Fucking Day: The Siamese Human Knot Web Page

I've been banging this drum for a while now, but today's perverts are spoiled. Time was, you couldn't just pull your phone out of your pocket and type in "muscle mommy uses stepson as pommel horse" and then have your phone overheat and explode because there were too many results. Back in the day — and I'm talking way back, even before my childhood, when "zelda.com" redirected to a porno site and you could catch softcore flicks on cable — you had to work for your perversion. You chanced to witness the panties slide down the legs of a woman carrying a bag of groceries and you devoted your entire life to developing the technical skill necessary to render this moment in visual art hundreds of times over. You watched The Jungle Book and your sexuality was forever tied to the image of a snake with spiral eyes. Or you saw any given episode of Batman and that became your whole thing.

Do people under 40 know about the '60s Batman TV series? When I was growing up it was a punchline, seen as a wild mishandling of a character everyone "knew" was dark and brooding thanks to Tim Burton's 1989 picture, the wildly popular Batman: The Animated Series, and the Knightfall storyline in the comics, in which Batman gets his back blown out by a steroid-abusing maniac. Me, though? I loved '60s Batman, catching reruns of it every afternoon. I loved the weird-looking Batmobile, the secret Batcave entrance, all of the goofy villains. But I could tell that there was something strange about the proceedings, some hidden layer of meaning I couldn't quite grasp lurking just beneath the colorful surface.

The joke at the time was that Batman was an extremely gay show. A wealthy man and his young male "ward" live together and have a secret life in which they dress up in spandex and masks. Haha, right? But the truth is that it was all much stranger than that. For its first two seasons, episodes of Batman famously ended on a cliffhanger in which one or more characters was placed into deadly peril from which they would not escape until the follow-up. Do you see where I'm going with this? It's the old maiden tied to the railroad tracks bit only with an adult man in tights. Literally.

Thus, like grit in an oyster, any number of scenes from Batman might lodge themselves in an unwary viewer's brain, over which said viewer might eventually form a lustrous pearl of fetishistic depravity. That scene might be the Dynamic Duo trapped in an enormous hourglass, being paralyzed by the icy rays of Mr. Freeze, or, hey, what about the time Robin was literally swallowed by a giant oyster?

Correction: that was a clam. Robin is swallowed by a giant clam and Batman has to summon all of his manly strength to pull him from its devouring maw. You know, normal, non-psychosexual superhero stuff.

But not every predicament Batman and Robin faced involved yonic imagery or oversized timepieces. Some of them were a little more down-to-earth. In the movies, Batman did battle with the titanic force of Superman. In the TV series, he was once incapacitated by a non-superpowered feminist-themed villain named Nora Clavicle who bound him not with chains or ropes, but with the limbs of his fellow Caped Crusaders — the legendary Siamese Human Knot.

To most, "Nora Clavicle and the Ladies' Crime Club" is a forgettable episode of Batman. There's no bat-fight — yes, that means no "bam," "zoom," "honk" or other terms of that nature — and the villain is a lazy one-and-done. Nora Clavicle is sub-King Tut. She's less interesting than Louie the Lilac. She makes Lord Marmaduke Ffogg look like Egghead.

Nora's deal is that she uses the guise of feminism to replace the police force with unqualified women. You can see where this is going, right? It's kind of like that episode of Powerpuff Girls where Femme Fatale convinces them to hate men so she can get away with stealing all those Susan B. Anthony coins. Except, remember, this is the 1960s — you're not thinking nearly sexist enough. No, Nora's real plan is to put out a ten million dollar insurance policy on Gotham City and then blow it up with explosive robotic mice. The incompetent ladycops are terrified of mice, you see! But Nora also has to get Batman, Robin, and Batgirl out of the picture. She accomplishes this by tying their limbs together in such a manner that any effort to pull apart would only constrict them further.

Why this is called the "Siamese Human Knot" and not the "Chinese Body Trap" is beyond me. I'm not saying either is good, but if we're breaking the seal on Orientalist naming schemes then we already have one for this exact dynamic.

Batman and friends escape from Nora's trap with a kind of yada yada characteristic of the show's lazier scripts rather than any real cleverness. The entire predicament lasts only four and a half minutes. But that's more than enough time for an image to sear itself into the brain tissue of an unsuspecting viewer — the guy who created The Siamese Human Knot Web Site, for instance.

Let's get the weepy millennial sentiment out of the way right here: I miss sites like this, thrown together in crude HTML with nothing but Notepad and the human drive to express oneself. Today, a man who sexually imprinted on a scene of an MMF pretzel would just be an obsessive Pornhub commenter. Upsetting Twitter account, at best. But back in the '90s, if you wanted to share your appreciation for superhero-themed bondage, you didn't have any options beyond throwing something up on Geocities and hoping to connect with likeminded perverts through webrings and listservs.

So why go through all that hassle? Let's hear it from the webmaster himself.

In modern parlance, this is margesimpson_ijustthinktheyreneat.jpg. It's the kind of deflection you rarely see anymore. For the most part, we no longer bother to cloak our erotic obsessions. We're sexually liberated beyond anything the swinging '60s could have imagined: we talk about "kinks" in daily life; we have access to infinite HD porno 24/7; we commission endless art of giant-sized versions of Star Fox characters fucking planets apart. Were things better when we were a little more buttoned-up about all this? I'll leave that debate to serious social critics writing at legacy outlets that are coasting on their rapidly-diminishing prestige. But I will say this: it certainly resulted in more interesting web sites.

The Siamese Human Knot Site is the authority on this one particular scene in a single episode of the Batman TV series from the 1960s, created by author "twof." The Wayback Machine has crawled it all the, uh, way back to 1999, but its proprietor had some sort of web presence as early as 1997. I know this because he emailed the woman who played Batgirl in 1997 and posted her reply to his Geocities page.

Yvonne Craig would have been sixty at the time she received this email. She was out of the acting biz and had started working in real estate, and was likely pretty new to the whole "email" thing. What did she think when one of the first pieces of electronic mail she received was about a scene from that old Batman show she'd done decades earlier which she'd almost certainly never had cause to recall since? Did she imagine that the missive came from a dedicated researcher studying those old episodes for some legitimate purpose? Or did she suspect the truth? Did she direct her Netscape Navigator browser to Altavista or AskJeeves and find The Siamese Human Knot Web Page, where she was met with a bevy of hyperlinked options, each enticing the reader to "click here?"

The full transcript is present, naturally. It's laid out with all of the grace mid-90s amateur web design could muster. Once you started playing with p align="right", you were really cooking.

Nora Clavicle uses a knitting needle as a weapon. Again, this is that classic, old-timey sexism, the type that would seem hack if you were writing it today.

We don't actually see the tying up onscreen, given that it barely makes sense and is impossible to suspend disbelief about unless you're horny for it. We cut from Nora and her gold-gowned goonettes to Batman, Robin, and Batgirl awkwardly sitting in a heap on the floor.

Put yourself in the mind of a child witnessing this scene. Imagine how confused, yet intrigued you might be by the play of color and form, the intertwining of spandex-clad bodies, the knowledge that these characters were in terrible danger. You can see how this might stick with someone like that, and might inspire them, decades later, to create an internet shrine to their sexual root at the age of 41.

Younger readers might not recognize the guestbook format, but every website used to have one of these. I'm not really sure what the purpose of it was. Evidence of human visitation beyond the humble hits counter? An opportunity to connect with fellow early internet weirdos? This page is titled "Victims of the Siamese Human Knot," and there are dozens of entries. It likely will not surprise you to learn that searching "female" on the page returns zero results.

The only comment left by a woman here appears to be an early form of porno spam. We've found a prehistoric "my pussy in bio" preserved for all time, encased in amber. I think Doctor Dinosaur tried to do that to Batgirl one time.

Back to the front page, let's take a look at the link that promised pictures of Batman, Batgirl, and Catwoman tied into a Siamese Human Knot. Hit me with those low-res, suspiciously incomplete sketches of superheroes, as if they were abandoned due to a sudden lack of interest partway through!

Oh. This is, uh. Not that. Even money on whether these images depict a trio of enthusiastic middle-aged Bat-perverts or three prostitutes that twof paid to dress up and take pictures of.

Regardless, the drapes and carpet tell me that this all took place at the kind of insanely depressing midwestern hotel where they have to put locks on the windows because too many people were checking in just to kill themselves.

This is going a little too far for me. I can appreciate a single-minded fetishist. There's an art to it, a dedication. As soon as you start adding other kinds of scenarios into the mix, you're just a garden variety hotel masturbator.

Maybe I'm being too harsh on the guy, though. For the most part, he's got his eyes on the prize. I mean, he's catalogued every mention of the Siamese Human Knot in literature, for anyone who wanted to read them and maybe jerk off a little.

Hey, it's a crossover with Burt Ward's erotic memoirs! Knowing Burt, he probably counted having his leg in Batgirl's armpit as sex. But even if he did, that wouldn't be the most deranged thing he said about it.

In Burt Ward's mind, it is plausible — probable, even — that the time that he pretended that a faux feminist villain tangled him up with Adam West and Yvonne Craig inspired one of the most famous toys of all time. I admire his delusional confidence, if not his irresponsible promises re: his dog food's effects on canine longevity.

But we're not talking about Burt Ward's claims to have invented the Rubik's Cube (by proxy) or dog immortality (directly). We're talking about all of the times that DC's in-house perverts referenced Nora Clavicle's diabolical torture technique.

If Burt Ward had ever had his face pressed up against Batgirl's tit, he would have considered it a threesome. But wait, there's more!

Holy selfcest stringup, Batman! Three copies of the same person getting tied into a human pretzel? And they're explicitly calling out the Siamese Human Knot? twof must have wept when he saw this page. But his desires were not fully slaked. No, his imagination is truly boundless.

"three of the Spice Girls" is probably my favorite here — dealer's choice. But pride of place goes to "Thumper" from Diamonds Are Forever. I haven't seen that Bond flick, so I had to look it up. Turns out that Thumper is a sexy, acrobatic henchman who tries to murder James Bond by choking him to death with her thighs, so I guess she's kind of the original Xenia Onatopp. And of course I clicked on that link.

Delightful. This is the sort of amateurish western fetish art that's been driven to near-extinction by the invasive species of huge-hitted anime babes. Oh, and Blue Lagoon is about two 9-year-old Victorian cousins who are shipwrecked on an island, grow up, start banging, and have a baby. The Human Knot stuff seems almost wholesome in comparison. Meanwhile, Thumper was played by a woman named Trina Parks, who must have been our author's second love.

When someone told her that she had a tribute page in the late 1990s, I hope they didn't mention that it was tacked on to a monument to human bondage. Maybe she'd think it was flattering that twof adored her so much that she came to play a prominent role in his Human Knot fantasies, to the extent that he wrote her into his Human Knot fanfiction?

We could do this all day. I could show you the rest of the images on The Siamese Human Knot Web Page, read all of twof's fanfiction. But to what end? I sometimes wonder — is it right to dig up things like this? Is there value in writing about them? Sometimes I justify it by way of an individual's vile behavior or beliefs over and above their eccentricities, as was the case with the Man2Man Alliance or CrazyJim. Sometimes we're just celebrating one of the myriad expressions of the human animal, albeit in a sort of roasting kind of way. And sometimes, like here, it's all so old that I can reassure myself that it's unlikely to get back to the person who created the original material. Does that make it ok to point and laugh? Not entirely, but that's why we have thin framing premises like "sex weirdos used to be more repressed and industrious."

The Siamese Human Knot Web Page is a testament to a different time — a different society, a different internet, a different world. I mean, it's not like there are people still doing this on modern internet platforms, right? You can see a limitless variety of holes, wet wet holes, at the press of a button. So the notion that anyone would still be doing this kind of thing, much less getting into fights with other perverts over content theft, is nothing but a beautiful dream.

There is yet beauty in this world. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but the Human Siamese Knot more.

Thanks to Mo for finding the Siamese Human Knot Web Page by whatever means in which he found it.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Matt Reiley, who is glad this article ended up being about wholesome batman bondage masturbation, and had nothing to do with furry porn.

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