the art of bein' a ho
So! It's been quite a while since I did an essay for Diva. I realize, looking through my tags, not since Sam dropped the first time, and that's the only essay on this journal. That is just sad. But anyways, this one is brought on by a movie that I watched recently and rewatched last night because I enjoy it so much. Black Snake Moan is about a nymphomaniac young woman who gets taken in by an older black man who keeps her chained to his radiator to prevent her from leaving. Sounds terrible, right? Not at all. Black Snake Moan is a love story about imperfect people. It's a father-daughter story. It's not what it seems to be, which is why I love it so much.
So let's get our cast of characters together. First of all we have Lazarus Redd (Samuel L. Jackson), a poor black farmer whose wife leaves him at the beginning of the film for his brother. Ouch. We have Rae Doole, a poor white nymphomaniac whose boyfriend Ronnie leaves for deployment, which upsets her greatly.
The beginning of the film is mostly about setting up Rae, since it's important to get to know her. The film introduces her at first as unlikeable--not long after Ronnie leaves, Rae goes and sleeps with another man (who the conversation tells us that she sleeps with regularly) and ends up going to a party and doing a lot of drugs and having about as much sex. But when Ronnie's friend takes her home, he tries to take advantage of her and severely beats her, leaving her for dead on the side of the road.
It's Lazarus that finds her and takes care of her, nursing her back to health. They both learn to deal with their problems with their relationships through each other and Lazarus's pastor.
Up to this point, we get odd flashes or moments that generally precede Rae having an "attack"--and those attacks are very clearly portrayed as painful to her, either physically, emotionally or both. By this point we sort of have an idea what these flashes are of, but when Lazarus and Rae go into town, she goes to speak with her mother and tries to make ammends, since Rae has decided she wants to be a better person.
Her mother pushes her advances away, after which Rae makes it very clear what those flashes are about in case you weren't sure. She was sexually abused by her father (or her mom's boyfriend, it's not clear which), and after Rae's mother says that she wishes she had aborted Rae, Rae flies into a rage, and Lazarus comes in again, rescuing her. If any scene in the movie, this whole scene is very tense, emotionally and ends up highlighting that Lazarus is the only "adult" figure that cares for Rae, a father figure that she never had.
Ronnie, on the other hand, got discharged because of his severe anxiety disorder, and we find out that Ronnie and Rae do love each other very deeply, since they're able to help each other with their vices. Rae can calm Ronnie down when he's having an anxiety attack, and when Rae is with Ronnie, she's less promiscuous because she's told Ronnie about her past, and it helps her to cope with it.
In a final scene where Ronnie and Rae are trying to talk to each other about their problems with the pastor's help, we find out that Rae's nymphomania is an escape. She'll start thinking about her abuse and it hurts her, and at some point, sex starts to make that pain go away, but doesn't really do that anymore. This is just a very basic summary of the emotional background of this movie, but to really get a picture of it, I highly recommend watching this movie. Despite the premise and the poor marketing, it's a human drama, not fetish fuel.
Interesting stuff, right? Well, with that background out of the way, I'm doing (another) analysis of Diva's sexuality, specfically relating to her nymphomania, since this movie is the only portrayal I've ever seen about what it's like emotionally and physically.
So despite its marketing and even summaries, Black Snake Moan does not portray Rae in a bad light. It doesn't glamorize or demonize her promiscuity. It treats them as a symptom of her emotional trauma, which is one way nymphomania can present itself. Nymphomania in women is very highly shamed--it's "slut shaming" to the extreme, because it's not recognized as a psychological condition. Rae is an ultimately sympathetic character because her nymphomania is a symptom and something she can't help. It's a way for her to try to cope with abuse.
So for Diva, I think her nymphomania is very similar. We're never told that Diva suffered any kind of abuse other than the tower, but there are pieces of dialog in the anime and manga (and I believe the novels, but I don't have those in front of me to look at) that certainly tell us that her life hasn't been easy and that Amshel especially takes advantage of her. One of the most telling quotes about her sexual history is something Amshel remarks in episode 41:
"I wondered how the Chiropteran Queens breed. We've tested this idea many times in the past, having Diva mate with humans and even with her Chevalier descendants, but it has never resulted in childbirth."
And in case you had any doubt, Nathan's role in the series, I think, is to give Diva a sympathetic element. He makes several remarks throughout the series that are astute observations about the other Chevaliers' intentions, but relating to Amshel, in Episode 43 he says:
"What is it that you need? Is it Diva...Or perhaps her children?"
When coupled with his remark after she's died that Amshel didn't understand Diva's desire to have a family, Amshel is very obviously painted as the real main antagonist of Blood+. Blood+ is not a deep series by any means and the writing is crap, since what they do in the series that does lean towards clever is not remotely original, the story-telling device here is a very interesting one. We have the characer who is portrayed up to a certain point as the main antagonist and completely unsympathetic, but as the story starts to draw towards its end, we're given examples that are designed to raise questions like "how would Character X be different if this had happened?"
So in the case of Blood+, the question the audience is asked is "How would Diva be different if Diva had been the twin picked to live normally?" We're not even really asked it--I'm pretty sure a character explictly says "What if Saya had been locked in the tower instead?" However, Blood+ is a disappointing series, personally, because these moments of sympathy or implication to things that have happened to characters are all made in passing--in a 50 episode series, it's very easy to forget these lines implying things like "Diva has had sex in questionable circumstances." I mean, Diva says that she "behave[d] like a doll" in Berchtesgaden, also known as Hitler's mountain home. And analyzing expressions/body movement in anime is kind of a fruitless effort for shit like Blood+, but this expression does not say happy things to me.
It's little things like that where I draw the headcanon of Diva's sexual and emotional abuse. It's obvious enough that's she's messed up--just the statement of "spent the first 50 years of her life isolated and experimented on" will tell you that, but what's interesting is that Diva doesn't really mention the tower as a source of pain. The only time Diva even mentions the tower at all is in Episode 24 when she says she "hates Joel" and that's it. In the manga adaptations, it's never about her pain or suffering, it's about how she and Saya met. When Diva explains herself and her emotions, it's not the tower or her Chevalier that have hurt her--it's that Saya left her. So even though we as the audience know that the tower was a painful experience and really messed her up, Diva doesn't explicitly identify that herself, which can lead you to the conclusion that anything else bad that has happened off screen, she similarly wouldn't mention.
As for specifics, it's impossible to pin anything down other than "the tower fucked her up" because we're not told anything. Doing close analysis, you can infer things, like that something went down at Berchtesgaden that Diva disliked enough to warrant mention (though what that was, we're never told), but for the most part, it's a mystery. One of my main inferences is about the relationship between Amshel and Diva, which is where her nymphomania comes in (I haven't forgotten!)
Diva sees Amshel as a father figure. That's very obvious, since she calls him Father, even when she doesn't have to for the sake of appearances. Because of her desire for a family, that action is fairly obvious as to why she does it. But it gets complicated and questionable because we know that Diva and Amshel have had sex at least once, based on the comment I highlighted once. Because he says "Chevalier descendants," that implies that she's had sex with all of them at least once. But with Amshel, I have reason to believe that it's quite a lot more than that, and my other examples comes on a more fucked up level. In episode 30, when current!Joel is reading old!Joel's diary, he explains the progression of their experiments with the Chiropteran twins:
"Joel sought to know everything about you, but when it became clear that he would not live to see this goal through, he decided to focus on researching your reproductive abilities."
But because Diva was the "physical" subject, that would mean that the research on reproductive abilities would be all on her, since Saya, we know, was oblivious to this. You can use your imagination as to what this research entailed, but in any case, it wasn't pleasant.
This is also made even more unpleasant in remembering Diva's mental state in the tower and early in her life. Logically, Diva would have been unable to even speak to Saya if she had been isolated, but that's just a gap in show's logic that isn't that uncommon in fiction. But we are clued in that Diva's speaking isn't great in the tower, since she's more often parroting Saya's words than actually having a conversation. Whatever happened in the tower would have happened to a woman with the inability to understand sex, much less say no. Similarly, even after she's been released from the tower, another way to look at her mental development as to sort of start counting her age from there.
So by the series' time, Diva is mentally about 11-14 (depending on which mode of the timeline you use) for the times where she's actually been awake. If you keep that in mind, it explains her childishness very well also.
But back to Amshel and Diva, that should set the stage for why I find their relationship very very bad for Diva. She loves Amshel, I think it's hard to refute that, but he's her father figure and lover. And with the mental state of a 14 year old at the most, their relationship is, by law, abusive.
But what does all of this have to do with nymphomania?
Well returning back to Amshel's statement of having Diva trying to mate "many times" with all of her Chevalier and humans, she's definitely had a lot of sex, even early on in her life. In Blood+ Adagio, which is not long at all after Diva left the tower, she's already a very sexual character. She gets jealous of Grigori because of his (implied) sexual relationship with Alexandra, and you cannot look at this page and tell me that's not sexual, especially because Alexei's dialog there basically amounts to "/MOANS." So within the span of about three years (very very roughly--remember how bad the timeline is?), Diva has gone from a soft-spoken and mentally undeveloped experiment to a ruthless, malicious and sexual woman. That kind of change that quickly (ignoring the fridge logic of the fact it's fiction) does not imply good things.
Diva uses sex to get what she wants and has no qualms about it, as we see with Riku, but on a personal level, I don't think that sex means anything to her. The pleasure is enjoyable, but sex is still a way to please others, not herself. What she prefers is the closeness of the physical act, which again, isn't surprising for a person deprived of affection and love. She seeks it out, and not knowing how to do that, or how to do it properly, she seeks it through sexuality, which is the only way she knows how.
In Black Snake Moan, Rae seeks out sex to distract her from her bad thoughts about her abuse or otherwise, But because Diva doesn't see her relationship with her Chevalier or her past as abusive, she herself thinks of it as something else. (This is, of course, excluding development in realityshifted) In reality, it is a way for her to cope with her abuse, but in a very different sense. Diva seeks out sex when she's troubled or lonely, because even if it's artificial, the physical closeness of sex can substitute love.
That's not to say that she thinks that sex = love. It's very clear to her that they're very separate entities because of Amshel's "mating experiments." Her nymphomania is a lot like her desire for a family in that it's misleading as to what her intentions are. With nymphomania, it may appear to be her desire for pleasure or for a family. But it's really about love in both cases. If she has a family, she can have children her love her unconditionally, and if she has sex and is open with her sexuality, she can have the physical closeness and affection that she expects people to have in love, but without the emotion itself.
Black Snake Moan ends not with Rae being "cured," but with the idea that now she can cope with it because she has Lazarus, who loves her as a father figure. And with Ronnie, she was able to control her nymphomania because he loved her. So in that very similar sense to Diva, Rae is able to cope with her problem when she feels loved, so promiscuity is her attempt to rectify that emptiness when she's feeling alone. Diva would be helped with a similar situation, minus the being chained to things.
Moving into RP canon, Diva's development from a raging, homicidal bitch to a sort of functioning member of society in realityshifted is the product of love. Because some loved her and forgave her for the things that she did, she was able to move past some of her issues and see her relationships as unhealthy and abusive. She's unable to leave them (though her canon progression did have all of her Chevalier die, I mean leaving them emotionally), but she's been able to come to terms with things that people have done to her instead of internalizing them and expressing them as violence and emotional distance from anyone but her Chevalier.
So I guess this turned more into a "here is my proof for saying that Diva is fucked up and sexual" kind of essay, but I did get to the nymphomania eventually. The characters of Black Snake Moan and their situations really couldn't be more different from those in Blood+, but Black Snake Moan inspired me to write all of this because it doesn't treat nymphomania as "just being a slut" but as a legitimate psychological condition, which it very well can be. It may not be for everyone, but it's definitely a top movie of mine, now.
And not just because of the frame in this essay it made for my vampire hooker love.
So let's get our cast of characters together. First of all we have Lazarus Redd (Samuel L. Jackson), a poor black farmer whose wife leaves him at the beginning of the film for his brother. Ouch. We have Rae Doole, a poor white nymphomaniac whose boyfriend Ronnie leaves for deployment, which upsets her greatly.
The beginning of the film is mostly about setting up Rae, since it's important to get to know her. The film introduces her at first as unlikeable--not long after Ronnie leaves, Rae goes and sleeps with another man (who the conversation tells us that she sleeps with regularly) and ends up going to a party and doing a lot of drugs and having about as much sex. But when Ronnie's friend takes her home, he tries to take advantage of her and severely beats her, leaving her for dead on the side of the road.
It's Lazarus that finds her and takes care of her, nursing her back to health. They both learn to deal with their problems with their relationships through each other and Lazarus's pastor.
Up to this point, we get odd flashes or moments that generally precede Rae having an "attack"--and those attacks are very clearly portrayed as painful to her, either physically, emotionally or both. By this point we sort of have an idea what these flashes are of, but when Lazarus and Rae go into town, she goes to speak with her mother and tries to make ammends, since Rae has decided she wants to be a better person.
Her mother pushes her advances away, after which Rae makes it very clear what those flashes are about in case you weren't sure. She was sexually abused by her father (or her mom's boyfriend, it's not clear which), and after Rae's mother says that she wishes she had aborted Rae, Rae flies into a rage, and Lazarus comes in again, rescuing her. If any scene in the movie, this whole scene is very tense, emotionally and ends up highlighting that Lazarus is the only "adult" figure that cares for Rae, a father figure that she never had.
Ronnie, on the other hand, got discharged because of his severe anxiety disorder, and we find out that Ronnie and Rae do love each other very deeply, since they're able to help each other with their vices. Rae can calm Ronnie down when he's having an anxiety attack, and when Rae is with Ronnie, she's less promiscuous because she's told Ronnie about her past, and it helps her to cope with it.
In a final scene where Ronnie and Rae are trying to talk to each other about their problems with the pastor's help, we find out that Rae's nymphomania is an escape. She'll start thinking about her abuse and it hurts her, and at some point, sex starts to make that pain go away, but doesn't really do that anymore. This is just a very basic summary of the emotional background of this movie, but to really get a picture of it, I highly recommend watching this movie. Despite the premise and the poor marketing, it's a human drama, not fetish fuel.
Interesting stuff, right? Well, with that background out of the way, I'm doing (another) analysis of Diva's sexuality, specfically relating to her nymphomania, since this movie is the only portrayal I've ever seen about what it's like emotionally and physically.
So despite its marketing and even summaries, Black Snake Moan does not portray Rae in a bad light. It doesn't glamorize or demonize her promiscuity. It treats them as a symptom of her emotional trauma, which is one way nymphomania can present itself. Nymphomania in women is very highly shamed--it's "slut shaming" to the extreme, because it's not recognized as a psychological condition. Rae is an ultimately sympathetic character because her nymphomania is a symptom and something she can't help. It's a way for her to try to cope with abuse.
So for Diva, I think her nymphomania is very similar. We're never told that Diva suffered any kind of abuse other than the tower, but there are pieces of dialog in the anime and manga (and I believe the novels, but I don't have those in front of me to look at) that certainly tell us that her life hasn't been easy and that Amshel especially takes advantage of her. One of the most telling quotes about her sexual history is something Amshel remarks in episode 41:
"I wondered how the Chiropteran Queens breed. We've tested this idea many times in the past, having Diva mate with humans and even with her Chevalier descendants, but it has never resulted in childbirth."
And in case you had any doubt, Nathan's role in the series, I think, is to give Diva a sympathetic element. He makes several remarks throughout the series that are astute observations about the other Chevaliers' intentions, but relating to Amshel, in Episode 43 he says:
"What is it that you need? Is it Diva...Or perhaps her children?"
When coupled with his remark after she's died that Amshel didn't understand Diva's desire to have a family, Amshel is very obviously painted as the real main antagonist of Blood+. Blood+ is not a deep series by any means and the writing is crap, since what they do in the series that does lean towards clever is not remotely original, the story-telling device here is a very interesting one. We have the characer who is portrayed up to a certain point as the main antagonist and completely unsympathetic, but as the story starts to draw towards its end, we're given examples that are designed to raise questions like "how would Character X be different if this had happened?"
So in the case of Blood+, the question the audience is asked is "How would Diva be different if Diva had been the twin picked to live normally?" We're not even really asked it--I'm pretty sure a character explictly says "What if Saya had been locked in the tower instead?" However, Blood+ is a disappointing series, personally, because these moments of sympathy or implication to things that have happened to characters are all made in passing--in a 50 episode series, it's very easy to forget these lines implying things like "Diva has had sex in questionable circumstances." I mean, Diva says that she "behave[d] like a doll" in Berchtesgaden, also known as Hitler's mountain home. And analyzing expressions/body movement in anime is kind of a fruitless effort for shit like Blood+, but this expression does not say happy things to me.
It's little things like that where I draw the headcanon of Diva's sexual and emotional abuse. It's obvious enough that's she's messed up--just the statement of "spent the first 50 years of her life isolated and experimented on" will tell you that, but what's interesting is that Diva doesn't really mention the tower as a source of pain. The only time Diva even mentions the tower at all is in Episode 24 when she says she "hates Joel" and that's it. In the manga adaptations, it's never about her pain or suffering, it's about how she and Saya met. When Diva explains herself and her emotions, it's not the tower or her Chevalier that have hurt her--it's that Saya left her. So even though we as the audience know that the tower was a painful experience and really messed her up, Diva doesn't explicitly identify that herself, which can lead you to the conclusion that anything else bad that has happened off screen, she similarly wouldn't mention.
As for specifics, it's impossible to pin anything down other than "the tower fucked her up" because we're not told anything. Doing close analysis, you can infer things, like that something went down at Berchtesgaden that Diva disliked enough to warrant mention (though what that was, we're never told), but for the most part, it's a mystery. One of my main inferences is about the relationship between Amshel and Diva, which is where her nymphomania comes in (I haven't forgotten!)
Diva sees Amshel as a father figure. That's very obvious, since she calls him Father, even when she doesn't have to for the sake of appearances. Because of her desire for a family, that action is fairly obvious as to why she does it. But it gets complicated and questionable because we know that Diva and Amshel have had sex at least once, based on the comment I highlighted once. Because he says "Chevalier descendants," that implies that she's had sex with all of them at least once. But with Amshel, I have reason to believe that it's quite a lot more than that, and my other examples comes on a more fucked up level. In episode 30, when current!Joel is reading old!Joel's diary, he explains the progression of their experiments with the Chiropteran twins:
"Joel sought to know everything about you, but when it became clear that he would not live to see this goal through, he decided to focus on researching your reproductive abilities."
But because Diva was the "physical" subject, that would mean that the research on reproductive abilities would be all on her, since Saya, we know, was oblivious to this. You can use your imagination as to what this research entailed, but in any case, it wasn't pleasant.
This is also made even more unpleasant in remembering Diva's mental state in the tower and early in her life. Logically, Diva would have been unable to even speak to Saya if she had been isolated, but that's just a gap in show's logic that isn't that uncommon in fiction. But we are clued in that Diva's speaking isn't great in the tower, since she's more often parroting Saya's words than actually having a conversation. Whatever happened in the tower would have happened to a woman with the inability to understand sex, much less say no. Similarly, even after she's been released from the tower, another way to look at her mental development as to sort of start counting her age from there.
So by the series' time, Diva is mentally about 11-14 (depending on which mode of the timeline you use) for the times where she's actually been awake. If you keep that in mind, it explains her childishness very well also.
But back to Amshel and Diva, that should set the stage for why I find their relationship very very bad for Diva. She loves Amshel, I think it's hard to refute that, but he's her father figure and lover. And with the mental state of a 14 year old at the most, their relationship is, by law, abusive.
But what does all of this have to do with nymphomania?
Well returning back to Amshel's statement of having Diva trying to mate "many times" with all of her Chevalier and humans, she's definitely had a lot of sex, even early on in her life. In Blood+ Adagio, which is not long at all after Diva left the tower, she's already a very sexual character. She gets jealous of Grigori because of his (implied) sexual relationship with Alexandra, and you cannot look at this page and tell me that's not sexual, especially because Alexei's dialog there basically amounts to "/MOANS." So within the span of about three years (very very roughly--remember how bad the timeline is?), Diva has gone from a soft-spoken and mentally undeveloped experiment to a ruthless, malicious and sexual woman. That kind of change that quickly (ignoring the fridge logic of the fact it's fiction) does not imply good things.
Diva uses sex to get what she wants and has no qualms about it, as we see with Riku, but on a personal level, I don't think that sex means anything to her. The pleasure is enjoyable, but sex is still a way to please others, not herself. What she prefers is the closeness of the physical act, which again, isn't surprising for a person deprived of affection and love. She seeks it out, and not knowing how to do that, or how to do it properly, she seeks it through sexuality, which is the only way she knows how.
In Black Snake Moan, Rae seeks out sex to distract her from her bad thoughts about her abuse or otherwise, But because Diva doesn't see her relationship with her Chevalier or her past as abusive, she herself thinks of it as something else. (This is, of course, excluding development in realityshifted) In reality, it is a way for her to cope with her abuse, but in a very different sense. Diva seeks out sex when she's troubled or lonely, because even if it's artificial, the physical closeness of sex can substitute love.
That's not to say that she thinks that sex = love. It's very clear to her that they're very separate entities because of Amshel's "mating experiments." Her nymphomania is a lot like her desire for a family in that it's misleading as to what her intentions are. With nymphomania, it may appear to be her desire for pleasure or for a family. But it's really about love in both cases. If she has a family, she can have children her love her unconditionally, and if she has sex and is open with her sexuality, she can have the physical closeness and affection that she expects people to have in love, but without the emotion itself.
Black Snake Moan ends not with Rae being "cured," but with the idea that now she can cope with it because she has Lazarus, who loves her as a father figure. And with Ronnie, she was able to control her nymphomania because he loved her. So in that very similar sense to Diva, Rae is able to cope with her problem when she feels loved, so promiscuity is her attempt to rectify that emptiness when she's feeling alone. Diva would be helped with a similar situation, minus the being chained to things.
Moving into RP canon, Diva's development from a raging, homicidal bitch to a sort of functioning member of society in realityshifted is the product of love. Because some loved her and forgave her for the things that she did, she was able to move past some of her issues and see her relationships as unhealthy and abusive. She's unable to leave them (though her canon progression did have all of her Chevalier die, I mean leaving them emotionally), but she's been able to come to terms with things that people have done to her instead of internalizing them and expressing them as violence and emotional distance from anyone but her Chevalier.
So I guess this turned more into a "here is my proof for saying that Diva is fucked up and sexual" kind of essay, but I did get to the nymphomania eventually. The characters of Black Snake Moan and their situations really couldn't be more different from those in Blood+, but Black Snake Moan inspired me to write all of this because it doesn't treat nymphomania as "just being a slut" but as a legitimate psychological condition, which it very well can be. It may not be for everyone, but it's definitely a top movie of mine, now.
And not just because of the frame in this essay it made for my vampire hooker love.