Bound and Gagged for Public Decency and Social Morality
He asks for a beer, spits on the bar, then turns to the side and pukes. It’s really not that big of a deal, he snarls... “What the fuck are you staring at, bitch?”
Trigger Warning: This piece includes explicit language, graphic imagery, and themes of gendered violence, power dynamics, and sexual politics. Reader discretion is advised.
That’s my man.
He walks in with a limp and three missing fingers. He smells like kerosene, leather, bleach and metal. He shows off freshly missing teeth from his tobacco stained gums. He asks for a beer, spits on the bar, then turns to the side and pukes. It’s really not that big of a deal, he snarls…“What the fuck are you staring at, bitch?”
Prince Charming would never insult women.
Prince Charming makes the world beautiful, sunny and warm. His kindness is a masterstroke of politics: he improves the whole of human civilization with his sweetness… like a cake, he adds the most delicious ingredient.
He holds open doors, kisses hands, smiles at old, unfuckable, post-menopausal and dried out women. He cares about single peasant mothers, sitting in the twilight, shucking corn and kneading dough, their skin all wrinkle-worn, and organs, touch starved.
His generosity knows no bounds: he finds ways to remove taxes for the poor. He's the prototype of all human chivalry and politesse. Kings, presidents, authoritarians, fathers, brothers, and husbands are all compared to him. He’s the man all others wish they could be one-twelfth as charming as. He’s Prince Charming, after all, and no other gentleman is worth remembering but him. He's the standard, the norm, and … so totally enveloping is his power … there exists only the bleakest shadow as the singular exception to his absolute rule.
He wins minds by touching hearts, and with his smile, he casts his beguiling enchantment. You want to please him because he’s so lovable and so handsome. Who can resist him? And why would anyone want to?
There's no cry he can't soothe, no wound so deep he can't fully heal it. He embodies the sun and the stars. He fills the world with the most adoring octave of patriarchal love. He fixes civilization, as though setting delicate watch mechanisms.
He finds and puts to use each unique quality, buried like diamonds in the darkness of each living soul, and he has enough intelligence and wherewithal to assemble society to sing with a supremely angelic melody.
Under his spell, we perform a concert to welcome Gods to reside by our side, on Earth, as in paradise, with King Charming shining at the center of everything.
That’s my man.
But he’s so pathetic and broken. He’s puking at the bar... Poor him! He’s calling his ex-wife a dumb fucking whore. He’s pissing himself in his blue jeans. He's on his phone scrolling foot worship porn. He doesn’t give a fuck about the puke on the floor. Some worthless cunt will clean it up.
He chugs his beer, tosses coins at the cashier, limps out and slams the door.
He sees a pretty girl across the street and calls her a slut. He gets in his car, throws an empty can of beer out the opened door. He’s holding up another aluminum beer can to his lips, and in his left hand, he lights up a cigarette.
He coughs.
Chugs beer.
Spits.
Prince Charming rescues beaten women from the side of the road. I’ve seen him, hundreds of times, on his way out to the hunt, picking up, like a hound, on the quiet whimpers of a thousand battered and disposed-of-women. From deep within the forest, he arrives, and steps gallantly down from his royal horse. His curly wig frames his noble face, light casts shadows like water through the dark leaves… When, finally, he beholds you, it’s as if the sun were glowing just to be felt by your skin.
His knights and servants part the way, and they hold out their arms to help each woman regain strength. They give her golden coins and tell her how important it is that women are treated right. Prince Charming makes an edict: “Women create the world, and men must maintain the property.”
"So true," I thought. My Prince is always right.
Prince Charming might only want me for sex. Maybe he only wants me nearby because of my sorcery and magic… My chaotic, infinite fertility… Which poses a threat to his military might, financial conservatism and rigid social order. When he has me, he knows I’m contained. In the candlelight, I speculate on why he wants me around, then he pulls off his wig and I see his shining bald head, glowing like the sun once again… I’m just so grateful to experience this. ♥︎
Prince Charming has other women, and of course… he would… He must… Have you met him? Seduction is his political power and he’s so charming, it would be cruel to want to place restrictions on his love… Only a very evil person would dream of such a thing! Deprive other women of the joy of being adored by him? Are you deranged?
I know some of his other female-property.
I know some of them look at me like a cheap whore, a threat to their austere marketing of virginal-untouchable-sanctity-scarcity. It’s too brutal and grotesque, how overflowing and excessive I am… Too much sex. Too much power. Too much flesh. Too much presence. Too much mouth. I cheapen the global feminine market.
They look at me, my vulgarity, and think, and say, in both plain and subtle language, “How disgusting”… My torn rags and black rotting teeth from all the sugar I eat… They look at my fat and my ass and my big, curly hair, and they see something less than human, something more like an animal. Something uncivil and improper. They ask about censorship and decency. Can’t Prince Charming make some sort of law? But Prince Charming sees my decadence and he loves my loud and abrasive electrical spark, so as long as he's the one wielding the current.
Other women look at me and tell me I’m just like them. I look like them. I think like them. “She’s just like me, fr.” Except, suddenly, they’ve hijacked and erased my existence? They’ve decided they’re me and I’m the copy?
Objectified in the feminine way.
Mirrored, mimicked, minimized.
”We can everything you do.
You look like everyone else.
I totally get what you’re doing.
You’re just like me, but worse.”
Projecting themselves onto me, forcing themselves to fit into me. Something like a non-consensual penetration. Like they’re Cinderella’s step-sisters, and I’m the shoe? Is it because they want Prince Charming? Why are they doing this to me? It feels like soul-rape. Mining. I thought we were sisters. You said only men are supposed to exploit us this way.
I go back to Prince Charming.
No… I run to him… He’s all I have left. The only one who wants me, the only who’ll see something sweet about me. But tonight, I find he’s busy.
I visit his counsel, behind closed doors, where they’re smoking cigars. Women don’t belong here, but I’m something less and other than human. No one humanizes me. They obliterate, possess, and blur. In exile, as an alien thing, conditioned to remain suspended between sacred and profane, whore-sorceress, relegated like waste into a special, unregulated social class. The black market as a person. Repression personified.
On velvet couches, in an aquarium of liquor, vapor and smoke, the counsel’s dried, calloused hands caress my softly glowing face.
In their silk suits, they hold my hands, touch my legs, play with my hair, lift up my cheap, torn skirts. They lavish me with compliments and make me feel like I’m felt, heard, seen. In exchange, my chubby cheeks blush, I laugh, and I let them have their way. Their strength is empowered by my strange, otherworldly power. I match their fire and provoke them by letting myself outshine them.
When I let myself go, and they see what primordial force lurks behind the mask of physical mass, it’s a reminder of the difference between women and men.
Once we're finished, and I leave the room, they get to feel like trophy hunters who’ve successfully tamed some sinister monster. That’s a real man, for you… Civilizing the primitive world. The Monotheistic God striking down the Whore of Babylon, with his big dick, of course. All thanks to me, and my pliant, charitable surrendering.
Other women made me the only girl in the world.
Censoring themselves, regulating and restricting.
"Lose more weight. Get filler, more Botox. Straighten your hair. Be quiet. Look at her tits, look at her skirt. She's not a girl's-girl. She needs to center men."
Women are the unpaid jailers policing one another from solitary confinement. Who needs a patriarchal guardian? We run the asylum as an altruistic non-profit. Once we decide you're beautiful enough, we'll hand you over to the warden, myself. I promise, you'll love it.
