In Our Own Image (But With A Bigger Penis)

The year is 2007, the place is Zimbabwe. A wave of hysteria sweeps the streets. The Popobawa is here again.

For those that don't know, the Popobawa is a sex demon. Having been accidentally loosed by an incautious magician in the 1970s, the Popobawah (who's name is swahili for "batwing") has come to terrorise the men of the area. How is he doing it? He's using his massive penis.

Though able to shapeshift, the spirit often appears in the form of a winged, dwarf, cylops ogre. He flys at the dark of night and attacks men, espescially unbelievers, in their own bed by pinning them down and sodomising them for hours with his freakishly large penis.

Beyond the obvious trauma of supernatural rape, the men are instructed to tell everyone the ordeal. If they fail to share the story, then the Popobawa will return and rape them again.

Sound ridiculous? For the victims it is a very real experience. Hospitals have had to deal with bruising, broken ribs and a shattered pelvis. The fear is equally as real, during periods of high activity men may choose to sleep outside rather than in the bed where the Popobawa would expect them to be.

Understandably, the international community has looked with scepticism on the claims of our Tanzanian brothers'. With very little effort, we have managed to explain the Popobawa away. There is a physiological quirk with human sleep that means we can't move whilst in REM sleep. Sometimes, this paralysis continues over into the begining of the waking state. The half awake dreamer often adds in something hallucinatory of their own making,and voila, demonic experience.

The experience of Sleep Paralysis often includes a pressing or crushing feeling,so that would explain why the Popobawa is reported as pinning down his victims, but there isn't much in the hypnpompic state that feels like a giant penis repeatedly entering your rectum. Or, for that matter, that would compel you to go out and admit your msenge status. So what's that about?

I, for one, would argue it's about the culture that the victims live in. Sleep Paralysis phenomenon have been around for a long time, and though the basic "I can't move, someone's sitting on my chest" experience always remains central, the window dressing has changed to express the important social dilemnas of the era.

Medieval men had witches ride them, because witches repressented unbound female sexuality and power over men. Monks of the time, who slept with crosses clasped to their groins, where visited by succubi. Female demons who represented sexual sin and nocturnal temptation. (Nuns, conveniently for them, could blame unwanted pregnancies on incubi, the male equivalents of the succubi. Incubi penises, which could be identified by their massive size and freezing temperature, squirted the semen collected by their succubi sisters. Hence why so many of the nun's demonic children looked suspisciously like local men). In the secular era modern America suffers from a surfeit of alien abduction stories, each of which makes an interesting study on America's relationship to the concepts of foreigness and anal-probes.

And Zimbabwe, for all it's comparative liberalism, still suffers from strong taboos against men being penetrated. In a country where same-sex handholding can result in imprisonment, it seems inevitable that the queer should become monstrous. I think it's telling that Popobawa is literally a "one eyed monster".

In all honesty, any country with Mugabe (a rabid,vocal and violent homophobe) at it's head is going to have a gay sex demon in it's head. I find it hard to look at the Popobawa and not see a nation suffering from a masculinity crisis. Popobawa is, to my uninvolved non-sociologist eyes, a voice given to the voicless characters in the national psyche.

But this, I think, is my point. Though it is easy to make a judgement and interperet other people's myths, it's not always the best response. Popobawa shows us that there is a mirroring link between a society and the religion it creates. Our spirits sometimes reflect ourselves more readily than they reflect our reality, and it would be arrogant to assume that the same process is not at work in our own beliefs.

Why, for example, is it important that the Virgin Mary has a perpetual virginity? What does us say about our view of female sexuality? Why are our superheroes straight men,and why can they fly? What does that tell us about our attitudes to the ground and to masculinity?

The Popobawa, for all it's oddness, is an important lesson in the nature of metaphysical belief. As strongly as our beliefs are held, we often hold them for reasons that are more psychological than philosophical.

That's not to say I don't believe giant penises fly through the window. Just that my belief might be based more on personal needs (and who doesn't need a flying penis?) rather than the spiritual reality.

(...to the full post)

Baby Sacrificing Lesbian Vampires: Halloween for Queens Part 1

This is my obligatory Halloween article. I'm writing it a bit early because, to be honest, I want to remind people to start getting ready. Halloween is the best night of the year and half arsed costumes make me want to immolate people.

There's probably a few people out there wondering how I'm intending to link Halloween to Religion. There's more than likely a lot of you wondering what this has got to do with Queer. Well, to start off I'm going to talk a bit about what Halloween actually is. Do not worry, the ever elusive point will eventually turn up.

Halloween is a, nominally, Christian festival that marks the evening before "All Hallows Day". All Hallows Day is a Catholic celebration of all the saints, known or unknown, who've achieved union with God in heaven. The day afterwards, All Souls Day, is for those dead people who are in purgatory and still working their way up to Sainthood. These three dates mark the beginning of November, a month that is dedicated to those Catholics who have left the body on a permanent basis.

However, this is almost certainly not what the majority of celebrants are thinking of. Halloween for the majority is about dressing up, telling ghost stories and waging anonymous war on those old people who don't distribute candy. "Mischief" is enacted and we all dress like monsters, saints or celebrities. It's a time where people can be safely perverse, on the condition that they put that perverseness away at the end of the night. It's a similar type of thing to the Medieval Feast of Fools, Ancient Roman Saturnalia and Ancient Greek Dionysia. All of these festivals involved the poor mocking the rich, women mocking men and individual bucking at state. But, unlike these other festivals, Halloween isn't just an outlet for the oppressed. It's also an outlet for fear and the fear inducing.

I'm sure you can all see the link I'm trying to make here. Halloween is about the oppressed and the feared and queer people are sort of oppressed and feared. Big whoop. I'm sure neither of these things are particularly revelatory. But, I want to explore a bit further the way that queer action can be seen as monstrous and, god help you all, then go on to suggest what I think we should do with that knowledge.

If we want to talk about fear, a good place to start it Freud's concept of "the uncanny". Uncanniness is a quality belonging to an item that it both familiar and unfamiliar. Dolls, those staples of childhood horror stories and adult phobia, are uncanny because they seem both human and inhuman at the same time. Masks, a personal fear of my daddy, are uncanny for the same reason. They are not alive, but they can seems alive. And, for a lot of straight people, queer living is frightening for the same reason. We are males who are not men, women who are not wives. We wear the faces of human beings, but behind them we keep alien thoughts. To prove my point I want to show a brief selection of quotes that link gender deviance to the occult, death and *thunder rolls* the dark.

"Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."

-Pat Robertson, vocal right wing "Christian".

"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of
marriage... It will destroy the Earth."

-James Dobson,

"You ask anybody that's investigated homosexual murders and without
question they are the most violent...even the sex act itself is violent
in homosexuals."

-Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council

"The perversion that follows homosexuality is bestiality and then human
sacrifice and cannibalism."

-Barbara Blewster, a member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Arizona State Legislature

"I have learned that the radical, perverted homosexuals and lesbians are
already promoting their '2000 Disney Gay Day'...they are timing it to occur in June -- right when children out of school will be flocking to Disney-owned parks! This proves the true intent of these homosexuals: they are after our children!!"

-Bonnie Mawyer, wife of Christian Action Network founder

"Homosexuality is Satan's diabolical attack upon the family that will.
not only have a corrupting influence upon our next generation, but it will also bring down the wrath of God upon America."

-Jerry Falwell

Well, I'm approaching the end of the article and I haven't actually got to my point yet. I'll continue my train of thought later in the month. For now, all I've really proved is that gay people are a bit like monsters, sortof. Next time I'll be discussing how to use that knowledge to undermine western thought, disrupt the family and spread HIV.

Or, if they want monsters, we can give them monsters.

(...to the full post)