A NAKED WOMAN (WARNING)

In the book I am making, there is a character who charts the first time he realized he loved women. I will paraphrase it for you here:

As an eleven year old boy, his grandmother would drop him off at the library before her chiropractor appointments and pick him up after. This meant spending about two to three hours a week at the library, never really reading any books, but just picking one up at random, pouring the pages with a flit-flit-flit through his fingers; never digesting a single word. One day, he had found a book called, “Illustrated Classic’s Presents, ‘Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’” Seeing this book, he did not find it strange that this line of books, designed to present classic literature to children in easy to digest drawings and paraphrasing of plot, decided to retell such a heady and adult-themed ‘Adultery Novel’.

There, standing in the library, he watched with absent eyes; eyes that cared nothing about anything they had ever seen. two cold and loveless eyes watched as the pages of the novel went, flit-flit-flit through his fingers. All until it came upon the scene in the book where the title character, Anna, through an act of desperation, decided to seduce Levin, the kind hearted but socially awkward farmer, removing her blouse and shouting, “MAKE LOVE TO ME, YOU KIND HEARTED BUT AWKWARD LAND OWNER!”

Looking at the image in the library, he did not care that the real Anna (Tolstoy’s Anna) had never removed her blouse; that the illustrator of the book had deemed it necessary for some reason, to showcase her desperation. He had fallen in love and with a swell of passion and shame and adolescent longing in his chest, he’d gaze into the twin pupils of Anna Karenina’s breasts, thinking only of this illustration; a naked woman. He would be in love with this drawing until, months later, his passion wore off, as all passion does, and he was tempted to scour the rest of the book for more images of his beloved, blouseless Anna. Only to have his heart broken. Only to see his Anna on the last page. Insane and struck by a train.

NOW,

I’ve been doing the drawings for this story recently and have, therefore, been forced to draw this woman myself. This naked woman. In doing so, I have decided to trace the first image of a naked woman that I myself had ever seen as a boy. I was watching free HBO at my grandmother’s house one afternoon when I was eleven, home sick from school. They were playing the 80’s film “JUST ONE OF THE GUYS” in which a wanna-be teenage girl reporter infiltrates a rival high school incognito as a boy. At the end of the film, when the jocks don’t believe that she is truly a woman, she exposed her naked breasts SHOWING ALL OF THE JOCKS AND ALL OF AMERICA THAT SHE HAS WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A GOOD REPORTER-LADY.

I didn’t think that the woman in the movie had a face that properly exemplified what I felt Anna Karenina would look like, so I drew the closed-eye head of Sarah Palin on the body. I will not reproduce the drawing here but I will tell you: it is the most disgusting female creature ever to hobble around in anyone’s imagination.

I told my girlfriend about this drawing and she laughed say, “It’s funny that you could have gone out tonight, but you decided to stay in and draw this picture instead.” Here are some different drawings I did. For you to see.