An Almost Monstrous Notion

I have a bizarre fascination with old book covers.  The pulpy kind, buxom girls in rolled jeans or a straight skirt, their blouses taut across the only weapons they've learned to use, buttons near bursting, seams strained.  Boys leering, cigarette in hand or tucked behind the ear obscured by a nest of greased hair, tight white t-shirts tucked into starched denim.  Books with titles like D for Delinquent bearing the tag line "She Was Strictly for the Boys," and Boy-Crazy, "A Powerful Story of Teen-Age Girls Who Fight Recklessly for Life and Love."  And of course, my favorite, Satan Was a Man, "A Surging Novel of Passion and Ruin."

These book covers adorn the wall next to my desk at school.  There are twenty or so of them, each one telling the same central story: hell is a woman, but Satan, it seems, is a man.  Woman is hell: heat, pain, both scorching and terrifying, but there is something irresistably attractive in the sinning that might get one there.  Man, though, is the devil.  He, master of temptation, is the one that brings these erstwhile good girls down.  Were it not for his nefarious ways, wouldn't all these little darlings be home, sewing in their laps, Bible on the nightstand, nothing more in the glass on the nightstand than water and ice?  Of course they would, because they have no agency.  These book covers tell the story of women controlled by their lust, their desire to have and be had, to feel more than they've been told they should.

It is ironic, my love of these covers, because I don't believe in victims.  I believe that people can be victimized and that bad things can happen to good people, but I do not believe in saying "Look what happened to me.  It made me this way.  Otherwise, I would have been good."  I believe in saying "This is what I want.  This is what I need, and nobody made me choose: I chose."  I, I guess, am the decider.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Bitch and Prozac Nation, writes in the former:

"What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished? You don't want to diet, you don't want to say no, thank you, and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always, you want more. That has been your defining characteristic: You have appetites, and only if you are truly shameless will you even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because you are greedy or insatiable but because you can't help it, you can't go along with the fiction that the world would have you believe and adhere to: that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with, that feminism and other political theories of woman cannot really begin to address because this is about something else entirely.


This is about what has become the almost monstrous notion of female desire."

So, while I find true joy in naming what I want, saying it out loud, asking for it, acknowledging my desire as valid, natural, human, I still feel drawn to those book covers.  Maybe because, in those images, a woman gets to belong to one group (the monstrously seductive bad girl) whereas my life seems to fall on a spectrum somewhere between good and bad, girl and woman, devil and damnation.  Being one thing may be easier, but for now I think I'll stick with my spectrum.  I find more and more that I, too, contain multitudes.