Silly Humans
Dear Madison,
The other evening, my daughter was doing some research on the internet for her class project at The Academy. I happened to be looking over her shoulder when she pulled up a drawing of a mermaid. The depiction had a very silly sort of tail but what was even more shocking was the artist had covered each breast with a starfish.
At first, I thought it was just some fool of an artist’s vision of what we really look like but the more I searched, the more pictures I found of mermaids with silly tails and starfish covering their – usually huge – breasts. These pictures are not only ridiculous, they’re insulting.
Just what is it with humans and breasts? It’s just a nipple, for Poseidon’s sake! I didn’t see starfish covering the nipples of mermen. Can you help explain these outlandish drawings?
Baffled by Humans
Dear Baffled,
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the mind-boggling approach mainlanders take concerning female breasts. I can understand the silly ideas about our tails because most of them have never seen a real live mermaid and we want to keep it that way. But breasts? Really?
I put in a call to our resident expert on mainlanders, Peter MacPherson. While it did take him a little while to adjust to our rational attitude concerning our bodies – with or without our tails – he doesn’t understand why humans are like this, either. While we may be more like humans than we care to think, we are still oceans apart on some things.
What makes this whole thing hilarious is that these artists don’t seem to understand anything about starfish, either. As you no doubt know, members of the class Aseroidia have their mouths on the underside of their central disc. This means that their mouths are attached to the mermaid’s . . . well, you get the idea.
Madison