abtw777

The news is filled with terrible stories and I fear that no matter when or where you’re reading this, it will still be the same. The stories are of the rape and sexual exploitation of women and girls. For a while I thought those stories got so much news coverage because the government wanted to distract us from all the dodgy things it does behind the backs of the citizens to whom it is supposed to be accountable. I also thought that – no matter how matter-of-fact the reporting – no matter how carefully sleaze and gossip are avoided – still, it might be better not to report at all. Somehow it seems like the victims are exploited all over again, by having their names and faces in the news. Mostly, I’ve avoided the issue. There are big political stories. There are big existential threats to our well-being like war and climate change and the ongoing destruction of Nature. The abuse of women and girls is mostly by bad men – cruel men with no conscience or compassion. We have laws aga...

It occurred to me recently that rather a lot of my writing involves stories about bodies. There’s strangely-clad bodies, tattooed bodies, painted bodies - and of course, naked bodies. Perhaps rather too many naked bodies. There’s plenty of big, important questions out there, to try to find the answers for, so was is the whole body thing really causing a bit of a distraction? I’ve seen it happen with artwork. Paint a huge landscape, and somewhere in the painting there are one or two tiny figures. People will shuffle up to within inches of he canvas and stare at the figures. And, heaven forbid, an artist tries to convey some deep meaning, by way perhaps of a visual metaphor, and places a nude in the painting. People, of course, just stare at the nude. ‘There’s a naked person there. What’s that about?’ one might say. ‘He’s made her too thin’, another replies. ‘No’, says another, ‘too fat’. So, I say to myself, why bodies? And the first thing that came to mind was that very obsessi...