Notes on toxic masculinity; a fantasy
A fantasy where I am cherished—my sensuality & sexuality as something to be savored, not reduced to the way they see it—in the way of it ultimately being my worth and value.
They push you away in every way possible—only eventually succumbing to their cravings for your body. They have no cravings for any of your other parts, never understanding the vastness of your being.
For if it weren’t for them, you’d be the “whore” you are, “whoring” yourself out the way women like you are meant to.
For they believe you have that particular drive. A notion formed by the patriarchy, but supported by keeping precious the notions of toxic men. Men who are historically regarded as “the greats” of their artistic fields.
Men who use inflammatory descriptors of their lover’s bodies—“gaping” this, “cunt of” that—to describe women they cannot live up to containing. Women who contain multitudes themselves, women who have universes inside them—reduced to how they are perceived—by men with weak morals, yet intact with the strongest of egos.
Men who believe “the cunt” can be stretched out, that sex work radicalizes women into fiends for prospective consumers. That behaviors turned to for one’s own individual reasonings have universal outcomes in the future of one’s own desires and self-worth.
The idea a woman can be “ruined,” broken-in the way you break a horse. Men like that—people like that—do not have the ability to capture a complete person. Their shortcomings, insecurities, and fear—projected onto you as if you’re a canvas, smeared with monkey shit.
They leave their stinky handprints on you and try to sell your own stories back to you, covered in their own filth, then tell you to call it art.
One man’s trash being another’s treasure, but you’re wondering why you were seen as garbage in the first place. You never meant to wind up in the bin, you were tossed there with all the other undesirables.
You’re a mouse—covered in oil—at the bottom of a glass vase. Your only way out is to climb the mice around you, use their struggling bodies as a ladder—or succumb to your fate, give up, let them kill you.
There’s always a few mice left inside—no matter how hard they fight, they can’t possibly stack to a height able to free themselves—they slip, trip, and stumble over each other for life. The others have left them, but they turn around and mock them—“You had your chance to get out, look how we all did.” The mice left behind try to explain their predicament, but the free mice can no longer hear them from outside the glass. “They’ll leave if they want to someday,” they will say in order to live out their own lives, guilt-free. The mice left behind aspirate on oil, claw for freedom.