12
NecroCalculus
From Karen Greenlee to Jeffery Dahmer by way of Sergeant Bertrand, the sliding scale of necrophiliac desire is obvious. Greenlee’s available and opportunistic macabre frottage is separated by moral leaps and bounds from the disinternement evisceration, masturbation and sexual penetration perpetrated by Sergeant Bertrand, which is again far from approaching in immoral standards the sadistic murder and rape of young men by Jeffrey Dahmer. As observers of these acts, we have to ask ourselves: why would and how could these people have sex—in whatever fashion—with dead bodies? Are they immoral? Are they insane? Are they evil? Is it a matter of sexual desire? Is it an uncontrollable paraphilia? Or is it that necrophiles do not experience disgust as much as or in the same way as other people? And if so, if it is a matter of sexual proclivity mixed with anosmia, should we deny them their rights however non-ethical they are? ‘Refusing the same ethical rights to those outside our community as those inside it is something that does not come naturally to a human being. It is a violation of our spontaneous ethical proclivity. It involves brutal repression and self-denial.’[232]
Carl von Cosel had sex with the dead body of Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos because he was in love with her dead and/or alive. Necrophilia for von Cosel was a furtherance of his obsessive desire for the 22-year-old woman. For Ted Bundy, necrophilia was just another means of degrading the women he attacked, another way to exercise his power. So is necrophilia a form of love or a form of rape? Whom does it harm? In Karen Greenlee’s case, we could argue that no(body) was harmed, relatives may have been perturbed and newspapers shocked but there was no injury to the bodies, no psychological torture for the ‘victims’. In the case of Sergeant Bertrand, again, no(body) experienced pain—beside Bertrand—even if the bodies were mutilated; the people most shocked by the acts appeared to be the gravediggers and the doctors who interviewed the sergeant. But once we move on to Dahmer and Bundy, our moral outrage becomes more pronounced, these men killed for pleasure, they killed because they enjoyed physical and psychological violence, rape and necrophilia. ‘“Violence,” here, is not aggression as such, but its excess, which disturbs the normal run of things by desiring always more and more.’[233] For Greenlee, corpses were akin to vibrators. For Bertrand, dead bodies were like Fleshlights within which he could fulfil his necro fantasies. For Dahmer and Bundy, their victims were human beings that they reduced to nothing through torture, rape and murder. This is where our immoral calculus may help us.
As William T. Vollmann states, ‘Death is ordinary’,[234] it happens to everybody, yet necrophilia happens to very, very few. Dead bodies are covered in faeces, in urine, they stink of rotten flesh, they exude noxious gases. Is having sex with a dead body immoral or is it just disgusting? Is necrophilia only immoral because of the means of acquiring the body as a vessel for sexual purposes? And if it is immoral, then are the perpetrators mad and evil perverts who will stop at nothing to satisfy their twisted sexuality? Or are they harmless opportunists with a fetish for the dead? Does necrophilia fall under the category of ethics or emotion? ‘Does every ethics have to rely on fetishist disavowal? Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering?’[235] Is it a question of moral negligence, moral indifference, moral weakness or moral perversity? Is it a form of preferential wickedness? Is it amoral rather than immoral?[236] And if we decide that it is immoral, then is it evil? In order to study these labels in regards to necrophilia, the case of various contemporary necrophiles will be taken into consideration.
Born in 1968, Graham Coutts had had violent sexual fantasies about women from his early teens and became an asphyxio-philiac, using self-asphyxiation to heighten and lengthen his orgasms. Coutts enjoyed what he termed ‘breath control sex’ and used this both passively and actively with his partners. Passive asphyxiophilia (the asphyxiation of a partner in order to render them unconscious) could be considered a training method for certain forms of necrophilia. The unconscious body becomes a sexual plaything for the active partner. Yet active asphyxiophilia in which one strangles oneself in order to heighten orgasm is anti-necrophilia in that it is attempted suicide for sexual purposes.
Coutts was a sexual experimenter, a man who enjoyed extreme pornography—he had bought DVDs such as Psycho Sisters and Murder x2 and paid over £100 in membership fees to pseudo-snuff and sadist websites Club Dead, Brutal Love and Twistedfiles.com, he fantasized about rape but was also a man who had a steady job and long-term girlfriend. In March 2003, he was in the company of Jane Longhurst, a friend of his girlfriend at his home in Brighton, England. Coutts told the court at his trial that he and Jane had had consensual sex, that he had wrapped a pair of tights around her neck and that her subsequent death had been an accident while performing asphyxiophilia. Erotic obsession had turned to murder. Coutts, like Christie, had pre-and peri-mortem sex with the body; whether or not he had intended to kill Jane Longhurst, after the strangulation, he had the ‘opportunity’ to act out one of his fantasies, to have sex with a dead woman, going against Terry Eagleton’s statement about Freud that ‘there is a sense in which we find death extraordinarily gratifying.’[237] However, Coutts had to overcome something that we would all feel, not a sense of the immorality of the act but that primal emotion of disgust. Coutts had kept the body for a month in various locations, until he placed her decomposing body in a storage unit, visiting the body on a number of occasions during that period. But Coutts claimed in court, ‘There’s nothing sexual about a dead body, nothing. And the smell was getting worse and worse and worse. There’s nothing remotely sexual about that.’ Did Coutts overcome his feelings of disgust to rape the dead body of Jane Longhurst?
Disgust—be it pathogenic, sexual or moral—must be overcome in order to perform a necrophiliac act. Pathogenic disgust has its basis in evolutionary human morality protecting us against disease, decay, dead bodies, most people have a primary emotional response to the sight of urine, faeces, blood and vomit and, it must be argued, most of these bodily emissions must have been present during and after the sexual strangulation of Jane Longhurst. Sexual disgust guards us against incest and also assists in choosing a mate through body symmetry, etc. However many times Coutts may have visited the body, the sexual disgust must have increased and his attraction decreased—he eventually burned the body in local woods. If Coutts had had consensual sex with Jane Longhurst—however against the norm—and the death had been an accident, then his necrophilia was a form of post-mortem rape. However, if he had lured her to his house, raped, killed and then committed necrophilia, Coutts was beyond the barrier of any form of moral disgust. Taking all three domains together, Coutts does not appear to be overly burdened with the primal emotion of disgust. The court did not think so and in 2007, after an appeal, he was sentenced to life in prison.
What is certain is that Graham Coutts committed rape on the body of Jane Longhurst. In his ‘moral calculus’ Vollmann asks, ‘What constitutes rape? We think we have it figured out. It is sexual knowledge without consent, or sexual knowledge of a person deemed unable to comprehendingly consent, such as a minor or a mental incompetent.’[238] This asks fundamental questions about sexual congress with a dead body? A corpse is not able to ‘comprehendingly consent,’ it is neither a minor nor a mental incompetent. It has no sensory stimuli, it is unable to feel pain or humiliation. For the necrophile, it is nothing more than an object of desire and a receptacle for sexual emissions. In other words, it is devalued to the point of pornography and the Coutts case led to the call in the UK government for the criminalization of extreme pornography, even though then most extreme pornography (in the case of some necrophiles) is the corpse itself.