Women in Chains

Here she must stand alone. With wrists bound by rope or chains, she knows she’s subjected to the dreadful male gaze. She can almost feel its touch upon her skin. The hands on her body will come later, if they come at all. But now… Now she feels it. The menace. The desire. The overwhelming eagerness of the beholder. It’s something primitive, primeval. With arms held high, there’s nothing she can do to prevent the lustful gaze from wandering over her breasts, down her body, consuming her entire being in a furnace of objectification. Her body will become the ashes of who she is.

She tries to get free. It’s useless. She knew that even before making the effort. That’s how the story goes. A story that extends far into the reaches of time. Bound damsels in distress cannot get free from that all-consuming gaze. The gaze is the gazer is the attacker. A unity of menace. To imagine is to do. That’s the equation. Bound, at the mercy of her captors, she is already suffering everything they’re imagining they’ll do to her.

She knows it. She feels them surrounding her with anticipation. They come from the limits of her vision, creeping in from the shadows. She can sense their thoughts. The patterns of perversion that dictate what surely must follow. The rape, the humiliation. Why does it ever have to be like that? Her destiny is as tied up as herself. Tied by the ropes of her female role.

In despair, she may cry, she may plead. But that will only arouse them further. That’s how the deep machinery of depravation works. Her fear will be their pleasure. Her tears their aphrodisiac. Her sweat the fuel of their actions. The furnaces of hell burn on the flesh of its victims.

And hell never fails. It’s as old as god and as sure as death. And just as the first tendrils of hell jump out of the crazy angles of existence, clawing at her clothes, pawing at her skin, striping her, caressing her body, probing where no one should be aloud to probe, she screams. She can hold it no more. She must scream and scream again. And screaming the realizes that in the beginning it was not the Verb. It wasn’t even the Scream. In the beginning that was the GAZE.

God’s male gaze, peeping at Eve’s glorious nakedness and innocence. And God saw it was good. And so he unleashed his snake, his own treacherous phallus, and he shattered Eden in order to preserve that sweet innocence. For God understood that no woman could be innocent until subjected to the gaze of male desire. And so he demanded sacrifices. Sacrifice of beauty and innocence. And so, she now realizes, that’s why women are bound and roped and tied. To open their bodies to the male gaze. Yes, she thinks. Maybe if close my eyes, I won’t see that abject gaze. Maybe if I don’t see I can’t be seen. Maybe it is a two-way process. Maybe…

But I’d bet its better to stare back. To face it unafraid. Defiant. Sublime. Who’s afraid of a peeping old goat of a god? When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you, Nietsche said. Well, let me be that abyss that engulfs your pitiful male gaze. Come and do your best. Come and do your worst. I’ll survive. Because it’s me you came to see. It’s me you desire. It’s me you want and cannot have. Bound as I am, I am freer than you.

With my sincere apologies for having left you, dears readers, hanging up while I was tied up with other things. And a big thank you to those who started following this blog while it was inactive. Cheers!