Pulp Fantasy

Seriously, folks.

It’s always a good thing when what I am studying in class and what is happening in ‘the real world’ collide. Especially when it is theatre history, where people with four names and a penchant for starched shirt fronts tend to be the star players. We were talking about melodrama of the Romantic period, specifically in opera, where the black moustachioed villain leers over the sweet girl in a lacy bonnet and stainless white dress. Our prof showed us one slide of what would have been a cheap novel of the time, where a ‘girl of eight years is violated and strangled by a monster.’ Classy. And we really haven’t evolved past that. Pulp novels and fantasies, damsels in distress, aggression and submission...these are all still very prevalent images to this day.

And yes, in a person’s private sex life, a little S&M or submissive role play is neither uncommon nor unhealthy. But you’ve got to pause and think about how these images, while playful in the bedroom, can be disastrous when it isn’t consensual.

Women’s bodies have always been the object of desire and wonder for men, and of course, other women, too. A reverence for beauty of figure can quickly become objectification. A woman’s body becomes the object of sexual desire, and it is detached from the person who occupies it. We stop looking at the woman herself, and to the features that we adore. We want her. And while celebration of the body is a great thing, adoration can turn ugly. We desire the thing and not the woman. When someone commits a sexual attack, it is a strike with the body, but it doesn’t end there. It is ruinous in every other aspect of the victim’s life because we are not separate from our bodies. We are so detached from them in every other way. Exercise is no longer an expressive act, but a way to re-model ourselves. We mask our smells, deny that we grow hair in lots of places, and treat food like it is fuel, to be metered out in doses purely for its nutritional content. We look at our weight, height, our BMI, heart rate, calories burnt – we understand our bodies through numbers, not through actually being in-tune with them and knowing by feeling when something is right or wrong.

In my research, sexual assault victims tend to describe an out-of-body experience during their attack, like they’re watching themselves from outside of their body, or that they actually leave the room. This is a survival mechanism to lower the impact of trauma. Often, victims have trouble getting back into their bodies. They’ll experience severe weight gain or loss, and I read a few cases in which they self-injured as a way to reconnect with how they feel. Dance and drama therapy in these cases are very useful to bring people back to their bodies.

I think this is something we’ve been shy about as a culture, and I can see things happening now that are pulling us out of it. We think we are very sexualised, but we are kind of like a thirteen year-old boy: we understand the body in an abstract and conceptual way. We see the ‘ideal’ body every day, and we spend our time trying to attain that. Sex is very much about what we think it should be, and not what it is: a natural body function. It can be beautiful, and it can also be hilarious. When we actually encounter a ‘real’ body, we’re shocked. We respond to it. We don’t know how to handle it when it becomes real.

She

She hangs like a pendant bead
against a neck of crumpled skin.
And catches the light, warping it
and finishing it to strange beauty.
In the heart of the heart
is light itself. A place
where life animates life
and nothing knows where it begins.

She is an heirloom, a longingless glass.
Long ago broken by a man's hands.
It is an undertaking she wishes
she'd done alone.

Pendulous beauty, pretty but cold
I may as well be dead, she says
but glitters on into the next day
as the untouchable bauble we want her to be.

Idolatry

You sit in the cathedral of my longing,
alone. You are unbothered by the graces of stars,
the understated twilight
and the romance of the sun and the earth.

In a room full of colour and stone,
candles poison the dark.
We raise a glass of forbidden wine
to a hidden god.
We are not polite.

Hidden handholds in places I've tried,
this is a sacrilegious crime
against the wall.
I move in here as I move within
a place of less permanence.