delicatesse fatale

Dionysus' female chthonian swamp is inhabited by silent, swarming invertebrates. I proposed that the taboo attached to women is justified and that the infamous "uncleanness" of menstruation is due not to blood but to uterine jellies in that blood. The primal swamp is choked with menstrual albumen, the lukewarm matrix of nature, teeming with algae and bacteria. We have a food that symbolizes this swamp: raw clams on the half-shell. Twenty years ago, I noticed the strong emotions roused by this delicacy, to which few are indifferent. Common reactions range from ecstasy to revulsion. Why? The clam is a microcosm of the female hygra physis [wet or liquid nature]. It is as aesthetically and physiologically disturbing as menstrual albumen. The primitive shapelessness of raw clams offers sensuous access to some archaic swamp-experience.

Boticelli's Venus coasts to shore on the half-shell. Sexual love is a deep-sea diving into the timeless and elemental. G. Wilson Knight says, "Life rose from the sea. Our bodies are three parts water and our minds compacted of salty lusts." Woman's body reeks of the sea. Ferenczi says, "The genital secretion of the female among the higher mammals and in man . . . possess a distinctly fishy odor (odor of herring brine), according to the description of all physiologists; this odor of the vagina comes from the same substance (trymethylamine) as the decomposition of fish gives rise to. Raw clams, I am convinced, have a latently cunnilingual character that many find repugnant. Eating a clam, fresh-killed, barely dead, is a barbarous, amorous plunging into mother nature's cold salt sea.


Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 92.