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Mystery | Feb 13 2003

J. R. Harvey writes in with an investigative analysis of the mysterious ass I discovered two weeks ago while searching for a photo to accompany a piece inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal:

concerning the picture of the woman’s ass, did you look around on that website? there are lots of other movie dialog snippets, and each has a picture at the top, and of course i wanted to see if there were more asses. but most of the pages have a broken link. it would seem that person (ajdlro) has linked to images on other sites, and a lot of those images are not there any more. but it appeared that the images in general had to do with the movies. so why is the ass there? i went to the website where the picture of the ass actually is. it’s another movie fan site. this site also has a seventh seal page, but the pictures are actual seventh seal pictures. and they are numbered; there is seventh6.jpg and seventh8.jpg, but seventh7.jpg does not appear on that page. seventh7.jpg is the ass.

from this i have formed a theory for the appearance of the ass in a place where death and the knight might have been. the picture of the ass is actually on danb’s server space, and ajdlro linked to it. i think that the picture of an ass wasn’t an ass to begin with. i think the ass was what openix.com/~danb/seventh6.jpg is now. That image is 329 x 232, which is what the html on the ajdlro’s page specifies for the ass, even though the ass is really 335 x 227.

so i think that danb noticed that adjlro was linking to an image on his page, and thought it would be funny to change the image to something else, thereby changing the whole tenor of adjlro’s page. perhaps adjlro has no idea that there is an ass there. or perhaps adjlro was as amused by it and left it. though i think the former is more likely, judging by the predominance of broken image links on adjlro’s site, and the claim at the bottom of the page that it hasn’t been updated since 1998.

at any rate, i like it.

Another reader, Sergio, reported that on the day I posted the original piece, the image of the ass rose steadily in the Google Image rankings for “seventh seal death,” for which I feel I owe a personal apology to Ingmar Bergman.

Sergio also noted that the woman’s fingers don’t really seem to pushing down the fabric but resting on it. This follows from the fact that the photo was staged. A woman stood with her pants half-off, pretending to be in the act of pushing them down. However, as I have just personally confirmed, you do most of the pushing in this case with your thumbs. You grip a bit underneath with your forefingers and perhaps your middle fingers and push down with your thumbs. The woman in the photo is doing no such thing. She’s holding her pants in place, having recently used this same grip to pull them up. Why were her pants previously down? That’s easy: So as to allow someone—presumably the photographer, but it could have been anyone, even a passing stranger—to wet her ass.

Considering the image from the viewer’s perspective, Sergio asks what real-life events could conceivably lead to a woman’s ass becoming wet just as she is removing her pants. The minds reels, writes Sergio.

In my response to him, I observed that the deeper one considers this photo, the less sexy it becomes. That is, until it becomes so unsexy, it’s suddenly sexy again, like traveling so far east you end up west.