Third Prize At A Golf Tournament

Triumphant golfers parade down an avenue lined with booty from their victories on the course.

This is a photomanip that I made from a couple of images for a T-shirt design. One is obviously a photo from a golf tournament, with a horde of golf carts filled with middle-aged fat cats prepared to roll onto the course.

Sitting on the lawn facing them is a naked woman in bondage, with a big sign on the grass near her announcing that she's "Third Prize."

The reason I thought this manip worth doing was they way it updated traditional bondage imagery. There are a lot of images with themes like this out there, but most of them are things like slaves on the Via Appia kneeling as chariots roll past, etc. Very historical.

This updated image has a lot more bite to it. You can imagine the guys on the golf carts as a bunch of Rotarian types, probably already half looped before they hit the course, making all sorts of vulgar comments about what they plan to do if they win third prize. And she has to listen to it, alarmed, because she knows that whatever they want to do with her that doesn't injure or kill her, they'll be able to do. It's part of the terms of her deal with the local sheriff to get her off that methamphetamine distribution charge she's facing.

Or it's part of the deal the strip club she works for cooked up with the golf course, one she has to agree with because the strip club caught her blowing customers in the parking lot, and they'll fire her if she doesn't come through.

Oh, the scenarios are limitless. My favorite is, she's an art student who's trying to make money fast over the summer to finance her next year of college, as her parents have suffered financial reverses and can't support her any more, and this gig is the best deal she was able to find that didn't promise to land her in jail. So she must submit to men whom she considers trashy merchants, to whom she ordinarily wouldn't give the time of day. Very humiliating. And because she's not at any way at fault for her situation, it has a nice element of pathos as well.

Also, the golfers are fully dressed in casual golfing clothes while she's stark naked and staked out on the lawn. Very humiliating.

She's also third prize. Not first prize, not second. Third. I was thinking of displaying second prize as well, maybe a set of fountain pens or a desk calendar, but I couldn't think of a way to do it and make absolutely clear what it was. Too bad. That would have been very humiliating too.

It's the modernity of the image that makes all these interesting scenarios possible, and gives them their bite.