Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, you wasn't to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. So
Speaker 1: this is gonna be a repeat episode, but we wanted
Speaker 1: to give you a little bit of an introduction to it.
Speaker 1: This is from about a year ago when Robert and
Speaker 1: I did an episode on the science of necrophilia, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to just throw it out there, this is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite episodes that we've ever recorded. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one is a really fun topic to research. I
Speaker 1: thought that the episode came together perfectly and we we
Speaker 1: were were able to demystify the topic takes something that
Speaker 1: is often seen is just you know, utterly repellent. You
Speaker 1: just you don't even want to look closer. Maybe you
Speaker 1: maybe you do, but in a gruesome car exc But
Speaker 1: but when you strip away the human complexities that the
Speaker 1: actual science is really fascinating as well. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: just you know, want to know, we talked about this
Speaker 1: up front in the episode. I believe, but don't don't
Speaker 1: think that this is going to be some like gross
Speaker 1: out fest or anything like that. We approach this the
Speaker 1: way we do all of our other episodes with a
Speaker 1: lot of research, and uh, with a modicum of dignity,
Speaker 1: I guess is what I would say, the same monicum
Speaker 1: of dignity that we we we dust off for every episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, but like organic food. Yeah exactly. So without
Speaker 1: further ado, let's jump into it, all right, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna start off by just by discussing necrophilia in in
Speaker 1: the animal kingdom. I mean generally, that's the way it
Speaker 1: goes with these things. We can talk about a simpler
Speaker 1: model of what's going on with the animals before we
Speaker 1: dare throw in the complications of the human mind and
Speaker 1: human culture. And what I was the most shocked about
Speaker 1: with this as we did the research was how prevalent
Speaker 1: it is. I mean, We've got at least what like
Speaker 1: five or six examples of different animals h that practice
Speaker 1: necrophilia today, and I'm sure there are dozens more out
Speaker 1: there that have just not been cataloged. And because we'll
Speaker 1: find with the penguin, it was and then that research
Speaker 1: was redacted basically for cultural reasons. It was just too
Speaker 1: shocking to share. I mean, but essentially you can sum
Speaker 1: it all up in a bumper sticker like, necrophilia happens,
Speaker 1: and yes, and the more you you just sort of
Speaker 1: acclimatized to that reality, the easier going everything else. Is
Speaker 1: that it's not something that is not necessarily an act
Speaker 1: that is just a defilement before the gods, as much
Speaker 1: as a thing that occurs in the natural order of things,
Speaker 1: and often as an accident. But accidents happen, and uh,
Speaker 1: and then human culture just makes it a little more complicated.
Speaker 1: You know. What just occurred to me, Robert, is that
Speaker 1: we're assuming that our audience automatically knows what necrophilia is.
Speaker 1: That's true. Yeah, so maybe we should just, i mean
Speaker 1: throw out a very basic definition which is in fact,
Speaker 1: and this was one of the things that surprised me
Speaker 1: doing the research. In the case of necrophilia, it is
Speaker 1: not the act of having sex with a dead body,
Speaker 1: with a corpse. It is the desire to right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: just the desire to alone. The fantasy of necrophilia is
Speaker 1: enough to classify one as a necrophilia um, and the
Speaker 1: term itself is actually pretty new. Necrophilia is an entirely
Speaker 1: nineteenth century term, but of course the practice it describes
Speaker 1: the sexual abuse of courses it's quite ancient myths going
Speaker 1: back as far as human memory, probably because it you know,
Speaker 1: it gets down to a lot of the key problems
Speaker 1: with dealing of death. Um. But of course you have
Speaker 1: to sort of define what is sex too before we write,
Speaker 1: because of course, human intercourse is essentially the physical act
Speaker 1: that allows the exchange of genetic information to mix everything
Speaker 1: around and create a new organism as offspring. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's what makes our first example in sort of
Speaker 1: the quote unquote animal world interesting because it's so alien
Speaker 1: to how we understand intercourse. It almost seems like it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be categorized as necrophilia technically, but it's referred to
Speaker 1: as such in the literature, right, And I'm sure in
Speaker 1: the science headlines I didn't. I mean, maybe not yet,
Speaker 1: But it's just waiting for the right paper to come
Speaker 1: out and then all the various science blogs will really
Speaker 1: run with the headline that will include the phrase bacterial necrophilia. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, bacteria they don't actually need to engage in
Speaker 1: intercourse in order to reproduce. Instead, they tend to swallow
Speaker 1: up DNA from other bacteria just as they move around,
Speaker 1: and they'll even absorb it from dead bacterial cells, they
Speaker 1: exchange new DNA fragments from the dead with their own,
Speaker 1: and then by shuffling all this around, they're essentially mating
Speaker 1: with the dead, uh, in a way that most higher
Speaker 1: creatures fail to achieve. Yeah. The stuff that I read
Speaker 1: about this, in particular, I'm going to be honest, was
Speaker 1: so dense that I had a hard time understanding it.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's its own very special niche field, uh,
Speaker 1: that that has its own language, and that I don't
Speaker 1: know necessarily that they're using necrofile or necrophilia sort of
Speaker 1: in the same way that we understand it when we're
Speaker 1: applying it, certainly to human beings but also to other animals.
Speaker 1: But it is how it is described in the literature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a genetic exchange between the living and the dead. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's almost its own thing because it doesn't really match
Speaker 1: up with most of the models of of biological higher
Speaker 1: organism necrophilia, but it's important to include here, especially I
Speaker 1: think it's a it's perfect to include at the top,
Speaker 1: But if you want to move on, we can get
Speaker 1: into what what Robert has coined here as the duck
Speaker 1: of death. And I'm sure, a lot of people are
Speaker 1: familiar with this one from the Ignoble Prizes, particularly the
Speaker 1: the Ignoble Prize for Biology in two thousand three. Now,
Speaker 1: just to rehash, uh, the Ignoble Prizes, this comes out,
Speaker 1: These come out every year. This was new to me
Speaker 1: and you explained it to me before the podcast. Yeah, it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's easy to mistake it for like a mockery, but
Speaker 1: it's really a celebration of of weird science papers and
Speaker 1: some you know, science papers that study the strange or
Speaker 1: just the just the the the weird minutia that often gets,
Speaker 1: you know, and and is inherently picked up in scientific literature.
Speaker 1: As as science expands like a slime mold through the
Speaker 1: labyrinth of of existence, you know, you're gonna pick up
Speaker 1: some weird topics. And they celebrate these topics. And so
Speaker 1: the two thousand three award went to um Keys moliker
Speaker 1: Um who's a Dutch writer and curator of the Natural
Speaker 1: History Museum in Rotterdam. Uh and he he won this
Speaker 1: paper for his uh his recorded uh his first scientifically
Speaker 1: recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the Mallard Duck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and before we get into the details here there's I
Speaker 1: want to back up a second because one of the
Speaker 1: things that I read was that apparently mallards in the
Speaker 1: Netherlands are particularly known for what are called attempted rape flight,
Speaker 1: and that this isn't necessarily from from what I was reading,
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily heterosexual or homosexual. It's just more like
Speaker 1: these ducks just go for it while they're flying, and
Speaker 1: it's somewhat regardless of gender. But one in ten of
Speaker 1: these attempted rape flights is homosexual, and that it's two
Speaker 1: male ducks. Uh, And that basically what we're looking at
Speaker 1: here in this example from Mullicker is that one of
Speaker 1: the ducks died midflight, either from injuries due to their
Speaker 1: struggle or maybe it ran into something, and the other
Speaker 1: duck just landed and kept going. It's ending. It's hard not.
Speaker 1: I laughed a little bit. It's so it's hard not,
Speaker 1: you know what. I think it's okay for you to laugh.
Speaker 1: I think it's okay for the people listening to lad
Speaker 1: you gotta have a little bit of literal gallows you
Speaker 1: with this in order to get through it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean they are justist ducks in this case doing what
Speaker 1: ducks do to each other. Yeah, and as we're gonna
Speaker 1: find too. You know, this kind of uh sexual behavior
Speaker 1: is fairly common in a lot of animals, birds especially,
Speaker 1: but yeah, these ducks, Um, it seems like I didn't
Speaker 1: get the impression because I read the actual account for Muliker.
Speaker 1: I don't know that he knew how the first duck died.
Speaker 1: It sounded like maybe it crashed into something. But basically
Speaker 1: there was this this duck corpse, and he saw the
Speaker 1: second duck mounted and began to peck at it and
Speaker 1: proceed for quite some time. I mean, he recorded pretty
Speaker 1: precisely how long everything lasted, and I believe it was
Speaker 1: like I don't have it in the notes here, but
Speaker 1: I want to say it was like forty five or
Speaker 1: seventy five minutes or something like that. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: like this duck didn't realize what was happening, then realized
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's a partner was dead, and stopped
Speaker 1: it really you know, made a habit of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's one of the reasons that the
Speaker 1: the paper won the egg Nobel Prize and was so
Speaker 1: everyone enjoyed it so much, is that it is this
Speaker 1: meticulous look at this horrible thing then that you know,
Speaker 1: most people might want to turn their eyes away from. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing about it, right, is that Mullicker sat
Speaker 1: there and watched this for let's say seventy five minutes,
Speaker 1: and I'm assuming, with like a pad of paper and
Speaker 1: just wrote it all down. And he actually, from what
Speaker 1: I was reading, it was after that, after the second
Speaker 1: I believe that this there were two instances of it
Speaker 1: with the same deceased duck. Uh, he kind of shoot
Speaker 1: away the other bird and finally took the corpse of
Speaker 1: the mallard and um, you know, brought it inside, and
Speaker 1: that other duck hung around kind of making noises for
Speaker 1: a while afterwards. So it's an interesting case. I would
Speaker 1: not be the person who would be so intent upon,
Speaker 1: you know, cataloging this that I would be able to
Speaker 1: hang out there for seventy five minutes. But yeah, it's
Speaker 1: an example of the unflinching gaze of science. Now our
Speaker 1: next case though, is it's more of an example of
Speaker 1: the the definitely the flinch. Yeah. George Murray Levic, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was the medical officer on Captain Scott's Terra Nova
Speaker 1: expedition to the South Pole in nineteen ten, and he
Speaker 1: recorded the sexual activity of the Adeli penguins uh in
Speaker 1: in detail, and he was he was somewhat shocked by
Speaker 1: much of what he saw. And a lot of this
Speaker 1: really has to do with with him falling into the
Speaker 1: trap of seeing penguins as little people. You know, they
Speaker 1: were little people in tuxedos instead of just bipedal birds.
Speaker 1: Do you know what this movie? Do you know what
Speaker 1: this article made me think of? Have you ever seen
Speaker 1: that movie March of the Penguins narrated by Morgan Freeman.
Speaker 1: I have not seen any of the various penguin related
Speaker 1: movies that have come out. I I saw it, gosh,
Speaker 1: must have been eleven years ago now or something like that.
Speaker 1: Whenever it first came out. I saw it in the theater.
Speaker 1: Is the one where they surf? Right? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: this is like a documentary. This isn't the c G
Speaker 1: I Happy I think you're thinking of Happy feat But
Speaker 1: then came from what's his name, director of Mad Max,
Speaker 1: So oh oh yeah that's right, George Miller. Yeah that's true. Yeah. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: for those of you out there who have seen much
Speaker 1: of the penguins, and I think there is a whole
Speaker 1: kind of genre of documentary film about Penguin's. One of
Speaker 1: the things that bothered me about that movie at the
Speaker 1: time is how much it personified the penguins. And clearly
Speaker 1: from reading this like Levick, they must have left some
Speaker 1: of the more animalistic behaviors of Penguin's out of the
Speaker 1: cut so that it fit the sort of humanized narrative
Speaker 1: that they established. As Morgan Freeman read to us, you know,
Speaker 1: over the over this very nice footage of Penguin's. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's an article that came out on the BBC in
Speaker 1: two thousand twelve titled Depraved sex Acts by Penguins Shock
Speaker 1: Polar Explorer and uh it's it's a wonderful little read on.
Speaker 1: Included link to it on the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: But there's a quote there. Um. They they interviewed Douglas Russell,
Speaker 1: who's creator of Eggs and Nest at the Natural History Museum,
Speaker 1: and uh, he says, what is happening here is not
Speaker 1: in any way analogus to necrophilia in the human context.
Speaker 1: It is the male seeing the positioning that is causing
Speaker 1: them to have a sexual reaction. They're not distinguishing between
Speaker 1: live females who are awaiting congress in the colony, and
Speaker 1: dead penguin's from the previous year, which just happened to
Speaker 1: be in the same position, and so um. As the
Speaker 1: article lays outge George Murray Levick, in writing about these penguins,
Speaker 1: was so shocked that the the stuff about necrophilia he
Speaker 1: essentially redacted only some of his peers and the individuals
Speaker 1: that they shared it with. We're able to read the
Speaker 1: full unedited account of penguin atrocities. Yeah, and in fact,
Speaker 1: like that, it goes beyond just the necrophilia too. I
Speaker 1: believe these penguins, similar to the mallards, you know, sort
Speaker 1: of engage in in like a habitualized gang rape, is
Speaker 1: what it sounded like, because there's lots of these male
Speaker 1: penguins surrounding female penguins, and what ends up happening in
Speaker 1: these situations situations is there so brutal that they accidentally
Speaker 1: killed the partner. Yeah, I mean really, it should come
Speaker 1: as no surprise, right that in a brutal environment, creatures
Speaker 1: will behave brutally in order to survive. Um, which leads
Speaker 1: us to HP Lovecraft. Yeah, this was I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but when I when I was reading this,
Speaker 1: I started thinking about At the Mountains of Madness, his
Speaker 1: novella which I just reread sometime in the last couple
Speaker 1: of years, Like, it's kind of fresh, it's great. That's
Speaker 1: one of my favorite Lovecraft pieces. It's a little bit
Speaker 1: longer than his other ones, but yeah, yeah, one of
Speaker 1: his later works. Definitely definitely science fiction. It's it's a
Speaker 1: work that he conducted a lot of scientific research for.
Speaker 1: He was Lovecraft of the guy who if he were
Speaker 1: around today, you know, he would be hitting all the
Speaker 1: science blogs. Who would be reading some of the journals.
Speaker 1: He'd have a subscription to to several of the magazines.
Speaker 1: He'd probably have a podcast at house of work. I
Speaker 1: would hope so. And uh he uh. But he makes
Speaker 1: several mention mentions of the penguin, like numerous mentions of penguins,
Speaker 1: often describing them as grotesque penguins. And he probably would
Speaker 1: have have read about about about Levis thoughts on the penguins.
Speaker 1: And I'm probably not the unedited content, but he certainly
Speaker 1: makes reference to Captain Scott's Terra Nova expedition in the story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if I remember correctly, in that story, those penguins
Speaker 1: were somewhat gigantic, right, there was something to do with that.
Speaker 1: They were sort of like prehistoric holdover penguins. And we know,
Speaker 1: I believe from what I've I've read an other research
Speaker 1: instances that that's a thing that that penguins did used
Speaker 1: to be considerably larger than they are now. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: almost feel like they come off more repellent in that
Speaker 1: story than like the show goths. Oh yeah, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're terrifying. Um. So let's move on to reptiles. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we've got a bunch of exa amples of of
Speaker 1: reptiles in action performing necrophilia. And one of the first
Speaker 1: ones that I found was from an article called It
Speaker 1: was published this year called corpse Bride Irresistible. A dead
Speaker 1: female tagu lizard courted by males for two days at
Speaker 1: an urban park in southeastern Brazil. It's very specific that title.
Speaker 1: I love the pool quote on this one from a
Speaker 1: zoologist who observed this act and process. It's very similar
Speaker 1: to the to the Mallard duck. This guy just sat
Speaker 1: there and watched quote. I felt a sense of wonder, Well,
Speaker 1: I'll go through this and then we can hit upon
Speaker 1: some of the other lizards he provided a very detailed
Speaker 1: account of what happened here with this tagu lizard. Apparently,
Speaker 1: it mounted a recently dead female, gained hold by biting
Speaker 1: the skin of her neck and attempting to mate with her.
Speaker 1: The same male just kept biting the neck and rubbing
Speaker 1: its left hind limbs on her body. And then this
Speaker 1: basically was like I think a two day dead female.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't, you know, as it wasn't similar to
Speaker 1: the Mallard case where it'd like just happened. Um. Then
Speaker 1: another smaller male came by and also held the neck
Speaker 1: of it, and they seems to be, you know, biting
Speaker 1: seems to be a major part of tagu lizard sex practice,
Speaker 1: because they just were opening their jaws kind of biting
Speaker 1: and putting their mouths around the whole head of this animal. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then after a while it ceased its attempts, and
Speaker 1: he this is exactly from his his figure description. The
Speaker 1: male tongue flicked the female's head and scratched her hind
Speaker 1: bodies with the right hind limb. So there you have it,
Speaker 1: necrophilia between tagu lizards. I love though about this case.
Speaker 1: One of the things I love about this case is
Speaker 1: that the analysis of what's happening here goes deeper than
Speaker 1: just oh, it's a stupid animal and it made a
Speaker 1: stupid mistake and tried to mate with something that it
Speaker 1: cannot mate with. They they point out that, first of all,
Speaker 1: lizards of course cold blooded creatures. So it's not uh
Speaker 1: so the creature that it's attempting to have sex with
Speaker 1: though dead, uh you know, it's it's ambient body heat.
Speaker 1: The body heat is essentially going to be that of
Speaker 1: the ambient air, and uh pheromones are still going to
Speaker 1: be in play even though it's dead. So there are
Speaker 1: there are enough signals saying yes, I'm alive for the
Speaker 1: you know, the dominating male to then come in and
Speaker 1: try and do its thing. Yeah. I think that's an
Speaker 1: important thing to distinguish here as well, too, is like,
Speaker 1: consider that these animals are relying on senses that they
Speaker 1: are very different than ours to distinguish what's what's available
Speaker 1: and what's alive. I'm thinking it's probably less like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, if if a human were to go to
Speaker 1: a bar and try to chat up someone who's just
Speaker 1: a corpse just propped up. Yeah, it's more like if
Speaker 1: you're driving down the interstate and you see a sign
Speaker 1: for a gas station and you pull in to get gas.
Speaker 1: It said gas station. You know, pull the car up,
Speaker 1: actually get out to fill up, and then realize that
Speaker 1: the place is closed, exactly like the existing signs. The
Speaker 1: major signs that we care about in this rather simplistic
Speaker 1: ordeal are saying yes, we're open for business, when in
Speaker 1: the fact the lizards dead. It's possible this table lizard
Speaker 1: didn't even realize it at all, you know, even even afterwards.
Speaker 1: It sounded like the same with a mallard. We've also
Speaker 1: got this with another reptile, the Amazonian frog. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have trouble pronouncing this Latin name, right, ryan Ella probuscda. Yes,
Speaker 1: And this one is fabulous because, as a two thirteen
Speaker 1: study reveals, this is functional necrophilia. This is something that
Speaker 1: pretty much every other organism out there, it's an impossibility
Speaker 1: because necrophilia. We've often discussed this, we've discussed it so
Speaker 1: far in lizards and birds. It's a mistake that cannot
Speaker 1: possibly work. But in this frog, in proboscidia here are proboscidia, uh,
Speaker 1: we actually see reproduct occurring through necrophilia, right, So they
Speaker 1: extract eggs from their dead sexual partners, right, and and
Speaker 1: then they fertilize them. They don't fertilize them and then
Speaker 1: extract them. Right. This is so how this happened. And
Speaker 1: it's not not to say they primarily or only reproduced
Speaker 1: through neck, but on the table as as as a
Speaker 1: viable option. So the males form a big mating ball
Speaker 1: they make, you know, consist of you know, dozens of frogs,
Speaker 1: and they're all just ready to go. And then along
Speaker 1: comes a female and they essentially all began fighting on
Speaker 1: top of her for the rights to mate with her.
Speaker 1: And in some of the cases, she ends up drowning
Speaker 1: at the bottom of this uh, this mating ball, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and so it ends up with you end
Speaker 1: up with cases where um. Researchers, particularly in this case,
Speaker 1: uh Thiago Izzo from Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research.
Speaker 1: He's analyzing the results of this breeding. He finds counting, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's counting him like a hundred males to twenty dead
Speaker 1: females in one in another one fifty males and five
Speaker 1: dead females. But then when he starts dissecting the females,
Speaker 1: there are no eggs. So he's trying to figure out
Speaker 1: where did the eggs go, how did this what could
Speaker 1: have possibly happened, and then he observed the act itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so like from what I had read that there's
Speaker 1: this is unique I believe to this particular kind of frog.
Speaker 1: But that one of the one of the articles that
Speaker 1: I read on this, which was called necrophiliac behavior in
Speaker 1: the career U toad, which is a different kind of toad,
Speaker 1: but it also references this instance. It says that it's
Speaker 1: been documented that in all groups of terrestrial tetrapods that
Speaker 1: this kind of uh necrophilia happens, and that the basically
Speaker 1: scientists just account for it as a lack of proper
Speaker 1: recognition by males during reproductive season. So in in this
Speaker 1: case with the Probisidia, that sounds like they do recognize
Speaker 1: it though, and they say, okay, we've got to take
Speaker 1: these eggs so that you know something actually happens with it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or at least they've they've reached the point in their
Speaker 1: evolution to where it still works. So it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's been selected. Um, because Yeah, what happens is
Speaker 1: the male squeeze the dead female's body the eggs pop out,
Speaker 1: the male quickly fertilizes the eggs, and then they eventually
Speaker 1: develop into healthy embryos. So like, where do they where
Speaker 1: do they put these eggs while they're fertilizing. They just
Speaker 1: have like a storage area. I got the impression from
Speaker 1: from being the paper that they just kind of pop
Speaker 1: out and it's just done. The beat is done right there. Okay,
Speaker 1: So it's just like the egg is next to the
Speaker 1: corpse of the female frog. Okay, Okay, I guess I
Speaker 1: was imagining something a little bit more fantastic where these
Speaker 1: like hundreds of bearded them away. Yeah, these rugs are
Speaker 1: bringing these these these eggs back to their layer. I
Speaker 1: believe Izzio did. Um he did observe like and when
Speaker 1: at least one of the cases of the frog moving
Speaker 1: the body to a location where he would be able
Speaker 1: to have his way with it undisturbed by the other
Speaker 1: other male frogs. All right, but but yeah, the fascinating
Speaker 1: thing here is that it's believed that this provides a
Speaker 1: reproductive advantage to both the deathborate outnumbered male who can't
Speaker 1: get his hands on a live mate, as well as
Speaker 1: the dead female because you know, even in her case
Speaker 1: she's died through this rather brutal breathing process, but she's
Speaker 1: still going to be able to fulfill the genetic mission. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the fascinating part. And certainly, uh, it seems like,
Speaker 1: at least in all the examples that we have here
Speaker 1: of animals, that that reproduction is still the goal, right that, Like,
Speaker 1: that's what seems to be going on in the heads
Speaker 1: of these mallards or these frogs or teng google lizards
Speaker 1: or penguins or whatever. And it makes me wonder too.
Speaker 1: Like I said at the top, I'm sure there are
Speaker 1: many other instances of other animals in the wild that
Speaker 1: have done this, and he means have probably already documented it.
Speaker 1: But like our friend with the penguins, they maybe don't
Speaker 1: want to get that research. That's that's not the first
Speaker 1: paper they're going to submit for publication, right, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get the impression that it's it's kind of an
Speaker 1: understudied area of human behavior, but but certainly there's any Yeah,
Speaker 1: certainly an understudied area of of animal behavior, but but
Speaker 1: there's some there's some interesting work there. Nonetheless, so I
Speaker 1: believe that this frog is a perfect way for us
Speaker 1: to transition into human necrophiles. Um. Now, before we get
Speaker 1: into anything to disturbing though, um, we should remind you
Speaker 1: that like, basically human necrophilia can be achieved in a
Speaker 1: way that is far less ethically sketchy and horrendous and
Speaker 1: you know and on a front to the gods, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And that is of course in the form of posthumous
Speaker 1: sperm retrieval and posthumous egg retrieval, which is similar to
Speaker 1: the frogs that we were just speaking exactly. Like, it's like,
Speaker 1: basically it's the frog scenario carried out, um, you know,
Speaker 1: far less brutally in human culture. Uh, the same thing
Speaker 1: that the frog has been it has evolved to deal with.
Speaker 1: Human technology allows us to do the same thing to
Speaker 1: remove viable sperm or egg from a brain dead or
Speaker 1: even recently the deceased individual and then utilize it uh
Speaker 1: in reproduction in a in a healthy body. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: had never heard of this before this before researching this episode,
Speaker 1: but it seems perfectly plausible to me, and I could
Speaker 1: sort of understand the motivation for some people as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not you know, it's not it's almost a disservice
Speaker 1: to call it necro to refer to it all as
Speaker 1: necrophilia because it's it's certainly not you know, an abuse
Speaker 1: of a body. It's there are allowed. There's some ethical
Speaker 1: concerns and you know, most of them concerned legality and
Speaker 1: consent of the individual whose reproductive material is being taken.
Speaker 1: But but at at heart it is a reproductive act
Speaker 1: occurring between a living individual and a dead individual. Almost
Speaker 1: like when we're going back to that bacteria, right, they're
Speaker 1: similarly mention line with the bacterial model that we discussed earlier. Um.
Speaker 1: And we've had this technology for a little bit. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've we've been carrying out the posthumous sperm retrieval for
Speaker 1: a while, and in two thousand eleven we actually saw
Speaker 1: the the the first um use of of of effective
Speaker 1: posthumous egg retrieval. There's a paper with a kind of
Speaker 1: horrible title, um that came out two twelve Michigan State
Speaker 1: Law Review, Dying to be many using intentional parenthood as
Speaker 1: a proxy for consent in posthumous egg retrieval case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that definitely sounds like something that I've noticed. That's a
Speaker 1: that's a law article to Michigan State Law Review. It
Speaker 1: sounds like a case of using a title to UM
Speaker 1: kind of kind of make it a little bit more
Speaker 1: sexy so it's more attractive to the publishers. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: It feels a little weird, but but I mean at
Speaker 1: hard it's I think it's a very sensible, UM, very
Speaker 1: sensible procedure to carry out, provided you consent is clear
Speaker 1: and established. You know, you have a sudden death that
Speaker 1: occurs between two people who who want to uh to
Speaker 1: have offspring, and here is a scientific way of achieving that.
Speaker 1: And it sounds like this article was specifically about uh
Speaker 1: an example in Israel where magistrates set a legal precedent
Speaker 1: for this um for the harvesting and freezing of a
Speaker 1: posthumous human being sax. Yeah, and I know some of
Speaker 1: you are probably wondering, well, how how dead UH can
Speaker 1: the individual be? I did find some stats on sperm
Speaker 1: retrieval from a from two thousand six paper uh into
Speaker 1: titled a Posthumous Sperm Retrieval Analysis of Time Interval to
Speaker 1: Harvest Sperm and this is published in the journal Human Reproduction.
Speaker 1: It said, quote, viable sperm is obtainable with ps R.
Speaker 1: That's posthumous sperm retrieval well after the currently recommended twenty
Speaker 1: four hour time interval PSR should be considered up to
Speaker 1: thirty six hours after death following appropriate evaluation. No quote,
Speaker 1: no correlation was found between cause of death and chance
Speaker 1: for successful sperm retrieval. So that's sperm in particular, not
Speaker 1: not not eggs. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I wonder if
Speaker 1: there's a paper out there that's about the time limits
Speaker 1: on eggs as well. Yeah, I wonder if it's, uh,
Speaker 1: if it's if it's about the same, or or maybe
Speaker 1: it's if there's a little shorter. I'm not sure that.
Speaker 1: If anybody out there knows, please tell us. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll throw that information in there. Um. So this seems
Speaker 1: like the moment for us to go down what probably
Speaker 1: most of you thought you were going to be hearing
Speaker 1: when you clicked on an episode that had necrophilia in
Speaker 1: the title, which and we're going to call it classic necrophilia.
Speaker 1: This is what you think of when you hear that word. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is you know, if you want to get
Speaker 1: off the train at this point, this is your stop,
Speaker 1: because it's all human necrophilia from here. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where it gets a bit spooky, but not as you know,
Speaker 1: what I'm going to qualify that not as not as
Speaker 1: a spooky or creepy as I thought it was going
Speaker 1: to be. I mean, especially once you crunch the examples
Speaker 1: that we've gone through already kind of demystifies and you know,
Speaker 1: de horrifies the situation and that I find And there's
Speaker 1: even some aspects of the human psychology that I can
Speaker 1: I don't relate to or identify with, but I can
Speaker 1: I can sympathize with with somebody, for instance, who misses
Speaker 1: their dead loved one, which seems to be one of
Speaker 1: the examples. We'll get into that, but I think what
Speaker 1: we should really start with is is this one paper
Speaker 1: that came out in seven which seems to be cited
Speaker 1: in all of the research that's done on the psychology
Speaker 1: of necrophilia. It is called Sexual Attraction to Corpses. A
Speaker 1: Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia, is written by Jonathan P. Rossman
Speaker 1: and Philip J. Resnick Uh And basically, these guys explored
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty two cases of necrophilia and they
Speaker 1: found what is the eighty eight of them were from
Speaker 1: world literature and thirty four were unpublished cases. What I
Speaker 1: want to know and I actually downloaded the whole article.
Speaker 1: I gotta go back through and look at the methodology.
Speaker 1: I don't think they explained it in there though. Where
Speaker 1: where do you get these cases? It's they make it
Speaker 1: sound like you just go to the library and you're like, yes,
Speaker 1: I would like all of the world literature cases on necliphilia. Please. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't recall seeing that specified in the paper either.
Speaker 1: But but you know, they had a lot to two
Speaker 1: on they did, and they they used it to basically
Speaker 1: create some categorizations, some classifications of types of necrophilia. Right,
Speaker 1: so we've got and they came up with three. Whether
Speaker 1: first of all, they're two, they're they're sort of a
Speaker 1: line in the stand that they draw initially between necrophilia
Speaker 1: and pseudo necrophilia, and pseudo necrophilia is you know, this
Speaker 1: consists of of transient attraction to human corpses, but it's not.
Speaker 1: But it with with these individuals with pseudo necrophiliacs, sex
Speaker 1: with the corps is not the central part of their fantasies.
Speaker 1: They're primarily interested in living sexual partners. But you know
Speaker 1: they're they're not averse to uh to to going after
Speaker 1: something dead. This group includes uh sadistic opportunistic and transitory
Speaker 1: cases of necrophilia. And again, like let's distinguish here. Necrophilia
Speaker 1: is the desire to have sex with a dead body,
Speaker 1: not the act of having sex with a dead body.
Speaker 1: Some of these lead to that, obviously, but some of
Speaker 1: these necrophilix that they're referring to in the literature didn't
Speaker 1: act upon their fantasies. Yeah, Like I could see someone
Speaker 1: being tricked and being classified as a pseudo necrophiliac, you know,
Speaker 1: like they have a drink in them and you're just
Speaker 1: talking to them instead, would you, And under these circumstances,
Speaker 1: and then eventually they break and say well, I don't know, maybe,
Speaker 1: and then and then all of a sudden they're in
Speaker 1: study on necrophilia. That's where they got them all. So okay,
Speaker 1: the first one is the first categorization that they came
Speaker 1: up with is I think what a lot of people
Speaker 1: think of when they hear the word necrophilia, but they
Speaker 1: categorize it as a type called necrophilic homicide. So what
Speaker 1: we're talking about here this is sort of the Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Dahmer model of an individual murders somebody in order to
Speaker 1: obtain a corpse for their necrophilic fantasies, and from from
Speaker 1: what I was reading about Dahmer, and I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a whole another rabbit hole that we could go down
Speaker 1: for the other episode. And I think Ted Bundy also
Speaker 1: partook in this, but that the idea was that those
Speaker 1: those men could not uh feel sexual pleasure unless the
Speaker 1: part of their quote unquote partner it's a terrible word
Speaker 1: for it, in this situation was was dead or at
Speaker 1: least like de humanized, and to a significant degree because
Speaker 1: I believe Dahmer tried to create essentially zombies out of
Speaker 1: by drilling into their their skull. But but it kind
Speaker 1: of comes down to the same thing. They need needed
Speaker 1: a person devoid of will, and the easiest way to
Speaker 1: achieve that is, of course to kill the individual. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the key here seems to be that what these people
Speaker 1: are looking for is a partner who is quote and
Speaker 1: this is from the text unresisting and unrejecting. So I
Speaker 1: don't know necessarily that it's like it. Maybe it is
Speaker 1: in some cases that the act of killing sort of
Speaker 1: sexualizes the situation. But what they're looking for is somebody
Speaker 1: who won't reject them, and somebody who isn't going to
Speaker 1: resist them. Right, we'll break down more on the motives
Speaker 1: for all these cases. Yeah, And one fact that I
Speaker 1: wanted to throw out there that wasn't in these studies
Speaker 1: but was another study came out was this woman Michelle
Speaker 1: Stein from the John J. College of Criminal Justice in
Speaker 1: New York. She reviewed two hundred and eleven sexual homicides
Speaker 1: and she found that only eight percent of those involved necrophilia.
Speaker 1: So when we're talking about you know, sexual deviancy, sexual
Speaker 1: prime and necrophilia, it's actually quite rare. I mean, first
Speaker 1: of all, these these deviant situations are rare, That's why
Speaker 1: we call them deviant. But then also that within that structure,
Speaker 1: the actual act of sex with a dead body is
Speaker 1: fairly rare as well. Within within these uh criminal acts, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you also can imagine the ven diagram right
Speaker 1: of the of the the psychotic murder or wentless murder,
Speaker 1: and the type of individual who would want sexual contact
Speaker 1: with a dead bye. Yeah, it seems as such, and
Speaker 1: I think that, yeah, the ven diagram sliver is probably
Speaker 1: fairly small. So don't listen to this episode and think,
Speaker 1: oh my god, they're everywhere that that's not the case,
Speaker 1: at least from what the research says. Now, the next
Speaker 1: classification under a genuine necrophilia is a regular necrophilia, and
Speaker 1: this is I like to think that this is the
Speaker 1: scavenger approach, entitling the use of entailing the use of
Speaker 1: an already dead body for sex, so, um, you know
Speaker 1: it's will explore late are a lot of this happens
Speaker 1: to to line up with one's job. You're in a
Speaker 1: job where you're in close contact with dead bodies and
Speaker 1: the opportunity simply presents itself. Yeah. Yeah, And I suspect
Speaker 1: that that is probably the situation. Referring back to the
Speaker 1: sexual homicides and the necrophilia like sort of numbers, I
Speaker 1: suspect that this is a bit more common, actually far
Speaker 1: more common. I think it's extremely rare to have somebody
Speaker 1: like a Jeffrey Dahmer type. And then the third one
Speaker 1: that they categorize and this is sixty eight percent of
Speaker 1: the people that they categorize as necrophiliacs is necrophilic fantasy.
Speaker 1: So this is basically getting back to the pseudo necrophilia.
Speaker 1: This is the idea that it's a it's a fantasy
Speaker 1: they have of having sex with a corpse, but they
Speaker 1: don't actually do it um and they sort of I
Speaker 1: think that, and by day I mean that the researchers
Speaker 1: here think that these necrophiles often choose occupations that will
Speaker 1: put them in can attact with corpses. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: working in a morgue or a hospital or maybe a
Speaker 1: grave digger, I don't know, Yeah, hospitals, graves in some cases.
Speaker 1: You know, we'll look at some of the stats in
Speaker 1: a bit. I think like clerics and even soldiers come up. Basically,
Speaker 1: any kind of profession you can imagine in which you
Speaker 1: would find yourself in proximity to a dead body. And
Speaker 1: here's a couple of numbers to break this down of
Speaker 1: the necrophiles wanted to be reunited with the dead partner.
Speaker 1: So this is the one that I was saying earlier
Speaker 1: that I can sort of not that I would participate
Speaker 1: in this, like my wife died or something like that,
Speaker 1: but I can I feel emotion for these people who
Speaker 1: are so saddened by the loss of their life partner
Speaker 1: that they fantasize. They're not even actually acting upon it,
Speaker 1: they're just fantasizing about being reunited with them. It reminds
Speaker 1: me of the old Irish ballad that particularly Shane O'Connor
Speaker 1: did a version of this, and also Dead Can Dance
Speaker 1: to the Fact was version of this, I'm stretched on
Speaker 1: your grave and will lie there forever about someone who's
Speaker 1: lost their beloved and there just lying on their grave. Yes,
Speaker 1: very modeling. Sounds quite light with my experience with Irish
Speaker 1: folk songs that kind of attitude, and I think all
Speaker 1: of us can relate to it on at least that
Speaker 1: level of sorrow. I think um, okay, fift percent of
Speaker 1: them were just attracted to corpses. Twelve percent had a
Speaker 1: power trip over this, right, so twelve percent of the
Speaker 1: people that they looked at saw that they very much
Speaker 1: like how we think about I think sexual assault is
Speaker 1: that it's a power strategy more than it is a
Speaker 1: sexual uh motivated crime. You know, I can't help but
Speaker 1: particularly in the whole idea about being attracted to corpses,
Speaker 1: I can't help but think of individuals growing up in
Speaker 1: the age of VHS, you know where you know, nowadays,
Speaker 1: if someone has access to the Internet, they can find
Speaker 1: just about an the example of sexual activity they want. Sure,
Speaker 1: you know, if the appropriate supervision isn't there. But when
Speaker 1: I was growing up, Like the easiest way to to
Speaker 1: see uh, you know more kind of adult content was
Speaker 1: through horror movies and science fiction movies. You know. So
Speaker 1: you know, you're not gonna go to the video store
Speaker 1: and rent something, you know, from the adult section, but
Speaker 1: you can certainly rent alien. You can rent rent a
Speaker 1: Return of the Living Dead, which of course has a
Speaker 1: naked zombie in it. So, like, I wondered to what
Speaker 1: it's you know, that's an important time in one sexual
Speaker 1: there's a there's a culturals like guyst around that that's
Speaker 1: somewhat maybe encourages such fantasies. I wonder. Yeah, like because
Speaker 1: imagine there are a lot of people out there who
Speaker 1: have their you know, their their sexual development kind of
Speaker 1: crosses into this horror genre and then and there they
Speaker 1: just sort of burned their mind or various sexy zombies,
Speaker 1: you know, like what and that's been a trope for
Speaker 1: at least the last couple of years. Is the whole
Speaker 1: zombie thing turned into a boom? I think there was
Speaker 1: a lot of like, let's make cash off of this
Speaker 1: by making those zombie zombies sexy as well. Yeah, um
Speaker 1: so this makes me think of you know, it's no
Speaker 1: surprise to the listeners. Both Robert and I are big
Speaker 1: horror fans. I was on Bloody Disgusting I think it
Speaker 1: was Bloody Disgusting, which is a you know, horror fan website,
Speaker 1: the other day and they had a list of, like
Speaker 1: I think it was like the top ten scenes of
Speaker 1: necrophilia in horror movies, uh, you know, overall, And I
Speaker 1: was shocked that there were so many. And then as
Speaker 1: I kind of went through it, I went, oh, some
Speaker 1: of these are actually like tasteful movies that tasteful horror
Speaker 1: movies that had, you know, a scene that had to
Speaker 1: do with the the character of the plot. It wasn't
Speaker 1: just thrown in there to be shocking or to you
Speaker 1: know Garner, you know, cult status. I guess yeah, growing up,
Speaker 1: I remember, we're not growing up. It was more like college.
Speaker 1: I remember hearing about Necromantic. I think it was a
Speaker 1: German film. Yeah, it's like kind of a video nasty classification,
Speaker 1: you know, banned a lot of places. I never saw it,
Speaker 1: but it was. It's it's kind of I think it's
Speaker 1: held up there as one of the earlier that might
Speaker 1: have been on the list. I'm trying to remember some
Speaker 1: of them I'm sure a d and Twenty Days of
Speaker 1: Sawdom was on there. Um, but I've never seen that
Speaker 1: slou And I believe there's I believe there's necrophilia and that.
Speaker 1: Um god, I don't remember. I actually saw it in
Speaker 1: the last year for the first time. Yeah, because one
Speaker 1: of our coworkers owns it. U because I mean, it's uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have fun guessing who that is later, But
Speaker 1: it's uh. I mean, it's it's an interesting film, and
Speaker 1: that it is highly controversial, but it's it's uh, it's
Speaker 1: artistically well made. It's it's a work of troubling art. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the I mean the director was stabbed to death
Speaker 1: shortly after it. I didn't know that really, And it's
Speaker 1: it's a I ended up not watching it in full, Like,
Speaker 1: I just could not watch a lot of it. I
Speaker 1: never saw it. But I remember when I was in college,
Speaker 1: I had a girlfriend who was in a film class
Speaker 1: and they had a signed say Low as something that
Speaker 1: they had to watch for class, and she was mortified. Um,
Speaker 1: and just I don't I don't think she was able
Speaker 1: to make it through. It was you know, probably part
Speaker 1: of the class was a part of the exercise was
Speaker 1: to see whether or not people could make it through
Speaker 1: that movie. Getting back to the actual you know, necrophilic fantasies,
Speaker 1: power trips come into it as you as you would
Speaker 1: suspect um. And then you know, as we referred to earlier,
Speaker 1: that the homicidal necrophiliacs. That's again only twelve percent of
Speaker 1: the cases they surveyed. So it's quite a small sliver.
Speaker 1: Twelve percent out of what what are these guys? They
Speaker 1: had a hundred and twenty two cases. And then with
Speaker 1: the other case, it was out of two hundred and
Speaker 1: eleven sexual homicides, it was only eight percent that involved necrophilia. Okay,
Speaker 1: So one last part to this study that they did,
Speaker 1: they also developed a model to help understand what kind
Speaker 1: of events led to these you know, psychological categorizations, and
Speaker 1: this is what they found. They found four um as
Speaker 1: you would imagine, poor self esteem, largely due to a
Speaker 1: significant loss in their life. Um. So that would probably
Speaker 1: bring us back to the you know, who wanted to
Speaker 1: be reunited with their dead partners. Uh. As you would expect,
Speaker 1: they're usually male, uh And there are men who have
Speaker 1: a fear of being rejected by women. And so as
Speaker 1: we discussed earlier, they desire a sex sex object that
Speaker 1: is incapable of rejecting them. The third is that they
Speaker 1: some of them actually have like a fear of the dead.
Speaker 1: They're scared of being around dead bodies, and this like
Speaker 1: as a way of conquering that, I suppose transform It
Speaker 1: transforms that fear into a desire um, which I think
Speaker 1: is fairly common transition, not necessarily with dead bodies. I
Speaker 1: think most people don't experience it on that level. But
Speaker 1: being afraid of something is also titillating, you know. That's
Speaker 1: why we watch horror movies exactly. Uh. And then the
Speaker 1: last one is just you know, the the fantasy of
Speaker 1: some It sometimes begins after you've just had your first
Speaker 1: exposure to a corpse, whether that's you know, as a
Speaker 1: child or an adult. Um. Yeah, it's a shocking and
Speaker 1: and and and it makes an impact absolutely. Uh. So
Speaker 1: there is there's there's a there's another pretty widely cited
Speaker 1: study by a guy named I believe this is pronounced
Speaker 1: a nil Agra wall uh and he he published this
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine, and I I believe from what
Speaker 1: I saw was that this was used to subsequently create
Speaker 1: a new DSM entry on necrophilia and his His study
Speaker 1: was called a New Classification for Necrophilia, was published in
Speaker 1: the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: and he came up with ten categories. Okay, we'll go
Speaker 1: through these. First up, role players, people who get aroused
Speaker 1: from pretending their live partner is dead during sexual activity. Okay.
Speaker 1: And then we have romantic necrophilia acts. These are these
Speaker 1: are what we were discussing before, bereaved people who remain
Speaker 1: attached to their dead lover's body, so they're you know,
Speaker 1: this is about sorrow. Then the number three necrophiliac fantasize.
Speaker 1: There's people who fantasize about necrophilia but never actually have
Speaker 1: sex with a corpse. And there's tactile necrophiliacs, people who
Speaker 1: are aroused by touching or just stroking a corpse without
Speaker 1: engaging an intercourse. I seem to remember that there was
Speaker 1: an extremely creepy episode of that TV show Millennium where
Speaker 1: there was a guy who that was his particular thing
Speaker 1: was just like showing up to funerals and pretending to
Speaker 1: be a friend of the family just so I could
Speaker 1: touch the corps. Number five is a fetishistic necrophiliacs. These
Speaker 1: are people who remove objects or body parts, even from
Speaker 1: a corpse, for sexual purposes, but without engaging an intercourse. Okay,
Speaker 1: and then as you as you can see where kind
Speaker 1: of this this list is getting worse as we're progressing.
Speaker 1: Uh necro mutual omaniacs. These are people, I know that
Speaker 1: sounds like a made up thing, but this is actually
Speaker 1: sounds like for sure, people who derive pleasure from mutilating
Speaker 1: a corpse while masturbating but not engaging in intercourse. Number
Speaker 1: seven Opportunistic necrophiliacs. These are people who normally have no
Speaker 1: interest in necrophilia, but they if they have the opportunity,
Speaker 1: they're going to take it. So yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't I'm having a really hard time imagining this scenario
Speaker 1: where this would happen. But I guess when you're left
Speaker 1: alone with a dead body for some reason and yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe you're maybe you're performing an autopsy
Speaker 1: or something. I'm not sure. Uh, regular NECROPHILIAX. That's people
Speaker 1: who preferably, you know, just want to have sex with
Speaker 1: the dead. So kind of back to that other model
Speaker 1: that we talked about before, Like they would even probably
Speaker 1: tell you look I'm not one of those exciting kind
Speaker 1: of necrophiles. I'm just old school necrophile. Uh. And they're
Speaker 1: again they're not killing people, right, let's be clear about that.
Speaker 1: That's the next one. Yeah. Number nine is homicidal necrophiliacs
Speaker 1: that we've discussed already, people who want to who want
Speaker 1: to commit in order to have sex with the dead.
Speaker 1: And then there is the tenth one, which is exclusive necrophiliacs,
Speaker 1: people who have an exclusive interest in sex with the
Speaker 1: dead and cannot perform at all for living partners. Now,
Speaker 1: this is what I think they categorized Jeffrey dahmeraz that
Speaker 1: like in his case, this was the only way that
Speaker 1: he could perform to have any kind of sexual gratification,
Speaker 1: and subsequently led to him both being homicidal necrophiliac and
Speaker 1: exclusive necrophiliac. Now, I have some other stats here just
Speaker 1: to roll through from that Rossman and Resnick paper, just
Speaker 1: to give you a little more idea about who necrophiles
Speaker 1: are and uh in why they do what they do.
Speaker 1: Sex in that study were male. Um, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: found one rare female case was cited. Uh, And I
Speaker 1: didn't have the time to be able to look up
Speaker 1: the case study on this, but her name was Karen
Speaker 1: green Lee, so apparently she's a well known female necrophiliacy.
Speaker 1: The mean age was thirty four, which makes sense. You know,
Speaker 1: you need to be young enough to get around and
Speaker 1: not have anything tying you down, but also your sexual
Speaker 1: appetite needs to have had time to reach this point
Speaker 1: right right, And also probably you would need to be
Speaker 1: you know, as we know about like them taking employment
Speaker 1: in situations that put them to your dead bodies, you
Speaker 1: would need to be of age in order to kind
Speaker 1: of have a job like that. Um, next up i Q.
Speaker 1: And this is really interesting because there's there has long
Speaker 1: been and still kind of remains, the stereotype of the
Speaker 1: necrofile as being essentially, you know, mentally deficient, that they're
Speaker 1: you know, almost like the example of a stupid reptile
Speaker 1: just engaging with this because they don't know anymore better.
Speaker 1: But in uh in Rosmann Resnics paper, they point out
Speaker 1: that all of the individuals that they profiled had i
Speaker 1: q s above eighty and sixty nine percent had i
Speaker 1: qs above a hundred and just to put that frame
Speaker 1: of reference, normal to average intelligence is nine two d
Speaker 1: and nine. So these for the most part we're not
Speaker 1: dealing with the with unintelligent individuals. This isn't technically like
Speaker 1: a disability and mental disability. This is deviant behavior. And
Speaker 1: among true necrophiles, s percent had i q s above
Speaker 1: a hundred um. Sixty percent of the cases there was
Speaker 1: a prior history of statistic acts. Uh. Sexual orientation attention
Speaker 1: was pretty much comparable to the general population sent heterosexual,
Speaker 1: thirteen bisexual, nine percent homosexual. There is not really surprising
Speaker 1: um underlying mental problems. This is interesting because this also
Speaker 1: gets into the idea that not only this preconceived notion
Speaker 1: that necrophiles are all going to be both mentally deficient
Speaker 1: and crazy. Only seventeen percent were psychotic, eleven percent among
Speaker 1: true necrophiles had personality of disorders had unusual belief systems,
Speaker 1: though seventy percent seventy three of pseudo necrophiles did, which
Speaker 1: you know, makes sense. If you're fantasizing about sex with
Speaker 1: the dead, you probably have, you know, a different worldview
Speaker 1: from your average Yeah, that's fair. Of those pseudo necrophiles
Speaker 1: consumed alcohol compared to forty of true necrophiles, So I
Speaker 1: guess that's just I wonder what they mean by that.
Speaker 1: If it's like alcoholism or just you know, they they did,
Speaker 1: they didn't imbibe at all. It kind of I guess
Speaker 1: I kind of think of it in terms of, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna need a drink for this. Um. So maybe
Speaker 1: the true necrophiles you actually don't see as much alcohol
Speaker 1: consumption because it is like they are, they're kind of
Speaker 1: enough in the necrophilia camp that there's no need for
Speaker 1: liquid courage, Whereas if it's just your fantasy, then maybe
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing that you have to decompress
Speaker 1: to get down to the point where you're fantasizing about it,
Speaker 1: you know. Well. And then fifty seven percent of necrophiles
Speaker 1: were found to be in an employed profession that gave
Speaker 1: them access to dead bodies. We've got a list here,
Speaker 1: hospital orderlies, more attendant, cemetery employees, funeral parlor workers, and
Speaker 1: as you said earlier, clerics and soldiers. I found two
Speaker 1: other studies that I feel like I need to be mentioned,
Speaker 1: but I'm a little dubious of the reporting here, and
Speaker 1: I'd like to see some more research or maybe if
Speaker 1: anybody out there has experienced with this kind of research
Speaker 1: or psychological experience, maybe they can tell us what they think.
Speaker 1: But these two studies basically connected the symptoms of necrophilia
Speaker 1: to both autism and asperger syndrome. Both these studies came
Speaker 1: out in twleven and basically it seemed like their conclusions
Speaker 1: were drawn from the fact that there was a similar
Speaker 1: lack of empathy between those with Asperger's and those who
Speaker 1: were interested in necrophilia. Uh, that was about it, um.
Speaker 1: One of them, one of these studies said that they
Speaker 1: they suggested something called autistic psychopathy lead to experimentation with chemistry, poisons,
Speaker 1: and killing, which subsequently they kind of tied into necrophilia. Uh.
Speaker 1: These studies were the first one is called necrophilia and
Speaker 1: autistic psychopathy and the other one is necrophilia and serial killers.
Speaker 1: Is there evidence for Asperger's syndrome? So, I mean this
Speaker 1: is published research. I wanted to mention it, but I'm
Speaker 1: also a little wary of making a connection between these
Speaker 1: two different kind of mental states just based on the
Speaker 1: lack of empathy. Yeah, I mean, there are only two
Speaker 1: studies and it's such a a hotbed um topic that
Speaker 1: I would uh yeah, I would hate to spend too
Speaker 1: much time on it, but you know, hey, if we
Speaker 1: see more more papers come out. Um, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll come back to it now. Another interesting thing about
Speaker 1: necrophilia is when you get into illegal issues involved here,
Speaker 1: because of course corpses are not really people, right, So
Speaker 1: these are crimes that often fall through the cracks unless
Speaker 1: there's a specific necrophilia law on the books, and without
Speaker 1: such a law in place, it often proves difficult to
Speaker 1: prosecute uh necrophiles. Yeah, and so this is, you know,
Speaker 1: something that I guess I never thought about and sort
Speaker 1: of assumed would be on the books. But obviously it's yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But there was a case, you know, kind of one
Speaker 1: of the leading cases was in Wisconsin in two thousand six. Uh.
Speaker 1: It turned out there was a case where three men
Speaker 1: were caught while they were trying to exhume a dead
Speaker 1: woman for sex. Uh. The men admitted to it, but
Speaker 1: another reason they know is that they brought a box
Speaker 1: of condoms. I remember this. I think I blogged about it.
Speaker 1: That's where I read about it. It was you were
Speaker 1: the source for this one for me. But so what
Speaker 1: ended up happening was technically their lawyers argued there was
Speaker 1: no crime committed because there was no law on the
Speaker 1: books that said that it was against the law. So
Speaker 1: this prompted Wisconsin Supreme Court two years later in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight, to finally decide on a law that forbid
Speaker 1: copulating with the deceased. So that's one example. I'm sure
Speaker 1: there are many other examples, but it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where I guess, like, until it actually happens and
Speaker 1: they need to prosecute, they don't put it on the books. Yeah,
Speaker 1: are you going to be the weird politician who brings
Speaker 1: up just necrophilia laws when there's no apparent need, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's gonna kill your presidential aspects. Incidentally, that blog post
Speaker 1: was one of the first ones I did for How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works right after we started the blogs, and and
Speaker 1: it was like immediately they had to hide it because
Speaker 1: they were like, I don't know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of eyes in the blog. Let's not have this be
Speaker 1: one of the top posts. That's too bad. I liked it. Well. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of the other things that came out of this
Speaker 1: when I was looking at the research here, is specifically
Speaker 1: about the legality is many of the families who are
Speaker 1: involved with incidents like this where a family member's corpse
Speaker 1: is a victim of necrophilia. They have a problem of
Speaker 1: it because they sort of psychologically think of the corpse
Speaker 1: as being their property. Right, So, like, as you're saying before, yes,
Speaker 1: it's not technically a living human being, some people would
Speaker 1: probably argue, I wouldn't. This is a victimless crime, right,
Speaker 1: But uh, it's not in that that the family members
Speaker 1: see this as being their loved one and technically property
Speaker 1: even though it's not a living person. Yeah, it kind
Speaker 1: of comes down to just what a somewhat a complicated
Speaker 1: area it occupies in our in our understanding of of
Speaker 1: our life and our our biological life, even because it's
Speaker 1: it's that it's our loved one, but it's not our
Speaker 1: loved one. It's that it's a person, but it's not
Speaker 1: really a person. Still. Yeah, And I mean, like I
Speaker 1: said at the beginning, to you know, this is considered
Speaker 1: to be the ultimate transgression in our culture, one of them. Uh,
Speaker 1: and therefore it's something that we both have a hard
Speaker 1: time talking about in sort of empirical terms like we're
Speaker 1: trying to do today, or in legal terms. And then
Speaker 1: at the same time, it's so sensationalized that we can't
Speaker 1: seem to stop talking about it. Whenever it comes up. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm sure if you googled Wisconsin necrophilia, there's probably two
Speaker 1: hundred newspaper articles out there from two thousands six when
Speaker 1: this happened. You know, everybody was covering it that week. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then yet when you start thinking about it, it's
Speaker 1: like if you have a deranged individual and if they
Speaker 1: were to you know, put the question to you, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm going to do one of two things this weekend.
Speaker 1: Which should I do? Should I dig up a corpse
Speaker 1: and copulate with it, or should I kill somebody? Or
Speaker 1: should I even just assault somebody? Like obviously you're gonna
Speaker 1: pick the corpse one because it is in a sense
Speaker 1: of the victim was crime. Yeah, I would probably, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, call the police. Well, yes, that's the correct
Speaker 1: that's the correct answer, you know, even if it's a
Speaker 1: covering myself legally here, No matter how good of a friend.
Speaker 1: I always when I think about this topic now, I
Speaker 1: always come back to Cornt McCarthy's novel Child of God,
Speaker 1: where the central character, Lester Ballard is a necrophile. Okay,
Speaker 1: I haven't read that. It's it's exceedingly good. It's one
Speaker 1: of those books I keep coming back to Um, because
Speaker 1: it's this character is a very dark character, but you're
Speaker 1: so close to him in the book. You do sympathize
Speaker 1: with his with it, with his his psyche to a
Speaker 1: large extent. It's it's so so very well presented. I
Speaker 1: think in I was trying to think of fictional examples
Speaker 1: for this episode. The only one I can remember is,
Speaker 1: do you remember that Marquis Assad movie that had Jeffrey
Speaker 1: Rush playing the Marquis Assad. I remember when it came out,
Speaker 1: but I've never seen it in full. There's I believe
Speaker 1: a scene in that in which Joaquin Phoenix engages in
Speaker 1: necrophilia with Kate Winslet's corpse um And I think, you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: because it's about the Marquis Assad, there's a certain amount
Speaker 1: of of bacchanalia to the whole ring, right, Um. But
Speaker 1: it's but it's if I remember the plot correctly. It's
Speaker 1: been a long time since I've seen that movie. I
Speaker 1: believe it was because like he was grieving for her
Speaker 1: and they were, you know, sort of in love. Interesting.
Speaker 1: I should maybe see it at some point. I've read that.
Speaker 1: I don't remember it being bad. I've read the sod
Speaker 1: I find him to be a fascinating character. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think he's interesting in small doses. I have a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty Days of Sodom, and I can only
Speaker 1: read like maybe like two or three pages. I see,
Speaker 1: I tried to read the whole thing. The problem with
Speaker 1: a hundred twenty days is that, um, it's basically incomplete,
Speaker 1: and so the further you get into the book, it
Speaker 1: eventually breaks down into just an outline of what he
Speaker 1: intended to finish. Yeah, I think they were originally published
Speaker 1: the unreadable pamphlets, Is that right, like a series of pamphlets.
Speaker 1: I think that. I think it's the one that he
Speaker 1: secretly wrote in a prison cellf So it was it was,
Speaker 1: it was hidden away for a while, but I never
Speaker 1: officially finished. So it's just in terms, and not only
Speaker 1: it's the content often to fficult to read, but it
Speaker 1: becomes increasingly unreadable as a word, because it's just a
Speaker 1: complete Yeah. Well yeah, that's mine market assad and you've
Speaker 1: got Cormac McCarthy to have literally great, it's a great book. Um.
Speaker 1: James Franco made a movie version, which I've heard good
Speaker 1: things about. I'll probably never see it, just because it's
Speaker 1: it's a book I love so much. I have such
Speaker 1: a crystal you know, it's a kind of mar your
Speaker 1: imaginary Yeah, but I hear good things, so you know,
Speaker 1: maybe our you know, listeners out there who aren't is
Speaker 1: into uh into reading reading, want to just you know,
Speaker 1: see a film, maybe check it out. If it's true
Speaker 1: to the book, then it'll it'll do. It does a
Speaker 1: good job. So there you have it, one from the vaults,
Speaker 1: one we're really proud of, and one that we thought
Speaker 1: everyone wouldn't it would either not mind listening to a
Speaker 1: second time, or you know, here's a chance to discover
Speaker 1: it for the first time. If you're a new or listener. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you've got some thoughts that you want to
Speaker 1: share with us now about necrophilia and what you learned
Speaker 1: in this episode, don't forget to write us at blow
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