I love Guillermo del Toro, but… when I saw his last movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in it that no critics pointed out : the movie was not only metaphorical, but dived right into ethical questions raised by bestiality
“Why would you think that ?” will you say, “And what make you so knowledgeable about fucking a sea creature ?”
Well, Well, I wrote a long article about delphinophilia some time ago. Yes, people that fuck dolphins. It’s a long article that will really give you all the details you need to know about IT. It tells the tale of the most famous delphinophile ever, Malcolm Brenner — but also of Margaret Howe Lovatt, a 70s scientist who had several experience of masturbating a dolphin named Peter in an attempt to build an universal langage to prepare for the arrival of extraterrestrial. Her story has a lot in common with the young heroin of The Shape of Water : the experience, the pool, the magical sea creature…
You can find it here :
Reading it again today, I found a lot of similarities with those stories and the movie.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it’s probably in its daring view of sex between different species that The Shape of Water is more interesting, the rest being, to my mind, quite shallow. It raises many questions : how can the character really establish the creature’s consent ? How can she know that she’s not going to wound him — or contaminate him ? In real affairs of bestiality, people usually say that “the animal started it”. It’s called “reversed bestiality”, which I call the “this dog fucked my leg” syndrome. Does it really mean you there get the right to fuck it back ?
No, no.
But of course, it’s a fantasy story ! I know, I know and it ends up being far more about the shape of water than the shape of the creature’s dong. I know ! However, that is where I need to elaborate on the comparison with another zoophiliac story : the 2009 novel, Wet Godess, by Malcolm Brenner. You would probably be shocked by Malcom’s tale of how he really fell in love with Ruby the Dolphin — but the most shocking part is its poetry : Malcom’s fascination for the dolphin leads him to dream of being a dolphin himself.
Just like The Shape of Water, the bestiality of the novel Wet Goddess propels other fantasies: the dream of an inter-species union, where the being frees itself from its limits and its appearance to plunge into an ocean where it is only one mind. The dolphin then becomes a metaphor of the soul freed from the body. From zoophilia to the astral out-of-body experience, at the end of the book, Ruby the dolphin finally offers Malcolm Brenner to accompany her into the ocean, just like in The Shape of Water. He accept, closes his eyes and suddenly becomes a dolphin swimming in the ocean in company of Ruby.
Just… like in the Shape of Water.
EDIT : Malcom Brenner answered and I want to include his point of view :
The notion that a non-human animal “can’t give consent” to sex is a quaint and stupid delusion used by ignorant puritans to condemn zoophilia. A superficial examination of animal behavior would show that animals indulge in “courtship,” an often-elaborate ritual to obtain and give consent for sex. It never ceases to amaze me how often people ignore this near-universal behavior in arguing against inter-species sex. A knowledgeable zoophile is familiar with the courtship behavior of his or her chosen species and uses this behavior, much as another animal would, to obtain non-verbal consent. In my case with the dolphin, whose real name was Dolly, she not only indubitably initiated courtship, but spent approximately 5 months de-sensitizing me to her sexual behavior and my fears about acknowledging my own zoophilia. Such a long-term goal required several shifts in her behavior, from violent to gentle to erotic, and an awareness of my state of mind at the time. This suggests great intelligence, and a “theory of mind” that allowed her to understand what I was feeling. But all people ever want to read into my story is that I fucked a dolphin, not how or why it happened. Get a life, Theodore, and quit worrying about mine.
