gullybogan

Dear Reader,

It’s easy to see why this image was co-opted for a parody aimed at that Mexican politician woman who’s in all the news lately.

It was immediately obvious that the image was faked. No forty-something would have a body in that shape. No mother of five would have that belly.

But the image still had enormous evocative power. There’s just something about bikinis and guns – let alone Mexican flag bikinis – that is disturbingly stirring.

The girl – Elizabeth – is quite fetching, you must admit. The way she has that left foot poised like that, and the confident way she holds the air rifle (“bb gun”), marks her as a woman in charge, both of her femininity and her masculinity.

And that’s the thing. Bikini babes with guns is a fetish. There are DVDs and websites out there in the capitalism devoted to girls in bikinis (or less) toting heavy weapons about, firing torrents of rounds like furious ejaculate into the air above suitably remote locales.

Why do men find this attractive? Apart, that is, from the obvious allure of silicon-fed breasts jiggling in high-desert air as automatic weapon fire shudders the model’s frame?

Why do we men (some of us, at least) want a woman, as Henry Higgins lamented, to be more like a man?

To shed light on this, let us consider another fetish: the woman in a bogged car fetish.

Oh, yeah. If you know where to look, the capitalism is full of DVDs of scantily-clad, stiletto-tottering babes taking rental 4WDs out to mangrove flats expressly for the purpose of getting them bogged to the axles.

And then there’s the roaring engine, the spinning wheels, the flying mud, the rocking back and forth.

It’s like the model is having some sort of filthy sex with this huge man-machine.

The girl is not shown as save-me-before-i-break-a-nail helpless, calling out plaintively in her footballer’s-girlfriend voice for some strapping lad to extract her from her predicament and then do her up her pink. Oh, no. She is alone, and she has to get out into the mud and deal with the shit her rental is in by herself.

So she’s dressed like a hooker, but she’s dealing with man stuff.

Men, and correct me if i’m wrong, dear Reader, identify with their tools. The gun and the 4WD are both manly tools. The woman, playing the role of tool-handler, does not subvert the power of the tool by using it. If anything, she increases its virility through the masculinising of her femininity before its demands.

And it *only* works if she acts like a man would, while handling that tool. It’s not a victory of masculinity over her innate femininity, but a relocation of the two natures, from foreground to background.

Throw into this the use of the Mexican flag on her bikini, and you’ve got some very complex subtexting going on.

If you flickr for images of girls in aussie flag bikinis, you get girls holding beer bottles and girls being lifesavers. You don’t get girls in the stars and crosses toting death tools the way you do with the stars and stripes.

I wonder why not.

My theory is that in this country we have a different attitude to the frangibility of the male-female boundary. Aussie girls are able to mix it with aussie blokes on almost like-footing, and aussie blokes (the big, burly ones, at least) will put on a dress at the slightest provocation, be it a pie night or a pool party.

Also, there’s the fact of the flag. In Mexico, if you put a flag costume on, you become a Superhero. Wonder Woman, for examples, wears togs made out of flaggy elements. And, as her name suggests, you might well wonder if she really is a woman, because, apart from the physiognomy, she acts pretty much like all the male superheroes. Except for maybe checking her nails more often.

The only time we in this country have seen the flag used to transform ordinary mortals into superbeings has been at the Olympics. And then it’s quite clearly a flag, not an item of clothing. One drapes oneself in a flag, but one becomes one’s clothing.

And that’s why i don’t think we’ll ever see a politician from this country being lampooned by having her head sardonically superimposed onto a chick wearing an aussie flag bikini and toting a gun.

Holding a stubbie, though, that’s another story.

Yours,
Gullybogan