Girl on the Net

Today, while the rest of the internet celebrates Ed Balls day, sex bloggers are instead faced with ‘why is everyone sending me pictures of a dildo made of human ashes?‘ Day.

In case you hadn’t already seen it RTd repeatedly with the comment ‘eww’, here’s a quick overview: 21 Grams is a memory box that allows a grieving person to collect together a bunch of intimate memories about their loved one. It contains speakers to play their favourite music (aww), a scent bottle for holding their loved one’s perfume (aww) and a blown glass dildo that contains a golden urn for their ashes (apparently, eww). The following quote is taken from the article above.

“21 Grams is a memory-box that allows a widow to go back to the intimate memories of a lost beloved one,” explained Sturkenboom [the designer]. “After a passing, the missing of intimacy with that person is only one aspect of the pain and grief. This forms the base for 21 Grams. The urn offers the possibility to conserve 21 grams of ashes of the deceased and displays an immortal desire.

“By bringing different nostalgic moments together like the scent of his perfume, ‘their’ music, reviving the moment he gave her her first ring, it opens a window to go back to moments of love and intimacy,” he said.

General content warning: this post contains a pretty frank and probably controversial discussion of sex and death.

Grieving for a loved one

As regular readers already know, I am knee-jerk suspicious of any instance of the word ‘eww’ when applied to sexual things. There are certain acts for which we hold a justified moral disgust: abuse, for instance. There are other things for which most of us hold a physical disgust: fucking frozen chickens. Still more for which we hold a sense of disgust born of cultural learning, on which the genuine moral questions are far more complicated: we might want to consider the context and questions around harm before making judgments about individual cases.

Where does death fit into this? Fuck me, it’s really complicated. And because of that I’m not going to say ‘hey, this particular thing is right or wrong.’ I’m going to be irritatingly sceptical about moral judgments when applied to different people’s method of grieving.

I am – SHOCK – not a religious or spiritual person. When I die, I won’t be looking down on you from heaven, hoping a few of you are having a good crywank over my blog. I will be dead. Hopefully my body will be chopped into as many pieces as can potentially be useful for others – kidneys, liver, corneas, whatever they need. At the moment of death, my body becomes – to me – no more than meat. As such, the only possible significance it can have is for other people. Strangers who need my organs, or loved ones who want to mourn me.

My loved ones will, I hope, respect my desire to be as useful as I possibly can be in death, then dispose of my remains in whichever way is most efficient. As a result, I probably don’t want to be turned into a dildo. But that’s a practical issue rather than a moral one.

Morally, if I knew that having my remains made into a sex toy would provide some kind of comfort or pleasure to my grieving partner then sod it – why not? I doubt he’d want to do that, but I’m certainly not against asking him the weirdest and most awkward sex questions, so I’ll see.

I’m not being churlish, this is genuinely how I feel. Because my body, to me, only matters while I’m in it.

Isn’t it necrophilia though?

Is it necrophilia? Well, only if you think having a diamond made of human ashes (which is a thing that exists, by the way) is the equivalent to carrying their dead body around in your actual hands.

Let’s ignore that for a moment though and assume, for the sake of argument, that this is necrophilia. The reason we have a taboo around necrophilia is because the idea of it carries a profound moral and physical disgust.

The moral disgust is born of the idea that our bodies are somehow sacred: most cultures have some kind of death ritual which involves treating the body in a particular way. With religion, this has often been linked to the manner in which someone will get to heaven (or not, as the case may be). Without religion, we use death rites for comfort and grieving, which can be incredibly significant for some people. Given the importance that we place on what happens to a body after we die, we imbue it with respect. The value of doing this is either religious (which, as mentioned, ain’t going to be a reason I do anything) or as comfort for those who are grieving. If the latter is better achieved with a sex toy, I’m not going to argue.

Physical disgust, then, is what stands in the way. Presumably our physical disgust about necrophilia stems from the fact that it’s unhygienic. Physical disgust can be an incredibly powerful thing, and scientists have explained it in relation to our socialisation – as we started living more closely together, we developed strong disgust reactions to things which would potentially cause disease. While that’s certainly the case with necrophilia as it’s commonly understood (sex with a corpse), the same simply can’t be said of a product made with human ashes that are sealed forever inside. You won’t catch anything, it won’t start to smell, it’s not rotting away in a drawer. In fact, it’s no less clean than an urn sitting on a mantlepiece.

When I was chatting to a mate about this he mentioned the ‘uncanny valley’ issue too – the fact that many of us would reject the idea of sex with robots, based on a disgust reaction to something that mimics some, but not all, human traits – we’re disoriented by it and react with horror. Perhaps because it reminds us of a corpse, or feels dangerous because it’s unpredictable or we interpret that it’s ‘oddness’ may be something contagious. With 21 Grams, perhaps the fact that something which used to be human, and is being used to revive emotions that were wholly human, yet is physically very removed from the real thing, is triggering that same discomfort.

Our physical disgust is clearly helpful to us in a number of situations. Unfortunately, our disgust reactions can also be triggered by things which are not going to cause us harm, and some of those icky feelings can actively cause us to change the way we reason about things. That link goes to a study on the influence of disgust on moral judgments, in which participants who’d been disgusted (by gross smells or horrible environments) made more severe moral judgments than control subjects.

I say all this to demonstrate that I’m categorically not calling you a horrible twat if your initial reaction was ‘eww’ – it’s understandable. There are plenty of reasons – both rational and emotional – why we’d be primed to be shocked by something like this. What I am saying is that perhaps in this case there’s a more interesting discussion than just ‘yay’ or ‘boo’ to 21 Grams. If, in an individual case, our disgust-based objections aren’t relevant, then is it really right to say that something which could be of actual benefit is wrong?

OMG are you saying you’re going to buy 21 Grams?

No. Because owning a keepsake like this doesn’t appeal to me at all. However, I can tell you that if my partner were to die tomorrow, sex and masturbation would play a huge part in the process of grieving for him. It would have to, because it plays such a huge part in our relationship. In what feels like a weird extension of ‘don’t disrespect the dead’, we’re assuming that once someone dies, they no longer hold any sexual significance. Even though their other acts (wisdom they passed down, jokes they made, etc) can live on in loved ones’ memories for a hell of a long time, the sex that they had must be scrubbed clean from their lives. Moreover, while most of the shock around 21 Grams has been the fact that it contains actual ashes, can we be a little bit honest here and admit that many people will also be thinking ‘eww’ at the idea of widows masturbating, or reminiscing about their sex lives with the deceased?

The creator of this project isn’t bringing something to the mass market, and telling us that we all have to use it. He’s starting what I think is a really interesting conversation about grief, and the way we mourn significant others. Reliving memories isn’t all going to involve smelling their scent on old sweaters and listening to the music of your first dance.

Grief is a phenomenally difficult thing to deal with, and I’m lucky to have never had to cope with the death of a partner. But when I’ve grieved for people I’ve loved and lost, I know that they don’t suddenly turn into angels in your mind the second they’ve passed on. We remember more than just the cute stuff, because people are more than just the cute stuff. We’re born, we fuck, we love, we fight, we live and then we die.

In the meantime we have some fascinating ethical questions to ponder. Would I turn my lover into a post-death dildo? No. But is there a rational reason to object to someone who would? If there is, it escapes me.