“Woman, respect thyself!” A confrontation of epic proportion between a magickal washing machine and a woman wanting to have sex.
Back in the sixties, a woman whose name has been forgotten by history made a bid for Ascension. More precisely, she bumped whatever free woman archetype there was, and ascended herself as the Flying Woman.
Her last ritual act was to burn her bra. Since this was her last ritual act, however, it never did burn – she ascended as the flames started licking one of the bonnets. What remained behind was therefore a bra with a slight burn stain. Unsurprisingly, that bra became a powerful artifact. One of her followers quickly grabbed it, and stashed it in her purse.
Many years later, some time in 2005, that unnamed follower of the Flying Woman died. Her son-in-law, planning to sell her appliances and clothes to pay for the funeral, decided to wash the bra upon seeing the stain. In went the bra, twirling and turning in the soapy water of the washing machine. Maybe through some cosmic will, maybe through happenstance, that very bra made its way through one of the cracks in the washing machine, and into its mechanism.
With any other bra, what would’ve happened next is that the piece of clothing would’ve gotten stuck in one of the moving parts, thus breaking the machine. Unable to complete its spin cycle, it would’ve left the clothes damp with rincing water. Most likely, the son would’ve ended up leaving the washing machine on the curb, unwilling to pay good money to get it repaired just to sell it afterwards.
This was not just another bra, however, and the machine didn’t break. It got sold to a store dealing in used appliances. Later, it got bought by a woman named Gina Hayes. This is as much her story as it is the washing machine’s.
At first, Gina was quite happy with her buy. Her clothes never looked better. They made her feel beautiful, in a strange empowering but not sexual kind of way. The whites came out as white as fresh snow; the colors as bright as the day she bought them. It was like living in one of those TV advertisements for laundry detergent.
Being a human being, however, Gina had other needs than pristine clothes. Put simply, she needed to get laid. Badly. Her ex had left over a year ago, and it was time for her to get back in the game. Not one to catch flies with vinegar, she decided to go out and shop for some sexy clothes and a bit of lace lingerine.
Wary of the germs of other people, she decided to wash her new clothes before going out. She threw them in, along with a batch of dirty laundry she’d been waiting to clean up.
The loud buzzing sound of the end of cycle alarm resounded throughout Gina’s appartement. As she threw the articles of clothing in dryer one by one, she noticed rags and tatters among the lumped up wet clothes. Quickly, she realised that those shreds of fabric were in fact her brand new clothes.
Furious, she went back to the store. She got a refund. She went to another store, bought new similar clothes, and came back to her house to wash them. Again, ripped to shreds. She called up a repairman, who opened up the washing machine but found nothing wrong with it.
Gina turned upon internet chatrooms. Made a few on-line contacts. Over the course of the following week, she flirted mildly with a few men. Then she had to wash her old clothes again. Everything seemed intact, but upon getting her clothes out of the dryer, Gine noticed that the washing cycle had left discolored stains upon most of her clothes. Looking closer at one of her t-shirts, she noticed that the stain was in the shape of a “W.” The next article of clothing, a pair of jeans, had a clear “O” shaped stain. Frantically, Gina laid down her clothes on the floor. She gasped.
The clothes spelled out a message : “WOMAN RESPECT THYSELF.”
Crying and in shock but still needing to go work the next morning, Gina went out to by new clothes. Some were plain, others a bit sexier. Again, the latter kind got shredded in the washing machine.
Fed up with her seemingly whimsical machine, she tried to call up stores and friends, asking them to take it away. Each time, the machine started up all by itself, making machinery sounds so loud that Gina had to hang-up the phone because the person on the other end of the line just couldn’t hear her anymore.
Gina went out, called a few friends from a payphone, told them to get their butts over at her place right away. A few hours went by, and they showed up. Even between the five of them, the machine felt impossible to lift. It was as if it had turned as heavy as an elephant.
This was war. Although she only half-believed it, Gina understood that the washing machine didn’t want her to have sex. She logged onto her favorite chatroom, and steeled herself against whatever was going to come up. There was no way she was going to let her life be dictated by an appliance – and a used one, at that!
As she flirted quite aggressively with various guys – sending revealing pictures of herself left and right – the washing machine growled in a mechanical sort of way. The sloshing sound of a huge load of clothes being washed filled the appartement, and water began to spill out of the machine.
“Go on. I don’t care anymore,” said Gina.
Of course, when the water flooded enough of the floor to fry her powerbar – thus shutting down her computer – Gina started caring again. She rushed to the washing machine, and kicked it again, again, and again.
The washine machine remained stoic. Appliance like.
Throwing on the first clothes she could find, Gina went out and called a repairman again. She ran to a sex shop, and grabbed the sluttiest lingerie she could find. Her plan was foolproof. The repairman and the lonely girl next door. This was the stuff porn was made of.
The doorbell rang, the repairman showed up. Gina opened the door in her sexy attire, and nonchalantly led the the repairman to the washing machine. It really should be noted that the repairman, however, was not even close to the stuff porn was made of. A five months shadow on his face, a huge belly, his asscrack showing from the top of of his jeans – the man was unattractive to say the least. If you added to that the musk of gear oils, sweat and farts that emanated from him, he was downright disgusting.
Behind the repairman, Gina grabbed her tits aggressively, made a face that was half-angry and half-slutty, and mouthed silently to the washing machine : “Fuck you bitch, I’m gonna fuck him anyway!”
Gina moved closer to the repairman, pressing her breasts against his back and leaning over his shoulder. Maybe through some cosmic will, maybe through happenstance, her long hair slid on each side of her shoulders, their tips pointing deep within the barrel of the washing machine. She was just about to say some uninspired bit of porn dialogue to the repairman while grabbing his crutch when the machine started up suddenly. How her hair got wrapped up in the machine’s agitator is anyone’s guess.
A scream echoed in the hall.
About ten minutes or so after the repairman ran screaming away from Gina’s appartement, she was found dead. How a scalpless woman in slutty lingerie managed to carry a washing machine to the appartement block’s stairs remains a mystery. How she managed to end up crushed under the machine as both of them tumbled down the stairs is more mysterious still. How the machine managed to stay intact and operational after crashing down three flights of stairs, nobody wants to know.
You don’t have to understand something to turn it into a selling point.
“Trust me, mam. This washing machine is sturdy as hell. It fell down three flights of stairs once, and it still worked afterwards. You won’t find a better buy anywhere else. Not at this price.”
I feel sorry for that bra. I mean, to be created at the ascension of the Flying Woman and then prevent a woman from getting what she wants – that bra must be pissed as hell at the washing machine.
It does seem bizarre that an artifact of the Fyling Woman would get between and woman and what she wants, whatever that might be. I could imagine it telling her to have some self-respect, or keeping her from debasing herself . . . I mean, to get that desperate just sounds horrible . . . but isn’t sexual freedom part of the flying woman’s portfolio? And besides that, she only got deperate enough to really hit the bottom of the barrel when the machine prevented her from meeting someone decent. But I guess the Puritanical reverseal makes sense, given that the bra itself just sat around for forty years, and that it’s caught in a washing machine, of all things. (The machine itself, and its story, are brilliant!) What I want to know is, what did the bra do originally – and what if someone got it out? Any ideas?
– F.A.R. out
Hey Far,
Good point about sexual freedom. Maybe it didn’t come across as clearly as I would’ve liked, but the bra / machine are objecting to Gina objectifying herself for sex. It’s okay for her to get laid in plain clothes and as her, but it’s not if she’s dressing up according to stereotypes, or acting according to stereotypes.
Plus, you know, the bra’s been trapped in a machine for a long long time, like you said.
Anyhow. As far as the bra itself and what it does, I have NO idea.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to comment!
Jocelyn, that’s sort of what I figured. That it didn’t really care about her getting laid, but about not getting laid by “giving in to the patriarchical values of beauty and attraction”.
As far as the bra goes, I tell you this much: it is NOT a bra you want to wear. I mean, it’s symbolic power is essentially against itself. Craaazy.
That’s a cogent observation, Neville – that bra must have split personality disorder. It’s a symbol of what the Flying Woman was destroying, caught in the wake of her ascension. So, no wonder if it’s a strange (or even self-defeating) manifestation of womens’ lib.
– F.A.R. out
So rad! Sadly, the bra-burning thing was actually a media fabrication:
http://www.snopes.com/history/american/burnbra.htm
I suppose there’s no reason why an artifact created by an ascension has to be a manifestation of the traits of the ascended. It could always be a backlash. Not in this specific case, necessarily, but in general, why not? It can be the shadow to the form. Or even just some small effort on the part of the universe to make some balance. Or not.
The fact that women didn’t actually burn their bras doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to a Flying Woman ascension bid – the important part is that people thought they did.
We’re talking about an avatar, after all. Image is everything, and the image of the feminist in the mass consciousness of the times was all about bra-burning.
And after all, this woman DID burn her bra. It’s still a valid symbolic action.
Or rather, she ALMOST did. Maybe the fact that she ascended before the bra actually burned is responsible for the fact that bra-burning never actually caught on, and its paradoxical subsequent popularization.
I think it makes a lot of sense for this bra to be inhibiting a woman’s desires for her own sake- it represents exactly what the Flying Woman was trying to conquer, and yet its almost-death aided her ascension.