Title: Women Without Men
Author: P.J. Reed-Martin
Cover artist: Uncredited [Barye Phillips]
Yours for: $9
Best things about this cover:
- Barye Phillips's paintings could be beautiful. Could be. Then again, they could be hot (mustard) messes.
- That's not a tear. It's a tear tattoo—you get one every time you kill an (inevitably) handsy matron.
- I love how the defining horror of prison, the impetus for complete social breakdown, is the absence of men. This way, men can thrill to the soft-core lesbian action they will (inevitably) find inside, while reassuring themselves that what women really need is ... them.
- Honestly, is her head resting on a pillow? A block of cheese? A pile of sand topped with a cat's paw? What the hell, Barye Phillips?
Best things about this back cover:
- So ... your typical "Chained Heat" stuff, with sadistic inmate instead of sadistic warden. Gotcha.
- I like "Queen," for its odd gender-confusing quality, but "courtier" is taking the metaphor into stupid and decidedly unsexy territory.
- "Twisted loves" = lesbian. "A web that would imprison Mary more degradingly than any cell in the world," though much wordier, also lesbian.
- Between "baggy, gray cotton" and "the gray, gross spider," I'm beginning to think that maybe the absence of men isn't your real problem. Try chartreuse uniforms. Or maybe mauve. I hear those colors are more soothing / less lesbifying.
Page 123~
After lights out, Willie's voice pleaded in the darkness. "How about it, Mary?"
"No," Mary said coldly. "But maybe you can twist my arm and make me, the way you made Annie go to court."
"Aw, baby. I'll come over to you if you want. Forget Annie. It's all over now."
"Oh, no, it's not, Willie," she said. "Go maul somebody else. You've had it. Never again."
Girls named after penises can be so pushy.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]
3 comments:
Clearly an homage to Men Without Women Hemingway's depraved cycle of prison stories (incl. 'Now I Lay Me').
Rex, I was recently reading someone somewhere claiming there was no such thing as female ejaculation and it was just a recent innovation of pornographic special effects, like anal bleaching.
To go by the face of the girl on the cover, though, it goes back at least as far as 1963.
I doubt if cover painter Barye Phillips would've had his anus bleached, though - it would've spoiled the colour for his palette knife.
Oh, I know why you're not here, you're rigging up that presentation of the ten best covers.
And there's me thinking you'd gone all Hollywood after doing that video presentation and van-ted...to be...ha-lone...
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