I'm crushed. Crashed. Thoroughly crunched. Rapunzel abandoned me right in the middle of our love feast in the Catalyst bathroom.

Sulking, I contemplate my next move. I sit down on the sidewalk in front of the nightclub, leaning against a wall. My attention is drawn to objects weighing down the pockets of my new shirt. In the right pocket is a small hardback book. In the left is a sealed envelope which contains a soft, puffy object. Both items are plum-colored.

The book cover shows a familiar image: the statuesque vulture with the lovely face and alluring breasts. The only difference here is that the strange creature is not naked, but scantily clad with a lacy red bustiere and red panties. The book's title: Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. It lists no author or editor. Inside are fifty-five pages of glossy, full-color photographs of female models posed on a runway. But most of these are not ordinary models, and this is no ordinary fashion show. I spy only a couple of women who come close to matching the pouty, anorexic specifications of the icons who populate the runways of Milan and Paris. Buck-teethed, pear-shaped, midlife women are the norm here. Saggy-titted, cellulite-proud, pigeon-toed women. Crone-faced, hairy-legged, big-nosed women.

"Demeter," for instance, a wild-eyed Caucasian woman in her fifties, has unkempt sandy grey hair -- including quite a bush under each arm -- and breasts that must have nursed several kids. I could easily picture her pushing a shopping cart full of all her worldly belongings down a city street. But here, instead of being garbed in a ripped 1950s-style house dress over baggy khaki work pants and moldy sneakers, she's in a sheer mauve lace bodystocking with embroidered butterflies and a tall, conical, violet witch's hat. Unlike the sleek, steely body language of all the models I've ever seen, Demeter has one leg bent and raised, and her arms are akimbo like a praying mantis doing tai chi.

"Hecate" is a pregnant woman in her twenties with dyed purple hair and countless body piercings, as well as a metal brace on her right leg. She's sporting a lovely emerald silk charmeuse camisole beneath a cape of white eagle feathers. Around her surging waistline is what appears to be a live snake, grasping its own tail in its mouth.

Holding a broom between her legs, "Tiamat" models a tapestry merrywidow with a gold bull skull talisman woven into the crook of the bra. A tall woman with glasses, a large forehead, and heavy legs, she looks remarkably like my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Byrd. It couldn't possibly be she, though, could it? I always had an inexplicable crush on her, which of course I never admitted to anyone, especially because all my friends thought she looked weird.

My favorite model in the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show is "Vimala." A vigorous-looking old crone sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks, she's one of the few models with an anatomy approaching the red-blooded American male's 36-23-36 ideal. In addition to purple cowgirl boots, a lacy red bra, and a red leather mini-skirt, she's wearing a tall crown of inflated pink and purple balloons tied together in the shape of a vulture. Further accessorizing the look is a necklace of tiny skulls, the candy kind that you get in Mexico during the Day of the Dead ceremonies.

Yow. I mean hallelujah. I mean what the fuck. Feminist pornography. Goddess-sanctioned lust-arousers. I'm dizzy. Itchy. Alienated but fascinated. Repulsed yet totally turned on. I've got to explore this further.

After studying each photo intently, I close the book and my eyes. My thoughts drift, in an inevitable comparison, to my customary experience of viewing the naked bodies of women I don't know. I must confess that when I'm at the liquor store buying cherry cider and olives for a post-midnight snack, I now and then fail to avert my eyes from the porn magazine section. I especially fail to avert my eyes from Swank magazine, which I've adjudged to be the least demeaning towards women and the most titillating to me. Yes, it's true that a suspiciously huge majority of the models are well within the criteria by which my conditioned reflexes evaluate beauty. But at least they're not depicted in degrading poses. They're not portrayed as being abused or dominated. They actually appear to be enjoying themselves. All that's got to count for something.

What vexes me even about the women in Swank, though, is their universally scoured, waxen, alabaster look. Profuse make-up has been applied to camouflage their "flaws." Photographic touch-up techniques do the rest. There's never a hint of leg hair or, for that matter, a cut from shaving. All underarm fur is scraped away. If it's there at all, the pubic hair is manicured like an English garden. Far too often the bodies reveal the grotesque blend of anorexia and silicone. Unlike real women, whose breasts differ in size and shape, many of the Swank siliconites have a perfectly matched pair.

There's a part of me -- and not just the moralist and feminist in me, either -- that hates this approach to beauty. Lately I've taken to boycotting any porn rag unless it features at least a few women whose breasts have never communed with silicon. And I truly prefer the presence rather than the absence of underarm hair.

But I'd be a slimy patriarchal dissembler if I tried to pretend that Swank and its ilk don't provoke in me an instant hard-on. I'm proud to say, however, that it's a sterile, dessicated hard-on. A like-eating-highly-processed-junk-food hard-on. A temperature-controlled, artificially-scented, recycled-airplane-air, muzak-in-the-elevator hard-on. In short, an impotent hard-on.

I may get lathered up for the wrong reasons, in other words, but at least I feel guilty about it. And to my further credit, I'm aware of the fact that there are right reasons -- which ideally I'm on the verge of mastering.

So how am I doing with this project, anyway? To what degree have I purged all non-feminist hormones from my lust? Maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity afforded me by Rapunzel's little picture book to take an inventory. Can I truly say I'm sincerely turned on in the most spiritually correct way by the women of the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show? Women who in their deviation from the freakish standards established by professional models are the very embodiment of normal? I would like to say yes. I would love nothing more than to be able to testify without any qualification -- passing a lie detector test if necessary -- that these pear-shaped, pigeon-toed, big-nosed women do indeed prime my kundalini for all the right reasons.

A judgment in my favor would serve many noble purposes, besides opening up a vast new repository of candidates for seduction. Most importantly, it would launch a healthy new chapter in the sordid history of my relationship with my conscience. The fact is that whereas the bulk of the population has installed in their superego a variation on the pissed-off, misogynist God of the Old Testament, mine is occupied by a very different archetype. Though sometimes she takes the form of a cagey, tender goddess like, say, Sophia of esoteric Christianity, more often she's a frowning fanatical harpy who has much in common with Medusa-clones like anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. The endless streams of bile that spew from this aspect of my nasty inner critic may be the closest a patriarchal stooge like myself can ever come to knowing what it means to be battered. But I can imagine in thrilling detail the freedom that would burst out in my heart if I could convince the Dour Matriarchal Judge I was fully aligned with her agendas.

"No, Judge, I am not a looksist," I could appeal to her with a totally straight face. "I am not a bigot who evaluates women first of all on their appearance. My attraction depends more on their inner than outer qualities. I may be a slobbering lecher, but at least my slobbering lechery is fueled by only the most righteous motivations."

Before I could in good conscience approach the bench with this plea, however, I'd have to convince myself of its verity. The Judge deals harshly with self-deception.

So what about it? Do I believe my own wishful assertions?

There is a certain amount of evidence in favor of this interpretation. Exhibit A: Ever since I explored the "feminist porn" in Rapunzel's book, I have been luxuriating in a most sumptuous blooming of what the tantric poets refer to as the jade stalk. What further data could possibly refute that ringing empirical documentation?

I bask now in the fantasy that I could actually feel happy and festive and self-respectful about being a testosterone-possessed fucknut.

Emerging from my meditation, I leaf through the last few pages of the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. Tucked between the last page and the back cover is a loose, rumpled piece of lavender paper folded into quarters. I open it up and find a text printed by hand. "Dear Rockstar," it begins. I feel a flush of excitement as I contemplate the possibility that Rapunzel didn't abandon me after all. She's just playing an interesting game with me. This is her next gambit. I eagerly devour the message.

Dear Rockstar,

Memorize every word of the text you're holding in your hands. You will be tested.

There are two doors between this world and the other world. Womb and tomb. Coming and going. Imagine a menstruating woman as one who opens both doors at the same time and peers both ways. When the uterine nest begins to disintegrate, the unfertilized ovum dies. Yet in the same instant, a hormonal message zooms to the ovaries, triggering the bloom of a new candidate.

So yes, women flirt with a little death every month. But it's a good death, a friendly death. When the magical "wound" between our legs bleeds, it purifies and renews us. No such luck for men. They can go on for months without any physical crisis that forces them to purge accumulated toxins. Or at least they think they can go on for months. In fact, many phallus-bearers walk around half-poisoned most of the time, unaware of how frenetically their rational minds are working to concoct logical explanations for their nasty, unacknowledged feelings.

The upshot is that women have a more convivial relationship with blood. For them, its flow symbolizes regeneration. For most men, the loss of blood portends plain old literal death; the ultimate humiliation; the ghastly annihilation of their one and only body.

There have been a few exceptional men who've courted the power of those who bleed but do not die. Maybe you'll be one?

Ancient tantric texts advise male initiates to make love with menstruating women if they want to grow wiser and stronger. Many shamanic cultures from Siberia to America were more likely to choose a man to be chief boohoo if he acted like a woman.

And we can't overlook good old Jesus. After he died, a soldier pierced his side with a spear, unleashing a stream of blood and water. In that lucky moment, he acquired a symbolic vulva; he mutated into an honorary menstruator. The bleeding slit was the seal of his immortality, the sign that his death was merely prelude to resurrection.

The Fisher King in the Grail legends wooed the same potency. The wound in his thigh gave him the chance to imitate a menstruator. He wasn't just an average dickhead, but a magical androgyne who'd taken on the power of a woman to regenerate herself.

What do you think?

Beauty and Truth,

Rapunzel

The letter is a little deflating, even if it does present an intriguing challenge that appeals to the poet in me. I have a hard time imagining what concrete actions I could take to become an honorary menstruator like Jesus or the Fisher King. Though I'm not a big fan of Aleister Crowley, I recall an experiment he once did to train his will. It involved the shedding of blood. He resolved not to use the pronoun "I" in his speech for a period of two weeks. Every time he violated his intention he slashed his arm with a razor blade. Quickly enough, his subconscious mind got the message, and added its considerable resources to the project.

As eager as I am to learn from Rapunzel's teachings, I don't know if I'm ready for a commitment as extreme as Crowley's. Outrageous meditations are more my style. There are certain Buddhist visualizations, for instance, that might help me, a mere man, cultivate a less literal relationship with death. One of the practices is called the corpse pose. The meditator lies utterly still for many hours, imagining himself moldering deep underground as if he were a dead body. In another exercise, the practitioner imagines his body being ripped apart by carnivorous animals.

There's one other treat left for me to explore from the pocket of the shirt Rapunzel bequeathed me. An envelope with a soft puffy something inside. Opening it, I find a rectangle of cotton inside a cover of waxy sheer violet paper. The corners are rounded, and it measures maybe six inches long and two inches wide. The edges of the object are decorated with glyphs and pictograms, which I recognize from Marija Gimbutas' research as more of the hoary symbols of the ancient Goddess religion: lozenges, double-headed axes, snakes, and butterflies.

One side of the object has a strip of sticky substance that extends from end to end. The other side is tinctured with what appear to be reddish brown blotches. They feel moist and sticky. I imagine or maybe actually experience a pleasant shock in my fingertips.

I bravely but gingerly bring the object to my nose to sniff. The fragrance is sweet patchouli with a hint of butterscotch and eucalyptus.

Making sure no passers-by are spying on me, I linger in this olfactory investigation. The longer I sniff, the more penetrating the odor. There seems to be no saturation point. Usually, if I sniff a strong smell over and over, its potency gradually fades. But if anything, the aroma emitted from the cotton pad is growing stronger.

Another strange thing: New sub-scents continually rush in. Raw unsweetened chocolate. Fermented apples on the edge between wine and vinegar. Roasting coffee. And then, impossibly, there's an unmistakable aroma from childhood: my pink night-night, the blanket I carried around with me for most of the fourth year of my life. I'm transported to the heart of a moment in which my four-year-old girlfriend Dulce Weil and I wrapped ourselves up tight in my pink night-night and rolled down a grassy hill covered with clover.

Other smells invade. Baking cinnamon buns. Moist carrots freshly plucked out of rainy dirt. Musky skin of Sheila Amundioso, the first girl I ever touched on the inside. The honeysuckle blooming outside the window next to our bed that night.

I feel dizzy but entranced. I love how the scents explode at the root of my nose and radiate out into my brain and body. My fingertips drink in the redolence; my heart; my lust. It's almost as if the circulation of blood centered in my heart is running parallel with the circulation of aromas centered in the cotton pad. My dizziness becomes a whirlpool. But I can't bring myself to pull my nose away from the magical artifact.

I open my eyes, trying to anchor myself. The reddish-brown Rorschach blotches on the pad begin to undulate and weave. I feel my pupils jiggling in my sockets, stimulating further animation.

And then I'm hallucinating deep into the history of the blotches. Their ancient origins. A giant, naked, blue-skinned Goddess with snake-like auburn hair and eight arms erupts out of a salty tidal pool in an autumnal estuary. She seems as inhuman as the wind or the ocean. I fantasize or hallucinate myself lying naked below her on marshy ground under a twilight sky. Her right foot is on my chest and her left on my thighs. She's over me like a holy mountain. She's inside me like a slit in my heart. I hear my voice inside me growling, "I know you! I know you!" As if in response, she breaks off a branch of wormwood from amidst her prodigious hair and shoves it in my mouth. As she squats, her smells fan out. Absinthe, marijuana, ammonia, eucalyptus, seaweed, rose. They're all over me, saturating me like a soft electrical shock. My eyes fibrillate, seeing her thousands of times per second. Bending her sweaty blue face down, she shoots a steaming river of words into my ear: "I'll make you famous with no one but me." Her necklace of severed human heads drapes across my chest, and I'm flooded with still-pulsing blood. She licks my face with her enormous tongue, inundating me with the tastes of the gall bladders and nasturtiums and comets she has devoured. She does not eat my face but rises again like a yew tree growing impossibly fast. Now she's swarming. Fireflies and maggots glisten in her gnarled hair, and her pendulous blue breasts ooze yellowish milk. One of her eight hands wears a baseball glove filled with a pomegranate and another cradles a toilet plunger topped with a diamond. Still others carry fresh figs, colored Easter eggs, and a silver Grail cup sloshing with reddish-brown liquid. In one of her hands swings my own bleeding, decapitated head. Even though I can plainly see it there, my face frozen with surprise, I still, somehow, have my head on my shoulders too.

I feel like vomiting but can't because I'm paralyzed. The only part of me that's able to move is my jade stalk, which is pronged straight up towards her and far bigger than usual. She leaps off me, grabs this handle with a free hand, and pulls me to my feet. My body is stiff and straight, like a hypnotized volunteer in a stage magician's levitation display. Still clutching, she drags me through a jungle of brown cattails to the inside of a purple canvas dome. She arranges me on the dirt floor, then squats down on me, engorging my sex with hers. Bright-eyed women in plum lingerie are arrayed around us, watching and murmuring prayer songs that sound like running water. I feel vulnerable, fascinated, humiliated, afraid, curious, and totally turned on. Waves of erotic pleasure rip through me, but they're so unlike anything I've felt before that they push me to the verge of panic. It's like she is penetrating me. As if she's ejaculating some ocean of electricity into the end of my lingam and gushing it down into and through my whole body. Time and time again her body is consumed by a rising spiral of shudders, then stiffens and climaxes. Each time she yowls triumphantly, "You're changing! You're really changing!"

Only when I feel sure that she has squeezed all the bliss she can from me do I give myself permission to release into an orgasm. But before I can surrender, one of the women from the circle hands her an antlered animal's skull. Grasping it by the horns, she presses it down against my belly. Miraculously, as if my skin were suddenly porous, the skull penetrates me. I feel my insides gurgling and rearranging to accommodate it. The agony is so novel, so interesting, that I hear myself screaming "Thank you!" as my eyes roll back into indigo sky. The anguish is not an event or a feeling. It's my whole world. I'm disappearing into the Land of Pain. With each heartbeat, an icy hot burst of shattered diamonds explodes at the base of my spine, shooting out a web of acid rivers which sluice through my legs, to the ends of my fingers, ripping out the tip of my tongue with a memory of the last nanosecond before the Big Bang. It's like I swallowed a bomb. Vultures and moles and hyenas and praying mantises are cannibalizing me. I'm being spanked with knives from the inside.

I'm aware of a perverse and yet poised longing to keep a record of the pain. I want to preserve every nuance of my relationship with it, as if this were the first flush of falling in love: the moment of imprinting. But the stress of the revelation is too great. I cover my face with my hands and pass out.

Next thing I know I'm floating down a dark red river on a raft. On one end of the vehicle is a television made of bushes and clay and glass and jewel-like beetles. Standing at the other end is Rapunzel. Wearing a rainbow batik mini-dress and unlaced black army boots, she propels us along with a pole. I'm reminded of Charon, from Greek myth, who guided dead souls across the River Styx. "Did you steal Charon's job?" I joke weakly to Rapunzel. "The archetypes are mutating, Rockstar," she replies.

I gaze at the TV. It has no images, but keeps scrolling the same printed message.

During your time of the month, meditate on the following questions: 1. What feelings and intuitions have you been trying to ignore since the moon was last in the phase it is now?

2. Which parts of your life are overdue for death?

3. What messages has life been trying to convey to you but you've chosen to ignore?

4. What red herrings, straw men, and scapegoats have you chased after obsessively in order to avoid dissolving your most well-rationalized delusions?