In 1977, my last year in getting a B.A. in Anthropology - ,, I took 4 classes. I didn't need any more for my major, just 12 units of General Education, at San Diego State University...so, when I registered I looked at the available classes and realized I could go to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, giving me a 4 day weekend every week!
I also realized, literally as I reviewed the board of class offerings, that I could write a paper on Necrophilia and turn it into three of the four classes! And, so...I took:
Black English - That's what Ebonics was called back the, and my professor Shirley Weber was one of the major contributors to the academic study of how the English spoken by afro-americans was related to West Aftican syntax etc.
For that class, I wrote a paper "The Trickster Character in Black Folklore", all about Br'er Rabbit.
Human Sexual Workshop - As the Prof said, "this is not a lab course, it is academic only"
I wrote a paper entitled: "Cross Cultural Homosexuality". The Prof suggested I become a sex therapist...
Sociology of Deviance - When I suggested, about three quarters of the way into the 13 week course, that the deviants we ought to be studying were Rich People, the prof blanched, broke out in a sweat, and did not have a good day...
Sociology of Death - Another fun course, I wrote a paper entitled "Necrophilia" It was quite a scholarly treatis, and I quoted literary
references to Necrophilia as diverse as Herodotus, who suggested that the bodies of rich Egyptians (500 BC or so) were sometimes defiled before becoming mummified...and so, the keepers of the mummification process waited 3 days so the body was really ripe...and therefore supposedly not appealing to someone interested in that...all the way to William Burroughs "Naked Lunch" that has a passage that is quite a graphic rendition of Necrophilia.
I'll always be ashamed I only got a A- on that paper, only because the prof was a former Presbyterian Preacher, and he was unable to finish reading the paper, as it made him sick.
Knowing the rules, I turned the Necro paper in to the death class for credit and the Human Sexual Workshop class and deviance class for "extra credit".
Understand, this was WAY before the internet (or Jeffrey Dahmer)...so I had to spend HOURS upon HOURS in a real library to glean nuggets of necrophilia!
Of course, I had two conclusions:
1. To the true necrophiliac (usually found working in mortuaries, if you wanted to find one), waiting three days makes the body even more desireable.
2. I also concluded, using all my Anthropological expertise, that Necrophilia is probably a uniquely human behavior and not much else is truly unique to us alone!
Thanks for suggesting that Necrophilia is a "victim-less crime" however, a dead body is as I understand it, is property of it's estate, so, perhaps necrophiliacs are guilty of trespassing! (but, you are the lawyer after all, enjoy these references...)
Afterword: There was a female student at school with whom I was more than casually familiar...She was in my first Anthro class, but changed majors to become a Biology student. She enjoyed going to the mountains and simply sitting quietly, sniffing the wind...in order to discover dead animals...The Sexual Workshop teacher agreed that she may have been a very rare breed, a female necrophiliac!
Frish
Attached is my West Hollywood Halloween Costume for 2009 (which is very much the same as it has been for almost 50 years!)
