She is suffering

The third and final single from The Holy Bible is a bit of a respite from the first three tracks which deal with prostitution, colonialism and abortion but this song is still dark and concerns itself with female suffering and the shedding of desire to become something purer. These themes also resonate in 4st 7lb. I can barely remember the music video but it’s interesting to see Richey Edwards in his last video before his disappearance on the 1st of February 1995.

Here are the lyrics to this song:

Beauty finds refuge in herself
Lovers wrapped inside each others lies
Beauty is such a terrible thing

She is suffering yet more than death
She is suffering She sucks you deeper in
She is suffering You exist within her shadow

Beauty she is scarred into man’s soul
A flower attracting lust, vice and sin
A vine that can strangle life from a tree. Carrion, surrounding, picking on leaves

She is suffering She sucks you deeper in
She is suffering You exist within her shadow

Beauty she poisons unfaithful all Stifled, her touch is leprous and pale
The less she gives the more you need her
No thoughts to forget when we were children

She is suffering She sucks you deeper in She is suffering Nature’s luke-warm pleasure.

I get from the reading of these lyrics and in context of the album title that lust poisons the mind and destroys beautiful souls especially those possessing the beauty who get exploited like in the song Yes which appears first on the holy bible album.
Nature’s lukewarm pleasure refers to sex but I get the feeling it is sex that is bought for and used as a transaction.

Anna Nicole Smith is someone I always think of as a beautiful person who was exploited and made famous from her looks. People tried to take her money and accuse her of being a gold digger. She suffered and died an early death https://www.biography.com/personality/anna-nicole-smith

or how about August Ames a porn star who committed suicide after receiving bullying threats after she refused to sleep with men who had shot gay porn.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/porn-star-august-ames-commits-suicide-after-bullying-for-refusing-to-have-sex-with-man-who-did-gay-porn

In January 1995, a 22-year-old Quek, using the name Annabel Chong starred in an adult film called World’s Biggest Gang Bang. Over the course of 10 hours, she had sex with about 70 men a total of 251 times https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqqd8/what-happened-to-annabel-chong this story always makes me think of the line a flower that attracts lust, vice and sin.

Manic Street preachers were instrumental in shaping how I looked at women and their femininity and how men can exploit that and destroy it like any other commodity in the world and how that bleak outlook could affect a tragic soul like Richey Edwards.

https://227lears.com/2020/12/30/desire-and-anxiety/amp/ This link takes you to Yusuf Sayad’s insightful exploration into the song which is just perfection and really delves into all the references etc.