Zombies and Sex

I got thinking about zombies one night after watching various zombie YouTube videos, mostly Resident Evil and Dead Island themed. It got me thinking about what zombies represent and especially what their hyper-evolution from slow shamblers to fast moving thinkers that can fire a gun.

Zombies, in mythology, have been around for hundreds of years. Usually, zombie lore can be found in tropical islands in the Pacific and more recently in the Caribbean. This is because certain toxins from fish and other sea creatures can be used as a paralyzer, so it appear you are dead even to a doctor, unless he was specifically trained to detect such paralyses. It slows your heartbeat down so that you have no pulse and could only be detected if you were hooked up to an EKG. Needless to say, some persons have been buried alive because of this.

It is from these facts that zombie lore originates from as it takes on a more religious connotation. Traditionally, primal or animist religious beliefs such as voodoo and hoodoo hold that if you in essence use black magic, which would include the use of a paralytic, one could cause someone to become a zombie. A zombie in this sense, is understood to be a harmless, yet mindless slave. Zombies were used to harvest sugar cane in Haiti, for example, if local legends are to be believed. For an example of this, you can watch, "White Zombie," on YouTube. It's a public domain film, so it's legal to reproduce it there.

It is not until the 1960's, or the Sexual Revolution, that the flesh eating variety was created by George Romero. It's these precise origins of the flesh eating variety of which I'm specifically interested in. I could be wrong, but to me the flesh eating variety of zombies infers a metaphorical sexuality, that is, just as a zombie is reduced to the basic urge to feed, so does the Sexual Revolution basically reduce a human being to the slightly more complex urge to mate without ceasing. The evolution of the flesh eating variety of the zombie from slow shambler to sprinter ironically parallels the increasing pervasiveness of sexual permisiveness and promiscuity in today's society.

It's also important to not that as societal collapse in the zombie world has become increasing serious and wide spread, so too has societal collapse come in the real world, due in great part to reducing humans to sexual objects as opposed to beings with great dignity to which sex is a sacred act.

Viruses seem to be a main cause of creating zombies in popular culture which could literally allude to sexually transmitted diseases but again in a metaphorical sense could denote that the permisive pervasiveness of sexuality is kind of like a disease. Coporations as the cause behind zombies could indicate the affects of materialism on sexuality namely that sex is now viewed as a commodity rather than a gift.