Down Where It’s Wetter

My paper is putting out a shark-themed issue this week. Yes, I realize that Shark Week was officially last week, but hey — we’re an alternative weekly, so I guess we get to have an alternative Shark Week.

In any case, I sat in on a meeting to think of cover lines for our shark issue. This process basically amounts to group stream-of-consciousness brainstorming, wherein the participants blurt out anything that comes to mind that might have some relation to the cover story at hand — appropriately themed idioms, puns, any available alliterations, pop culture references, and whatever else comes to mind. Almost instantly, I got the Little Mermaid song “Under the Sea” stuck in my head, specifically the lyrics “Darling it’s better / Down where it’s wetter / Take it from me.” My God. What a filthy, filthy collection of lyrics, even for a Disney movie with more than its share of sex joke urban legends associated with it. This chunk of the song seems especially filthy when you remember that it’s sung by Sebastian, a crab, and it seems especially strange when you remember that it’s being sung to a woman who lacks any apparent human body parts from the waist down.

Past mermaidery:

• Mermaids, Futurama and The Rape of the Lock
• Starbucks and the Baubo Siren
• You too can be a mermaid

And then there’s also the odd connections between Disney’s version Little Mermaid and Mary Magdalene, which I stumbled onto while trying to find a good list of the sex-related urban legends surrounding the film. I’d previously read about Mary-related imagery associated with mermaids in general but had no idea that anyone, much less Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, had tried to make ties the between Jesus’s supposed number one lady and the Disneyfied version of mermaid who wanted legs. See here and here and here.

Secrets of the Starbucks Mermaid

I swear I’m not fixating on mythological creatures, previous posts being evidence to the contrary. That being said, this post chiefly concerns mermaids and coffee.

During my aimless Wikipedia browsing, I stumbled upon the page for a concept known as “The Mermaid Problem,” which is basically an examination of the paradox of mermaids being sexually attractive but sexually unviable by virtue of the apparent lack of genitalia. Take a look: Those girls are mackerel from the waist down. It's a problem that Fry encountered with no small amount of distress in the "Lost City of Atlanta" episode of Futurama. Wikipedia poses a few solutions, however, among them the notion that some mermaids were depicted having a split or split-able tail that would theoretically allow for lovemaking and subsequent creation of babies that were one-quarter fish.

As this insightful article discusses, mermaids make for some fun speculation, as far as symbols go. They are simultaneously sexpots and permavirgns — a dualism that should bring to mind the Madonna-whore complex associated with Christianity’s supreme mystical female, Mary. (The article also astutely mentions that “Star of the Sea” is one of Mary’s many names despite the fact that the woman wasn’t exactly a beach bum during her time on earth.) After all, the very name of these often naked female creatures can be literally read as “sea-maiden.” All this happens to be encapsulated nicely in the Starbucks logo, which, in its original form, also happens to be a good visual example of what these imminently sexable split-tailed mermaids look like.

Here’s the Starbucks logo as it looks now:


And here it is before the mermaid mascot was cropped.


And here’s what she looked like in her initial incarnation, before Starbucks higher-ups decided she might look a little too provocative.


And this fourth image — a purported 15th-century drawing of a figure known as the “baubo siren” inspired the original logo.


Talk about a familiar company logo that’s showing more than you thought.

Similar to how the Disney’s The Little Mermaid — mermaid text with which most Americans are now familiar — managed to hide any hint of the dangerous sexuality associated with this mythological creature, so too has the Starbucks mermaid been gradually de-sexed. It’s still there, if ever so slightly: on either side of her head in the current logo, you can still see the halves of her split tail held to the sides of her head. You wouldn’t know what you’re looking at, necessarily, unless somebody explained it, but it does hint at concealed sexuality. And for God’s sake, don’t think that pose isn’t supposed to be overtly sexual. Were Miss Starbucks a full-on woman and not a half-woman, her pose would be downright pornographic.

Thought I don’t recall ever seeing this figure before I started looking into material for this post, the split-tailed mermaid is not an infrequent subject in art from various periods, the following samples being proof.




In my opinion, this revelation is easily twice as shocking as the hidden phallus on the old VHS cover for The Little Mermaid. May you never look at the Starbucks logo the same way again.

EDIT: In case you’re curious — and the remarkable influx of traffic I’ve gotten from people Googling “baubo siren” would lead me to believe that some of you are, in fact, curious — I have newer mermaid-related and baubo-related posts.

The Dusty Little Mermaid

Given that I had to read The Rape of the Lock twice in my academic career, you'd think I would have gotten the joke sooner. I don't know how many times I've watched "The Deep South," the Futurama episode in which the crew discovers the lost city of Atlanta. But upon seeing it yesterday in rerun form, I finally noticed that it manages to reference both Rape and Disney's The Little Mermaid — a commendable feat.

In the episode, Fry meets and marries the mermaid princess of Atlanta. Voiced by a drawling Parker Posey, this one-off character is named Umbriel. In Rape, the protagonist-idiot-heroine, Belinda, is attended chiefly by two spiritual guardians, the airy-fairy sylph Ariel and a dustier, more earthen and far less beautiful gnome named Umbriel. (As far as I can remember, Umbriel doesn't do much useful except return from the Cave of Spleen with far more aggravation for Belinda once her lock's been raped. Umbriel's name would seem to come from the Latin word umbra, meaning shadow. We get "umbrella" from the same root.) In any case, the Futurama mermaid being a slightly off version of the main character from The Little Mermaid, the name "Umbriel" is doubly appropriate. Clearly, Alexander Pope's dust fairy Umbriel has gotten way more mileage than cameoing attendant fairies Brillante, Momentilla, Crispissa, who are referenced nowhere outside of Rape.

And who says you can't do anything with an English major?

Also: I feel weird about abbreviating The Rape of the Lock to just "Rape," but I refuse to write it out.