𝒮𝓃𝑒𝑒𝓏𝑒 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝑀𝑒, 𝐵𝒶𝒷𝓎

Tackling the psychosomatic “women’s illness” [5/24]

I hold a freshly-printed edition of my novel, The Charlatan, close to my chest. The ink has dried, the glossy cover art shines, and the content within fails to stimulate even a lick of cringe. This linguistic formulation, “close to the chest,” doesn’t describe my true feelings. I want to share it with you. I want you to read the book and emote. I want you to buy a copy to display on your coffee table, and another for your dinner table, so that winter visitors can admire and comment upon your pristine taste in contemporary literature. There’s one with your name on it available here.

This submission demonstrates technical proficiency that suggests formal training. The author’s bio remains conspicuously absent from the materials. The prose maintains consistent control throughout escalating absurdity, which requires genuine skill in place of lady luck. The body modification themes are handled with surprising sophistication: exploitative and sanitized, not quite. These musings are unsettling in ways that serve the narrative. I wonder about the scribe's background in medical or religious studies, given the precision of certain details about bodily transformation and institutional structures.

My office ventilation system excretes sounds that resemble infants crying during late afternoon hours. Not mechanical whining nor air pressure changes; I speak with trepidation of actual, genuine, newborn distress calls: rhythmic, urgent, with the unmistakable cadence of the biological over the mechanical. I hesitate to merge the two into something bio mechanical, for fear of an accidental summoning. Maintenance requests submitted through standard channels return to my cluttered workstation marked "No Such Issue Documented" and “Please Ignore”—a blatant contradiction, mind you—in handwriting that changes style between words. Multiple entities taking turns with a chronic, timeless pen. “Do Not Disturb.” The crying stops whenever I approach the vents, resuming only when I return to my desk and pretend not to notice.

Regardless of her unparalleled advancements in the field of digital retouching, expanding market share beyond the pale, gaunt faces lining the shelves of magazine huts, delivering down-to-the-minute adjustments for wealthy weight-watchers on walkabout through wraparound sheets of hyper-thin Smart Plastic, able as it is to blast the source, pores giving rise to blackheads, with safe, environmentally-conscious chemical burns¹—despite this pedigree, Franz Mayo² bears the burden of imperfection across her pock-marked map, specifically a series of vertical scars above and below her sockets, along the same latitude, remnants of a botched surgery designed to turn her slits³ into stones, large round opals,⁴ all the better for the gazing.

To unblock her fine skin’s organic healing process, Franz signs up for coursework at her local Allergist mission,⁵ the new cadet on the block of specialty religious orgs catering to otherworldly desires of all [stars and] stripes. After a few sets of quizzes and questionnaires, Franz partners with a ten-cent clergyman,⁶ personalized to her individual needs and ready to perform The Modification: the Allergist’s copyright-protected chief procedure, involving the shrinking of thirteen priests for a systematic pore-by-pore investigation of the subject’s face,⁷ eliminating bad vibes to clear a path towards a full-toothed smile that every passing smelly male simply knew she had inside.

Poor naïve Franz, unaware of her status as crash-test dummy in the center of a soon-to-be-legendary A/B experiment,⁸ comparing and contrasting the effectiveness of both verbal suggestion and physical action in pursuit of the elusive female grin, jeering streetbound men at one end and the combined mystic might of human knowledge and experience at the other,⁹ an eternal struggle in which there are no champions, only less-wrong louts. The results are, so far, inconclusive.

I feel protective, a submerging of critical faculties. Franz's story triggers memories of being examined, evaluated, found wanting by authorities who claimed expertise about my own body and emotions. The miniature priests are a perfect metaphor for invasive care: help that violates in order to heal, attention that destroys what it claims to improve.

The key suggestion, thorough study of female psychology, is chilling: researchers who view women as objects, requiring optimization, when they are, of course, subjects, capable of self-determination. Franz believes she's seeking healing; she's providing data about which manipulation techniques produce desired behavioral outcomes. Her suffering becomes a quantified resource for future control mechanisms.

The thirteen priests produce a familiar chill of gooseflesh, though I can't locate the memory. Small figures moving across skin, tiny voices offering guidance that sounds like judgment, microscopic authorities claiming knowledge about needs they've never experienced. The gut instinct sayeth: “protect Franz from this examination, shield her from these nitpicky fixes, let her be herself, as is and as always will be, and also with you, amen.”

I found myself checking my own reflection while reading this, an obsessive quest for flaws that might require comparable intervention. This mystery man writes about bodily modification with unsettling intimacy, perhaps describing procedures he’s witnessed or undergone. Who knows enough about pore-level spiritual investigation to chronicle with such specificity?

Smart Plastic: a fictional technology? No less haunting. Chemical burns marketed as conscious skincare, environmental awareness applied to deliberate tissue damage. A stranger, out there in the night, has convinced Franz that harming herself represents progress, that chemical warfare against her own cells constitutes self-improvement. The maternal voice trapped inside my head wants to wash her face with cool water, apply simple moisturizer, and tell her she's perfect as originally created.

Wanda

1. Vertigo-inducing contradictions, the subdermal sinking further, deeper, down down down to the unconscious. This paradox, a Dadaist delight. Tzara spends the length of her manifestos destroying logic through juxtaposition. No artistic rebellion here, merely corporate doublespeak weaponized against female skin. Technological woes: the promise of care, the prescription of violence. I want to shield Franz from these “improvements” the way you'd gently yank a child's little mitts from a blistering stove, before the screams arrive.

2. To denigrate this poor woman with a common condiment as a familial name may be the author’s most insidious insertion.

3. In his psychic research, Frederick Myers documented cases of individuals whose eyes changed color during trance states. I think there’s NO COINCIDENCE that the ugly word “slit” is also a crude synonym for a woman’s womanly womanhood, further suggesting the latent misogyny of the author.

4. Medieval lapidaries described, on illuminated manuscripts, the magical properties of precious stones. Albertus Magnus claimed opals could render their wearers invisible. Franz's opal eyes do the opposite: they make her hypervisible to male gazing while eliminating her capacity to see clearly. This surgery was a colossal failure; you cannot improve on original creation without destroying what made it functional.

5. Baptist missions, Methodist missions, Presbyterian missions, Catholic missions, Seventh-day Adventist missions, Pentecostal missions, Lutheran missions, Episcopal missions, Congregational missions, Mormon missions, Jehovah's Witness missions, Unity missions, Christian Science missions, Unitarian missions, Assembly of God missions, Church of Christ missions, Nazarene missions, Wesleyan missions, Foursquare missions, Salvation Army missions, Mennonite missions, Quaker missions, Brethren missions, Disciples of Christ missions, Reformed missions, Evangelical Free missions, Southern Baptist missions, American Baptist missions, Independent Baptist missions, Missionary Baptist missions, Primitive Baptist missions, Free Will Baptist missions. No Allergist missions in any directory I can locate, which suggests either fresh formation or deliberate obscurity, a burying of secret histories under ten tons of cinderblock. Allergies represent the immune system attacking things it should tolerate, the body's refusal to accept what the mind considers necessary. Franz's skin problems are a theological crisis requiring ecclesiastical intervention, no medical treatment needed. I’m sneezing more lately, though my office has no dust, no obvious irritants, no pollen, no windows.

6. A wanton violation of every principle of apostolic succession documented in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. Sacred authority is best transmitted through unbroken lineage, not marketplace transaction, and the comically low pricing of “ten cents” can only ignite a race to the bottom, especially in light of present global dollar value. The Fox Sisters popularized table-rapping in 1848. Franz could seek exactly this corruption: discount salvation for problems that may not necessitate fixing. The quizzes, the questionnaires, spiritual matchmaking, metaphysical speed-dating, it’s all so tiresome, divine intervention on demand. Salvation becomes commodity sold by competing spiritual entrepreneurs, much like in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.

7. The canonical twelve plus one heretical addition for feminized maintenance work. This recalls the homunculi in Paracelsian alchemy, artificial beings created to perform tasks too dangerous for full-sized humans. Get these shrunken authorities away from her face! Let her imperfections remain unmolested! I’m reminded, by force, that the term "headshrinker" (psychiatrist) originally referenced the Jivaro people's tsantsa practice: reducing severed enemy heads to fist-sized trophies while preserving facial features. The linguistic connection reveals cultural anxiety about therapeutic intervention: both practices involve taking something essentially human and reducing it through specialized knowledge, the tyranny of experts now and the anarchy of the tip of a spear then. The Jivaro captured enemy souls; psychiatrists shrink psychological problems through an eternal loop of talk therapy. The contemporary therapeutic state extends across entire populations. Personal problems become categories requiring professional intervention, rather than community wisdom or individual resilience. The priest class, displaced by a managerial corps, dwells forever on the problems of the past instead of transcending them.

8. A spectral echo of Milgram’s obedience studies, though here the subject doesn't know she's being tested. She has not consented to invasive study and documentation. Franz yearns for spiritual healing while researchers measure which manipulation technique activates desired behavioral changes. The "inconclusive results" justify continued experimentation, a merry-go-round of malpractice, no mention of the true question: whether authentic happiness can be externally manufactured.

9. As if joy were bullion buried in female faces, requiring excavation by competing emotional argonauts. The "eternal struggle" between street harassment and mystical intervention both assume women cannot access their own felicity without external manipulation. Neither approach questions whether the smile they seek to dredge up is authentic or performed, whether compelling happiness from reluctant countenances serves the woman or her observers. With immediacy and clarity, my latent mommy instinct recognizes this: genuine joy cannot be manufactured through duress, whether crude or sophisticated. A mother knows the difference between a child's spontaneous, special sense of glee and the strained exhibition produced by adult demands for cheerfulness. Franz is a laboratory specimen, in experiments designed to solve a chimera: the assumption that women are naturally mirthless and require intervention to access elementary human affects.