I used to not value myself much, in terms of the way I treated my body, not just in the plain routines of eating and health, but being very sexually promiscuous wasn’t the right thing for me at a certain age. I believe in the right that everyone owns his or her own preferences and should make choices on their own about what they feel good about in whatever they do. I was having sex for the wrong reasons. Not wanting to talk to the other person anymore is no reason to give them a blow job. Boring people do not deserve to get off so that you can go home early. It is true. I really mean it. I mean, I will give someone I am attracted to, like, not love, but like, something something, but that is now. I have been around, I have really punched the clock, and I know now enough to know that my time is valuable.
I went to see “Monster” with my friend, and at the end of the film, I turned to my friend and said, “We old hos just know.” I just wish I could have had the presence of mind back then to have charged the dudes some money.
“Monster” is the story of alleged serial killer Aileen Wournos, America’s first female to commit this typically white male crime. Serial killing just ain’t what it used to be. Forensics are just too sophisticated, the computers track everyone’s movements, and after 9/11, forget it. We live in a police state. No one is able to go unaccounted for anymore. They watch us, closely. A side effect of the Patriot Act in the information age that strangely works in the public’s favor is that the menace of ‘serial killers’ seems to have died down, no pun intended. Not that it was so much a huge problem to begin with, lending more to urban myth and public fear than to actual body count. Now we have more people that just freak out, get a shotgun and fuck up a whole bunch of people. Postal workers still seem to get every which way but loose, as they always did.
Aileen Wournos is different, she didn’t fit the prototype of a serial killer, and most believe, as I do, she was acting out of self defense. It is a hard life for a ho, and I should know, because I have been there, maybe not in the frontage roads of the highways of murky South Florida, but in my own way, I understand what it feels like to do that, to just close your eyes and do it, not kill people, but to have sex without feeling like you are, because in a way, it is killing yourself, just a little bit at a time, until the end of it, you are done, and you have killed that part of you forever. I resurrected that part, and live on my own terms now, in all areas of my life, and I am lucky for that. How I did it, I am at a loss to explain. Maybe it was that I trusted the fact that if I didn’t want to do something, I just could say no instead of doing it and turning out the light inside me so I wouldn’t have to see. Tuning out wasn’t an option anymore because I got scared that I would tune out for so much I would start to forget to tune back in, and then what if the channel got deprogrammed, like when you unplug your cable and then try to set it back up again and all you get are local news and weather. Being there became more important than letting the other person be there without me. Pleasing myself, became more important than pleasing others. Big lesson. If you haven’t learned it, I bet you would get much out of trying it at least once. It will send shock waves through your body. It will get you high. Seriously. I am not preaching abstinence. I am talking about choice. I think if people want to get it on, they should stop reading this and be on it and have at it, but there are times you know you don’t want to, and you go through the motions because you feel obligated. The body remembers this as a small crime against it, and it builds up over time, until you have a long record of misdemeanors against yourself that confines you to your own death row from which you can never escape. I don’t want to do any disservice to the film “Monster.” I am just saying, if you understand at all what I have written here, go see it. I felt more human after watching that film than I ever had before, and closer to being in real understanding with what all women face at one time or another in this world. Whether or not Wournos is guilty or innocent, she is not around anymore to tell us. She was executed last year. Her story died with her, but it serves us to weave our own story from where hers abruptly ended. If you ever were sexually abused and you allow the continual abuse, whether by yourself or by someone near you, understand that the pain of that cannot be dissipated. It goes somewhere and it stays stuck like a bullet fragment in your heart. Stopping, reassessing, changing your behavior, loving and trusting and putting a lot of value on the actions you take and what you will take from others is a kind of psychic surgery that you need to do. If you need it. If you know what I mean. If you don’t, just tune in tomorrow. There will be something funny and ironic and witty and fluffy to take your mind off the fact that sometimes this world is a fucked place to live.
Hey, Lee, if you are out there, I am really really sorry. I know, I understand.