Becky James had been a precocious child - beautiful and nubile at five, alluring at ten, and impossibly irresistible at twelve - a nymphet, a desirable ripe plum, a bursting flower - and by sixteen she was noticed by Elle and Cosmo. Both these magazines knew a diamond in the rough when they saw one, and Becky James would be their new cover girl.
Neither she nor her parents had done anything to enhance her appeal. She had simply come out this way, naturally provocative, sensual from tip toe, top to bottom; and impossibly attractive young woman whose sensuality defied description None o her suitors could have said why they couldn't look or stay away, why she was honey to bears, a salt lick, an exotic flower.
Like Marilyn Monroe who was not classically beautiful, but had an unmatchable sensuousness and sensuality, Becky had an allure, an immediate, undeniable sexual appeal. She embodied sexual desire. Men were drawn to her not to admire her beauty, but to make love to her. It is no surprise that despite the classic, unmatched beauty of Hedy Lamar, Ava Gardner and Vivien Leigh, impossibly beautiful women as classically beautiful as those of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, and as exemplary of the universal standard of feminine beauty as any woman, it is Marilyn Monroe men think of in their most erotic moments. And so it was with Becky James.
Yet Marilyn and Becky were women of different eras. Marilyn flowered in a still chivalrous age - women were sought for their charms and soft seductiveness. The days of Bernal Heights dykes in flannels and E-boots were only strips from an unimaginable dystopic future; but a future in which Becky James grew up.
What would have been a normal playing out of a thousand soap operas, boy-meets-girl romances and made-for-television love had a rough gestation. Ugly tough girls were getting the play, trannies rose to the top of the social pyramid, and back seat sex had been retired. Water sports, queer sexual monopoly, and first up the flagpole individualized sexuality took its place.
So Becky without even trying divided the Branch Parker School Without Walls into hostile groups. There were the butch, sex-of-the-day banger lot and the frilly, Barbie girly-girls, both played out with a vengeance. New wave vs old sandy, rum punch, recliner, palm tree old wave.
The tough girls lectured her on the new generation of female and how she represented the slave mentality of their mothers. Get rid of that lipstick, they said, and the eye shadow, and the facial sparkle Get real and down and dirty.
To the great dismay of the lesbians, transgenders, and deviant wannabees, Becky was the most popular girl in the class. The boys - few of whom had cross-dressed or even considered going over to the other ide - flocked around her like hungry orphans. They begged for audience, for attention, for just a scintilla of recognition. Becky was a goddess, a sexual truant from the cant and circumstance of genderism. No one wanted these weird sci-fi sexual aliens. They only wanted Becky.
Branch Parker had never given up its tradition of Prom King and Queen - there still would be a crowning, but in recent years the jury had been rigged - preference would be given to gay men and women of color, transgender preferred. Quite a parade of sexual maladroits had marched to the martial music of the Branch Parker band in years past. Letitia Johnson and Brattle Armstrong - a trans woman and trans man - had been elected last year and their dance moves were hot. Simultaneously and in sequence they played out the sexual drama of the tango - he/she, him/her on top and beneath, rapping out the syncopation in disharmony but unison. The whole affair had been choreographed, videoed, and sent viral.
This year, however, was different. In a show of unusual solidarity Becky James and Peters Dunning had been chosen Prom King and Queen. She, Marilyn Monroe clone, most sought after woman since Lavinia Hurst, Victorian aristocratic New Yorker with Mata Hari appeal and Sarah Bernhardt flair, and sexual diva par excellence; and he, football captain, Lothario of New England, maleness and virility combined stood together on the podium before their pas de deux on the dance floor - a lithe, graceful, sexually involving, and unmistakably carnal display of heterosexual desire.
The contract offers from Elle and Cosmo came in droves before graduation. They knew that it was her sexuality and sexual allure that would sell magazines and not the popular colored girl diversity of the times. She would be on the cover, nude at the centerfold, and sold to millions of women as the counterculture answer to sexual distortion.
As fate would have it, Becky turned out to be a Hedy Lamar, Hollywood goddess and sex queen who had discovered innovative means of electronic communication. She had her cake at ate it too - sought after, pursued, hunted as a bitch in heat, but recruited by the Physics and Computer Science Departments of Harvard and Yale. And of course tenure at MIT was helped not a little by her inadmissible beauty.
Vogue made her the best offer and featured her as a décolleté intellectual beauty, so in the very year she made tenure she made millions from corporate sponsorships. She became the living lie to transgenderism and alternate anything.
This all would not be surprising in any other place but the United States. The French are still with the old program of sexual dalliances; Italian men still ogle women; and Indian women, so long in Hindu sexual harnesses, have come out as sex goddesses in hip-hugger saris.
In America, however, there is still a lot of moaning about the recalcitrance of old guard, retrograde sexual Trumpists, but few pay attention any more. Eyes are turning to the Old Country whether knightly, patrician Europe or macho Latin America, and our obsession with sexual transformation and perversity is coming to an end
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