Scribbled in the margins of a little girl’s spidery pencilled Spice Girls notebook picked up from the ground in Hackney.
Monday January 12, 2009
This, this is not quite right, no. But:
The first is of a woman, long and lean, young, her belly and thighs bared by a gaspingly, laughably fetishistic costume (take your pick: lingerie’d angel; latexed demon; Catholic schoolgirl stripper; battle-thonged nun; tank-topped and hot-panted soldier of fortune; extreme-sports paramilitary cop; strategically splattered with creepy alien encrustations; dolled-up in crotch-floss and body paint). She usually carries a long slender sword, or a gun, or some kind of arcane Japanese farm-implement-turned-weapon, but not always. She sneers, she glares, she’s defiant, she’s angry; if she grins, it’s some kind of feral rictus; sometimes, occasionally, she’s serene, gazing expressionlessly off into nothing at all. She hangs there, on the covers, on the banners, in mid-air, mid-fall, mid-leap, mid-splash; she’s poised, her weapon of choice at the ready, up and back from the follow-through.
The second? Lemme grab At Swim-Two-Birds:
Too great was he for standing. The neck to him was as the bole of a great oak, knotted and seized together with muscle-humps and carbuncles of tangled sinew, the better for good feasting and contending with bards. The chest to him was wider than the poles of a good chariot, coming now out, now in, and pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat the better to hide his bones and fashion the semblance of his twin bubs. The arms to him were like the necks of beasts, ball-swollen with their bunched-up brawnstrings and blood-veins, the better for harping and hunting and contending with the bards. Each thigh to him was to the thickness of a horse’s belly, narrowing to a green-veined calf to the thickness of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball against the wideness of his backside, which was wide enough to halt the march of warriors through a mountain-pass.
Which led me roundabout to this:
- Forced prostitution = military draft
- Prostitution/sex work chosen because of being a best financial option, limited availability of or access to further education/life options or particular social/regional limitations = Military enrollment chosen because of being a best financial option, limited availability of or access to further education/life options or particular social/regional limitations (in either case, sometimes these are also temporary situations rather than permanent ones)
- Prostitution/sex work chosen despite having a wide array of other employment/financial options or open availability of further education/life options = Military career chosen despite having a wide array of other employment/financial options or open availability of further education/life options
I think that looking at things this way, we might tend to see (well, I am, anyway) some correlaries when it comes to how many people are in each group for both prostitution and military (and that right now, we’re seeing the most people in both areas of work in that second group, and how those folks get there also have some common factors), and how in that first group, either situation is something one’d probably consider inhumane (though more folks seem to think a forced draft is acceptable, and I’m not sure why), and how, while that third group is where we tend to see the fewest people for both types of work, we certainly cannot deny that group exists.
None of which is helped by having recently read this:
Which might be doing strange alchemical things with a dash of this:
No, I don’t know precisely what this all means yet. Yes, there will be an angel. No, I’m not entirely sure how to keep this mixture from taking off a hand. Yes, it is taking longer than it should. —Well fine then. Fuck off. See if I care.