Damned

Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison. Please do NOT get  the idea that I'm some Miss Trollopy Van Trollop. It's true that I've read the Kama Sutra, hut why anyone would bother to attempt such revolting gymnastics remains largely a mystery to me. In regard to sex, mine is a kind of complete intellectual understanding with no real aesthetic appreciation whatsoever. Forgive my uneducated distaste. While I know what organ stimulates what, the bizarre, sordid business of phallus and orifice interaction, the exchange of chromosomes required for procreation of the species, I have yet to grasp the appeal. Meaning: yuck.

It is no accident that I segue from a scene in which my group is confronted by a towering nude giantess to a flashback in which I, myself, am undressed and exploring both my interior and exterior environs without the usual protective layers of clothing or shame. In the enormous, exposed figure of Psezpolnica, no doubt I feel an affinity, perhaps an admiration for any female who can present herself with such apparent lack of self-consciousness, seemingly in complete disregard for how she might be judged and exploited by her audience. Having masqueraded one Halloween as Simone de Beauvoir, I guess I'll always be a bit de Beauvoir.

The satire of Jonathan Swift remains a staple of English-speaking primary education—including my own—but it's usually limited to the first volume of Gulliver's Travels; or, in very daring and progressive classrooms, strictly as an illustrative example of irony, students might also read Swift's classic essay 'A Modest Proposal.' Few teachers would risk introducing the second volume of Lemuel Gulliver's memoirs, his misadventures in the island nation of Brobdingnag, where looming giants capture and make of him a household pet. No, it's far safer to present children, those powerless, diminutive children, with a narrative in which a giant is taken prisoner and manipulated under the control of tiny beings whose sole reason for not murdering him is their fear that his gargantuan corpse might decompose and threaten the overall public health.

It remains unknown to the majority of children that in the kingdom of Brobdingnag, in the second volume, Swift's picaresque travelogue does get a tad bit tawdry and dicey.

These are the salacious tidbits one learns when bothering to do the supplemental reading for extra credit. Especially while spending Christmas vacation naked, alone in an otherwise empty residence hall. In the second volume of Swift's masterpiece, once the giant residents of Brobdingnag capture Gulliver, he's presented at their royal court and is made a kind of mascot, forced to live in the queen's apartments, in very intimate proximity among the very gigantic ladies-in-waiting. It's these ladies who pleasure themselves by removing their clothing and lying together, sharing a bed while our hero is compelled to journey the peaks and valleys of their way-naked bodies. Writing in the guise of his narrator, Swift describes these women—the most-lovely female aristocrats of their society, who would appear so charming and appealing from a distance—as in fact constituting a swampy, reeking Gehenna in actual up-close physical contact. Our minuscule hero stumbles about their spongy, damp flesh, encountering monstrous pubic thickets of hairs, inflamed blemishes, vast cavernous scars, pits, knee-deep wrinkles, stretches of dead flaking skin, and shallow puddles of fetid perspiration.

And yes, it's duly noted that such a landscape depicted by Swift bears a marked resemblance to the actual terrain of Hell. This spreading landscape of noblewomen recline in their afternoon languor, expecting, really demanding that this teeny shrunken man bring them to pleasure. All the while, he stumbles and reels in disbelief and utter disgust of them. Overwhelmed with sickness and horror, exhausted, our enslaved Gulliver is forced to labor until the giant women are satisfied. In all of English literature, few passages can match this one of Swift's for its descriptive bluntness and unwelcome, masculine crudity.

My mother would tell you that men—boys, men, males in general—are too stupid, too easily found out, and too lazy to ever succeed as truly gifted liars.

Yes, I might be dead and rather imperious and steadfastly opinionated, but I know the blunt stink of misogyny when I smell it. And that it's very likely Jonathan Swift found himself the victim of childhood sexual abuse, and was now venting his rage in the passive-aggressive avenue of fantasy fiction.

In his own unhelpful way, my father would tell you, 'A women eats to feed her pussy' Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification.

My mother would say that men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty.

Really, being the offspring of former-hippie, former-Rasta, former-punk, former-anarchist parents means that I'm bombarded by no end of earthy truisms.

And no, I've never enjoyed an orgasm of my own, but I have read The Bridges of Madison County and The Color Purple, and if I learned nothing else from Alice Walker I learned that if you can help a woman discover the curative power of manipulating her own clitoris she'll serve as your loyal devotee and best friend forever.

That said, I stand before the Serbian demon, the towering nude tornado woman known as Psezpolnica.

First, I shuck off my remaining penny loafer and place it at a safe distance from the giant. I pull off my school cardigan, fold it, and settle it neatly on top of the shoe. Unbuttoning the cuffs of my blouse, I roll the sleeves back to each elbow, all the while gazing up the length of the giant's hairy legs, looking skyward to see her shins, the knees, the muscled naked thighs, craning my neck to see the Brobdingnagian mons pubis beyond.

A shrill whistle splits the air, a whistle as loud as a fire siren. On the ground, resting near my stocking feet, Archer's severed head looks up at me, the lips still pursed. 'Hey, little girl,' the severed head says, 'whatever you're planning, don't do it....'

Reaching down, I grab Archer by the long hairs of his blue Mohawk. Carrying the head as I would a purse, I step up onto the arch of the giant's foot.

Dangling from my hand, Archer says, 'Getting eaten hurts like hell.' He says, 'You don't have to do this...'

Transferring the blue hair to my teeth, I bite down, gripping the Mohawk as a pirate would a knife as said pirate climbs the rigging of a ship. In that manner, I climb the copious leg hairs of the giant demon Psezpolnica, scaling the fleshy ridge of her shin. Like Gulliver, I navigate the wrinkled skin of the demon's knees, then continue grasping the coarse body hair, pulling myself ever higher along the giant's thighs. Glancing at the distant ground, I see Babette and Patterson and Leonard, all of them with their heads tipped back, watching my ascension with their mouths gaping open. Looking around, from this height I can see the distant mother-of-pearl shimmer of the sperm ocean, the steam rising off Hot Saliva Lake, the perennial dark cloud of bats that hover above Blood River.

Swinging from his blue hair, gripped between my clenched teeth, Archer's head says, 'You're crazy, little girl, you know that?'

Still climbing, I skirt my way around the wrinkled folds of the labia majora, hauling myself, like Jonathan Swift's worse nightmare, through pungent thickets of curling, dense pubic hair.

Above me hangs the foreboding cornice of two enormous breasts. Between them I can discern a chin, above that a rolling pair of chewing lips, and one blue-jeaned leg of Archer's, still shod with a motorcycle boot, dangling out a corner of the giant's mouth.

Even though my knowledge is largely theoretical, based on years of witnessing naked family friends on French beaches, I do know my way around the adult female genitalia. Clinging to the abundance of lush hair, I locate the clitoral hood and deftly manipulate the sheltering skin, thrusting my arm within to find the retracted organ of such fabled womanly pleasure. On this scale, merely brailled blindly within the warm enclosure of the clitoral hood, it feels to be roughly the size and shape of a Virginia ham.

The severed head of Archer watches my actions. Licking his lips, Archer says, 'Little girl, you are sick...' Smiling, he says, 'The bitch monster ate me so, hey, the least I could do is return the favor.'

Retrieving my forearm from the warm depths of the fleshy hood, I take the hank of blue hair from my mouth. Holding the head so that I gaze directly into Archer's green eyes, I say, 'Take a deep breath, and make yourself useful,' and I stuff the grinning, salivating head deep into the hooded depths.

For a beat, not much occurs. Above me the vast mouth continues to masticate the cud of Archer's body, his blue jeans and boots. From below, the trio of Babette, Patterson, and Leonard stare, slack-jawed. Something stirs, moaning and slurping like a ravenous beast, moving within the skin of the clitoral hood. Then gradually, the giant's lips cease to chew. The giant's breathing deepens and slows. A warm pink glow suffuses the acres and acres of skin, a great landscape of blush covering the giant's face, chest, and thighs. A shudder, tremulous as an earthquake, shakes the towering body, and I'm compelled to grip the pubic hairs more tightly lest I plummet to the fingernail fields far below.