Love Bites!

You know how sometimes I like to take a novel or unexpected approach to the weekly blog theme? Now that Valentine's Day is safely out the way, and the consecutive Singles Awareness Day (can you believe it?), I thought we could head over to the dark side of amour - although the origins of Valentine's Day were dark enough (if you care to check that out).

I am a long time fan of the Rivers Of London series of fantasy novels by Ben Aaronovitch, (ninth in the series due in April actually), and it was when I was reading 'Moon Over Soho'  back in 2012 that I first came across some bizarre folklore that (although surely apocryphal) must rate as the ultimate in love bites. I can't not shock you, because that's the nature of the phenomenon, so let's just get stuck in. 

If you're unfamiliar with the novels, DC Peter Grant is a crime-fighting London bobby with a difference, for the premise of the books is that magic exists, can be used for nefarious ends and the Met has a special division responsible for investigating and dealing with any criminal activity that has a whiff of the supernatural about it. Chief Inspector Nightingale (wizard) and sidekick DC Peter Grant (apprentice wizard) are the heat on the streets of the capital, with sharp noses for vestigia, sensory traces of wrong-doing involving magic.

In 'Moon Over Soho', Grant gets summoned to a crime scene in the West End's Groucho Club (private members only!) where a male victim has bled to death in the toilets after having his todger bitten off. Grant has been called in by the regular Met police because of the unusual 'feel' of the crime scene and the bizarre nature of the man's wounds, reminiscent of a previous case involving the supernatural, in which a victim's manhood had been excised by sharp teeth, the configuration of which a bemused forensic dentist opined "looked remarkably like a human mouth, only shallower and with a vertical orientation". 

The chilling conclusion was that the man in the Groucho Club had also been in the throes of intercourse with a woman (or at least something that looked like a woman from the Club's CCTV images) when she bit his penis off using her vagina dentata, a term apparently coined by Sigmund Freud. (Now there's a surprise!) What a gruesome concept; the stuff of nightmares if you're a man and possibly of revenge fantasies if you're a woman wronged.

 And no, I'm not going to include an illustration of "a woman with teeth in her fanny" as Aaranovitch's DS Miriam Stephanopoulos so graphically termed it. (Best left to the imagination, I think.) Instead, here's a rather spooky tableau of some mannequins in the woods - just because it's such an intriguing photograph, and not entirely unconnected to the mood and theme of the above-going. 

Putting scruples aside, I researched briefly the concept of vagina dentata for this blog about love bites and here is what I found. The teethed vagina is fairly universal in mythologies and probably arose either as a cautionary tale against men forcing themselves on strange women, or out of deep-rooted male fears of women's sexuality, a sort of emasculation complex (as Freud would have it). There are strange tales of toothed vaginas from North and South American folklore, African, Arabic, Asian and Australasian literature and even Hindi religious texts, though they don't appear to exist in European folk tales for some reason. They all involve teeth which either grow in the vagina or dentures that have been inserted for the purpose of biting men where it hurts. The possibility of encountering a set of "obsidian sharp" teeth in a lover's "jewel box" might well have proved a passion dampener! Or a pre-emptive rumour against molestation or rape. Needless to say, I don't have a favourite tale. And of course there is absolutely no medical evidence to support the notion of vagina dentata.

It turns out there's a cult horror movie 'Teeth'  (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007) based around the same premise. Maybe that was Ben Aaranovitch's inspiration for building it into his novel.

I couldn't leave you on such a disturbing note in this week dominated by all things loved up. So to finish more sweetly, here's a humorous little poem begun on the coach back from Cardiff this evening (and maybe a work in progress if I get further inspired). It was partly suggested by the recent TV series 'The Larkins' (based in turn on H.E. Bates' novel 'The Darling Buds Of May') and the joyfully affectionate relationship between Pa Larkin (Bradley Walsh) and the voluptuously roly-poly Ma Larkin (Joanna Scanlan). Here goes...

Love Hearts  

Plump at fifty but still happily in love,

by mutual consent the scales gather dust

under their sagging love nest, this sweet

mountain of a woman and her doughty

pre-diabetic mountaineer of a swive.

Age has merely fleshed out a passion

for each other and wine and chocolates

in bed, now the kids have safely fled

and they have time to indulge their hearts

delights and pills to help them thrive.

That's all, folks. Thanks as ever for reading my stuff. It's been a long old football away day at the end of a tiringly windy week. I think I might be due a holiday from the blog for a couple of Saturdays, but I'll be back. 

Love and hugs, S ;-)