"THE STOKKE AFFAIR" - (Atanes' thought development)

I was the whole yesterday disturbed by Allison Stokke's soufflé. Confused, because it is a question of a phenomenon-hank where multiple and heterogeneous fibers are thread. This morning I continue meeting unable to analyze it with clarity, however much I pull the threads.

The thread of the beauty. If we it stretch sufficient this thread it drives to the pain, as good noticed Thomas Mann. The tragedy of being so pretty, object of so much desire. I do not touch me, neither look at me, do not wish me even. If we were reducing the question to this interpretation we would scarcely distinguish the beauty of a monstrous tare for the effects. Both are dazzling masks that catch the public’s attention and simultaneously they conceal. Like an eclipse. Is beautiful girl owner of her beauty, this gift from the nature that she radiates without control? There have not appropriated of her beauty those who look at her? We are not owners of the desire or the rejection that we wake up in the others.

The thread of the youth. In the edge of eighteen years. A girl in woman's body that has stopped being a girl for the formal sanction of the adult age. The soothing cabin of the legality in the margin of the board. A few months ago the traffic of these photographies they had alerted the hunters of libertines. Not, as so many other times, for the pics themselves. But for what of inopportune would project on them (again) the wishers’ look. But crossing the gorge we leave behind the libertines to find only an unexpected conspiracy of onanismers. No law has been transgressed. Has some right been damaged? I do not know. Which.

The thread of the voracity. The sex’s uncontrollable and predatory drive. We understand but do not attend. The girl is scared - it says - because she feels overwhelmed. But the media outbreak is unstoppable. The fright and the innocence, if there are, do not stop to the beast that nests inside us. I look at her photographies. I return to look at her photographies again. And with me, millions people. And tomorrow, more millions. The libido is a roller that crushes empathy.

The thread of the vanity. Now the whole world looks at her. She wants that they look at her jumps with bar, not to her. The bar, please, the bar. But it is to her at whom they look, inevitably. The bar interests some few ones, but the beauty interests to almost all. And now almost they all know that she exists, and look at her. Before were not they looking at her? What has changed? Probably her perception of the effect that she provokes in the others. She has discovered that does not pass unnoticed, that misinterpreted many of the previous looks. Were not coming just fans bout the athletics to the stadium. First the beauty came, and the tsunami of the reputation has come later. Nonetheless she is one among countless. All media are filled with young, pretty and anonymous maidens. Like her. But she has won the ticket. Internet sometimes is a cruel lottery.

The thread of the ghosts. Her father is worried. Probably they have agreed that she also does. But they base their worry on the quantity, which here is almost irrelevant. The number of glimpses? Now more people saw her. Many people would see her equally along her life, without any electronic mediation. Closely, in the street, at the institute, at the stadium. The fundamental thing is the quality of the phenomenon. The eyes from another side of the screens do not see her, they just see her trace. There are not an interaction here among persons, between her and the spectators. What is given is a ghostly dialectics: the commentary most mentioned in the means - "hope her lifes goes down the drain due to some crazy injury, and eventually goes into porn"- exemplifies the masturbador’s halting in the lookers-on’s society. The desire does not demand her, her physicity. It demands her image, which we reproduce, exchange and swallow. The masturbation is nourished of images and does not need from another thing, only from any more images. A new danger has not added to the inherent dangers in an pretty girl’s life. The cannibalism is not exercised on her, but on her ghost.

The problem is not that they look at her. It should have it assumed. What really has embarrassed her has been to find out suddenly a merciless and volatile truth, what very few ones dare to tell her to face: what the world wishes her.

I conclude with Sade: "And you, for which you wept before the mishaps of the virtue and you felt sorry the unhapp Justina, forgiving the inks, probably a bit too loaded, that we have met bound to use, I hope you extract at least from this story the same fruit that lady of Lorsange! ... God wants that you become convinced with her of that the real happiness takes root exclusively in the bosom of the virtue and that if, with intentions that it does not correspond to us to quarrel, He allows her pursuit on Earth, it is to indemnify her with the most pleasing remunerations in Heaven! "

Carlos Atanes

Madrid, May, 2007.