Category: Uncategorized

Ten years ago the EU was still called the EC. When it was first mooted that the UK may leave, a Berliner acquaintance was shocked to learn that I had just heard. “You don’t read newspapers?”

‘Oh, well. I like cartoons. The weekend magazine sometimes, in cafes. I read the arts section.’ “But how do you… know what’s going on?”

Filled with frustration I turned my head to look out the window. ‘Look out that window. This is supposed to be spring. But we had hail today and it’s flooding in Zurich. I feel like, you know — my daily life is more in tune with the bigger picture… than are the habits of most of the people who tell me I’m stupid for not reading newspapers.’

To make this sweeping-it-under-the-carpet statement I had to ignore my recent, colossal, ozone-stripping consumption of jet fuel: among other things. It’s a total lie. But maybe, if we all stopped clogging ourselves with updates and detail, we might all be a lot more focused on the bigger crises: like what’s going on with our air and water and with our climate. Like pesticides and the future of food. I mean: read the newspapers if you want to. But for goodness’ sake don’t let it distract you from current events.

My phone rang just now with a number I don’t recognise. A grandmotherly voice said, “Kyle! Congratulations! I’m so excited for you.”

I said, Sorry, who is this?

“You’re not Kyle!”

“No!” I said, “But I’m excited for him too.” We laughed like we knew each other. “We’re all so happy for him,” she said. I said, Me too. Please tell him from me that it’s brilliant and I am so happy for him that he has all this great nourishing support around him.

Sunday I picked up a quilt cover from an online seller and we talked half an hour and hugged and she said, I already adore you. Strangers can share love. And families can be alienating and punitively cold. Stranger love vividly real and momentary before it dissolves into the stream of our lives is what keeps me going, some days. I love you, strangers.

Three days ago I posted a picture of my face on a dating site because I am longing to be held. I yearn to be held by someone friendly and calm, somebody who is not gross. A twenty-three-year-old boy child wrote to me: older women are So Hot.

Delete.

A man posing in front of a blow-up portrait of himself wrote, Yo. Another man said, I like car karaoke and I said, oh, caraoke? A man calling himself ‘a Dom and Proud of It’ wrote to me and I told him, I’m not interested in sexualised violence against women.

Oh no, he explained, eager on his favourite topic. “BDSM has been around for 1000s of years and people haven’t realised it. It goes back to the ancient pharaohs and slaves.”

How innocently he compares his sexual habits to slaving, to the idea that some people were born to rule. Yes, I told him: patriarchy itself goes back thousands of years.

This is not an argument in its favour.

“I understand that you believe your sadism is consensual. You probably practice ‘enthusiastic consent’ and all of that. But if you love someone or respect them, you cannot wound them.

“Not even if they ask you to.

“Not even if a lifetime of relentless and ceaseless predation and the perpetual threat of violence and degradation from random men within a world where women have so little, and so little power, has persuaded them they want it.”

Was he interested in conversation, in getting to know someone, did he listen? Of course not. He used our conversation solely as a recruitment tool, wanting to lure this woman (any woman) in to damage. He kept demonstrating the sexiness of harm and trying to sell me on my own openmindedness, for that might make me unable to say no. What kind of a man overrides a woman’s No? “You should try it,” he said, “before criticising.” Yep, gotcha, still hoping to access this woman (any woman) as an accessory to his fantasy that women want him to hurt them.

He seeks to override women’s boundaries, through persuasion. What this means is that his talk of mutuality and consent is just a mechanism for subverting consent.

“I would need to see some form of understanding from you,” he said, “before I could agree to meet.” Already he was trying to trigger the programming he knows women are subjected to: the need to please, the need to try to extract kindness from the people who threaten us, in order to stave off harm.

Fight/flight/freeze and fawn.

We know that a woman who has escaped and exited this strapped-in world often speaks of her abusive loved ones, an unloved childhood, her longing for gentleness. Sometimes the only way she knows to get hold of kindness is by putting herself through indignity and subservience and pain, so that at the end of the session of stamping on her head dragging her on a leash or pissing into her mouth the ‘dom’ will gather her bruises in his arms, he will comfort and soothe them and call her his love, call her such a good girl.

This dating site sleazebag says, with wounded pride, “I don’t do violence against women and children.” I point out he is talking about violence as something he could choose to ‘do’ but nobly refrains from ‘doing’, using the vocabulary of recreational drugs. He cannot respond to any of my arguments, he is slippery and slick like greasy latex. What he’s seeking is to train women trained to perceive their own obedience and their submission to degradation as the proof that they are sovereign, they are untamed and free: they must be whipped, bound, crushed and tamed in order to show how they are radical and ‘wild.’

I look back at my photos and read my profile again. In it I am clear that what I crave is shared experience and tenderness, not an exchange of projections and fantasies: not ‘mutual’ exploitation and power games.

Delete, delete, block. The app tells me, he is <10km from me. Should I be worried? He sees himself as some warrior for wildness but what he convinces his victims is that their freedom in fact means being bound and insulted, handing over control. He is the embodiment of patriarchy, that is: submission to the norm. A powerfully built man, two metres tall, outspoken about his desire to subject women to pain, is not brave, and his pride in coming out as a wounder of women is not courageous. What I find courageous is the women who labour to recover from such harm, and to keep our hearts open and still see men as fully human and to live out among strangers who are half of them men and be open to their humanity and treat them kindly.

On New Year’s Eve I visited my mother for the first time in weeks and as she was listing, again, my faults I stood a little apart from her, slightly smiling. Oh! she said, I’d like to smack that smile off your face! In my life, my family’s violence is ever vigilant. They are violent because I have been outspoken about their violent behaviours in the past. I have faced all this down alone and I will continue to face it and I will never succumb to anyone’s cruelty ever again. Instead I will keep seeding and watering nourishment, connection, good listening, and love. Alone if necessary, I will do the work.

Strangulation is part of sex. Now titled (so coyly) ‘breath play’ it is commonplace, admissible and often successful as a defense in court by men who’ve murdered women. Imagine being strangled to death whilst being fucked. Where is the mutuality in this, where is the joy. Now, porn rules the world. Porn is half the internet. All porn is revenge porn and it is sexy to hurt women. It is what sexiness is for. The woman, roped up in high heels and the perpetual arousal mimicked by lipstick and blusher, is meant to long for the safety of a man’s domination. He protects her. Against whom? Against the threat of other men. Pornography has become at once so normalised and so extreme that rapes are filmed and each rape attracts millions of hits, that is, enables millions of orgasms. To say out loud how lonely these lives have become and how wasteful and pointless this is, and how we need each other’s love, is to my mind the bravest, most courageous and soulful of all possible work. In our porn-soaked world I put out a shingle, to say: I would love to be hugged. This was met with opportunism and greed, and the offer of violence. This two metre tall man calling himself a ‘gentle giant’ is a violent giant. Like a baby, so cossetted by privilege that he believes his dedication to pleasure through patriarchal enslavement is somehow radical and free, he is dangerous and raw. He can’t hear No. And he would say it is I who lack adventure, who cannot kick over the traces of conventional thought. But of the two of us, I am the one standing unbowed by debilitating pain, I am the only one finding the courage to ask for and to offer kindness: to radically resist submission and domination, the conventions of centuries past. I do not believe that the cry from the heart which says I’m longing for love and I seek true companionship is any sign of timidity or weakness. It is the only kind of courage that can keep carving from the bleakness of our cold as marble cities the very David, the individual, the human who can converse and be loved, who can be gathered in and form a household.

Adept at dancing in small spaces & a one-man dance party, at any party you care to name. Not for long, though; not always. Sometimes the whole crowd starts frothing. Sometimes I slip through alone and go home sweating and late and loose. My hair a web of smoke that wakes me suddenly, when I turn my head into it on the pillow.

All the way home I am paying attention to the trees. These are my champions, companions, and friends. The morning after disembarking from far-off chilly-cold and fairytale Berlin I was scattering the pawpaw seeds from my first breakfast in a scarred yoghurt tub in the sun to dry: in order to make more trees.

I rode home on the back of a bike and feeling the cool night time breeze in my ears. We rode past Ghana International Airport, where a few of the letters have dropped out so that it says Ghana Inter nal Airport. You could fly to Kumasi. You could fly to Ga. If they only had an airport, in Ga.

As we were approaching my friend’s house where I am staying I leaned forward in the highway breeze and said to my ride, What is something you really like — about ME. He said, steering suavely, “You are beautiful.” He said it vehemently but without any hurry. I felt filled with wellbeing, and dropped down under the spreading trees where I walk home and as I walked up around the curving nearby street a man who guards the block of flats painted blindingly white stuck his head out of his tiny guard hutch to greet me. “Hello!” I said. When I passed last week he was hanging on the barred gate and I had the impulse but didn’t say, Don’t they let you out? Should I free you from there? because it seemed to me so amusing. I am easily amused and it’s something I have held onto. Now in the thrum of the generators he said, My sweet friend. How are you. Long time. And I said, Chairman. Long time. How be. The night rose up around us like a steam built from all our bodies and their exhalations and their sleep. I love to be free and alive at such times…. Don’t you.

Today I was walking down the street wearing shorts and within a block two men had slowed down to call out to me. One was up high, in a truck. Yo yo yo! he said, sweeping his arm to show the shape of me. Gee thanks. Second guy riding past on a motorbike, at my eye level. He slowed way way down. Bent his head towards me and said, very slowly, You. Got really. Good. Legs.

Gee thanks.

Reason I was walking down the street in the paralysing heat is I had an appointment at the physiotherapist, my forty-fifth, trying to slowly heal the damage to my right arm from the shoulder where a third man, someone I have no connection with who was sitting drinking and took exception to me, got up and charged at me from behind swinging his motorcycle helmet on its straps. He walloped me like a mace. It was like a cannonball. His blow has shattered the flexibility of my beautiful shoulder possibly forever, second MRI scan this week is not looking good, this was more than a year ago and I am still in pain when I try to comb my hair or play the guitar. Or, you know, uncap a bottle of water.

Gee. Thanks.

On my way home from the physio a man called to me, Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello! Hellllllllloooooo! until I had turned the corner to escape him.

This is what it is like living under male rule.

I met the grandmother of the chief of the tiny coastal village near where I am staying, and she has been extraordinarily gracious. Today I went to visit, bringing with me two bottles of a spicy local ginger and hibiscus drink called bissap. She wanted my name and the name of the town I come from and wrote everything down in a beautiful script on a folded piece of lined paper. Her little grandson set out plastic chairs from a stacked pile. Local children crept closer and closer until they were crouching underfoot and they leaned in, leaning on me from all sides, patting my hair and coiling it softly in their tiny fingers, cuddling against me confidingly so that every way I looked up, there were three or four more little faces leaning in and gazing. They treated me as though I was an exotic curiosity but at the same time, like someone they had already loved and trusted all their lives and had been kept away from for too long. The most beautiful feeling. “My friend my friend! Picture me! Picture me!” And when I did, they melted like a froth of sea foam into a thicket of accomplished gangster gestures, cool and hilarious at once. And when I did, all the photos were blurred but one, because eighteen children leaning in on all sides made the body of us jostle as one, like a kind of dance.