Spring Break — time to sit back, relax and fool around a little. But if any of that gets boring, why not skip YouTube and other traditional time-killers and go straight to another time-honoured classic?

Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is a sexual allegory, or a puzzle of perspective. Allegories are stories with multiple levels of meaning depending on how they're viewed. Ever see the Dolphin Illusion? Classic example. If a child looks at the dolphin illusion, they see 13 dolphins. If you look at it, chances are you'll see a couple getting down and dirty. In the same way, Goblin Market's dual perspective makes it a classic for preschoolers and Playboys alike.

The author of Goblin Market was also a closet lesbian and prostitutes more than likely took a hand in her education, religious and otherwise. A gentlewoman, Rossetti wrote in the 1860s during her work at a Christian streetwalker's shelter. We'd expect her to be preachy as Focus on the Family, but instead, the old maid writes with all the sly insinuation of a callgirl. It's a wonder a woman with such a sexy persona never married. But maybe not. On checking her out, her brothers' friends noticed "she might have sung and made music to children on the same instrument that made music on the Lesbian lyre, and on another feminine organ not necessary to specify." Sorry, boys, but this girl's playing for the other team.

If any of Rossetti's admirers had any hopes of flipping her, they would have been dashed with the man-hater rhetoric written in Goblin Market. The heroines of Goblin Market, two gorgeous girls known as Lizzie and Laura, are perfectly happy, until the creepy little characters known as 'goblin-men' slink into the scene. They lure Laura with phallic fruits, symbolically take her virginity with hair from her 'maiden's head,' and get her into an orgy. Yeah, an orgy. For a hundred years, people have been reading their kids stories about this sextivity. And you thought HBO was bad. Laura "sucked their fruit globes fair and red//sucked and sucked and sucked the more//she sucked until her lips were sore." And all this without practice? Damn, but there's a reason this is a fantasy.

Naturally, though, the trampy goblin men leave Laura with syphilis, gonorrhea and a broken heart — oh, and the insatiable need for sex. Lizzie doesn't know what to do for her, and so descends into the glen to steal sexual knowledge from the patriarchal goblin men; as ballsy a move as when Prometheus ascended into heaven to steal fire from the gods. This pisses the goblin men off, and they try to gang rape her.

Hey, maybe I should add an Rrating to the top of this column?

Shucks. Bit late now.

They "held her hands and squeezed their fruits/against her mouth to make her eat" in an attempt to fuck her mouth, until she felt "the drip/of juice that syruped all her face//and streaked her neck that quaked like curd." Translation: they gave her a 'facial' and ejaculated all over her head, an act designed by the Marquis de Sade, founder of sadism, to degrade his partners long before it entered hardcore porn in the 1960s. Then they groped her and tried to gang rape her, beat her up and finally left on finding they couldn't pry her knees apart.

This was the reality of a London prostitute in the 1860s, when a woman who had no skills could not expect to find her way into any other source of income, and law enforcement disregarded the disadvantaged. In the current debate over legalizing prostitution in Canada, we are concerned with protecting sex workers while not validating a job that often carries with it high health risks (both psychological and physical) and that often employs and exploits those who are already emotionally vulnerable.

What differs in the experiences of Britain's 19th century prostitutes and our contemporary callgirls is the degree of autonomy in their employment. There is a sense in which prostitution is rarely, if never, a choice, but there is more choice in the profession of a dominatrix in our democratic society than there was in that of even the most brazen prostitute in patriarchal Britain.

Rossetti was a first-wave feminist, a forerunner of modern equality. She identified the sexual predators of her time as those who offered the female body as an object of consumption. She recognized the way goblin-men were educated into their sexuality and given license to act upon their desires without consequences, while innocent girls were ruined because of their actions. And she rejected the primacy of men that resulted in an exploitive and unequal relationship. Lizzie returns home to Laura, who "kissed her and kissed her with a hungry mouth", until their sisterly love restores Laura to health.

So yeah. Girls, if you're still sulking after a bad Valentine's Day and feel the need to engorge on truffles and read feminist tracts, this is a nice place to start. Otherwise, look up the iconic Playboy illustrations for this stuff and settle down to talk porn and politics.

It'll keep your mouths busy for the break, assuming they aren't occupied elsewhere.