I have pinned an anatomical drawing of myself to my heart, the way my mother would pin the seams of a dress together before she ran it under the machine.
I put my fingers to the words “labia minor” to the word “clitoris” my hand over the word “vagina.”
I might feel like fucking, I might not. It is my choice isn’t it?
Well I remember when I wanted it, I remember when I didn’t. In detached marriages with the sighing sheets and dented sat upon sofas.
Me spread wide in the pages of a pornography magazine, and how am I to know what teenage boys and men everywhere are thinking when they see me, like this? I can’t censor their thoughts, can’t say you know I didn’t mean this, but I can’t really help it anymore. Sticky debasing blurred fingers, and right now in thousands of boy bedrooms they are coming all over me.
In the living room with the TV on I am told to pout a little more, to push my breasts out, and now to smile seductively as I drape myself over an automobile. I sell the medicines too, I pretend to care that you have the flu, as you think it must be that way, it always has been and always will. But really, I don’t care. Smile sweetly they say, look concerned.
I do the washing for you too, as I juggle my high-powered job and motherhood and looking after you and your underwear you still have not got around to washing yourself. I am to represent nurturing and goodness as I pop an instant meal into the microwave.
Are you not bored? I am. I have fallen asleep on the sofa, I am snoring in a manner you would call unbecoming of a lady. I would sleep forever if my mothers who fought for universal suffrage and equal rights, my mothers who burned their brassieres had not woken me up, pulled me by the ear and said “it is not over yet, we can say it has become worse, much worse, a world full of complacent tired women.”
I get up and take your dinner plate to the kitchen. Later I let you talk dirty to me. This must mean that I am liberated then?
You take the most destitute of me from the forgotten corners of the earth, so that they will dance pretty circles around you, gyrate their hips and sit on your laps, while you stuff money into their rhinestone crotches. I wrap myself around poles so you can feel good about yourself, so you can play with yourself in the dark while you slurp at your drink.
I bring nations together at sports events, in tight little skirts, with my long legs and my cleavage, my provocative moves. I make it more interesting for the spectators.
Why do you always need me to do this for you, why do you always embarrass me this way, use me this way, why is this the only thing you can ever come up with, when you think of me?
In the beginning had I had the chance I would be someone different I know. Never a product to sell, to swell the crowds, never an attraction to push up the profits. You would never assume that my only reason for being here in this world, was for you-to serve you.
Once, I might have cared about you, I might have even loved you, the possibility of a different kinder you.
Now, I am over-exposed, over-stimulated, sold. I feel nothing anymore. I feel nothing for you.
Megan Voysey-Braig
Megan Voysey-Braig is a South African writer, author of Till We Can Keep an Animal (Jacana, 2008), winner of 2007/2008 European Union Literary Award, shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize – Africa, longlisted for the 2009 Sunday Times Fiction Prize. She currently lives in Berlin. This is the first piece in her series for Women In and Beyond the Global.
About Megan Voysey-Braig