In Julia Armfield’s “Stop Your Women’s Ears With Wax” challenges the fantastic genre with elements of obsession and horror. In this piece, we follow the character, Mona as she works on the crew of a popular girl band. Throughout the story, she recognizes a pattern of destructiveness, towards men specifically, in their fan base.
A story has been spinning about for several days about a group of girls in Keele who left the gig and holed up in a pub round the corner, drinking rum and Cokes and pints of shandied lager. Three hours later, they had chased a boy out of the pub– chased him out into the road, so goes the story, straight into the path of a passing truck. Knocked flat, one of the sound technicians is saying, with a sound like blood on her tounge. Exit pursued by barrier girls off theirs heads on lager and lime. (90)
This story is beautifully written with detailed descriptions and odd yet understandable comparisons.
On her laptop screen, Mona watches a clip of the evening’s encore. The band– their long hair, their flaring nostrils– reappearing to the kind of clamor Mona has only ever seen reserved for the Beatles; weeping female fans in strips of dicumentary footage, fingers reaching up into eye stockets, digging down with a violence made slippeey by tears. It is not a reaction she is used to seeing for a girl bans. The scrabble, the sweat behind the knees. (83)
The Spice Girls (Photo by Terry McGinnis/WireImage)