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The Inventor in Hollywood
Believe it or not, this essentially happened to Hedy Lamarr. Often proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the 26-year-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood when, in mid-September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down and sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Seventy-seven drowned in the bleak north Atlantic. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, was horrified. She decided to fight back, but instead of the usual celebrity posturing, she sat down at a drafting table at home and sketched out a revolutionary radio guidance system for anti-submarine torpedoes.
This unlikely tale is the subject of Richard Rhodes’ new book, Hedy’s Folly. Compared to his other works, like the magisterial (and quite hefty) The Making of the Atomic Bomb, this book breezes by in 272 chatty pages. Rhodes succeeds in the most vital thing—capturing the spirit of a willful woman who wanted recognition for more than her pretty face—but he skims over the deeper questions that Lamarr’s life story raises about the nature of creative genius.
Lamarr—born Hedwig Kiesler—came from an unremarkable, even boring bourgeois family in Vienna. As a girl, she accompanied her father, a banker, on long walks, absorbing his detailed explanations of how printing presses, streetcars, and other modern marvels worked. Rather than pursue a technical career, though, she became an actress. While still in her teens, she starred in the notorious 1933 film Ekstase, which reportedly included the first onscreen depiction of a female orgasm. A sudden star, she married the plutocrat Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer and Nazi lickspittle who spent much of his marriage buying copies of Ekstase and destroying them...
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On the limits of sexual ethics: The phenomenology of autassassinophilia
Contemporary liberal discourse advocates tolerance of a diversity of sexual orientations and behaviors, provided that the principle of informed consent can be shown to have been respected. Borrowing an extreme test case used by the sexologist John Money—the reciprocally chosen lust murder pact—this theoretical article examines the limits of liberal ideology for sexual ethics. Using as its illustrative material the case of Sharon Lopatka, a Maryland woman who instigated her own sexual murder in 1996, it demonstrates that the phenomenon of being murdered for pleasure problematizes commonplace assumptions about the legitimacy to consent. The discussion recalls and refreshes existing debates in feminism and the politics of sadomasochism and reads them alongside the rhetoric surrounding the ethics of medically assisted suicide. Consenting to murder for pleasure is revealed as a formulation that exceeds the terms of informed consent as it is currently understood and thereby constitutes an ethical and logical aporia. In a final section, the phenomenology of consensual murder is explored via a reading of the dynamics of sexual activity and passivity in philosophical accounts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martha Nussbaum, and a fictional text by Muriel Spark.
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Good Enough To Eat
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