Photo by Rajiv Bajaj on Unsplash
Για το κείμενο στα ελληνικά κάνε κλικ εδώ
Every sunrise was the hardest time of the day, every awakening was a torture. From the first strike of the clock that was against 9, I felt as if a blindfold had been removed. Along with my own eyes, the aluminum ones opened over an exponentially paranoid city somewhere in downtown Athens, in the centre of Greece. A superorganism like a nest of ants, where everyone struggled to protect the queen: money and sex. For me it was the centre of the world.
Along with my morning routine, the palpitations, fear and flush for my day automatically activated. I wasn’t an ordinary student college. I didn’t go to university, I didn’t eat at student restaurant and my parents didn’t care if I was broke. I have always had more than the essentials for me and those I treat as my own children, my friends. Inside the dorms you came across damaged family environments, with a tendency toward post adolescence, abuses and the treatment of life as a video game. If I play well, maybe I live. It was privilege to be able to fulfil all of the above with the contribution of money. And right about here I have to get in touch with my emotions.
Until now I cogitate myself as a third person. I take into account how someone in my position would feel and I decide to talk about them whenever they ask me. But now, and today and as my hands run to the keyboard – I wish I was one of the classics, writing on white paper with black letters – I will express myself authentically and unfiltered, because that is the curse of writing.
Back to my morning meretricious movie life. I always took care of my hygiene, because that was the work rules. Well-groomed limbs, seductive smell, pure blond hair, carefully and subtly dyed – you didn’t want to look like a woman, but a little girl – a hairless body, because that’s what social standards and porn education for women dictate. This disgusting apathy that every day I took out of the closet and supplied me to endure life. I have never fathomed the idea that I am the fairer sex. The gumption of her no, the expeditious imagination of her humour, the ascendancy of her affection, her raw intellect make a woman beautiful. Unfortunately I have always been beautiful in other people’s eyes for my own. This has always been a distressing portrayal of myself in other people’s minds. I suppose that delicate in this world will either make you destroy yourself or others, and because I am modest, my thinking is made up of sequences I decided to do them one by one.
A message, with an address for a house or hotel, a room or floor number and a name were what I always expected, but never wanted to come. They were arriving from my dealer, a woman who was paid to set me up with mainly men so I could give them healing massages. That’s mostly what I used to say to those around me. She informed me about all its caprices, since she had first gone to them herself, for security reasons. These messages would interrupt me from laughter and bring to the surface the cynicism and sickness that accompanies our existences. They emerging from this deep and bottomless lake of the collective unconscious everything that is going around in someone’s lost thoughts, but they label it as an anomaly and push it back to the unconscious. My work is on the sidelines because it is abusive, something that society is deeply aware of but also in great need of, since it is made up of the two main ingredients of modern sustainable life: money and sex once again. At the moment when the sound of a message travelled through my eardrums I surprisingly felt so strong that I am not sick while in the veins of a social leukemia. So defensively intrepid, I would chew my gum and head off.
Always along the way I would look through white privileged men in the eye, through white transit lights or under the bright sun skim on their cheeks and then look away. I was taking two breaths where one could fit as I was repeating the same lies that had been told to me from the studio: “Take advantage of the patriarchy if you can’t fight it”. For a moment I was encouraged and felt confident of what I was going to do, but I always bit and prick my lip with fear. It was a humiliating experience for everyone else, except me obviously. Have you noticed that when we talk about things that have ceased to exist in our lives, we talk in the past tense? It’s as if they have stopped to exist now. I call this the small death, and along with the assassination I also kill a part of me. And so you slowly putrefy from the inside, but at least you conceive and you don’t linger wonderfully.
I took taxis that took me to half-board hotels almost every day. They were familiar with these places since they were located in all the neighbourhoods. The taxi employees, bourgeois people, deeply influenced by the patriarchy had the need to demonstrate their masculinity by belittling a sex worker, mostly their daughter’s age. At those times I would light a cigarette and feel numb. No, there was no wrath on his face, just a sneer on mine. I never got into the process of explaining my beliefs or to him about poetry to overcome the image of a hopeless case nymphomaniac he had in mind about me. I didn’t do it not because I was a tiger woman who didn’t care what anyone thought of her, but because I believed I deserved this treatment. And that’s where this taxi driver and I were alike, in the remnants of misogyny and patriarchy, and how sorry I am for understanding him.
He directed me to the places where sensuality was sold by the pound away from family moments and the card you clock in before entering the company. At that place people were free to buy you from a photo on a website, as if you were a piece of fresh meat. At that place they were waiting for you half-naked, and they felt comfortable putting you in a difficult position. They would welcome you by name, and shake your hand suffocatingly hard, to point out that since they are paying you, you are trapped and belong to them. They were your customers. You saw mainly rich and middle-class people who were searching for a meaning, but at least they found love – perishable. Butchers, stockbrokers, architects who often just wanted you to drink wine and hold a conversation. I just listened and pretended to sympathize with their loneliness. They were the creatures I heard about in fairy tales as a child with blank stares, cold hands and were under your bed even when you were alone in the room. In both cases the lights were off. They made out eerie sounds, which sounded like distorted songs and every now and then you could make out a word. Well these words are mentally repeating themselves and I don’t know if this is how my brain is considered functional. I recognize the cliché of the sequel, but also its truth. How humiliated you were with the oils staining your clothes and your nails having skin in them. You know, every person has their own natural smell, but for me at that time my smell was obscenities, a men’s deodorant, cigarettes and landfills.
Born and raised to an urban landscape, which I’m sure has inspired multiple social dystopia films, I began from a young age to perceive the pathologies within its fabric. From the school dress code to the different parental edification between me and my brother I was condemned to my different chromosomes. The whole industry of capitalist promotion brought to my childish eyes tall, thin and plastic dolls. Later I realized that this was preparing me to be hired as a showcase from coffee shops to a camera lens. The only way I could escape and maybe compete in intellectual fieldwork competitions was to become a dynamic lawyer or doctor where at the first adversity someone would offend my low ass and not my professional status. It’s no petty victory to equalize wages between the two sexes, but let’s face it, the real war lies in the mindset of beautiful versus powerful. The capacity of a hunter, a flimsy stereotype of men, is able and almost compelled to conquer the beautiful –the only condition provided is that the beautiful is there. We are paid to position ourselves as shiny trophies of conquest in the pursuit of a sick hunt among us. What is the difference between sex work and any other work, I thought. At least I won’t pretend I’m getting paid for my appearance. And if you still don’t see this, take a look at the club’s reception, TV shows, influencers.
Nonetheless, it’s not just sexualization and the deep-rooted belief in consumerism that leads men to measure their glamor by the number of women and their watches, it’s also internalized misogyny. It’s our moms who watch shows where a woman gets sexually harassed and their pupils would dilate at how she dared to arouse the lust of a married man. It’s our friends who pare our confidence for our longer hair and bigger breasts. It’s the receptionists who, as soon as they heard that I have an appointment at 302 room, laughed. It is the fashion industry, its specific measurements and the experts who talk about diversity in a space based on the separation of the beautiful and the ugly. Irony. It is competition that swells within the vast city and there is little room left for it in every mind of femininity.
Clearly, patriarchy also affects the male side in countless oppressive ways, but the truth is that I’m not here to talk about it. I’m here to lay out some of the reasons feminism needs to exist and resonate. I’m a white privileged woman and I’m aware of sexism and patriarchy and every inter-Balkan cell in me.
But the abyss is unbearable and many times I took a break and went to the bathroom to burst in tears. Then I would go out again and lay on the bed with them, unaffected by what is reality. Reality for me was that at some point this would end and I was only living for that moment. This is how I became aware of my delayed feelings. I didn’t have time to experience the situation only to overcome it. Are you the sickest if you feel healthy where we live?