It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy claiming to be an editorial assistant for Nerve.com and soliciting my responses to a questionnaire for a feature they wanted to run on “Sex Advice From Butchers.” My first thought was “Whoa! This is a change from the penis enlargement spam or the ‘please-allow-me-to-introduce-myself-I-work-at-an-African-bank’ spam. This is a joke or scam aimed just at me!’” I guess that’s what it feels like to hit the big time: personalized spam.

Even crazier than that, the request was legit, and today you can read the feature on Nerve.com. Now, as you may know from earlier posts taking others to task for fawning over butchers as the new porn stars, I don’t believe that butchers have any special insight to offer when it comes to personal sex advice. In fact, I’m sure my friends all think it’s hysterical that someone would solicit such advice from ME. (They’re just too polite to laugh right in my face. Well, most of them are.) But I am willing to entertain the notion that butchers might have some insight when it comes to “meat,” and how our culture deals or fails to deal with meaty matters.

For their feature, they didn’t have room to run my full responses or my answers to all their questions, so you can read them here. If you’re a real glutton for punishment, you can find more meaty musings by selecting “Curiosities” from the Categories list or by clicking on “abliguritions” in the tag cloud.

Larbo’s full response to Nerve.com’s questionnaire for “Sex Advice from Butchers”:

First of all, I’m not a butcher. My grandfather was a butcher. He hauled around sides of pork that weighed hundreds of pounds, and, when someone wanted a pork chop, he would ask how thick and then literally chop it off with a cleaver. His butcher block was so dished, it looked like a moon crater. I’m a guy who fools around with meat. I pick out the cow or pig I want, and I brine it, smoke it, barbecue it, cure it, turn it into sausage, salamis, and pâtés. I think a lot about meat, and I blog about some of my crazier ideas. What all this makes me, you decide. That said, here goes:

1.) Has being a butcher changed the way you look at the human body, and if so, how?

Absolutely. If you are engaged with what you are doing with your whole being–head, heart, and hands–your thinking will change the way you work and your work will change the way you think. On the one hand, working with meat demystifies the human body. So much of our culture–like most of advertising–is devoted to selling fantasies about our bodies and about sex. As a result, much of life can seem pretty disappointing simply because it fails to live up to the script running in our head 24/7. Knowing exactly where your meat comes from, slaughtering it, breaking it down, all help keep you grounded in the actual, physical, tangible realities of meat. In the slaughterhouse, nothing is airbrushed.

This does not mean devaluing all flesh as so much “meat.” On the contrary and on the other hand, it means revaluing meat in all its minute particularity and singularity as something special, mysterious. As Wendell Berry writes, “we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we can not comprehend.” In this sense, every meal is a holy communion. All this may seem far removed from sex, but it’s not. The ingestion of meat, making it one flesh with our flesh, is fundamentally no different from the dominant idea of marriage or from what we do with our bodies and all their orifices during sex: licking, sucking, savoring, biting, devouring–trying to incorporate an other that we know will always remain other, mysterious.

2.) Have you ever thought about sex while you’re handling meat?

I’m a guy. You might as well ask does your heart beat, do you breathe or blink while you’re working? But of course there is more to it than that. Meat is a once-living and still sensuous material, and, even though it’s “dead,” it will speak to you of life, of natural life processes. Once, cutting up a side of beef that came from a three-year-old bull, the meat had a rich, heady, metallic smell, like iron; if you were open to suggestion, it reminded you of the strong, metallic smell of menstrual blood. Not a turn on, but a reminder of how the flow of blood is part and parcel of the cycle of fertility, of regeneration.

3.) Should someone approach sex with a carnivorous appetite, no matter their eating habits?

It’s not a question of should. Unless you’re having sex with a carrot or a tofu dog, sex IS carnivorous! (Even then, I would argue.) Sex is the act of entrusting yourself wholly to the other, implanting yourself in the other. Sex is a Dionysian act of sacrifice, which means dying, letting yourself be devoured, and resting in the other. (In French, the flaccidity of the penis that follows orgasm is called la petite morte or “the little death.”) “Making love” is the reciprocal desire to devour the other, to eat them up–even if you do it ever so politely, and eat them “with a spoon.” All the acts of introjection that are part of sex–the tongue or penis in any of the body’s orifices, words whispered into the inmost recesses of the ear, etc.–are all of a piece with the consumption of meat.

So is there any such thing as strictly vegetarian love or sex? Is there any keeping of the other without blood sacrifice? The speaker of the poem, To My Coy Mistress writes of “My vegetable love,” but I think he’s being coy about just what is “grow[ing].”

4.) As the old saying goes, “The way to one’s heart is through their stomach.” How would you put this bit of wisdom into practice?

A very good question. Again, I think it all comes back to the quest or question of incorporation. Love is wanting to hold the other in us, in “our heart,” as used to be symbolized by encasing a lock of hair or a photograph in a locket, worn on the breast. Nowadays, I suppose we get a tattoo of a heart with our lover’s name inscribed in it. If love is also about giving oneself to be kept, about giving (oneself to) the other to eat, then, yes, food enters into it and it all passes through the stomach.

“Food is love” is a common expression. We show our love by giving food, by feeding our lover or loved ones, but it is never simply about the food on our plate. What we need to ask is, what are we feeding them with the food we put on the plate? If we are feeding them fast food, processed or prepared food, in other words, food to which we have contributed almost nothing, then we may be keeping their bodies alive but we are starving them of love. Love requires putting yourself in the food in some way, injecting yourself, and then giving of that food to your lover, your loved ones, your friends, so that you are also giving something of yourself to be eaten.

5.) Should love always need be a messy, if not sometimes bloody, affair?

Love and sex ARE messy and bloody! Again, seeing things this way is part of the realism of someone who works with meat. If you can’t deal with blood and mess as part of love and life, then you are still living in some airbrushed fantasy world and you haven’t come to grips with the fact that death is part of life. This does not mean that blood should be spilled every time you make love. There’s no need for that! If you are really making love, if you are really cutting yourself in pieces and feeding them to your lover, if you are leaving pieces of yourself in the other, then there will be plenty of mess, and blood will flow, sooner or later, trust me!

6.) In the attempt to go exclusive with someone, is it best to just cut to the chase or let the mystifying flirtations and games marinate into something potentially fulfilling?

Asking a meat man, I take it that by asking “is it best to just cut to the chase” you are asking “should we just get to the meat of the matter” and forget about any appetizers, side dishes, and, above all!, that goddam fig leaf or parsley that just gets in the way.

Whew! You’ve got me at a loss; I really don’t know what to say. I guess it depends on whether “the meat of the matter” is really the meat of the matter for you. As I hope I’ve made clear, in lovemaking there are so many ways that we give ourselves to be eaten that the meat is just one of them and may not be the most important for you.

7.) My boyfriend and I both love going to the movies, but all he ever wants to see is bloody horror and action flicks, which I secretly despise. How do we reach a compromise without a.) hurting his feelings and b.) wasting any more of his or my money?

Now this is a question meant for a butcher! Even if one isn’t a kosher or halal butcher, all butchering has its roots in regulating, mastering leukorhea or the flow of blood.

So my advice is: learn to love the blood. I am not saying there is nothing you can do about it, so just lie back, relax, and surrender yourself to the splatterfest. Not at all. But “bloody horror” flicks are a great place to start thinking about how powerfully blood is encoded in our culture. Looking at the first books of the old testament, Julia Kristeva notes how blood is associated both with men, a propensity for murder, and death on the one hand and (through menstruation) with women and fertility on the other. As she stresses, blood “becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together.” Think of splatter films as a chance to see this vast cultural drama on the big screen, as a struggle over the meaning of blood and who controls it.

If you can learn to do this, not only will you stop wasting your money, but you never know your luck. By cultivating a nose, a taste, an appetite for blood, by becoming a connoisseuse of blood, and by sharing your thoughts, you might even be able to spoil your boyfriend’s taste for such gory movies!

8.) Don’t get me wrong, I love the girl I’m seeing now, but there’s something which until now I was able to overlook—she refuses to shave her pit hair. I’m no longer warm to the idea of my girl having as much pit hair as I. What can I do?

I think you’ve laid your whole problem out for me. By dropping the “arm” out of “pit hair,” you’re conflating the armpit with the pit down below, and what freaks you out is that she has “as much” as you. As a result, you’re “no longer [feeling] warm” but growing cold as stone. What you’re suffering from here is a classic case of Medusa complex. If you remember your Greek mythology, after she was raped, Medusa’s hair was transformed by the gods into serpents, and her face became so terrible that one glimpse would turn a man to stone.

To lay it out, all too briefly and simplistically, hair=snakes=penises. All the pit hair freaks men out because it suggests that the woman has a penis too or OMG! that she might have taken your penis! The time-honored solution is to castrate these penises, just as Perseus did by cutting off the head of Medusa. So our culture requires women to take razors to their bodies and cut off all the offending hair in order to render themselves non-threatening.

Instead of requiring this symbolic castration of women, how about we confront our fears head on and castrate, de-capitate them instead? This does not mean simply waving away fears of castration as silly, because they’re far too deeply embedded for that. Just as Dr. Strangelove had to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb, we need to learn to stop worrying about castration and embrace the fact that, essentially, the penis is always already castrated! After all, dude, how could your girlfriend have it, if you didn’t already lose it or lose control of it?