by Stephanie Carver

I first started having alien sex fantasies at age eight. No, just kidding. The alien sex fantasies were more a part of my early teens. In 1984, V: The Final Battle produced my very first feelings of arousal, and created a link between that arousal and fear. I was just a little too young to remember the original 1983 V: The Miniseries that spawned the sequel. The scene I remember most from V: The Final Battle is that of a naked woman taking a shower. You can see the blurry outline of her body through the shower door and the doughy whiteness of her skin. When I first tried to recall the actual V storyline, it was only that image my memory was able to return to. Looking back, I think that she was either showering so that the aliens could have a "clean" specimen to examine or else she had just finished having sex with one of them.

At eight, sexual morality a la Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes (CCD) had infected me enough so that I felt it was wrong for me to look at her. However, I could not stop myself from looking at the woman's naked body. I wished very much that the shower door didn't make her outline so blurry. I squirmed and made sure to make gagging noises with the appropriate fervor so as not to expose my secret crush to my brother, who usually watched the show with me. I was terrified of the Visitors. The Visitors ate hamsters and rats. fuzzy little creatures that I liked a lot. I sat rigid and saucer-eyed, barely breathing. It's pretty normal that the lack of oxygen, fear, and arousal combination would spill over into a grown-up love of horror movies, no? I go to scary movies all the time trying to recapture those special V-like feelings. The only times I've felt any remote V-like quivers have been in the movies Memento and The Mothman Prophecies.

My father is a well-regarded member of The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Project. Maybe for that reason, aliens have always felt very real to me. Not real as in currently walking among us just real as in floating around waiting to probe us. Interestingly, the V fear/arousal feelings never spilled over into sadomasochism just horror movies. Maybe if I'd watch more Bambi or The Fox and the Hound I could have grown up to be a plushy. Ah, if only to have those crucial formative years back.