White Ribbon

Posted on 20th February 2022

While I was on Journalspace back in 2007, my friend (and, as it later turned out, my illegitimate daughter) Emily posted a vignette in her journal called White Ribbon. I found it captivating, and asked her what the story behind it was, but she said it was simply an image that had sprung into her head. She knew neither what had happened before its beginning nor what was to happen after its ending. She pressed me several times to expand it into a short story myself, but sadly, despite repeated attempts, I failed to satisfy her demands.

However, in 2020, almost 13 years later, I decided to have a go at illustrating it. Here are both her vignette (reproduced with her permission) and my painting. It is highly stylised, and does not entirely match the text, but it was the best I could manage. I felt I had made at least some step towards compensating for my earlier inadequacy, though the idea of writing a complete story still haunts me.

White ribbons hang carelessly from the ceiling. Three are strung tightly.

Suspended cruelly at the end of the ribbons, a young woman; her face hangs with shame, eyes closed, dark. Her hands lie limp above her head, slender fingers bleeding slightly. Her ankles are crossed, tied in a painful twist.

She hangs there, helpless amongst the pure silky fabric, lips pouting at gravity, breasts and charms exposed, curves exploited. Her blue-black hair is tied away from her face with ribbons, made of rich, soft ringlets that bounce gently with her soft, even breathing.

She is lowered gently down, down onto a downy soft bed of black. Ivory skin covers slack, unused muscles and she is nearly translucent as she lies there, limp and vulnerable to the robed figure walking slowly towards her, removing his robes, exposing a handsome face made of strong features and cruelty.

The midnight robes slip from his fingers and his body towers above hers; her eyes open slightly, move to see him. Her beautiful mouth twitches, yet she continues to lie still.

His hands caress her skin, just the softest of touches, but he’s violating her, his Virgin Whore.

Pressing his dark lips to her ear, he whispers, soft as clouds, “Perhaps a ribbon is what I need, to wrap tightly around your pretty throat.”

Her chest jerks as she skips a breath, and his lips grow slowly into a smile.

—Emily McDurman

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NOTES

This blog is not the first site to which I uploaded it; I did so just after completing it, on 21 February 2020. As my diary records:

So I uploaded a titled copy to my DeviantArt page, added a description, along with Emily’s vignette and her name, then wrote her an email asking her to look, and if she’d rather her name didn’t appear, I’d remove it. I am well aware that whatever she may have thought back on Journalspace, having her name publicly associated with what some would call porn is not necessarily a good thing.

Do any of you have a 20-year-old illegitimate daughter who lives in the United States? Those of you who do will not be surprised that my diary entry for 22 February 2020 includes this:

Because I wasn’t sure if she still used – or at least checked – the email account I have for her, I sent Emily a brief message on FB chat telling her to do so. She responded a few hours later with a simple ‘Yay thank you ok hi :)’ which of course left me wondering if she was saying yes, she’d check, or if she meant ‘Yes, that’s okay’. Emily never was one for lengthy email responses, so if I don’t hear more from her in the next day or two I shall assume the latter.

Which is what I did. My diary had more to tell me, however. Two years later, on 20 February 2022, the date upon which I uploaded it to this blog (for the conspiracy theorists, 20/02/2022, or for American conspiracy theorists, 02/20/2020), I recorded this disturbing discovery:

But for some reason I felt impelled to go back to my cyber-daughter Emily’s journal entry White Ribbon, and my correspondence with her at the time (2007). To my amazement I saw that in proof-reading it I’d found she’d used the verb ‘to lay’ where she should have used ‘to lie’ no fewer than three times. This was so comical (I hesitate to say Freudian) I composed an entry for my Into Slumber blog containing both the White Ribbon vignette and the painting I’d done for it, and giving a link to it in a comment on the Facebook post that started off this exercise.

This was deeply troubling to me; again, I had completely forgotten about it. What made it ironic this time was because I was in the process of clearing out and dusting off Into Slumber at the time for its October 2026 relaunch, and the entry I’d resurrected just before White Ribbon was Lying and Laying, in which I deplored the common confusion between these two verbs… and which I’d uploaded to this blog on 12 February 2020 (12/02/2020, or perhaps 02/12/2020), while I was in the process of painting White Ribbon, which I’d uploaded on 21 February 2020 (21/02/2022, or possibly 02/21/2020). Coincidence? I don’t think so. And to find that one’s own daughter – albeit illegitimate – could have done such a thing was so deeply distressing to someone of my fine sensibilities that I had to lie (v. intr.) (or maybe lay (v. tr.) myself) down for a while and have one of the servants administer my smelling salts (to me, I should stress).

What do you mean, I’m wandering? All right. I shall attempt to return to the subject. Yes, the painting. You’re right; to do a painting of a beautiful, naked young woman who is bound by her wrists and ankles in preparation for some scene of disturbing and depraved debauchery is something many would consider inadvisable, or even disturbing and depraved. What can I say? I am disturbing and depraved. I can only console you by assuring you that it was to be the last painting I ever did.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.