Butterflies

My trainer at the gym is also a photographer, mostly making money from shooting fashion shots of gorgeous and exotic if not to say erotic women.  But he has a kind of other passion which is photographing butterflies which have landed upon the petals of various budding flowers.  The exquisite moment of rest for an insect so much in flight together with the harmonious blend of shape and color which it is his genius to capture far outshine the curves and shining skin of the young ladies who pose for him.  Butterflies when their wings are spread and they are in flight have a way of bouncing on the air that is delicious; they make so many tentative and delicious passes at the flowers beneath their path.  And then they land, and assume a texture with the shapes and color of the plant on which they are feeding.  And evolution dreamt this up I have been told so that the birds overhead would not be able to make them out.  Camouflage.  How different it is from the other subject of his photography, these beautiful models, whose goal is always to put their breasts, their thighs, their everything on full display.  Women are vulnerable because they are subject to or rather more to the point the object of the male gaze.  It is an erotic gaze, needy, demanding, rapacious.  It is in a way like the birds overhead yet they miss out on seeing the butterflies alighting on the multi colored flowers below in the garden because of the camouflage.  Some women think they have much to lose if they were to employ camouflage; others hope that they just are not that much noticed.  It is strange but my photographer friend's outrageously beautiful semi naked women are in their own way so aggressively beautiful that they provide their own defense against the gaze.  Their beauty and artificiality are their camouflage.  "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" asked Yeats.