MODERN ERA

It's about fashion.

Actually, when I first wrote this I didn't want readers to take it the wrong way and think I was saying that people were more beautiful in classical times, because that, clearly, is absurd. Fortunately, no one, to my knowledge, has ever taken it that way. (Except for you. Spoilsport.) This is just an interpretive piece about the changing view of beautiful women: there was a time, it seems, when they were to be cherished and wooed, a time when the very notion that they needed to be protected would have been seen as absurd on its face. Or perhaps I'm dreaming.

Ironically, a couple of years after I wrote this, I fell into a very abusive relationship and was within an ace of becoming a full fledged batterer myself. There were black eyes; there were bruised shoulders. It's never happened before or since, so I'm convinced, if only for my own self-preservation, that it was just that relationship. Some days I thank whatever Gods there are that I got out of it when I did; others I wish I'd never gotten into it at all.