You don't see many porn sites that showcase intercourse with corpses, and even if you do, there's no way to be certain that they're really dead. And due to new legislation aimed at curtailing sex with the dearly departed, necrophilia-enthusiast site owners would be wise not to crow too publicly about the lack of vitality in their featured players. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has reportedly turned his attention away from the trials of SUV drivers and signed a bill that criminalizes necrophilia. Under the new law, sex with a corpse is a felony punishable by up to eight years in prison.
Age is no barrier. The state's first attempt to outlaw necrophilia - in response to a case of a man charged with having sex with the corpse of a 4-year-old girl in Southern California - stalled in a legislative committee, but the bill was revived after the unsuccessful prosecution of a man who was found in a San Francisco funeral home passed out on top of an elderly woman's corpse.
Necrophiliacs have been getting away with it all this time, but district attorneys will no longer be stymied by the lack of an official ban. According to Tyler Ochoa, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law who has studied California cases involving allegations of necrophilia, "Prosecutors didn't have anything to charge these people with other than breaking and entering. But if they worked in a mortuary in the first place, prosecutors couldn't even charge them with that."
Whether necrophilia is a victimless crime may still be open to debate. Nevertheless, claiming that the act was consensual will not be considered as a legal defense.
According to his own journal entry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most revered figures in American literary history, was so devastated by the death of his young wife, Ellen, that, shortly after her burial, he went out to the cemetery one night and dug up her corpse, though he didn't mention exactly what he did with it.
One of the most popular episodes of the police TV show, Homicide: Life On the Street, was about the investigation of an old lonely widower, a mortician, who used to party with the corpses, setting them around a table as if they were alive. They investigated him because he shot a neighbor who knew about this practice and then sat in the garden and waited for the cops. But again, the mortician's relationship with those corpses may have been purely platonic.
Let us now eavesdrop on the dialogue of a few participants in an Internet support group, Necrophiliacs Anonymous:
"Obviously, neither a corpse nor a 4-year-old can provide consent, but if you leave permission in your will for your lonesome spouse or significant other to have one last fling with your mortal coil, shouldn't the state of California respect your wishes?"
"It's just that I believe the only offense here is really violation of private property. I wonder if someone gives their partner, in a will, the right to have sex with their body after their death, will it be legal?"
"Or, even without that permission, if you are an only heir of somebody, doesn't it mean their body belongs to you? It sounds gross, but isn't it an issue of private rights in the United States of America, that likes so much the idea of individualism and is ready to exploit people and the environment in the name of that ideal?"
"I never understood why people think that having sex with a dead body is worse than raping a living person. To me, that's the worst kind, and then raping poor helpless animals. I really couldn't care less about my own dead body."
The majority of cannibalistic serial killers are motivated by a kind of necrophilia; it's usually a highly sexually arousing experience for them when they eat their victims. Here, from my "Great Moments in Necrophilia" file, is a dispatch from the Associated Press:
"The prosecution in the insanity trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer rested its case. Dahmer has confessed to killing and dismembering 17 young males since 1978. A jury must decide if he will be sent to prison or a mental institution. The final prosecution witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist, testified that Dahmer wore condoms when having sex with his dead victims, showing that he could control his urge to have intercourse with corpses."
I smell a public service announcement publicizing the new law here: "If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?"
