Heartbreak
enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one
can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to
pick one kind of pedagogy over al others, I pick listening. It
breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed
limits; it takes one into another’s life, her hard times and, if
there is any, her joy, too. There are women whose whole lives
have been pornography and prostitution, and still they fight
to live.
The world gets meaner as prostitution and pornography are
legitimized. Now women are the slave population, an old
slavery with a new technology, cameras and camcorders. Smile;
say “bleed” instead of “cheese. ”
I’m tired, very weary, and I cry for my sisters. Tears get
them nothing, of course. One needs a generation of warriors
who can’t be tired out or bought of . Each woman needs to
take what she endures and turn it into action. With every tear,
accompanying it, one needs a knife to rip a predator apart;
with every wave of fatigue, one needs another platoon of
strong, tough women coming up over the horizon to take
more land, to make it safe for women. I’m willing to count the
inches. The pimps and rapists need to be dispossessed, forced
into a mangy exile; the women and children - the world’s true
orphans - need to be empowered, cosseted with respect and
dignity.
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Counting
Are there really women who have to worry about a fourth
generation’s becoming prostitutes? How many are there? Are
there five, or 2, 000, or 20 million? Are they in one place - for
instance, the Pacific Northwest, where the woman I quoted
lives - or are they in some sociological stratum that can be isolated and studied, or are they al in Thailand or the Philippines or Albania? Are there too many or too few, because in either
case one need not feel responsible? Too many means it’s too
hard to do anything about it; too few means why bother. Is it
possible that there is one adult woman in the United States
who does not know whether or not a baby’s body should be
penetrated with an object, or are there so many that they
cannot be counted - only their form of saying "I don’t know”
comes in the guise of labeling the penetration "speech” or
“free speech”?
A few nights ago I heard the husband of a close friend on
television discussing antirape policies that he opposes at a
university. He said that he was willing to concede that rapes
did take place. How white of you, I thought bitterly, and then
I realized that his statement was a definition of “white” in
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Heartbreak
motion - not even “white male” but white in a country built
on white ownership of blacks and white genocide of reds and
white-indentured servitude of Asians and women, including
white women, and brown migrant labor. He thought that
maybe 3 percent of women in the United States had been raped,
whereas the best research shows a quarter to a third. The male
interviewer agreed with this percentage pulled out of thin air:
it sounded right to both of them, and neither of them felt
required to fund a study or read the already existing research
material. Their authority was behind their number, and in the
United States authority is white. Whatever trouble these
two particular men have had in their lives, neither has had
to try to stop a fourth generation, their own child, from prostituting.
“I had two daughters from [him], ” said a different woman,
“and he introduced me into heroin and prostitution. I went
further into drugs and prostitution, and al my life the only
protection I ever had was my grandmother, and she died
when I was five years old. ” This woman spoke about other
males by whom she had children and was abused. She spoke
about her mother, who beat her up and closed her in dark
closets. It’s good that her grandmother was kind because her
grandfather wasn’t: “I can’t remember how old I was when
my grandfather started molesting me, but he continued to
rape me until I became pregnant at the age of thirteen. ” Can
one count how many women there are on our fingers and
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Counting
toes, or does a bunch of us have to get together to have enough
fingers and toes, or would it take a small army of women to
get the right numbers?
There is another woman who was left in a garbage can
when she was six months old. She was born drunk and had to
be detoxified in her incubator. She was, in her own words,
“partially mentally retarded, ” “abandoned, ” and “raised in and
out of foster homes, ” some of which she says were good. She
had the chance to stay with a foster family but chose to be
with her father, since that was her idea of family. He was a
brute, good with his fists, and first raped her when, as a child,
she was taking a bath with her kid brother; and like many incest-
rapists, he’d rape her or make her perform sex acts and then
give her a child’s reward. “I just wanted him to be my father;
that’s al I wanted from him, ” she said. At twelve she was
stranger-raped. The stranger, a fairly talented pedophile, would
pick her up from school and talk with her. Eventual y he
slammed her against a garage and raped her: “Nobody had
ever talked to me about rape, so I figured he was just showing
me love like my father did. ” On having the rape discovered,
the girl was called no good, a whore, and shunned by her
family. “My father had taught me most of what I needed to
learn about pleasing men, ” she says. “There was a little bit more
that [the pimp] needed to teach me. So [the pimp] would
show me these videos, and I would copy on him what I saw
was going on in the videos, and that’s how I learned to be a
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Heartbreak
prostitute. ” Her tricks were professional men. She worked in
good hotels until she found herself streetwalking. “I ended up
back in prostitution. I worked out on Fourth Street, which is
the strip, and St. Carlos in San Jose. There were [many] times
that I would get raped or beat up. ” Daddy pimped.
One night she was trying to bring home her quota of
money when a drug-friend of her father’s came by. “He raped
me, he beat me up, he held a gun [in] his hand [to my head].
And I swear to this day I can stil hear that gun clicking. ”
She then worries that she is taking up too much of my time.
I’m important; she’s not. My time matters; hers doesn’t. My
life matters; hers does not. From her point of view, from the
reality of her experience, I embody wealth. I speak and some
people listen. I write and one way or another the books get
published from the United States and Great Britain to Japan
and Korea. There is a splendidness to my seeming importance,