That Obscure Object of Desire
My friend Katie Dylan was a teenager when she started working as a model and it has taken her a decade since she quit to become sane. Supermodels are getting younger – so young I have finally understood Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
Girls don’t only seem younger, they are younger, which means at 1.45 in the morning when I’m dying to take off my heels and walk barefoot back through the village in Spain where I’m on vacation, the girls are giggling like a class outing as they dance on with the off-work waiters and keen-eyed fishermen before they set out to sea.
Beneath the flickering lights, these obscure objects of desire are spirals of smoke, shapely as hourglasses in uplift bras – more beautiful than Helen of Troy. I see them on the beach late afternoon with their boogie boards and inflatable rafts; they squeal and chase each other, uninhibited, doing things that children do. The sun sets and, like bugs becoming butterflies, or those mysterious flowers that only bloom at night, they change into tiny clothes and 5″ heels, children transformed into women kissed by the moon in his many phases.
As I circle the sea, a black mirror at night, I feel ancient, uncertain, shocked – a hypocrite, even. I write erotic books and I feel afraid for these all night girls of 15, 14, some barely teenagers, who have been turned by the marketing men from children with toys into sexualized consumers in one stealthy, profitable move.
I am writing a new novel; half way through, the hard part when things sag and you have to maintain the pace. The main character is 28. She will go to Spain in the summer. She will watch these pubescent girls playing on the beach and dancing beneath the swirling mirror ball, and she will work out what it all means, because I can’t.
Katie Dylan grew sane, by the way, penning a novel based on her life. She called it Cult of Beauty – it is one of my favorite books – just click through to Amazon and savor it those late nights after you walk home around the bay.
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