A man who infamously had sex with a dolphin after ‘falling in love’ with the marine mammal in the 1970s is sharing his thoughts about the film The Shape of Water, which tells a story similar to his own.
Journalist Malcolm J. Brenner wrote an autobiographical novel in 2010, Wet Goddess, about his experience with the animal, and became the subject of the documentary Dolphin Lover a few years later.
Speaking to the Huffington Post, he said that while the Academy-Award-winning film portrays similar themes to the ones in his book, the overall fantastical nature of the film makes it hard for him to relate to it.
Journalist Malcolm J. Brenner reviewed The Shape of Water, which tells the story of a mute woman who falls in love with a fish-like creature with human features, for the Huffington Post
Brennan sees the public’s positive reception of the film as proof of a double-standard in the way society treats humans who are sexually attracted to animals
Although both his story and the movie are about a human having a romantic relationship with a non-human, the situations are not really the same at all, he claimed.
He said: ‘My overall impression is it was an unabashedly romantic fantasy.
‘But to me, the fact that this won Best Picture, that’s just astonishing. It just shows to what degree it really is fantasy.’
Throughout the interview Brennan seemed resentful of the public’s acceptance of the love story between Elisa, a mute woman, and a fish-like creature who stands on two legs.
He said: ‘As long as, apparently, the object of your desire is a featherless biped, we’re not going to let a few gills or scales stand in the way of true romance, seems to be Hollywood’s dictum. Quadrupeds? No. Animals with flukes? No. But if it looks like a man…’
Brennan sees the public’s positive reception of a film that shows a human and a nonhuman creature having sex as proof of a double-standard in the way society treats humans who are sexually attracted to animals.
The journalist said that while the Academy-Award-winning film portrays similar themes to the ones in his book, the overall fantastical nature of the film makes it hard for him to relate to it
Brennan earned temporary fame as a college sophomore when, he claims, a dolphin named Dolly began courting him by ‘rubbing her genitals against him’. He’s pictured with Dolly on a still from the documentary Dolphin Lover
‘I’m sure a lot of the good liberals who criticized me for making love with a dolphin loved this film because the hero was a featherless biped. If ‘the asset’ had been a dolphin, it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as popular,’ he said.
Yet the fact dolphins don’t look like humans at all is exactly why he finds them so attractive.
Brennan said: ‘They don’t have any legs. Their limbs are flippers. Their nostrils are a blowhole on top of their head. Their buttocks have become powerful flukes, and they can swim at 20 miles per hour.
‘They are the most radically divergent and one of the oldest of all mammal species from the main mammal line. They’re sleek. They’re smooth. They are interested in us, usually.
‘I must say, I find a dolphin a lot more sexy than that thing was. Then again, I’m not Elisa. Maybe you have to take it where you can get it.’
He said ‘of course it bothered him’ that people only accept relationships of this kind when it’s fantasy or an allegory.
‘I don’t like people threatening to go Lorena Bobbitt on me because I made love with a dolphin,’ Brennan said.
The journalist describes himself as a zoophile, not a bestialist, because he’s ‘someone who has tender or caring emotions for their animal partner’
‘What I was really attracted to was her attention and the intellectual ways she challenged me, not her appearance,’ he said of former lover Dolly the dolphin
Brennan earned temporary fame as a college sophomore when, he claims, a dolphin named Dolly began courting him by ‘rubbing her genitals against him’.
He said: ‘And if I tried to push her away, she would get very angry with me. One time, when she wanted to masturbate on my foot and I wouldn’t let her, she threw herself on top of me and pushed me down to the 12-foot bottom of the pool.’
The star-crossed lovers eventually consummated the relationship – ‘he vertical and she horizontal’, according to what the Huffington Post says.
The journalist describes himself as a zoophile, not a bestialist, because he’s ‘someone who has tender or caring emotions for their animal partner’ and not interested in just sex.
‘What I was really attracted to was her attention and the intellectual ways she challenged me, not her appearance,’ he said of former lover Dolly the dolphin.
‘I must say, I find a dolphin a lot more sexy than that thing was. Then again, I’m not Elisa. Maybe you have to take it where you can get it,’ Brennan said
According to Brennan, the film was only able to win the Oscar for Best Picture because its fantastic nature allowed audiences to feel comfortable with a interspecies relationship
Still, even though he took issue with the unrealistic nature of the film, he said he could understand how the main character might have felt because he too fell in love with a non-human once.
‘I don’t know to this day and I refuse to speculate about why she might have wanted to have sex with me or a human being in general, but somehow she devoted a lot of attention to me,’ he said.
‘And over time I came to find it flattering, especially when nobody else was paying any attention to me. So I can understand how Elisa in the movie felt.’
When asked if he hopes his attraction to animals will be more accepted by society after the movie’s reception, he said: ‘I would like to think that society will become less religious, because the prohibitions in Leviticus are the only conceivable basis for any laws against bestiality.
‘I can’t see that my boffing my dog has any effect on society, good or ill, as long as I’m not hurting her or abusing her. Laws against animal cruelty ought to be sufficient without criminalizing the act of interspecies sex, which organizations like PETA are trying to do.’
But he the doesn’t think the film’s success will help him achieve the acceptance he yearns for.
‘It’s so obviously a fantasy that most people won’t carry the goodwill over to zoophiles like me.’