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| Sometimes, Ed gets right to the point with his article titles. |
NOTE: This article continues my coverage of Ed Wood's When the Topic is Sex (BearManor Media, 2021).
The article: "Interview with a Slut." Originally published in Body & Soul (Pendulum Publishing), vol. 5, no. 1, March/April 1971.
Excerpt: "I like men. Man oh man, I like men . . . there's just no two ways about that. I like their hairy chests, and their strong legs, and if they got a big arm, I like that too .. . especially when they wrap both their arms and their legs tight around me, and I get my legs right up there around their shoulders."
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| "Bring out the Gimp." |
Reflections: I distinctly remember an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head in which Beavis takes exception to Butt-Head referring to Beavis' mother as a whore. "My mom's a slut," Beavis tells his friend. "She doesn't charge for it." Apparently, to him, this is an important distinction. Well, Ed Wood's article "Interview with a Slut" is about a woman who is both a slut and a whore and is damned proud of it.
This is yet another of Eddie's fake interviews in which the author pretends to pose questions to some fictional person, then answers those questions himself. These have been some of the most fun items in When the Topic is Sex because Ed really seems to enjoy getting into character as the interview subjects. In this case, he presents himself as a reporter for Pendulum's Body & Soul magazine talking to a 27-year-old prostitute named Marti C., a woman who truly enjoys her work. In the Wood canon, you can file Marti alongside such joyously crude, foul-mouthed, sex-loving broads as Hosenose Kate from "Calamity Jane Loves Hosenose Kate" and T from "Commentary: Article by 'T.'" I think it's significant that this hooker's name is even androgynous, sounding like the masculine name Marty.
In this one article, you'll find so many of Ed Wood's classic motifs and obsessions: prostitutes, social diseases, fuzzy cardigan sweaters, the expressions "love feast" and "jollies," the movie Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1970), fur rugs, feathered dresses, brassieres, panties, violent trauma to women's breasts, cross-dressers, sadomasochism, even undertakers. Yes, the death-obsessed Ed Wood somehow manages to work in a mention of undertakers in "Interview with a Slut." That's what happens when he interviews himself! His subjects give him the exact answers he wants to hear.
As for Marti herself, she seems to be down for just about anything except for anal sex (she's "built too small" for it) and sadomasochism. On the topic of S&M, she tells a harrowing story that reminded me of the Gimp scene from Pulp Fiction (1994):
You know, there was this one guy who worked on a girl I knew. And he got his kicks when he put the girl in a one piece rubber suit, zipped up the back, no opening for her face, no sleeves or legs . . . all one form fitting piece. Only he went too far. While he was playing with himself in the mirror the rope around her middle slipped and went up around her neck. By the time he finished and went back to her there was only one thing left to do. Call the undertaker . . . Only, he didn't. He just beat it and left the poor thing hanging there until somebody found her later.
Who'd have thought Ed Wood beat Quentin Tarantino to the punch by 23 years?
Next: "College Interview" (1974)