Harry Palmer
I saw a pic of Erika Eleniak in the UK’s Daily Mail the other day. She was apparently quite famous in her day when she starred with David Hasselhoff as the character “Shauni McLaine” in the TV series Baywatch (original series 1989 to 1999). She looked quite fetching in her red swimsuit.
These days Erika is sporting ‘sleeve tattoos’. I have to wonder why women, beauties like her especially, feel the need to have facial piercings and once elegant arms now covered by tattoos? It intrigues me, as to how best, as a woman, you might tackle the problem of ageing, especially when you have been relying on your svelte appearance and beauty to provide you with the income you need to maintain the standard of living to which you’ve become accustomed.
It’s a problem that’s always faced actresses of course. Some scramble towards fillers; Botox and cosmetic surgery, but it seems that, even with these treatments, they’re still displaced by the younger set. Some of them, both young and old, who’ve lost their appeal to their fickle followers just give up, take to drugs, tattoos and ‘dumpster diving’, as a former starlet colleague of Erika Eleniak’s was pictured doing a few days ago in West Hollywood. Poor woman.
It’s quite interesting and instructive to flick through the Wikipedia pages of Hollywood celebs. Many seem to have put a couple or three wives or husbands behind them before they settle and stick with the last one – and that last one, one suspects, only because they realise they’re getting on a bit and don’t wish to die alone in their mansion; their corpse only to be discovered by the ‘daily woman’ who comes in to do the cleaning.
With the arrival of the likes of Tik Tok and Only Fans on the web, the young female body in the short period of its prime has become more and more available for trafficking, pornography and objectification, where such women can make fortunes in no time at all from gullible drooling men – and no doubt some drooling women too. The ogling of them being the least intrusive of possibilities. With the parallel growth in the promotion of the interests of transvestites and sexual perversions in general, it would seem that the feminists who once complained about the ‘objectification of the female form’ have been overwhelmed by this tsunami of – what else can an old codger like me call it? – filth.
Let me finish this brief tour d’horizon on the packaging of the body of the wealthy female, by suggesting, to paraphrase Jane Austin, that it is a truth universally acknowledged that it’s actually what’s inside the packaging that counts. Or, tongue in cheek and to quote the lyrics from Jimmy Soul’s 1963 hit: “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, never make a pretty woman your wife, from my personal point of view, get an ugly girl to marry you.”
Let me expand on this subject. My father, who married a Manchester woman, was born in County Galway, Ireland and he took my three brothers and me there during the summer holidays each year.
The old, stone built cottage, the family home he himself along with several brothers and sisters grew up in, still stands today and is used as a barn. Our living conditions in the old home during our summer holidays were very primitive as you can imagine, with no electricity or flush toilet, and a turf fire.
The youngest of my father’s siblings – as quite commonly occurred in those days – was left behind to care for the poor old mother after his brothers and sisters left for the rich and prosperous shores of England. And who could blame them in those troubled times in Ireland with the handed-down, still-strong memory of the great famine of the 1840s and the civil war in Ireland on the way to gaining its full independence in the early 1920s? The left-behind was son Uncle Tom-Joe and he never married.
My brothers and I tried to help Uncle Tom-Joe out around the farm when we were in Ireland for our holidays. Making hay, stacking the bricks of turf in the bog ready for transporting (by donkey and cart) to the homestead after Uncle T-J had cut and tossed them to us and spreading muck to encourage next year’s growth of grass, etc.
On one memorable occasion taking the old sow Merty to be serviced by the boar. A license was required to own a boar, so each locality had one boar, whose owner was patronised by the local farming community. My brother and I harnessed up the donkey, put him between the shafts of his little high-sided cart and ushered Merty up a ramp onto its deck.
When we got to our destination, we lowered the ramp and coaxed Merty into the compound with her paramour. It was the first time, ever, that copulation had entered my life. I’d never been told about “the birds and the bees” or even discussed such matters with my parents or teachers at my Catholic secondary school. I saw the performance to be of great interest and I imagined that it was probably the sort of thing most mammals got up to in order to procreate, so I stored it away in the back of my mind as a vital lesson in the biology of the species.
When the time came, it was another lesson to watch Merty give birth to her many offspring and I shall never forget that either, when the males among the batch were old enough, to witness Uncle T-J use a razor to cut the testicles out of their scrotums and throw each bloody mess to the waiting farm dogs. So perhaps you can see why I became a lifelong vegetarian.
But this process from start to finish taught me the stark difference between the physical act of procreation and love, itself, that I concluded must come from the heart. How very different in this present day and age. Our present day monopolistic use of the word ‘love’ was broken down into six different areas in ancient Greece – brotherly (and presumably sisterly) love and love for oneself, love for one’s spouse and children etc. One of the six was the familiar eros, their word for sexual passion and which gave access to the spiritual plane, whereas these days copulation is merely – mostly – the fulfillment of lustful, animal desire. You only have to see the front pages of some newspapers, TV programs like Love Island and what’s available on the internet to recognise the truth of this.
I resent and lament how the word ‘love’ has been reduced: diluted to mean anything and nothing. Jesus advised his disciples to “love thy neighbour”, and one example of the misuse and abuse of the word is the way in which politicians, following hidden agendas, use it to fling open their countries’ borders and invite in primitives and savages. The word is weaponised, too, by vocal groups like those who loudly promote the cause of homosexuals. In actual fact I believe the meaning Jesus is trying to communicate here, is for one to love fellow believers as you do your own self and your immediate family, and certainly not in a collectivistic sense to embrace a crowd, a country or even a church.
So circling back to where I started, with people who cover themselves with tattoos, these people seem to me to be wanting to signal something about themselves, rather than trying to enhance their appearances.
My predecessors in the seafaring life took to tattooing themselves because – though it might only be a ship’s anchor or even an arrow through a heart on the bicep with a girl’s name beneath – it sent the message that “I’m a sailorman and I travel the world and I have seen things that you’ll never see.” As well as impressing the wife or girl friend with the pierced heart that says she’s “the one and only” of course.
So what are we to make of the modern-day fad for having lots of tattoos and piercings, for sleeping on the streets and ‘dumpster diving’ etc? I suspect that these things are suggestive of a depth of loneliness, a lack of ‘true’ love and an attempt by those in the “Last Chance Saloon” of life, to find friendship and empathise with others who have found themselves in a similar lonely or disenfranchised plight.
Of course, some will claim their ‘decorations’ are ‘artistic’. More fool them. It’s a big wide, wonderful and infinitely complex world and universe that we live in, and to obsess about what tatt you’re to get next, or about getting your penis, vagina or nipples pierced, is to have locked yourself up in mental cell and must surely be indicative of a lack of cognition, or of a brain addled by drugs.
May God open the eyes of such tragic people and give them relief and the spirit of hope and love that they deserve.
