, Zapp may seem like a big, pompous buffoon, but inside, he’s just a pitiful child craving love and shaking in fear like Nibbler alone on an alien world. (On the other hand, outside that child is a big, pompous buffoon. . . .)
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