Sphinx & Semele • by Dani Spinosa • 1

Sphinx by Dani Spinosa The first real pornographic image I ever saw was the shoot Geri Haliwell did for Playboy. I was probably twelve or thirteen. I found it by accident, hidden in a pile of magazines in a bathroom, tucked away. In the time between that first clandestine glimpse and today, the sleek analogue print medium of the nudey mag has been kind of lost in porn’s current digital ubiquity. I wonder what we do now with the veil that was supposed to hide these images, this curtain over the back half of the store. I wonder what we do with the ways we’ve internalized that veil, looked for sheer pieces of fabric to drape over breasts and thighs to make them art and not porn, myths and not bodies. As I sat on the toilet flipping blush-red through the Playboy’s pages, I remember two emotions that greeted each other like awkward new neighbours in my preteen mind. First, the initial rush, the arrival at the forbidden, and a kind of glee that the breasts I had found were the Ginger Spice breasts I had been looking at for years, barely contained in a fashionable union jack mini dress. And then, a dull disappointment that set in, that I turned over like a garage sale item without a price sticker. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. First, the utter similarity of these bodies with the bodies in all the other magazines I’d been reading—Seventeen, ym, a bit too late for Sassy—and the massive amounts of Spice Girls paraphernalia I had been collecting. And then, just the poor quality of the images before me, all grainy and desaturated like stills from some indie VHS that circulated from basement to basement. It’s an eight-page spread that includes twelve nude images that starkly clash with the clear Spice Girls marketing on the issue’s front cover. This cover might have fit nicely into my childhood Spice Girls collection, collectable photograph books and dolls and a pile of temporary tattoos that came in licensed lollipops that my sister and I saved up one summer only to find by late August that they’d lost their transferability, stuck to the paper in stubborn stickiness. Even within the spread, images of the girls on stage, the girls with Prince Charles (twice!), the girls with the Queen, the girls with Nelson Mandela. The iconography was confusing to my younger self, but today makes clear sense; this spread is not marketed to Spice Girls fans, but their fathers. The disconnect between Geri on its cover and Geri in its pages says: we know you were jerking off to the Spice Girls already, now you can feel a little less guilty for it. ***  [  >>>>>   FORWARD ]   + [Distillate © HA&L + Dani Spinosa {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]