In the original Feral Rabbit blog I had a number of posts organized under the topic of the Objectification of Women. In these posts I organized vintage erotica (photographs mostly) under various themes. What I’ll do here is post some of the photos, again loosely organized by themes, but these posts won’t reproduce the original posts except in some of the illustrative content.

Earl Carroll’s Vanities was a nightclub show in the 1930s and 1940s. Supposedly some of the most beautiful women in the world appeared on stage in this show.

To illustrate the variety of costumes, I’m reproducing 5 printed Mutoscope-type cards. These cards were available at least into the 1950s. Kelsey remembers seeing them at carnivals.

As time permits I’ll be making more photo posts.

In 1975 Kelsey was divorced, again a single mom. She’d decided she loved me, was about to begin a disastrous relationship with a man who beat and terrorized her. We’d last seen each other in 1971, wouldn’t meet again until 1977.

In 1975 I was living and working in London in a large eighteenth century house on the Thames. The music room had 18 foot ceilings. As one of the job perks I had reader’s tickets for the London School of Economics library and for the main and manuscript reading rooms for the British Library. The latter ticket is the source for this 1976 photo of me.

I was extremely hung over when it was taken. The night before there’d been a party where the English artist, after a year-long residence in Moscow where she got to know members of the underground art community, taught us to drink vodka like a Russian. Poor sad me, I spent part of the evening afterwards wading in the Thames bawling my eyes out.

Kelsey and the Beautiful Woman in appearance very much fit the same type. The difference is that the Beautiful Woman knew she was pretty. Kelsey thinks she’s average looking, maybe rather plain. She’s a chameleon, constantly changing. Not having a fixed sort of prettiness only enhances the fascination.

The ongoing Wall Street protests remind me of her. I first saw her in a van filled with college students and a couple of townies like me headed for a protest in DC. It was 1984.

The way she moved fascinated me. She and her coterie were in a seat in the middle of the van, lying on their backs, wheeling their legs in the air while Ferron’s Shadows on a Dime was playing.

Memory for me consists of motion. I can’t remember a face, though she was pretty, looked just like one of the models in the daughter’s Seventeen magazines, but it was a generic sort of beauty.

We talked briefly in the church in DC where we were washing up before going to the Mall. And again in the midst of the march, her telling me about Jello Biafra running for president. I saw a banner for a group I wanted to walk with and left her.

That evening, back at the van, her foot was bandaged and she was limping. She’d been playing in one of the fountains and cut her foot on a piece of glass.

On the ride home we were in the back, her foot in my lap, her panties twisted around the ankle (a fashion statement I wish more women would adopt).

Kelcey and I had been going through a rough spot. Things were getting better. Maybe one of the things that helped was this bit of human contact; I didn’t feel so isolated.

We ran into each other periodically after that, on campus or in town and I fell utterly in love with her, a huge crush.

About a year later, she’d been away at her co-op job, she was fresh looking and sunburned in the midst of a winter blizzard. We were standing in line in the small grocery story in the center of the village where we lived. She smiled at me and her voice dropped an octave. “I’m so cold and lonely.” The cashier was watching us, like she’d never heard that line said quite that way.

She made her purchase and was waiting outside.

Winter storms energize me. I love to walk in the bitter subzero cold, enjoy the quiet and snowflakes hitting my face. I wasn’t cold and I enjoy being alone.

I knew what I wanted was forever and what she wanted was a partner for the night. I knew she couldn’t come home with me; the daughter who was fifteen would utterly flip out. And I knew what Kelcey offered was what I really wanted and needed. So I walked past.

After that she was distant. Not exactly unfriendly but none of us likes rejection. I still loved her, but no longer woke up with her name on my lips.

A couple of years later there was an article in the newspaper about her killing a man (a boyfriend?) and partially dismembering his body.

Back in ’84 in the van my knife was borrowed by those up front to cut cheese. When it was passed back, she took it and cleaned the blade. “They don’t know how to take care of a good knife,” she said, handing it to me. The knife was a gift from Kelcey.

Kelcey knows if some day the murderess by chance knocks on our door, I can’t turn her away. I won’t say no this time.

And, Ferron is absolutely fantastic live.

After the cut is a repost from the old feral-rabbit blog. I gave the original blog the title 1970 because I couldn’t think of anything better. For me, at the time the post describes, was a period of transition. After the Dreamer, before the Joker (see Cast of Characters post). After giving up drugs, before doing a bit of opium. Just before the first time there were watchers while I was having sex. Just before my last x-some.

For Kelsey, also, this was a time of transition. She started 1970 in Florida, returned to Ohio where she had the daughter, and moved again to Toronto where her older brother lived and her younger sister was going to college.

I could write this as a strictly sequential narrative except I believe splitting the story into three layers, one following the other, provides the best idea of what occurred.

Near the beginning of the fall 1970 term I was in a friend’s dorm room. There were five of us, I remember, myself and four women. One of the women (I’ll call her Lisa) was being asked questions by the others and I just listened. She’d quit school and had adventures during the summer.

Lisa was very brief in answering questions about her experiences in porn films. She was totally at ease, the faces and voice of the other women showed they weren’t.

“I did whatever they told me to do,” she said with a smile. “I didn’t care.”

The woman who was showing the most shock was the person who first told me about the Story of O — “this weird book.” In a few weeks a lover would have sex with her while she was bound and she wouldn’t like it.

Eventually the questions got to why Lisa left. “Because they wanted me to do it with a horse,” she said. Now she was on campus looking for a place to stay for a while.

My memory of the conversation, what actually was said, is just those two sentences and I don’t think a whole lot more was said while I was there.

That evening Lisa appeared in our door room. On of the women and my roommate (and best friend) had made the arrangements.

I’m surprised she ended up in our room and can only guess there was an overriding reason she couldn’t have stayed in one of the women’s rooms. Or it might have been because we had a spare bed. We’d accumulated a hoard of mattresses so we had five if my memory is correct. I had one on the floor; my roommate had a multi-level triple bed.

When it was time to go to bed Lisa undressed. She had no purse or bag, just the clothes she was wearing — a flannel shirt, jeans and a pair of sneakers. No panties, no socks. Her body looked beautiful naked. She was tall and well-formed with highly placed large breasts and skin that looked soft to touch.

She slept on the upper tier on the triple bed, my roommate on the lower and me on my mattress on the floor. Either that night or the next she and my roommate rolled together and had sex. He said it was the easiest fuck he’d ever had — his words.

He was in the midst of breaking up with one woman who had dropped out and now lived in Jacksonville, across the state, and was beginning a relationship with another on campus. When Lisa moved in I’m not sure what these women thought of her.

My friend got stuff from the cafeteria for Lisa and she was unobtrusive. I don’t remember her being in the room much but she was a quiet person so maybe that’s why. I remember watching her, and I remember watching them fuck. She was quiet then too.

Eventually my friend told her she had to go. I’m not sure when that eventually was — two weeks?

The second layer:

My friend developed a chancre on his cock the size of a quarter. He thought it was syphilis but it wasn’t; instead, a milder STD easily treated with penicillin at the campus clinic. He was sure he’d gotten it from Lisa and he said she refused to be treated. There was a free clinic in town where this could easily be done, but she refused even to be tested.

Looking back I question if he’d gotten the STD from Lisa. Her history made her an obvious candidate, but I wonder if too obvious. He was still having sex with the old girlfriend when she came to visit.

It didn’t matter. My friend was angry at Lisa. He told me “not to have anything to do with her,” which was said with such force that it struck me as odd.

The third layer:

Lisa as a child had been in a car wreck. Not wearing a seat belt, her face had hit the windshield and was terribly scarred. The scars also covered the crown of her head and she had an odd twist of hair that stuck up from the gnarled skin.

I’m attracted to scars, especially facial scars. A boy in the fourth grade had a bicycle accident which had torn his cheek open, giving him a long sagging scar which was fascinating to me. A star athlete in high school he was busted after graduating for dealing and spent a year in the state’s hellhole penitentiary. When I talked to him afterwards he was subdued, as if his prison experiences had broken him.

My friend’s younger brother would do time in the same penitentiary a few years later.

I remember watching a college classmate’s wife as she dressed. She’d had a radical mastectomy leaving deep scars from the sutures surrounding a large area of shiny flesh. That wasn’t ugly.

Years later there was the long deep scar on the Beautiful Woman’s inner thigh from her groin halfway down her leg. She said she’d never wear a swimsuit again. Or the woman I knew with the shallow crater on her left cheek which fascinated me to no end.

But Lisa’s scars were so profound and the effect they’d had on her face was so terrible, at least to me, I had a hard time looking at her. My friend (as the old girlfriend described him to me recently — a kind and gentle man) didn’t seem to notice the scars at all.

So the last time she was in our room, Lisa and I were sitting and watching each other, not saying a word. She smiled, she did have a beautiful smile, and I realized she was as shy as I was. If I said the word, she’d be mine for however long I wanted her, but what I said was I was going to dinner.

I saw her leave campus a half hour later, walk toward the highway, just as she came to our room — dressed in the flannel shirt and jeans, wearing sneakers. And that was that.

Of course there are other layers, but those three should do for now.

In order of appearance —

Kelsey (or Kelcey). We met on the second day of freshman orientation at college, the weekend before classes started. Kelsey’s pseudonym is from the name of one of the swimmers in Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus surrealist fun house at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Orgy Girl. We met that weekend also. She’s the woman in The Needle post, the naked woman sitting by the punch bowl at an orgy. Her smile lets you know it’s okay to have some.

The Dancer. Kelsey left school the end of January 1970. The night before I was at this party, reluctantly and in a bad mood. This woman took off her clothes and did things at my feet. I was thinking, Just why the hell is she doing that?

The Dreamer. I had this strange dream I’d lost my virginity but couldn’t remember what happened. I woke up, went out and she was the first person I ran into. I blurted out my dream and she gave me a weird look and fled. That’s how I met her and later I found out my dream was what happened to her. She remembered going into a house and remembered coming back out but nothing in between. Six months on we weren’t doing so great and I ended up, in our dreams, chasing her in my submarine.

The Joker. After a party I got ready to go to bed and there was a woman there. “I’m staying the night,” she said. I seriously considered throwing her out. I’m glad I didn’t, but goodness knows this one hurt. I fell hopelessly in love with her but she had a boyfriend in prison and I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. He got out and beat the crap out of her. I got dumped, of course.

A long tedious interim where I was extremely relationship shy. I decided I wanted to go somewhere and live in the woods. So I asked every woman I knew and they all said yes, much too quickly. I figured they weren’t sincere. Kelsey was soon getting letters from women that they’re going to live out in the woods with me and a bunch of other women and have babies. This didn’t happen.

The American Artist. I met her in London in 1975. She’s the friend of the English Artist. I just got an email from her; she’s vacationing in London with her husband and son.

The Beautiful Woman. I was back home after working in London for a couple of years. The doorbell rang and I answered. My first thought when I see her was, She’s beautiful. Orgy Girl sent her to me because I had slides she could use for a class.

The Beautiful Woman was engaged but the fiancee lived out of town. He saw me one day and wanted to kill me. He was sure I stole his lover years earlier — a woman I’d never talked to. What she told him was that I was taking care of her. What she didn’t tell him was we were sleeping together. It was platonic since, because of stories she’d heard, she refused to have sex with me.

Kelsey and the daughter came to visit me for a month. We decided to live together but it was almost a year till I moved to Ohio and that happened. We’ve just had our 33rd anniversary of not being married.