Displayed side by side every week on the newsagents counter,
slim, laughing girls, girls,
girls gazing into the eyes of the man they've won,
laughing in the rain or sedate and feminine,
cover girls invite the reader in;
learn to be lovely this way, tricks and hints and games to play.
Which one will you choose? Wasteline darling,
which one has caught you up?
True Romance? My Guy? Loving? Photolove? Woman?
So many to choose from and all of them pieced together without care or love.
How can they wish you love and happiness when they rely on lonely daydreams
and aching hearts for their sales? Do we give and take love, or share and make
love? Like the massively wealthy
drug companies, with their valiums and megadens, they need sick people for
their money and the paptrap romancers promote sicklove for the lovesick. No
cure--no money in that. No cure, merely temporary measures, a touch of
make-up when she wakes up because they tell her that her bare face is not
enough for HIM. The hairs on her legs repulse him, her armpits must be
scraped of little haris which choose to grow there, she must be softened for
HIM, deny her body the marks of her movements, knees and elbows sanded off the
skin that has grown there to protect, her face is a mask for HIS fantasy.
She is not allowed her own reality, no comfort in her nakedness. When she looks at
herself in the mirror, that trap of glass, she looks not at her own image, it is
through layers and layers of warpaint that she sees herself, the careful
application of disguise learnt from childhood on. Mother at her dressing table,
the musty dust of face powder, foundation creams and shadows. Mother pampering
herself, tampered with shadows.
My guy, my life. One husband, one wife. For HIS
eyes she corrupts herself in the mirror, and when the eyes scorn her, the mirror
receives her weeping face like an executioner greeting his victim, for the
mirror is always an executioner, every time she casts her eyes into its false
dimension she is beheaded, forsaken. The paptrap romancers say...ring your eyes
with subltle lines, blend the blusher, smear your features with the creams and
dusts to catch his eye.
These are the same authorities that made the
feet of Chinese women into festering hooks, that made Victorian women gasp for
breath beneath their whalebone binding, that make women today distort
themselves with high heels and chemical additives. The dust and cream, the
swamp in which they deny women any completeness or intelligence of their own,
only a terrible game where the participants are forever women imitating a social
idea of woman so that she may buy her way into the life sapped out by them for
her. To be his amazingly lifelike companion, as close to his fantasy as she can
be.
What an insult this is, do they really take women as such empty-headed fools?
Do they really take men for such malicious lords of our bodies? These obscene
romance magazines would have us think so. They're gluing her together for the
happiest day of her life, or reminding her that she has that memory contained
in her waning mind or stifled in her glossy albums.
Do they really care?
Where is the caring of those that live by the drowning of others?...They mean
to prevent your eyes from looking beyond their lurid landscape into a better
place. They mean to hold you in their overcrowded wasteland where they can
regulate your heartbeat and responses...They'll moderate your pain because they
cannot allow you to be and see yourself...a token of life is all that those who
fear you can allow you...Every week they take you for a ride in the skinideep
intimacy on thin paper, their con-trick deprives you of your right to be
yourself.
They offer you cheap products that exploit you and the emptiness that we all
feel, their obscene and mindless intrusions into the emptiness are tragic
insults to our intelligence. It is because of their poverty of thought that they
off Our Wedding,
pure unadulterated shit...THEY SELL IT TO YOU WITHOUT A CARE.
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This website was originally produced by Southern Records in the 2000s. It has been reconstructed as part of http://theartofcrass.uk