Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you
rights, honor, and knowledge because you earn them; but it
also takes from you too much tenderness. One needs tenderness to love - not to be loved but to love.
I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the
pain; I’ve heard so much heartbreak among us. I think I’ve
pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not much
left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe
it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while. I’m told by my
friends that it’s not evil to rest. At the same time, as they
know, there’s a child being pimped by her father with everyone around her either taking a piece of her or looking the other way. How can anyone rest, real y? What would make it
possible? I say to myself, Think about the fourth-generation
daughter who wasn’t a prostitute; think about her. I say,
Think about the woman who asked herself whether or not it
was bad to penetrate a baby with an object and figured out
that it might be; think about her. These are miracles, political
miracles, and there will be so many more. I think that there
will be many more.
Basics
Politics doesn’t run on miracles modest or divine, and the few
miracles there are have the quality of invisibility about them
because they happen to invisible people, those who have been
hurt too much, too often, too deep. There’s a jagged wound
that is in fact someone’s life, and any miracle is hidden precisely
because the wound is so egregious. The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain. When a rapist stomps on
your life, you are victimized, and although it is a social law in
our society that “victim” is a dirty word, it is also a true word,
a word that points one toward what one does not want to
know.
Women used to be identified as a group by what was presumed to be a biological wound - the vaginal slit, the place for penile penetration. There is a 2, 000 year history of the slit’s
defining the person. If a stranger can go from the outside
to the inside, the instrumentality of that action is the whole
purpose of the creature to whom it is done. That area of
the female body has hundreds of dirty names that serve as
synonyms.
The mystery is why the vagina is such a mystery. Any reference to one of the dirty names elicits sniggers and muted laughs. What are seen as the sexual parts of a woman’s body
are always jokes; anything nonsexual is trivial or trivialized.
For a prostitute, the whole body becomes the sexual part,
