My girlfriend and I binge-watched a bunch of recent documentaries about people with bizarre habits, largely sexual.
One was Dogging Tales which makes some directorial and editing choices, possibly deliberately, that render the entire thing absolutely hilarious. One is that they intercut the entire thing with genuinely gorgeous footage of night-time wildlife and night-time countryside, as if trying to make an artistic case for this documentary that really is just about people who park their cars in one place and watch each other bang. The other is getting everyone involved to wear weird animal masks (because it's dogging, maybe?) which lends virtually no anonymity because they're mostly like domino-sized masks and loads of them have tattoos and really distinctive voices. It also makes everything about a million times funnier because any and all dialogue is now spoken by blank-faced, dead-eyed animal masks instead of people. The funniest shot in the thing comes when they cut together one of the doggers, an impossibly meek young fella who fantasises about being with two women and then fails to get a hardon with said two women while being filmed, with a shot of a wolf or a fox (I forget which) staring down the lens, as if to imply they were one and the same. Easily the funniest of the things we watched.
Secrets of the Living Dolls was the one I found the most disturbing. These guys basically dress up in massively unconvincing body suits (including faces) to look like women - or more accurately, really terrible sex dolls - then wear women's clothes and just kinda... hang out like that. I've got no issue with this whatsoever. It's completely harmless, not even slightly sexual, and people are obviously well within their rights to do so. The only one that worried me was the 70-odd year old man who got divorced over this habit, and when he puts on his (again, INCREDIBLY unconvincing) women's outfit and is asked by the interviewer what he sees in the mirror he says 'a very exciting female.' Now, this fella is not trans, in any sense. He identifies as male, he refers to himself as male, he makes no indication of any gender dysphoria whatsoever, but he puts on this suit and says that what he sees when he looks in the mirror is an 'exciting female.' That, to me, is signs of being delusional and so he (and only he) worried me quite a lot.
The last one was Married To The Eiffel Tower, one which I got altogether too wrapped up in. It's about objectum sexuals, people who are sexually attracted to objects. Again, nothing wrong with that if it's not hurting anyone, but... well, I think that if these folks aren't hurting anyone, they're skirting dangerously close to doing so, and even taking that out of the equation I was a little bit baffled by the rules they assigned themselves.
One of my main questions, not really an issue per se and it was addressed extremely perfunctorily in the show, was that every single one of these women (and yeah, they were all seemingly cis-women, not a bloke in sight) was polyamorous. They all have multiple objects they're in relationships with, and will bang around with basically any object they happen across in the course of the show. Considering they don't consider this just sexual but actually give names and genders to all their 'partners,' this was, again, something that struck me as a tiny bit delusional, but hey, as long as nobody's getting hurt.
One of the women was previously kicked out of a church she was a member of because she was having a relationship with the church organ. I thought this was a little bit harsh until she admitted that she once fucked the organ. Keep in mind, this is an inanimate organ, in a church.
Let's follow their trail of logic here - this woman considers this organ to be a sentient being, she even described it as being her boyfriend at the time. The vast majority of churchgoing Christians I know would consider sex out of wedlock to be a sin, and she wasn't married to this organ when they had sex, which is kinda bad enough in itself. But also, this organ is on church grounds. I can think of at least one Christian I know who considers out-of-wedlock sex to be fine (not that I've ever discussed with her why she feels that way because it's none of my business and I'm not a Christian so who cares) but I can virtually guarantee you that not a single Christian I know would consider having sex in the church to be okay. Are there children in this church? Were there any in the building when it happened, in what is a semi-public place? I'm not sure that's okay, folks.
And then there was the woman for whom the show was named, who is married to the Eiffel Tower... and promptly doesn't see it again for well over a year. Now, again, to follow the thought process of the women involved, I know a lot of folks on here are polyamorous and that's fine, I did that myself for a while too. But I would've thought the one you've married to generally gets priority, whereas this woman marries the Eiffel Tower, before disappearing for over a year. Does the Tower not get mad about this? Does it not miss her? How is this a strong foundation for a relationship? This woman also, at the end of the documentary, is implied to be basically rubbing her vulva up against the Eiffel Tower, in public, in broad daylight, when children are present, albeit not aware. Again, pretty sure that's not okay.
This woman has some quite severe mental health problems, she's ex-military and has PTSD as a minimum if I'm remembering right, and she then uses this as an excuse to berate a woman who was once a refugee from East Germany before the wall fell, because she's also in a relationship with the Berlin Wall and thinks the wall is unfairly misunderstood by everyone.
Out of everyone I saw in any of these documentaries, she was the only one that actually made me angry - I really got the sense that for the safety of herself and others, she needed to get some help, and pretty soon.
That post turned out longer than I expected.
