The Televisionary Oracle (7 page)

Wave your arms and leap off the ground and punch the air.

Spin around in erratic circles while slobbering and mussing your hair.

Shriek “no.”

Wail “nooooooooo.”

Faster.

Harder.

Wilder.

Feel nothing but your own juicy, red, oozing, unscratchable pain from the beginning of time.

Lurch, gnash, writhe, and twist until you realize there’s no longer any need for you to pretend to be in control.

And now unleash the sound of a hurricane lashing an erupting volcano.

Ululate the cacophony of an earthquake in a forest fire.

And keep screaming until the alphabet is gone.

I
’m crushed. Crashed. Thoroughly crunched. Rapunzel abandoned me right in the middle of our love feast in the Catalyst bathroom. Sulking, I contemplate my next move. I sit down on the sidewalk in front of the nightclub, leaning against a wall. My attention is drawn to objects weighing down the pockets of my new shirt.

In the right pocket is a small hardback book. In the left is a sealed envelope which contains a soft, puffy object. Both items are plum-colored.

The book cover shows a familiar image: the statuesque vulture with the lovely face and alluring breasts. The only difference here is that the strange creature is not naked, but scantily clad with a lacy red bustiere and red panties. The book’s title:
Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. It
lists no author or editor. Inside are fifty-five pages of glossy, full-color photographs of female models posed on a runway. But most of these are not ordinary models, and this is no ordinary fashion show. I spy only a couple of women who come close to matching the pouty, anorexic specifications of the icons who populate the runways of Milan and Paris. Buck-teethed, pear-shaped, midlife women are the norm here. Saggy-titted, cellulite-proud, pigeon-toed women. Crone-faced, hairy-legged, big-nosed women.

“Demeter,” for instance, a wild-eyed Caucasian woman in her fifties, has unkempt sandy grey hair—including quite a bush under each arm—and breasts that must have nursed several kids. I could easily picture her pushing a shopping cart full of all her wordly belongings
down a city street. But here, instead of being garbed in a ripped 1950s-style house dress over baggy khaki work pants and moldy sneakers, she’s in a sheer mauve lace bodystocking with embroidered butterflies and a tall, conical, violet witch’s hat. Unlike the sleek, steely body language of all the models I’ve ever seen, Demeter has one leg bent and raised, and her arms are akimbo like a praying mantis doing tai chi.

“Hecate” is a pregnant woman in her twenties with dyed purple hair and countless body piercings, as well as a metal brace on her right leg. She’s sporting a lovely emerald silk charmeuse camisole beneath a cape of white eagle feathers. Around her surging waistline is what appears to be a live snake, grasping its own tail in its mouth.

Holding a broom between her legs, “Tiamat” models a tapestry merrywidow with a gold bull skull talisman woven into the crook of the bra. A tall woman with glasses, a large forehead, and heavy legs, she looks remarkably like my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Byrd. It couldn’t possibly be she, though, could it? I always had an inexplicable crush on her, which of course I never admitted to anyone, especially because all my friends thought she looked weird.

My favorite model in the
Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show
is “Vimala.” A vigorous-looking old crone sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks, she’s one of the few models with an anatomy approaching the red-blooded American male’s 36-23-36 ideal. In addition to purple cowgirl boots, a lacy red bra, and a red leather mini-skirt, she’s wearing a tall crown of inflated pink and purple balloons tied together in the shape of a vulture. Further accessorizing the look is a necklace of tiny skulls, the candy kind that you get in Mexico during the Day of the Dead ceremonies.

Yow. I mean hallelujah. I mean what the fuck. Feminist pornography. Goddess-sanctioned lust-arousers. I’m dizzy. Itchy. Alienated but fascinated. Repulsed yet totally turned on. I’ve got to explore this further.

After studying each photo intently, I close the book and my eyes. My thoughts drift, in an inevitable comparison, to my customary experience of viewing the naked bodies of women I don’t know. I must confess that when I’m at the liquor store buying cherry cider and olives for a post-midnight snack, I now and then fail to avert my eyes from the porn magazine section. I especially fail to avert my eyes from
Swank
magazine, which I’ve adjudged to be the least demeaning towards
women and the most titillating to me. Yes, it’s true that a suspiciously huge majority of the models are well within the criteria by which my conditioned reflexes evaluate beauty. But at least they’re not depicted in degrading poses. They’re not portrayed as being abused or dominated. They actually appear to be enjoying themselves. All that’s got to count for something.

What vexes me even about the women in
Swank
, though, is their universally scoured, waxen, alabaster look. Profuse make-up has been applied to camouflage their “flaws.” Photographic touch-up techniques do the rest. There’s never a hint of leg hair or, for that matter, a cut from shaving. All underarm fur is scraped away. If it’s there at all, the pubic hair is manicured like an English garden. Far too often the bodies reveal the grotesque blend of anorexia and silicone. Unlike real women, whose breasts differ in size and shape, many of the
Swank
siliconites have a perfectly matched pair.

There’s a part of me—and not just the moralist and feminist in me, either—that hates this approach to beauty. Lately I’ve taken to boycotting any porn rag unless it features at least a few women whose breasts have never communed with silicone. And I truly prefer the presence rather than the absence of underarm hair.

But I’d be a slimy patriarchal dissembler if I tried to pretend that
Swank
and its ilk don’t provoke in me an instant hard-on. I’m proud to say, however, that it’s a sterile, dessicated hard-on. A like-eating-highly-processed-junk-food hard-on. A temperature-controlled, artificially-scented, recycled-airplane-air, muzak-in-the-elevator hard-on. In short, an impotent hard-on.

I may get lathered up for the wrong reasons, in other words, but at least I feel guilty about it. And to my further credit, I’m aware of the fact that there are right reasons—which ideally I’m on the verge of mastering.

So how am I doing with this project, anyway? To what degree have I purged all non-feminist hormones from my lust? Maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity afforded me by Rapunzel’s little picture book to take an inventory. Can I truly say I’m sincerely turned on in the most spiritually correct way by the women of the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show? Women who in their deviation from the freakish
standards established by professional models are the very embodiment of normal? I would like to say yes. I would love nothing more than to be able to testify without any qualification—passing a lie detector test if necessary—that these pear-shaped, pigeon-toed, big-nosed women do indeed prime my kundalini for all the right reasons.

A judgment in my favor would serve many noble purposes, besides opening up a vast new repository of candidates for seduction. Most importantly, it would launch a healthy new chapter in the sordid history of my relationship with my conscience. The fact is that whereas the bulk of the population has installed in their superego a variation on the pissed-off, misogynist God of the Old Testament, mine is occupied by a very different archetype. Though sometimes she takes the form of a cagey, tender goddess like, say, Sophia of esoteric Christianity, more often she’s a frowning fanatical harpy who has much in common with Medusa-clones like anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. The endless streams of bile that spew from this aspect of my nasty inner critic may be the closest a patriarchal stooge like myself can ever come to knowing what it means to be battered. But I can imagine in thrilling detail the freedom that would burst out in my heart if I could convince the Dour Matriarchal Judge I was fully aligned with her agendas.

“No, Judge, I am not a looksist,” I could appeal to her with a totally straight face. “I am not a bigot who evaluates women first of all on their appearance. My attraction depends more on their inner than outer qualities. I may be a slobbering lecher, but at least my slobbering lechery is fueled by only the most righteous motivations.”

Before I could in good conscience approach the bench with this plea, however, I’d have to convince myself of its verity. The Judge deals harshly with self-deception.

So what about it? Do I believe my own wishful assertions?

There is a certain amount of evidence in favor of this interpretation. Exhibit A: Ever since I explored the “feminist porn” in Rapunzel’s book, I have been luxuriating in a most sumptuous blooming of what the tantric poets refer to as the jade stalk. What further data could possibly refute that ringing empirical documentation?

I bask now in the fantasy that I could actually feel happy and festive and self-respectful about being a testosterone-possessed fucknut.
Emerging from my meditation, I leaf through the last few pages of the
Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show
. Tucked between the last page and the back cover is a loose, rumpled piece of lavender paper folded into quarters. I open it up and find a text printed by hand. “Dear Rockstar,” it begins. I feel a flush of excitement as I contemplate the possibility that Rapunzel didn’t abandon me after all. She’s just playing an interesting game with me. This is her next gambit. I eagerly devour the message.

The letter is a little deflating, even if it does present an intriguing challenge that appeals to the poet in me. I have a hard time imagining what concrete actions I could take to become an honorary menstruator like Jesus or the Fisher King. Though I’m not a big fan of Aleister Crowley, I recall an experiment he once did to train his will. It involved the shedding of blood. He resolved not to use the pronoun “I” in his speech for a period of two weeks. Every time he violated his intention he slashed his arm with a razor blade. Quickly enough, his subconscious mind got the message, and added its considerable resources to the project.

As eager as I am to learn from Rapunzel’s teachings, I don’t know if I’m ready for a commitment as extreme as Crowley’s. Outrageous meditations are more my style. There are certain Buddhist visualizations, for instance, that might help me, a mere man, cultivate a less literal relationship with death. One of the practices is called the corpse pose. The meditator lies utterly still for many hours, imagining himself
mouldering deep underground as if he were a dead body. In another exercise, the practitioner imagines his body being ripped apart by carnivorous animals.