Reptilian Rapture

Yep, I changed my mind about the title since this morning. ;-) But I didn't change the basic idea, which came to me last week when I was hunting for pictures to go with my Statuesque Beauties post for Wednesday. I was poking around D4rkw00d.NeT, and as I browsed the Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell galleries, I couldn't help noticing that Hajime Sorayama (pic at right) isn't the only artist out there with a snake/dragon fetish. Then I thought back to my "Peek Beneath the Duct Tape" on Spellbound, in which I hinted at an earlier version of the story (never written, alas) that involved snakes, and noted that Callidus understood the attraction there. And then I had my blog entry for the weekend. :-)


The easy explanation for this sub-fetish, and the one I always bought myself until I really started thinking about it last week, is that snakes and dragons are phallic symbols. Certainly that's what was foremost in Boris Vallejo's mind when he painted the third picture above! (BTW, that whole row is his; everything beneath this paragraph is Julie Bell's.) But in my case, at least, I don't think that's all or even most of the story. Honestly, I'm not into penises (no offense to those of my readers equipped with them). What excites me about the idea of sex with snakes and dragons is the alien-ness and, even more importantly, the danger. We fear real-world snakes because they can kill us and because, hell, they just look so freaky with their slitted eyes and forked tongues and sinuous, limbless movements.


Dragons at least started out a fantasy extension of that fear, though writers of the last couple of centuries were turning that notion on its head well before Vallejo and Bell began painting. And since dragons are much less obviously phallic than snakes, I have to think I'm not the only who's more attracted to their alien/danger quality than to their resemblance to penises. They're monsters, and submission to monsters implies at least perversion and at most mind control. Again, see Callidus, obviously channeling a moment of early MC imprinting for many of us: The Jungle Book. ;-) That, I think, is what I really like about the idea of reptilian sex: it's yet one more example of being so deeply enthralled that you end up reveling in what should send you screaming.

BTW, for those of you who don't know, Vallejo and Bell are married and have a joint website here. Most of the pictures above can be found both at D4rkw00d.NeT and at their official site, but the versions at D4rkw00d are much larger and sharper. Where I could, I got the titles from the official site and the pictures themselves from D4rkw00d.