Recently someone sent me these lyrics from the Village People:
"Body...wanna feel my body?
Body...such a thrill my body
Body...wanna touch my body?
Body...it's too much my body.
check it out my body, body
Don't you doubt my body, body
talkin' bout my body, body
check it out my body"
These words made me reconsider bodies in contemporary media, particularly
female bodies, and particularly the space between what we as women experience and what others parade as models in front of us. I call my response
Pretty Me Not
Disney stick chicks not
Runway ravenous not
Beauty queens not.
"Not known, because not looked for".**
Nor, like minimus, of hindering knot-grass made.*
Rather
Ravaged by time
Shredded by deformities
Distorted by bigotries and imperfections
Death masks our destiny.
And all that remains
Are bits and pieces of yesterday.
Pretty Me Not
For the Awful Truth is
That I...and we...
Are fast disappearing into
the dust bin of history.
The species to come may not like us
very much
Addicted to war, we don't seem to like ourselves
very much.
Can we change? Will we change?
Pretty We Not
But maybe, just maybe
Wise in time.
c. Corinne Whitaker 2013
(In truth, there are those whose outlook is less cynical than mine, and you
can read about their rosy prognostications at the Positive Futurist.)
*Forsooth have I quoted the Bard, taken words from a Midsummer Night's Mare.
**And thanked TS for "Little Gidding", which you can find in full at Eliot.
