My sister Miriel and I take our mom to an animated film a local woman directed--supposed to be very good. But it's at a theater I mistrust--they've pulled last-minute substitutions before. So I called ahead to verify it's really showing tonight. Yes.

A short subject comes on. Two-color animation with a lithographic effect... the palette keeps changing, keying in the mood, but it's always two colors. A cool effect.

But it's about an Edwardian English schoolgirl who disobeys her parents and gets disciplined via spanking and bondage... oh, just the thing to show our mom!

The poor girl's hideous Maggie Thatcherish mum and her frumpy neighbor gang up on her--tie her ankles and then bend her over a headboard of a bed, really just a brass rail, so she's almost touching her toes, with her face shoved in a pillow, her pink little cunt and tiny breasts bare to us. They paw and fondle her, drooling and snickering. I'm embarrassed that I get turned on. From her eyes and muffled protests, her character's in the same predicament--body excited, feelings upset. At least she's not in physical pain; I'd freak, I can't take that, I'd get flashbacks to being bullied.

Hey! Who pulled my pants off? I didn't undress, that film somehow stole my pants! I'm just glad the theater's dark. As the film zooms in on her slippery lips and long legs squirming, I think "just like Miriel's legs!" As I sit here next to her... uh-oh, some incest issues of my own, huh? I don't dare look to see if she's naked, rubbing herself... or glaring at me, outraged.

Or, of course, both. Our family's a full-service guiltshop.

My erection starts throbbing strangely and there's a feeling deep in my pelvic floor, an unusual sensation, tickly, itchy... it's as if the cartoon first undressed me and is now masturbating me expertly, clinically... and then suddenly, I come without even touching myself--from sheer watching! Not much pleasure, it's just a release. I'm more startled than pleased.

Almost before my spurting has stopped, the film ends and the theater owner walks onstage. She starts lecturing us on the animation technique and the colors--blandly ignoring the subject! I just worry she'll turn the house lights on while I search for my pants and put them back on... I notice most of the audience is dressing hastily. Somehow the film stripped us all just as naked as the bound girl!

When the lights do come up, I bike impatiently back and forth in the aisle at the back, waiting for the feature.

The lights dim and...the same B&D cartoon runs again!

Where's the feature? We paid full price! It repeats the early bits, before the sex scene, and then stops. We don't even get a cheap premature orgasm this time. The house lights come up.

My mom and sister are gone. Walked out in disgust! Most of the audience has, in fact. This theater ripped us off again. This one short cartoon is all we get! It's not a feature film and never was.

I walk out disgusted. There's something familiar about the title on the marquee, as I leave: "The Royal Nonesuch." Then I remember that title. The theater scam in "Huckleberry Finn"!

I was warned.

NOTE IN THE MORNING

The theater in my dream got off easy. In Huckleberry Finn, they rioted during the third show of "The Royal Nonesuch" and ran the actors out of town.

So what was all that about? I can tell you exactly: yesterday on TV I saw Rachel McLeish, of the film "Pumping Iron II: the Women", supposedly a documentary on female weightlifters pushing the limits of female body images... But McLeish, interviewed, says "The movie was fiction" and "Female bodybuilders often use steroids at near-fatal levels..." She warns that body sculpting can be as deadly as anorexia--indeed, it's just a variant of that illness. A different insane ideal, a different set of risks... but the same body-obsession.

So what do the interviewers show as footage while she talks? Why, crotch and ass shots--pumping cheeks and thighs, faceless gym girls tied to gleaming brassy torture machines (no wonder my dream shows this as no different from Victorian bondage fantasies). They avoid the faces of the women, and even the muscles they're risking their lives to build. Tits and ass instead--pure sex tease. Exactly the disease McLeish is warning about in the voice-over! Women dying to be pretty--just a new definition of pretty, a new way of dying.

McLeish warned of a new bondage, a new disease... and they did their best to make it look hot!

And no one ran that TV crew out of town.

At least in Mark Twain's day, people knew how to riot... and what for.

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