Why She Did

She's wearing horns, and sometimes she'll wear cones instead of a blouse. She's dancing over an air vent, she's wearing this little thing and it's showing other little things whose scientific names make us uncomfortable, like "areola." She is stripping off what little there is, but not entirely. She looks like she wants us to see everything, she moves in that way that maybe, we think, she does.  She's wearing a stuffed leopard over her crotch, and sparkly rainbows over her nipples. What does that mean? We're not sure. These are new, complex images that bring us to old conclusions.

And she used be be such a nice girl when she worked for Disney, when she tasted Kix cereal in the commercial, when she wasn't shaped like rising hills, the ground that defies gravity, this girl that we don't know any better now than we did then. Why would the girl who kissed Mickey Mouse shave her head?

Why she did, and why she does, and why she will do it again, none of us will really know. We can ask her, or we can let some else ask her, and we can read it in a magazine, the one where she's in an acrobatic position on the cover. But no matter what her answer is, we'll draw our own conclusions. Some of us will think she's a tramp, some of us will think she's liberated, and some will think she wants attention or money.

I think about Halloween.That night, when it was young, human beings used to wear masks, not for candy, but to frighten evil spirits. We wore horns, we stuck out our tongues, and we shouted at the devil to keep him from taking our souls.

Tomorrow there will be a picture of her in a spandex gum wrapper. Her hair will be sprayed and teased into the shape of a vulva. She'll hiss, and scream, and shake, and bear skin. And some of us will look but most of us will turn away just when she wants us to, so that we can't take her soul.

And we used to be such nice girls.