 she said he smelt clean, altar-boy good. they were my mother + my father. & i was good, clean, Catholic — stirred by the dirty about you starting with your shoes, quarry-muddy; the smell of your mechanic’s sweat, of grease, grime and irreverence contrary to my air of jonquils erlicheer. & we both laughed at Louis C.K.’s dissection of stupidity. ____ +Magdalene Carmen photographed by Peter Matulich
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 © Gil Evgren, 'Cooling Off'/ The Great American Pinup ‘No Bra, No Problem’ is the catch-cry of certain American schoolgirls pushing for the prerogative to attend school braless. No Bra head girl Kaitlyn Juvic & Co were reprimanded for defying their school’s dress code. They pleaded along female sexualisation and gender equality lines. My thought-bubbles: 1) Yes I know, I’m petite + small-breasted, so going braless has always been an easy option for me. 2) To wear or not to wear a bra. Sounds like a reasonable prerogative not only of pubescent girls, indeed going braless already a grown-up option of the couldn’t-give-a-fuck or fashionable set. 3) When this girl became Woman (ie. morphing into something else that went beyond the physiological changes at puberty) and discovered all sorts of gorgeous brassieres and related apparel, she couldn’t resist the damn things, indeed wearing them for her own pleasure first. That this whetted any lover’s appetite was usually an after-effect, but at once also interestingly tactical. A bra is like a soft little wall of China one’s lover has to scale to get to those particular fine preciousnesses on the other side. A piece on this piece I wrote much earlier than this commentary begs to be inserted here: what is a bra what is a bra but a piece of plaited string teasing you into untying me. it is not modesty. untying's the thing. why, i would put on the bra i do not wear for untying's sake to remind you you are privileged to unstrap me, know me bare. ____ 4) Female sexualisation? This woman + wordsmith feels ill about the common plaiting (i must like this word) and careless touting of these words by such as girls crying wounded when they’re not in fact. Senior schoolgirl Kaitlyn plays the female sexualisation card while she presents in the powerful prime of her puberty: voluptuous, pouting/posing sexily, made up, and in one picture wearing a provocative off-the-shoulder top, her braces about the only thing referencing her juvenility. Dear girls, your school’s modest dress code did not sexualise or oppress you (if they annoyed you). The TV sitcoms, movies, popular music, women’s magazines etc etc you’ve consumed so far + peer pressure to be alluring already did. Our sexualisation’s pretty much given when we trip from adolescence to adulthood, we won’t see what might be wrong with our status-quo programming unless we critically observe our own becoming. And yet are we kidding ourselves about some Utopian non-sexualised society? Are we not most of us sexual? Are not our sexualities innate? Do we forget our inherent animality? Do we not engage in various forms of sexual activity? If we could choose to have been born attractive if we weren’t already, would we choose to be born physically wanting? sexually unappealing? Would we protest very much if we made it on the list of The Sexiest People on Earth? Any attractive, feminine woman out there who does not feel generally happy with her loveliness (yes it’s blessing + curse at once) and must dislike any sign of admiration/adoration from men raise your hand. 5) Attractiveness (in male, female, androgynous, LGBT etc forms) is almost always a genetic gift vs a right. But visually pretty people could also disgust with their behaviours. Therefore they’re ugly until they fix their attitudes. Attractiveness + character + talent and/or intelligence = lethal. Beyond our given animalities, psychologies, and beyond entertainment, much we can do (good, bad and ugly) with that much power. 6) Gender equality? Again I have a problem with the (lack of) truth in the term. I am female and regard myself feminine in presentation and in most of my manners and my girly-ness. But I certainly have my tomboy days and can think like a man too. If I cut my hair a certain way I’d easily look like a boy. But never mind my hairstyle or my androgyny. I love being most things the word Woman means that the word Man or Human does not. The word Woman usually conjures (or indeed is often equated with) these four other most powerful forces on earth: Love, Sex, Art, Fashion. God too is often invoked as in “Goddamn!”, for example, when a man is confronted with a beautiful woman. So I celebrate being Woman. And outside my human rights do not desire to be literally absolutely equal with Man. Or what are gentlemen for? Man and Woman each with their distinct anatomies and the specific functions of their particular sex organs at the very least cannot be (sexually) equal. Is not Man and Woman, or the masculine and the feminine in either/any gender, essentially complementary? Certainly we’ve had problems. But must the fault lie in our genders and sexualities? Or are our problems with relating with ourselves and each other found in our lack of honouring our differences? And the lack in our own persons of: self-awareness and self-love, reason and an open mind, character and higher loving. For a very long time now Woman in her many attractive forms has been the more popular, more fascinating, more provocative, more compelling, more controversial bearer of any and all kinds of things ever advertised on earth. For many reasons, right and wrong and left of centre, Woman rules the world because she rules the world’s imagination. (And we’ve not even begun to unstrap the sexy success of Coca-Cola’s energy drink it calls ‘Mother’.)  MOTHER energy drink advertising |
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