In a little Hungarian cafe I found a tourist map of Budapest. It very much resembles the summertime map of Berlin. All-night “party with a capital P” hotspots, hostels with wifi, a Sunday farmer’s market “to soothe your hangover soul.” When I got home, a trail of smashed-up pieces of coloured foil lay glittering among the autumn leaves through the house door. Revellers have taken over the world.
The back of the fold-up map has a kind of jokey phrase book that made me feel I had never been young. Spelt out in comic-font phonetics are the translations for “Yeah, whateva,” “Good penis,” “Please may I fondle your buttocks” and “Harder, faster, now.” “How much for him/her?” gave me chills. By the end of the page the insouciant mood has soured into something more like desperation:
I’m having a heart attack
Don’t harrass me
I’m thirsty
My bum hurts
I’m drunk
Never again
Help me
Fuck OFF
Don’t stop
Goodbye
Once more
I’m lost
………………………………………………………………………..
Berlin 2013. Found among some old stories.
Tag: sexuality
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revellers have taken over the world
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Ghanagain
The grandiose way of telling this would be to say, I am flying back to Ghana for the premiere of a film in which I played a small role. The truth is, I fell in love. This happened before I ever went there, and on the first night of my first visit, in January, we met. He picked me up at the airport and I thought, how terrible if I couldn’t find him among all the brown faces whose country was new to me. We had talked so much by email and had spoken of our whole lives. He said he loved me. I said, you can’t say that until we meet.
He sent me flowers and chocolates and wine, which arrived at my door in Berlin while I was in Morocco, and died. The florist lady was so touched by our story she allowed me to visit and pick out a fresh bouquet, choosing out all the blossoms I liked best. By video I showed him. “I love orchids and I love roses.” I showed him the field flowers I had chosen from her big vases: valueless to some people, but beautiful.
We lay down together. We’d still not kissed. I looked at him and he looked at me. Three nights later when he texted to say, I’ve come home, I ran barefoot down the alleyway to unlock the big security gate and flung myself against its bars. And he grabbed me and dragged me to him and we kissed passionately between the curls of steel, and I felt as though I had come home.
My first morning in Africa, because Morocco is different, he said I don’t want you to go out on your own. Wait for me. No fear, I said, no way: I’ve been travelling independently since I was fifteen. This was further back for me than for him. I went walking and at the end of the day and after furious adventures I came home, finding my way and proud to find it. Outside a two-storey building which stood out, a woman said, “Are you American?”
I crossed the road to shake her hand. “No, I’m Australian, this is my first day, it’s so beautiful!”
“Do you think you could fake an American accent?”
“I dunno,” I said, “quite likely not well.”
“Would you like to screen test for a film we’re making? We’ve hunted all round Accra for the right white lady.”
I went in and she took me through a room full of people in headphones. I can’t act, so I just tried to imagine how this character might feel. The director came down, who had written the film, and spoke to me about what he wanted. “It’s an American woman, a bit older, and she’s flirting with a Ghanaian man online. And she knows that he’s scamming her but she doesn’t care, she’s bored or… maybe a bit lonely.”
I stuck out my foot. “My sandal and your microphone – they look like they’re cousins.”
My hairy goatskin sandals from Morocco and the furry windsock on a big boom mic made them laugh. “So what brings you to Ghana?”
I said, “You’re not going to believe this…”
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kink shaming
On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.
As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.
I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?
It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.
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me too, yesterday
Monday morning I left my doors wearing a tiny skater skirt. I flung a leg over my bicycle. A guy standing up the street a ways said, “Wow.”
To himself, not to me.
I am old enough that this now seems flattering. I pedalled away, smiling to myself. Such a beautiful day. Around the corner I came along a quiet street in which another man followed me, in his car, too close behind, very slowly for the entire five blocks. It seemed to last for an hour. There were other cyclists on the street. The sun shone on my back and on his bonnet. What ran through my head as I pedalled forward and he kept pace was the conversation initiated by a friend this week in the wake of international outcry from all the women who have ever been sexually molested or assaulted. It has started to feel the quicker process would be for women who have not been abused to come forward. This friend asked, “he raped me”, or “I was raped” – which feels more real?
I could feel the mood of angry unrest and how women were wanting to claim back our active sovereignty. We needed to use the active voice and be less passive. But for me, I felt, it has changed. First ‘I was raped’ was the overwhelming sentence pounding in my brain. It was the change in state in myself that I noticed, not him – he was the agent, he was unimportant in those first moments (which lasted years). Virginal and unknowing, curious and excited about maybe kissing, filled with fantasy and romance, 12 years old in a 17 year old’s body… then rupture. Pain. Overwhelm. Disbelief.
Secondly because his congress on my body and his forced colonisation inside me split up my feeling of myself. It did render me passive. It did render me somehow compliant and I stayed in the relationship with the guy for 9 months, until his threats of weaponed violence woke me up and I had to climb the spiked wall. I was fresh out of a very repressive Lutheran school and imagined I would have to marry him now and have his children in order to redeem ‘my’ ‘sin.’
It was his act, and I’m not ashamed of it anymore. It was his act. But he carried me under and moved on.
He went into a career in Conservative politics and later switched parties as the first was not right wing enough.
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May Day, May Day
Two people made fuck, out on the concreted area in front of the apartments. I recognised the act by her cries. He had her sprawled over a car bonnet with his hand around her throat, and for a few minutes I watched clenching my fists. Were those cries of despair? Is she ok? Do I need to rescue this woman from rape?
But then she got up and staggered before him for a minute and lifted away her skirts on either side like a ladybird’s tissuey inner wings. The pale curves of her bottom and thighs were perfect with youth, like two slices of soft long pears from a can. She presented to him her hindquarters and bent herself forward with yearning. He drew her back into his lap and then, skewered, she twisted herself round to kiss. Now and again someone walked past them and they simply froze in place, his place just now being immemorial. A couple of girls strolled by with their cell phones lighted and I feared a filming, an aggression, a posting which would attempt to shame, but the girl walking just ahead lifted her phone and continued a conversation without, apparently, noticing the two there who were holding down the fort. He lifted her jumper to cup her breast. It is cold. They rearranged themselves again and she spread herself on her back on the shiny car, her legs like searchlights. Next morning I went down to buy bread, because we are Germans now, and passed the chalked square for a parked car where they had set each other alight. The big sprawling dark car was gone and in its place a tiny blue and silver rechargeable, as though the yelping congress in the night had already borne its fruit.
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illicit flower factory
Today my boyfriend discovered the illicit dried flower factory I have been running in his apartment. At first glance it looks as though a two-dimensional squirrel has made herself a nest out of private papers and unwanted official letters retrieved from the waste paper bin beside his desk.
“What’s this?” he said, lifting away the heavy row of comic books along the shelf to reveal my little stack of flattened envelopes and folded paper.
“Uhm,” I said, “that’s my dried flower factory. I have one at home, as well.”
The whole city has burst into bloom and the streets are filled with love. On our way down to the post office a man in the street grabs me, both hands clasping my forearm in a grip surprisingly determined and strong. An African man, bearded, handsome, long muscular arms and that’s all I see of him. He is smiling, pleading, manly, he is wooing me in his own language. “Danke,” I keep saying, “Danke, nein, ich muss ~ ” and wrenching my arm away I turn back to the taller man I have come out with, my beloved, who is bristling and who wraps his hand possessively about me at the waist. “What was that?” he asks, “you don’t know that guy?” “No,” I say, “he just really liked me.” “You look confident today. But why would he grab you while you’re kissing me?” he growled, looking over his shoulder in a feint.
“Well, that’s why,” I say, having understood the man in an instant. Perfect attraction is like that, if it so often only lasts a moment. “He liked it, I think, that I was laughing and teasing and reaching for you. I think maybe he thought, I’d like a woman to look at me that way and to kiss me like she loved me. I’d like that woman.”
He isn’t really worried, because he knows I love him. Other men casting glances and women looking at him are not new. And I know that he loves me too, he treats me beautifully and his dark sweetness and deep limpid loving heart are my water and my salt in the desert of city sugar and fat. And I know that he understands me, better than the guy who grabbed me in the street and would not let go, his eyes imploring and his smile broad, might ever do.