What is a woman – What is a Man

It was the dead fish in a dream that led me to these feelings.
I was reminded of all the sperm that comes away from a man during a lifetime.
Then image after image of women flashed through my mind.
Pictures of women in black brassieres and black corset straps.
Women with fags in their mouth with unfeeling hard faces.
Women having a period.
As I watched I saw they were all images pushed at me by our culture, by advertising and films.
They were images I had been handed of women.
It’s so fucking unreal. It’s so unreal.
It’s just a whole big picture people have made of what a woman is, and what sex is.
So unreal. A huge picture people have painted about this thing.
It’s so terrible. It’s just not like that.
Life, sex, isn’t like that – as awful or as beautiful.
We keep going off and getting stuck like a bloody old record.
These images and feeling dead inside like the fish in the dream are all a part of it; part of being dead.
All this bloody muck on top of you from our culture about tits and brassieres, and pictures of women with their legs open, as if that is womanhood.
That’s not womanhood. It’s a part of a woman’s equipment, but a woman is something so different.
Womanhood is a lovely thing. Why picture it as all those things?
It’s not just a fairytale thing either.
A woman is a real animal who feels something personal behind all her body equipment.
There’s a real human being, with fears, hopes, love, weakness, strength, and we give our youngsters this bloody stupid image – of men too – and it’s all part of the deadness.
Such a huge thing this dead fish.
It is an image of the sickness of sexuality in our society.
As a nation we don’t want to admit it as sickness.
We accept the strip shows, pawnshops, prostitution, rampant homosexual activity, as parts of our permissive or accepting society.
It’s suave to accept.
But we accept because we don’t want to take a look at ourselves as individuals, individuals who make up this culture we live in.
We would rather blame it on to somebody else – it’s them – the youth – the coloureds, the dorpouts.
Well it is, isn’t it?
We still have the ghost of the middle class, or upper class ideal of the English culture and family life of loving devotion and romance haunting us.
We’ve got a crippling image of what is right to do, but what a terrible price individuals have to pay – prostitution, pornography, strip clubs.
We torture ourselves by trying to live morals and a way of life, rules of relationship in marriage and family, that is flagrantly sick.
We try to conform to a society that has a deep sickness.
Because of this I thought I was sick.
I have been murdering myself trying to cure my own beautiful wildness.

Copyright ©2007 Tony Crisp