999,860: Judas Priest - Eat Me Alive

A bluntly phrased ode to aggressive fellatio, “Eat Me Alive” was the song that got Judas Priest in trouble with Tipper Gore and the PMRC, landing on their notorious “Filthy 15” list of songs that a handful of Washington housewives thought should be banned from public consumption. Admittedly, the song does contain the lines “Gut-wrenching frenzy that deranges every joint/I’m gonna force you at gunpoint/To eat me alive!”, which could be taken as disturbingly sincere if you hadn’t read somewhere that Rob Halford was really drunk when he wrote this. Certainly the PMRC and others took this as a disturbingly sincere approval of sexual violence…against women.

But what if? What if everyone had known then what we know now about Rob Halford’s sexuality, that he’d been writing about gay S&M since about 1976, and that that was pretty much the source of the band’s wardrobe? What if everyone had known that “Eat Me Alive” was actually about getting aggressive fellatio from dudes? Would that make it more…or LESS offensive to cultural watchdog groups? I mean, sure, they’ll still be uncomfortable with the overall sexual content. But even if you’re nuts enough to take the song at its absolute literal word, it’s CLEARLY not suggesting that listeners go out and rape WOMEN. There’s no longer a feminist argument against the song. And both of the participants in the song seem pretty enthusiastic about the proceedings, aside from that one tossed-off line about gunpoint – which in context sounds more like Rob talking dirty to the guy he’s got consensually chained to the wall. If you’re hell-bent on taking the song as a threat, the only argument left to make is that, having failed in their evil conspiracy to get all but two of their fans to attempt suicide, Priest decided to use their mystical subconscious powers to try and turn all of their fans gay. Now, this being America, you could probably get some people to sign on to that idea. But fortunately, it wouldn’t be enough to form a sizable voting bloc.

Ultimately, what “Eat Me Alive” shows us – besides a graphic gay-dungeon scenario with sweet metal guitars – is a failure of academic theory. Gay male porn is conspicuously missing from most feminist critiques of pornography and objectification, especially when – just as in “Eat Me Alive” – the sexual aggression is transferred onto another male. Nobody knows how to account for it, and nobody wants to try interpreting the abstract symbolism therein, as academic theory is wont to do. This is largely because nobody in our fucking stupid post-Puritan culture knows how to talk about male sexuality – straight or gay – in any terms but the utterly horrified. Fuck you, academia, this is why I haven’t bothered blowing a five-figure sum of money on a master’s degree.

Eat Me Alive - Judas Priest