I found him/her in my garden, we did several photo shoots

and I even kept him/her in an outdoor aquarium for a couple weeks

(before he/she ungratefully escaped one night without even leaving a good-bye note...).

Now, why do I refer to this particular snail as "him" and "her" all together?

Because, as some of you know, most snails are hermaphrodites, that means they are both male and female since they have both reproductive organs (but they still need to mate with one another

in order to reproduce; good for them!).

Oh, and you want to know why I called my snail "Ernest"?

Well, because of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Cargot! (wink, wink).

Hon Hon Hon! Sacrebleu! Mademoiselle! Croissant! Baguette!

Click (at your own risk) on the picture below for more stupid French pun jokes.

Now, please take a look at the photo below and picture this inside your head if you dare:

a snail produces both egg cells and sperm cells and, when they mate, they inseminate each other

and they will both lay eggs afterwards (up to a hundred each)! Isn't that something?!

Needless to say, there are no transgender issues in the snail community...

and it is physically impossible for them to be gay!

But really, come to think of it, couldn't it be the solution to all our problems of mutual sexual acceptations, if we were ALL hermaphrodites? And if you listen to Plato, some of us were in fact androgynous right from the start! Indeed, in his "Symposium" (written around 370 BC) he has one of the participants of a pretty-boozy-banquet, Aristophanes, come up with a speech where he invents the history of "the conception of love" in the form of a myth. This myth, even though it was presented as fiction (as he warns people not to take him seriously), was (AND STILL IS) very tempting to believe in because it could possibly explain that "je ne sais quoi" that love does to (some of) us sometimes and it could also sort-of rationalize the yearning some of us may have in the quest of finding one's supposed other half...

So here it goes: according to that myth, at the origin of the world, we all had double bodies, back to back, with only one head but two faces, two sets of arms, two sets of legs and two sets of genitals. Some of us were composed of two male bodies, others two female ones and the rest had one of each making them androgynous beings.

In that story, we were supposedly so powerful that the gods felt threatened and Zeus, with his legendary "finesse", took action by cutting us in half in order to reduce our power... And ever since we have been looking everywhere for our other half and, when we find it, we cling to it and we call this reunion "love"... Isn't that sweet? And doesn't that explain beautifully why some men look for men, women for women but, wait a minute here, in that case it means that it was the androgynous who became straight!

Boy, do I like this picture which I took years ago: I love how the sun carresses those beautiful and lascivious bodies at the end of an autumn day when the sun is low...

They have now sadly moved this sculpture to the opposite and dark side of the room, but I’ll still take you there and you’ll get to see the other side, so please relax.

Always looking into the unknown... What a guy/gal!

I deliberately chose not to make a comment about the central part of that particular picture because that would bring us to a hosta-3-level and we wouldn't want that... (not here anyway).

Anyway, there are subtle differences between this Platonic myth and the one told by Ovid in his inimitable Metamorphoses explaining the story of Hermaphrodite, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite and, guess what, I will tell you all about that other version during my "Lust at the Louvre" tour as we will see several hermaphrodites during the tour. Just to let you know.

In fact, I can't resist the temptation to show you already now a picture of the most famous and beautiful one inside the Louvre here below:

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