For Red-blooded Males
I gave blood today, as I do every two months, barring the occasional cold virus. There’s not a lot to keep one occupied as his vital essences drip away, so I’ve grown quite familiar with the framed inspirational posters over many visits. That’s about the only reading material under the circumstances.
A few of the posters are bland reminders that everyone needs blood, complete with multi-ethnic children to tug the heartstrings. These are boring.
The north wall is more interesting; it has four posters obliquely urging frank discussion of HIV/AIDS and its dangers through proverbs taken from different regions of Africa. As it happens, I recognize three of these proverbs, as they are taken from parables I’ve read as part of my folk tale research. (Presumably, the fourth is as well, and I just haven’t seen it.) One of the proverbs is misquoted, and another is taken grossly out of context. This drives me to distraction.
So by preference, my attention focuses on the remaining three posters, done in the style of WWII recruitment posters—for all I know, they are reproductions of actual blood drive posters from the period. In each of them, bold letters urge you to give blood, while a young woman in nurse’s garb stands yearningly beneath. Just what she is yearning for is ambiguous. The artist did his work carefully; the explicit suggestion is that each of these nurses is straining forward with raw, patriotic fervor, burning with a desire that you save your country by spilling your blood, if perhaps a bit less messily and painfully than our boys Over There. But the implicit suggestion is that each of these lovely ladies has an urgent desire to have sex with you right there on the couch, held back only by the need first to see you proven a man through blood donation. Although the nurses are tastefully covered, their eyes are heavily made up, and their lips are parted in a manner reserved for women about to tear someone’s clothes off, and their hair is just beginning to work loose from where it had been decorously pinned back that morning. The pearly lighting and low perspective suggest a virginal Greek goddess, until you realize that the lighting casts unambiguous shadows down the abdomen, and that the perspective doesn’t make the nurses so statuesque as to be unhuggable. They’re archetypal depictions of the virgin slut.
I doubt that any of this occurred to whoever selected the decorations. If you don’t pay attention, the posters are just a bit of history; maybe they’ll remind people of the noble efforts of the Red Cross in past generations, and make them feel part of a larger whole. I doubt the workers give the posters a second thought, either; they’re usually hustling to deal with donors, and when traffic is sparse, they’re busy with gossip. But for a donor, with little to do but stare at the walls and/or ceiling, there’s time to take a good, long look. And frankly, it’s rather surreal to be lie on that couch, carefully avoiding thoughts of needles and arms, suddenly to realize…
“Hey! There’s soft porn in here!”