Dignity and Depravity.
A thought has been buzzing around in my head for some time now – you’ll just have to bear with me. Nothing else will get written until I rid my brain of it.
No, this isn’t a post about ‘cancer’ – though that is where the brain weevil stems from. It was during the process of working out what I really, really, hated about getting cancer. It wasn’t the fear of dying that everyone assumes must be so. Nor was it the various treatments I have ‘enjoyed’. I’m being sarcastic.
It was something much deeper, that was really digging into my psyche. Finally I got there.
There are some parts of our bodies, and some bodily functions, that from childhood are intensely private. As women, we get used to the ‘stirrups’ the charming contraption we must climb into and bare our genitals towards whoever happens to be interested. We spend a lifetime being ‘groomed’ by society, and ourselves, to be reasonably choosy about who we expose our genitals to – and suddenly we are supposed to abandon such reticence and be blasé about the presence, in my case, of three young Frenchmen standing between our legs having an earnest conversation in French whilst gesticulating towards our labia. It takes some getting used to, but I did, after a while.
Where my psychological strength disintegrated was when the cancer spread to my bowel and my life was ‘saved’ by being presented with a colostomy for Christmas. In itself, it was no problem. Not even when the nurse insisted on changing the equipment in front of Mr G so that he would know how to do it in an emergency. We have a close relationship and he is a good egg – but even so, I had never considered defecating in front of him.
It is the last taboo. A period of life we all observe in total privacy. Mostly, with the exception of those incontinent, we select the time, take ourselves off to some privacy, and never talk about it. We make embarrassed jokes about Bronco toilet paper. We titter nervously at the suggestion that someone might have opened their bowels involuntarily in a period of extreme stress. Workmen in stained and paint covered outer-clothes would pale at the thought of exposing a hint of a ‘skid mark’ on their underpants. Controlling your bowels, and disposing of their output in private is the mark of adulthood.
Believe me, having a colostomy hurls you into the outer reaches of lack of privacy. The world and its Aunt turn up to view the process – a Doctor, nurse, and “you don’t mind our students do you”? Day after day, they inspect the contents of the bag, discuss changes to your diet to produce something more to their liking – and every time they remove the bag – you defecate. Whether you want to or not. It is the ultimate loss of control (for this control freak!), the ultimate humiliation, the ultimate lack of privacy.
Fortunately, it is a horror memory from the past now, Ms Raccoon has been rebuilt with inner plumbing, but I have never forgotten how utterly vulnerable I felt at the time. Reduced to an infantile state – albeit surrounded by people who only wanted to help me.
It all came screaming back to me yesterday – nowt to do with my health, nowt whatsoever; it was this picture that did it, and I was totally outraged.
It is a picture of a girl, barely dressed, moments after she had had sex. That is also a time when we expect to have privacy. A time that we normally only share with those whom we have had sex with – be they however many. A time when we enjoy a quiet cigarette, or words of intimacy.
However, for this girl, it is not. The police have ‘reason to believe’ that money may have changed hands. Not money as in housekeeping twixt man and wife; nor even twixt lover and mistress; but money between man and woman outside of marriage or other forms of cohabiting.
Thus they believe that society wants them to burst into that bedroom, armed, helmeted, stab-proof vest coated, dressed like extras from a sci-fi movie, and haul all parties off to a cell in the police station.
Apparently the logic behind this is that they believe that deep in Romania, there might be one girl daft enough to think that a total stranger really will pay her fare to London in order to earn thousands of pounds a week clearing tables – and might then find herself ‘trafficked’ into a brothel.
In order to protect daft bint from her foolishness, perfectly capable girls, who have just had sex, of their own free will – and accepted money from the man outside of marriage of cohabiting – have to have every last shred of dignity stripped from them.
It is utterly outrageous. That picture went right through me and I thought, ‘I know just how you feel’. Vulnerable; humiliated; stripped of the privacy the rest of us enjoy – and you don’t even have the ‘It’s saving my life’ mantra to console yourself with. You’re just trying to pay the rent.
If we want morality police – which I don’t think we do, why don’t we issue them with long dresses and wooden sticks and they can do it properly?
Sorry to treat you to that – sometimes I just have something burning the tips of my typing fingers, and nothing else will emerge until it’s had its outing.
The first person who comments anything even vaguely resembling ‘Ms Raccoon writes crap’ will be tarred, feathered, and kept for my sadistic amusement for life. You won’t enjoy it. You have been warned.
- Gaye Dalton
February 9, 2016 at 12:27 pm -
Anna Raccoon I truly love you…just when I think I have had all I can take of life you restore me in a page.
But the intrusion “in flagrante” is only the most blatant intrusion of many you are deemed in need of as soon as you engage with the sex industry on either side…
This is where I would USUALLY launch into a 3000 word introduction…BUT…it is threatening to snow properly, there isn’t a blessed thing in my fridge and I have to get to post…so later…
- JohnR
February 9, 2016 at 12:32 pm -
It’s nothing really new, is it?
The police tend to have a rather authoritarian attitude to people anyway.
Doubtless she was “strip” searched in a cell, by a person of similar gender, and on cctv.
I fully expect that a “body cavity” search was conducted.
Probably her/his clothing was kept for “forensics”, and a police-issue white tissue coverall issued (very thin, so conceals nothing).
Yep. It’s enough to make you want to hate them: Except it is the system…- JuliaM
February 10, 2016 at 8:42 am -
It’s pointless blaming the police. It’s a crime. That’s – supposedly! – what they are there for.
- windsock
February 10, 2016 at 10:36 am -
Prostitution is not a crime. Soliciting is. Are all prostitutes trafficked?
- windsock
- JuliaM
- DtP
February 9, 2016 at 12:44 pm -
I once had some bollock issues requiring some kind of sonograph or something – not pleasant but, yer know, rock on. Two nursey types talking about irrelevant stuff which was awesome as I was a bit worried that err..the old Cap’n may think he was on parade or something – fortunately, he’d been demobbed. Anywho – job being done, slimy medium applied and procedure underway when another 3 wandered in and started getting supplies from the other side of the room! “Hiya, how’s it going – how ya keepin’, dodgy weather what the chuff what?”
Hmm…yeah, medical procedures are err…bummers! Taxi? Pour moi?
All the best Anna xx
- Mike
February 9, 2016 at 12:56 pm -
Ms Racoon writes total sense (as usual).
- The Blocked Dwarf
February 9, 2016 at 1:07 pm -
Having had to have The Bestes Frau In The World help to get me clean during the worst bits of the DTs I can ‘get’ what you are saying about the Colostomy Bag (perchance a little Norfolk village just down the lane from Upper Nosebleed?) the phrase ‘shit yourself in fear’ was surely invented not by soldiers about to go over the top at the Somme but by some Alki whose bladder and bowels had been hit by the waves of TERROR only going cold turkey off a daily litre and a half of Lidl’s ‘Scotch’ can bring.
Not sure I see why that photo should have provoked such a reaction from you though but that’s no doubt because I am a male uncaring, insensitive bastard. My only thought was ‘leopard skin throw, housecoat and white shoes? Show some Class girl, if not any sense’ and ‘sitting down after sex leads to stains on the leather upholstery ‘ (although as tacky as the rest of the scene is it might be easily wipeable PVC I suppose).
- Hadleigh Fan
February 9, 2016 at 1:28 pm -
I recommend the film by Luis Bunuel that you can find an extract of just here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6boxoksi3U
Anna, you are perfectly correct that defaecation is one of the last great taboos to be done in private, but clearly not in India where public crapping seems to be the norm.
As for prostitution, it is not illegal, but what is illegal is to have it on an organised basis where prostitutes can be safe and healthy. And I suppose they can be checked to see that they are in fact not trafficked and not under age.
I myself am greatly in favour of properly licensed and regulated prostitution, not I might add because I’m in need of the services, but then it would remove the activity from a cash only and therefore non-taxable source of income into one that was capable of generating a source of income for the Exchequer. Hopefully, this would mean that the activity of whores might reduce my tax burden, whereas today a bunch of whores in Parliament increase it!
A side effect of licensing prostitution might be to turn it into a recognised profession. I can imagine, for example, a Royal College of Prostitutes, with an ethical code of practice and professional standards of dealing with clients, providing VAT invoices for services rendered, refusing to take business away from another prostitute, and carrying professional indemnity insurance.
A further side-effect might be proof that a woman with children by several fathers has already demonstrated that in practical terms she qualifies in practical terms as someone adept in hiding the sausage, and therefore she can work in the noble profession and will not require maintenance from the state, which basically means the rest of us who pay taxes (most of whom incidentally don’t get the benefit of the service!) don’t have to support her. I imagine that universities will rush to provide courses leading to the degree of BA in Prostitution, although some will produce purely academically qualified tarts, and others including periods of industrial training, will produce tarts with more practical skills.
Grooming gangs could therefore face additional charges of evading VAT!
Now if only Luis Bunuel’s successors are interested in a script …
- Ed P
February 9, 2016 at 1:44 pm -
Would that be a BA (Honours) – on hers?
- Hadleigh Fan
February 10, 2016 at 1:35 pm -
If the degree was awarded in the US, it might also be “Cum Laude ” …
- Hadleigh Fan
- Ed P
- Stephen
February 9, 2016 at 2:17 pm -
When I had an ileostomy Anna, it was showering that really used to give me the pip…
Just when all was clean and dandy, the heat from the shower stimulated another seemingly endless outpouring…
MMMM….
More tea vicar?
- Mudplugger
February 9, 2016 at 2:39 pm -
I count myself as very fortunate that, for all my long adult life, I have managed to avoid any medical interference with either the ‘crown jewels’ or exhaust passage and can relate to the view of this being the final taboo – I really don’t want the messing around down there.
But then I’ve just passed a key age-threshold and have now been invited for an abdominal ultrasound scan of my aorta, which apparently can explode at any time, despite lack of symptoms and with fatal results, according to the fear-inducing paperwork – I just hope they’ll give me a picture, like they do with 20-week pregnant girlies.OK, that’s not exactly high on the stirrup-scale but it feels very much like the start of the slippery slope – next it will be all bodily-fluids and outputs, then it may be more invasive investigations, then the final humiliation of the rubber-gloved prostate examination, none of which fill me with glee. But, in our generation, we should really be thankful that medical science now offers advance detection and treatment of so many previously life-threatening conditions, so a few moments of dignity-removal seems quite a small price to pay – but please note, I may revise that opinion once I hear the snap of the medical Marigolds going on…….
- Robert Edwards
February 9, 2016 at 3:05 pm -
Magnificent. I am just back from a ‘swift half’ with an old friend who had apparently recovered from long-neglected prostate cancer some time ago. Now, he has back pain and swelling in his neck. I adverted his attention to this splendid website, so he may pop in.
What he hated about it all was that he had the sense that it was his own body which was trying to kill him. The privacy issue, of course, also loomed large but as he put it: “I couldn’t really complain; these people were trying to save my life…”
Fair enough…
The plod issue is of course both clumsy and grotesquely offensive. There is something rather pivotal about being post-coital and that picture is highly intrusive…
- Lilith
February 9, 2016 at 3:26 pm -
There’s a business opportunity for an enterprising soul.,.printing colostomy bags with “My other bag’s a Prada”
- Stewart Cowan
February 9, 2016 at 3:28 pm -
“A time when we enjoy a quiet cigarette, or words of intimacy.”
I reckon that the police were called because a cigarette set off a smoke alarm in no-smoking accommodation, so, quite rightly, was met with the full force of the law!
Why is a military policeman there? What’s the back story?
Actually, Anna, I think you’re comparing apples and oranges. Sex outside of marriage is very bad and so if an act of adultery has taken place and ‘MP’ actually means “Marriage Police” then bravo to our boys in black paramilitary uniforms. On the other hand, unavoidably doing a jobby in front of strangers is an unfortunate, but innocent, phenomenon.
TBD – I thank God that I had a Librium detox. It was hard enough. Bad scene all this sin.
These are perhaps my main sins to be worked on: gluttony and laziness. Actually, I can’t be bothered working, so am about to consume a whole quiche, cheese puffs and chocolate to tide me over.
Woe is me!
- Gaye Dalton
February 9, 2016 at 3:50 pm -
As soon as you are seen as a sex worker you lose every basic right that human consideration and courtesy usually default to allowing.
Here is the best way I can think of to show you how that works:
In October 2012 Linda Latham stood up to speak and introduced herself as “the manager of the Women’s Health Project, a program founded in 1991 to deal with the huge drug problem among street workers”.
I was dumbfounded, not least because I had checked this on the current HSE site that very week – it is still the same see: http://www.hse.ie/eng/services/list/5/sexhealth/whp/Women%E2%80%99s_Health_Project.html
Politically I can tell you she did that as part of a strategy to hide the fact that the 1993 Sexual Offences Act caused more problems than it was worth including an epidemic of drug abuse. I can also tell you that unless a project is drug related it doesn’t have a shot at Justice Department Funding…but that isn’t my point:
I was working on that street when the Project was announced, never mind founded (“Gaye, they are starting a project to tell us how to do safe sex” something we all knew more about than they did already, but the women tended to go with “it’s the thought that counts”). These women were almost all Mums, most of at least one teen or pre-teen. Many of them gave huge amounts of time to their local “Concerned Parents Against Drugs”. They were apt to believe that any of the younger one who admitted to smoking a little sensi was in dire need of rehab.
But it was ok to stand up in the Justice department and wipe out every aspect of the people they were and chose to be and call them junkies because they were only sex workers.
Four years on I am used to hearing us all reinvented to agenda, being INFORMED who I am, having the work I did described in intimate and pornographic detail that never happened, being told how I feel, what I OUGHT to think…
…but the first cut is the deepest, and that was the first cut…
- Lisboeta
February 9, 2016 at 3:52 pm -
By now, you’d think that society would have learned to accept that prostitution always has, still does, and ever will exist? Making it illegal merely forces it underground, primarily to the detriment of the women. Coincidentally, it also strengthens the hand of pimps and traffickers: they know that, in countries where it is illegal, the women have no recourse if they are ill treated. That much should be quite obvious. Yet there is a puritanical streak — in society but especially in lawgivers — that balks at the sensible solution. We have de-criminalised homosexuality. So why can’t prostitution be de-criminalised?
On the other topic: I am so glad that your inner plumbing has been restored!
- adams
February 9, 2016 at 4:58 pm -
Just had a urodynamics test in connection with an enlarged prostate . Two ladies . One tube up the back passage and another up the trouser snake . Then pee on command in full view of the 2 staff . Age does not come alone !
- Mazz
February 9, 2016 at 5:58 pm -
Enlightening and informative, thank you, Anna and all.
- Bandini
February 9, 2016 at 8:44 pm -
I recall reading an interview with Jerry Hall many moons ago in which she explained the secret to sustaining her (legally worthless) marriage to that legendary rascal, Mick Jagger: separate bathrooms.
Paraphrasing a little, it seemed that she kept him under her thumb & eager to spend the night together with her by not letting him watch her curl one out on the lav. (Did Mick return the favour? She didn’t say.) Their relationship sadly came to end not long after, for what were hopefully unrelated reasons.As she embarks upon a passionate new love affair with Rupert Murdoch one can only hope that he, too, is aware of his responsibilities & doesn’t ruin the whole thing with an impromptu poo.
- Bill Sticker
February 9, 2016 at 9:27 pm -
Colostomy bags. Ah, unhappy hospital memories. Glad it was only temporary for you Anna.
I’ve never really understood why prostitution attracts such moral outrage. Seen from a purely dispassionate standpoint, it’s a handy means of remedying the disparity in sex drive between men and women, providing employment opportunities not only in the primary role, but also subsidiary employment like facility management, security and health care.
- Hubert Rawlinson
February 9, 2016 at 10:40 pm -
“The world and its Aunt turn up to view the process – a Doctor, nurse, and “you don’t mind our students do you”?”
Oh my life, that is so true! I’ve lost count of how many times this has happened to me and yet despite always hearing my inner voice quite literally screaming “NO… F*ck off with your bloody medical students and your Uncle Tom Cobbly and all!” I always seem to end up giving the classic “English” reply of ” Oh… err… no… I mean… that’s just fine, of course, why not?” etc. etc. Glad to hear that the downstairs pluming has been renovated, hope that this means that you can both “Go” and also go on for a long time yet.
P.s. Kinda reminds me of this…
Anna Raccoon, Blogger, a woman barely alive. Gentlemen we can rebuild her! We have the technology. We have the capability to make the worlds first Bionic Blogger. Anna Raccoon will be that blogger!
- Pericles Xanthippou
February 10, 2016 at 10:46 am -
From my visit some years ago to an hospital I recall the boon of a catheter: when you drink as much tea and coffee as I, you acquire frequent-urinator points; the catheter relieved me (so to speak) of the need to rise from my bed in the I.C.U. A luxury, I thought. (Well, I didn’t get out much for those few days.)
Inevitably, I guess, I had never — till Mme. Raccoon took her brave stride in to the realm of personal frankness — given any thought to colostomy bags. If asked, I imagine I should have preferred to discuss my own death than any aspect of the distal alimentary canal.
One thing I found particularly enlightening was that Mme. R. had had the internal plumbing restored: I didn’t realize such a thing could be rectified (again … so to speak). The wonders of modern science!
Many thanks, Anna, for having the courage to write so openly on what for us all is a matter of the utmost privacy.
ΠΞ
- windsock
February 10, 2016 at 10:52 am -
Anna, I understand your feelings. May I give two examples of my own?
A few years ago my HIV decided my pancreas should stop working – no enzymes produced to digest food which therefore shot through at the speed of, well, food. Anywho, before they arrived at that diagnosis, I was given a colonoscopy. While getting changed into my gown, my “personal nurse” asked if I would mind the procedure being observed by medical students. OK, says I, and shortly after, he introduced me to them.
They were about 16/17.
I asked them at what university they studied (for they could have been prodigies for all I knew), they told me they were just starting A levels with a view to EVENTUALLY study medicine. I was very confused. I felt almost like a dirty old perv for letting them watch (but only almost), but then again, I thought if my arse doesn’t put them off medicine, nothing will…plus I was unaware that during a colonoscopy, your abdomen is constantly massaged to allow the camera to get around the bends. This produces lots of farting, to which the doctor commented “let it out, we are all used to that here.” I wonder where those “boys” are now?
Story number 2: returning from Seattle via Amsterdam (it really was the cheapest way home), I was stopped at customs at London. They searched my luggage, found nothing illegal (of course) and then asked to do a body search. I asked why – apparently because I looked “weird” (shorts with a yellow leather jacket) and I had come via Amsterdam and why would anyone do that if drugs were not involved?
As far as I was concerned, they had no grounds and were just trying to humiliate me. so I bend over, the rubber glove goes on and the poking around begins. Nothing found (obviously). The officer pulls his hand out and says ok, get dressed, you can leave. I stay bending over, and say do you mind carrying on a bit? I was starting to enjoy it.
I think that is the link with the photo Anna – humiliation in the medical process is a by-product. Humiliation in the legal process is the desired outcome.
- Eccentric
February 10, 2016 at 11:01 am - Eccentric
February 10, 2016 at 11:08 am -
As fer Dignity & Depravity SeX.
Quote the irreverent Woody Allen, “I’ve been asked, is the sexual act depraved? And I say, YES! If it’s done right.”
- Gaye Dalton
February 10, 2016 at 2:17 pm -
Must add a lighter not from my repertoire…in the past couple of weeks, in their enthusiasm to invade the privacy of others before the Dail (Irish Government) was dissolved pre-election the Irish Government nearly managed to decriminalise all forms of same sex incest:
https://mymythbuster.wordpress.com/rushing-the-sexual-offences-act-2016/They failed…this round.
- Michael
February 10, 2016 at 8:08 pm -
The only time I’ve been near was when a b*ll*ck managed to tie itself up in a knot. Speaking of the religious police, the ambulance driver told me he’d been out working in the Middle East when one of those religious policemen looked over at him.
My ambulance driver motioned the guy to come over. “Listen pal,” he told him. “You wave that stick at me and I turn you into a lollipop, OK?”
Apparently the guy just grinned and continued on his way.
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