I was nine when I was sexually harassed for the first time. I was walking home from school, in my blue and white plaid uniform, with an apron and dark socks. A man was masturbating near the stairs I had to climb every day on my way home. He followed me. I heard his footsteps behind me, I heard him moaning.
My whole body went cold, I was terrified.
I got away from him when I went out onto the boulevard. I hoped that if somebody saw what was happening to me, it will stop. And it did. And after it stopped, I felt guilty, ashamed to exist, dirty, disgusted with my body. I didn't tell anyone.
Ever since then, I've started looking around carefully, scanning for potential danger. Walking around with the key in my hand, pretending to be talking on the phone, avoiding certain places. To dodge what I might cause, what I might draw on myself just because I exist in this body.
This body which for society means sex, children, cleaning and food. This body that to me means all the love that has ever touched me, all the traces of my experiences, the body that holds me close to what I love, that lifts me off the ground and that I love to live in.
And it's not ugly nor beautiful, not enough nor too much. It contains me. And it's unfair and dehumanizing to be torn apart from it. It's unfair to be forced to love my body unconditionally.
I'm screamed at to love myself unconditionally and I want to scream that I can't.
Our bodies are political. On them standards of beauty are traced, on them demographic goals are set, they are a non-renewable resource of care and domestic labor. They are subject to control and coercion, kept under close surveillance.
Our bodies carry the care. Since our birth we are taught to nurture, to care, to worry. Everything prepares us for a life where we leave our own and care for others.
Our bodies are incubators for pregnancies we sometimes don't want to hold inside us. Half the pregnancies in the world are not ours, they are unplanned and unwanted. They are the pregnancies of the state, of the man, of the family, of the church, but they are not ours. And with each unwanted pregnancy our bodies becomes more and more the bodies of other's.
We're only allowed to be sexual when we're producing pleasure for others. We're good to be looked at as pieces of meat, fetish, pornography, but we're not allowed to enjoy it too. Or at least we don't have to.
The first time I got naked in front of someone I wanted to hide.
I was looking at myself as well. At everything I hate, everything I don't want to be seen: the boob that is too saggy, the belly that shows in profile, the nose, crooked from the time I broke it at the fair, the scars on my arms. I knew almost nothing about my sexuality, about what I like, about what was going to happen to me. I was trembling with excitement and fear.
I knew it was going to hurt.
How it also hurt the first time I got my period - and then every time I got it, how it also hurt the first time I was bullied, how it hurt the first time I saw how a man is hitting a woman.
How it hurt when I had a nose surgery after fifteen years of bullying.
I went to my mom to tell her I couldn't stand living in my body anymore, to be ugly. I was ashamed of every swear word I received on the streets, or from my classmates from the middle school. People would look at me with pity or disdain, ready to make a joke about the way I looked.
I broke the bones in my face, spent several months with my eyes black from the operation, with my nose in a splint and hoping that no one would ever shout at me in the streets that I had a big nose, that I was ugly.
And no one did, but I was left with the shame and the frustration that I had to become someone else in order to feel that the others accepted me. I wished the world would be different and I would stay the same.
Pain tolerance is learned since we`re little, like care.
I inherited pain tolerance from the women in my life: exhausted from the daily eight-hour workday at the boss, they continued their unpaid labor at home. Exhausted by the emotional labor they did every day in care, they were the ones who absorbed all the waves of men's anger and hatred.
They picked up the pieces left behind after the fight, they held the children in their arms, who were crying out of fear of the scandal in the house, they comforted the other women when they felt they could not bear such pain anymore.
Women built themselves all kinds of networks of solidarity and rebellion to defend their bodies profaned by stereotypes and prejudices, by control, by violence. They were in the front line of resistance, they used gossip and rumors as warning systems, they stood in solidarity and stirred each other up to evil:
to protest
to do whatever they wanted with their bodies
to divorce, or worse, to stop getting married
to stop having children
to accuse their abusers
to have sex for pleasure
to be exactly how they want to be.
The women in my life liberated me, they taught me to name what hurts, they helped me not to be alone, they pushed me to scandal. And with every no, with every moment of resistance, I take back a little bit more of my body and my identity, I take back what is mine and has been defiled by violence, control and prejudice.
In the feminist movement after the 90s, the first fights were for our bodies and the right to choose. After 23 years in which the state used women as incubators, banning abortion and leaving them without contraception, feminists fought for legalizing abortion to be one of the first measures the new Parliament took. Then they brought in contraception, started sex education programs, built a family planning network - progress that has disappeared in the last decade.
The new generations, of which I am part of myself, are once again demanding their rights in a country that does not give them access to contraception, sex education, policies to protect them from violence and discrimination. A generation which, instead of learning to have safe sex, to have sex for pleasure, out of love and desire, consensual and without pressure, is learning that sexuality is shameful, dirty, sinful.
Many of us have never known pleasure. For many of us, sex is torment, it is rape, it is obligation, it is conception.
Marital rape has existed in Romanian law since 1997, but the tradition remains that it is the wife's duty to satisfy her husband. Consent is given for the rest of her life at the civil registry, the woman is no longer allowed to say no, to change her mind. Thy will be done.
I discovered my sexuality in a swamp of confusion, between experiment and abuse, between suffering and pleasure. I kept silent when a man forced me to give him oral sex. I dressed quickly, made a bit of small talk and disappeared. I blocked him and never said anything to him ever again.
I kept quiet when a man took off his condom while we were having sex. When I realized, my stomach turned inside out. I told him to leave, I confronted him years later. He told me, I was wrong, you were also wrong.
When I let my sexuality be a part of me, I was judged, I was told I was having sex like a man, that I was emasculating them. My sexuality intimidates the penis because the vulva demands its pleasure, asks for consent and does what it wants. I look at my body and it arouses me, it inhibits others - I am too much of a woman.
I refuse conception, I incapacitate reproduction because I want to be a woman only for myself. All my life I've been told to hide and be ashamed. I was told that women are faithful to one single man. That's why I kept silent, because all my life I've been told to be everything I don't want to be.
I will have sex for pleasure. I'll say no, I'll change my mind, I'll go on the counter-offensive, and I'll make a scene.
Free, strong. That's how the women around me and my own pain have taught me to be. For each of us strength means something else, and for me it meant taking my body back. To look at it gently and be grateful to it. To be the object of my own pleasure, to arouse me and bring me to orgasm. To carry me through my sufferings and fears. To keep me close to my sisters.
Our stories are important. They make us be seen the way we are. They give courage further, they add fuel to the fire of resistance, they tame the relationship with the woman in us. In each and every one of us there is a lot of power - more than we are allowed to believe.
There is much power in our voice. Let's make it heard on all feeds and all walls, on the streets, in our homes and our classrooms. There's a lot of power in our bodies: we are the beginning and the end of the world. The beginning of our world and the end of their world.
