17: On sexism and cold days

I’m getting tired. Really tired. I’m in the soft leather couch of yet another house that is not my home. I look at books that aren’t mine. The people who live here, when I don’t, have a love for Harry Potter and organic gardening. I cut up kale for dinner on a cutting board I never bought. I vacuum dead grass from a garden that I didn’t grow. I don't even know what number bed, I am sleeping in, in the four months I have been homeless now.

Don't get me wrong. I love my life right now. I am exactly where I want to be and exactly where I should be. I am grateful and my cup floweth over. That doesn't mean some parts isn't rough on the road. Or weird. Unfamiliarity is the only thing that is familiar. 

In every new place routine follows fast. It’s the innate way of creating familiarity out of the unknown. Me, the first thing I do is walk the streets. I walk from one end of a new city to the other. Then all the streets in between. Until I can find my way without a map. It helps my body understand I am physically here now. On the way I figure out where to get coffee. Always priority number one: Find the watering hole. Then I figure out where to get food. It's the hunter-gathering of the urban jungle.

I have been on the road long enough now to know what works and what doesn’t. The place I lay my head needs to be quiet. The people and the place. Often they think themselves to be quiet. But they have heels that hit the floors hard (not the shoes, the heels of the naked foot), they bang every door, they talk like God herself was deaf. It is very often the same people that hang the Tibetan prayer flags without ever having been to Tibet. There’s such a fine line between living a spiritual life and saying you live a spiritual life. Leading an actual quiet life and saying you lead a quiet life.

I need the solitude. I need the alone time. I need the long hours in the middle of the night, when the world is sleeping. That is when it is just me and God. I can hear her better, when everybody else shuts up. 

I also know now that I need nature. And civilization alike. Go long without running water, and suddenly lipstick seems like a necessity of existence. Somehow deprivation screams for excess. 

I get really tired when men make speeches about things I already know. And when they remind me that really I'm nothing but a thing for them to fit neatly into fevered late night dreams. I guess that has nothing to do with being on the road. It just seem to come up a whole heck of a lot. Not sure if the whole female travelling alone thing wakes up a male idea of domination. 

Like the 80-something year old man I slept with all the way back when I was hiking the Camino de Santiago alone a whole year ago. Somehow he didn’t seem to grasp how that didn't mean he bought me. He still writes. Apparently he also reads this - he said so in a very long email I just got that ended with him inviting me into the home he shares with his wife. Um. Who in their right mind invites the woman they slept with into their wife’s home? I can’t think of anything more disrespectful. Not to me. TO HER. 

Oh, yes, and she does not know that her husband of a life time gets naked with other women. At least that’s what he said back in Spain. After a long speech about having lived with the Mormon. I didn’t care what kind of reasons he needed to tell himself to justify being unfaithful. That was not my job at the time. That was between himself and his own conscience. I never told him that this was the moment I realized that somewhere along the lines of his life he somehow got the idea that other people’s lives were his to narratively turn around as he saw fit to create little dream worlds to harbor his own wants. I do know that only someone either delusional or incredibly disrespectful or simply out of this world privilege blind would use the Mormon faith as an excuse to have extra-marital sex. The people I know who are Mormon are some of the most wonderful humans I know - and the most incredibly family oriented people in the world. Even the ones who have several wives are exactly that - family oriented. They do not live in harems dammit. They are MARRIED. Before even touching each other. Using them as an excuse is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. 

Only very few people have ever made me feel like a pony at an auction like this man did. And he still believes we had a steaming encounter. Pay here, claim ownership there. Grabbed, like my ass was being appraised. Honk, honk. I went into that bedroom on a warm autumn day in Spain because I’m curious like that. Not to be the love toy of a man twice my age. I even told him flat out that I was meeting people after, I was not staying. And yet he kept talking as if I was coming back to his room:

- The price is right, he said smiling slyly.

The price is right? Because I wouldn’t have to pay to stay the night at my hostel, if I stayed with him? I ’only’ had to pay in the way of having him naked next to me again? In what version of reality does anyone believe that is a compliment? 

If someone out there meets him, please pass along the memo that women were never actually a thing you could have. Like you can have a boat. Or an expensive car. Or well, a pony. Not even if apparently all of your friends have young female ’friends’. Like we were the newest Gucci handbag. What the fuck. Not in the hey day of white-man-privilege. Not now. 

Apparently the arrogance of men is not reserved to the country you grew up in. It’s a global business. Here’s a pro tip: If I sleep with you that does not mean you somehow have claimed ownership of me. I'm not a piece of dirt for you to plant your yard stick in. 

And for anyone confused about me writing about sex with not even a dusting of blushing on my cheeks: I am not a tramp. Not for writing about this. Not for sleeping with a man once and never again. Not for sleeping with a man old enough to be my grandfather.

I don’t care how many I have slept with, I am still not a tramp. I don’t care if I have slept with men that are younger than me, my own age or way older - or with women - I am still not a tramp. I don’t care if the things that turn me on are outrageous to you. I don’t care about judgement, shame or societal expectations. I don’t care if I sleep with five different people in one year - or not a single one in ten years. I don’t care of you buy me a freaking fur coat and think that means I somehow owe you sex. Let alone a mother effing measly dinner and then a lunch. I will never look at Spanish food with the same love again. Or maybe I will, to take this back out of the realm of encounters of the body suddenly lewdly mixed up with some sort of exchange of goods. If I give my body, I do so because I decide to. I'm not a prostitute, you do not buy me, I do not owe you anything.

All of these ideas of what we should and should not do when it comes to sex is bullshit and meant to keep us trapped in control. Both men and women. I do not call for a free sex revolution. I call for taking responsibility for your own actions. Sex is there to be a wonderful exchange between people who enter into this freely. Not there for men to bolster their dwindling egos by having a pretty thing on their arm. Or, well, somewhere else. 

That ideas like this still exist are tiring af. 

On this journey I can't even count the number of times I have met convictions about how surely I must be on my own because I just haven't found a man yet. 

There was the affluent lady on the Upper East side in New York who could not stop talking about how I must be waiting for my male companion when she saw me eating on my own. When I told her I was not waiting for anyone, she gave me a knowing look:

- Oh, I see (wink wink).
- You never know who will come, she smiled (I swear she had to contain herself not to actually wink her eye at me again, not sure that would have been lady like).

- Oh, I'm sure, I said.
- No one is coming, I continued, getting really fed up with this game now.

- I'm sure someone will come, she insisted.

- No. I do not need a man next to me to eat my dinner, I said.

That seemed to do the trick. Especially maybe because she had actually spent her entire dinner talking to a young man that seemed to be her real estate agent, and who I was now thinking might have been her excuse to go out to eat so she wouldn't sit alone. The thing is, though, I truly was absolutely fine on my own.

You do not have to be a third wave feminist (or any other wave for that matter) to acknowledge this is sexism. The belief that you cannot eat your dinner alone; surely you must be waiting for a mans company. As if food somehow spelled a special kind of dangerous independence.

But the thing is, it goes both ways. Like when a female acquaintance realized I was living in the home of a man, when I stayed in Brooklyn.

- I'm surprised you would do that, she wrote me.

I would do that? Like ... why?

She went on to say, how she was brought up hearing how 'all men think about is one thing', but maybe I wasn't brought up like that (so her fear was justified). I said that this was a thing in the entirety of the Western world - and even more so on the rest of the planet. I was neither ignorant of this, nor somehow putting possible rape on myself by not living by the standard that all men are equally dangerous. And that just maybe she actually didn't have to keep living like that was gospel, just because that was the word of her youth. She was grown now, she could decide to challenge this extreme generalization. And that it quite frankly was sexism, too.

I couldn't help but think of all the boys I knew. The children, who happened to be born male. When did they realize that to some women they were inherently seen as predators because of their gender? In what world was it helpful to perpetuate that myth? And when exactly did a man become dangerous to all women? When he was a teenager? When he started school? When he was born?

Just a month prior I had photographed the birth of a new tiny baby boy. I did not accept a blank statement about men being sexual predators, and me being irresponsible for deciding to live in the apartment of one, when I had just held a newborn baby boy. Not for him, not for any other men. That does not mean that some men aren't. Or that we do not have a worldwide serious fucking problem with the wide majority of men not even realizing the extent of the privilege they live in just by being born with an appendix the rest of us don't need. But to paint half of the human population as inherently dangerous is not the answer. And don't get me wrong. Like most other women, I have known male sexual violence. I am not being ignorant here. I just decide whether or not the man in front of me is an ass on a man-to-man basis.

And sometimes I get it wrong. Like the 80-year old, who was in no way violent, but definitely steeped in privilege of astounding depths. I am actually still surprised he was/ is this much of a sexist. Even when we first met, I couldn't quiet take it in. Because he was also intelligent. And we had some of the best conversations I have had in a long time. And then he said:

- I started thinking of you in a different way, when you showed me your breast.

Um. Hold up. When did I show you my .... wait a minute, what the hell are you talking about? Why do you think I did that? Like - what? Do people even do that (when they are older than a very drunken early 20's version of themselves)? I kept saying I didn't. He kept saying I did, and it clearly didn't occur to him that just maybe I had simply scratched my leg and his eyes had wandered places they didn't belong.

Just..... sigh.

One thing that helps is the young guys. Like the 20 somethings. They have grown up in a world where men do not say things like ’we can’t concentrate if there is a skirt in the room’ without banging their own heads into the wall. That is something right there. But hey, then again - it’s not more than 25 years ago that I was told I couldn’t mowe the lawn. Because *vagina*. It’s also no more than just a few months ago that people were petrified on my behalf because I would be heading out into the unknown as a single female traveling alone. 

Oi vey. Seriously. These days I am hanging out with a young woman who rides mountain bikes up and down trails that makes the crazy rides in the amusement parks look like the lobby to a nursing home. Women are out there being brain surgeons. Engineers. They have been mathematicians at NASA for decades. And yes, even astronauts. Was it last year that an all woman team of paleoanthropologists found a whole new species of human beings in an unexplored deep cave? The response of my very own brother, when I posted that on my Facebook page? 

- That one to the far left - are you sure that's a woman, tee-hee.

And no, honey, that is not funny. I'm pretty sure she is not laughing. You wanna know why? Because I'm also pretty sure she didn't want to be reminded that the day she found an entirely new species, it was still more important how she looked in the male gaze. I'm also pretty sure she didn't give a shit whether or not you think she look woman enough for you. She was busy changing history.

If we listen to the fears of others, we will spend a life time trapped. If we conform to the beliefs of others, we will wither inside. If we make ourselves small to fit the idea of who we should be so no one gets offended - we might as well just jump the bridge that has a sign on it saying: Think again! Yes. Do think again. Think differently this time: You - and all of us who have met these fucked up ideas of who others think we are so we fit into the image they have constructed of the world - go out there and rock the shit out of this life. What is that burning thing in your chest? What is that thing in you that screams for you to let it out? 

Are you really a kind kid, when all tried to convince you that you had to be burly to be a ’real’ man? Are you an artist, when all tried to convince you those people just ’feel too much’? Are you a woman who does not give a rats ass about weird social conventions when it comes to her own body, when all tried to convince you your body was never really yours, but a thing to please men? Excuse my language, but FUCK THEM. Live YOUR truth. As long as it does not physically harm other people, be all of who you are with no excuses, no holding back, but with a fierce smile on your face. 

You being you is what the world needs. We need more people living their one true life. Maybe that can even inspire the rest to stop being jealous and resentful to those who do, and instead get on with being their own awesome selves. 

.... Or you know, start to really look at their own wives and realize they were actual, real people all along. They were never just another conquest to be used when their husbands saw fit, and tossed aside when the husband decided to he needed to try out the latest 'thing' on the back porch of life. Nothing like young(er) flesh to make you feel like you still got it. But then - what if you never actually had it? Then what do you do? What if you realize your pals are surperficial dicks who simply screw young women while married to keep the realization away that they're all inevitably going to die. And soon, too. Sorry. But at that point of life, you can't deny forever that dying is an actual thing that happens. To.us.all. There are no boats, no winter homes in Mexico, no wooden wonderhouses with fireplaces and libraries and dogs at your feet that can keep that from being a reality creeping in on you as time passes. It is always the reality of course. For all of us. I know. I've been there already. I have no delusions about living forever. Want advice from someone who looks at death without running? Stop running. Stop buying stuff and screwing young women. While telling yourself your not running. While telling yourself your doing them a favor even. You're really, really not. You're using them. 

You were using me. 

I'm actually just realizing that fully now. At the time I just wanted to get away. It felt icky. Now I know that it was because it was never an encounter between two fully present grown human beings. It was a man using a female body like just another thing in the line of many things to keep feeling alive by living on the edge of the acceptable. Not just the extra-marital sex. But a yearning for drama even. Like when I said that I wasn't impressed with him sneaking around creating weird email accounts that he wanted me to write to or creating guises of us knowing each other because I was to find him a home swap deal in Denmark. Um. No. His answer? I should just write his normal account - that he shared with his wife - then happen what may? Wtf? Like he was inviting me to expose him? What did he think would happen? He could get out of the sticky situation of having to demand a divorce himself by staging a scene where his "lover" would write and his wife find out that way? So SHE could leave? And then what? 100 boxy virgins would magically appear for him to touch into his final days on Earth?? Because just being alone didn't seem to occur to him as an actual thing that could happen in his charmed life.

Jesus, the arrogance of privilege.

This new place feels a little too much as the place I was born in. Maybe that is why I am tired. I know the days grow darker there, too. Days so cold you can see your breath inhabit space before you do. Skies the same grey as tired asphalt. Granted, the majestic mountains here in the ever present distance do add an incredible backdrop. But there are still also homeless people in the streets - one passed out on the lawn next to the tourist office while a Japanese lady snapped photos of the sculpture right next to him. I still hope he was just sleeping, and not immobile for a whole other reason. 

This house has ten pairs of skis hanging on the wall next to the bed I sleep in for the next few days. For some reason this - and the branches of tomatoes hanging in front of the windows to ripen - makes me want to find a home for myself. What does home look like to the homeless? 

I am tired, but always also grateful. I take none of this for granted. All I hope to do, is to live before I die. Preferably with a little less sexism as the cold days pass. You, too?