Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  So beloved, confused Isadora leaves Bennett and heads off with Adrian in his car through Europe, and it does not take long before she realizes that she has made a huge mistake. While Isadora thought that they were driving aimlessly around Europe, it turns out that Adrian had his own private agenda: he has decided to meet up with his wife and children in Brittany, where they are going to have a two week holiday.

  Suddenly Isadora finds herself alone in Paris without a lover or a husband to lean on. She sits there, just like me, alone in a café with a beer and tries to look indifferent. We are about the same age, both married, though Isadora does not have any children yet and is infinitely more tired than I am after her and Adrian’s crazy road trip.

  There at the café, Isadora suddenly realizes that what she did wrong.

  I had pursued him. Years of having fantasies about men and never acting on them – and then for the first time in my life, I live out a fantasy. I pursue a man I madly desire, and what happens? He goes limp as a waterlogged noodle and refuses me.

  LIKE A WHORE

  When you are so turned on you are about to explode it is easy to forget how taboo it is – if you are a woman that is, and you do not want to get the cold shoulder or be called a whore. It does not matter if you are thirty or thirteen.

  But when I was thirteen nobody told me I was not allowed to be just as horny, relentless, and as willing as the boys, something I bitterly experienced one of the first times I was snogging someone. Fredrik L was a boy in my class and he froze out of fear and shock. We were lying on Cissi’s bed, while she and Anders were on the black leather sofa in the living room. Bryan Adams was singing about Heaven and how fun the summer of ’69 was and everything was perfect except for the fact that Fredrik had stopped stroking my back. He had actually stopped kissing me and was trying to sit up.

  ‘Let’s slow down a bit, OK?’ I remember him saying.

  I was horribly embarrassed because I suspected my persistent humping against his thigh had been a bit too much. But for just a few wonderful seconds I had shed all my inhibitions and felt only pure and simple desire. Time had stood still and I wanted to rub myself against him for all eternity.

  Fredrik was considered good looking and I suppose he was the one who had taken the initiative, that he was used to being the one humping stiff, rigid female bodies and not, like now, being humped. Afterwards he spread a rumour that I was horny as a damned whore and for I long time I decided to be careful about ever being horny again.

  That same summer I was called a whore for the second time in my life. We were camping with good friends of Mum and Dad’s and their five children. It was the summer holidays and it was Öland and it was the sea and I felt grown up and relatively pretty. I had bought a new dress, it was sleeveless and tight and made from a black, shiny material. I remember wearing the dress almost every day.

  One evening I went with Frank, the son of the friends who was the same as age as me, to buy some sweets at the only kiosk at the camp site, and he told me that his father had said at dinner that he thought I looked like a whore in that dress.

  I do not know if I actually became sad, it was more that I thought it was disgusting of his father to look at me in that way. And I never wore that dress again.

  The third time I was called a whore was in a hotel lift a year later. My boyfriend and I were there to meet his mother and we were sharing the lift with three men in their fifties in business suits. One of them looked at me for a while and said, ‘And what’s a whore like you doing tonight?’

  I was so shocked I just politely replied, ‘I’m going to be with my boyfriend.’

  They thought it was hilarious and laughed the whole way up. My boyfriend did not say anything, but I saw his cheeks and neck turn blotchy. Then I became embarassed and wanted to apologize.

  Since I turned thirteen, I have been called a whore about once a year by all kinds of men, in all possible and impossible situations: at the bar when I have not been in the mood to play along, or on the phone, when an anonymous man’s voice has whispered ‘Whore, whore, whore, whore.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Then he said it one more time, ‘Whore, whore, whore, whore.’ Only then did I hang up and I did not answer the phone again for the rest of the night.

  There were so many tiny signs reprimanding my open horniness. It should never have reached the point at which someone called me a whore, subtler gestures would have sufficed. Like the time when a boy I’d met was going to come over for dinner.

  I was single, enjoying having survived a boring relationship with a boring bloke and I was not the least bit interested in starting a new one. On the other hand, I definitely wanted several partners, preferably ones who would take over, one after the other.

  This bloke was new and so far we had only kissed each other at a party, deep passionate kisses that promised more. Now, a night or so later, he was coming over for dinner and we could finally have sex.

  It was wonderful and afterwards I lay in his arms, naked and satisfied. Then he suddenly asked if I had been offended that he had brought condoms with him. At first I did not understand. What did he mean? It was great. He looked a bit embarrassed and said that it could have seemed planned, like he had taken for granted that we would have sex. I understood that it was a well-mannered consideration, but I could not help noticing how shocked he was when he understood that I’d had the same thing in mind. That quite clearly didn’t gel with his idea of who would be doing the conquering and who would be conquered. He never came back and I realized that I had broken some stupid unwritten rule yet again.

  Young horny thirteen-year-old boys spreading rumours about their female classmates is not really all that strange when lawyers in business suits are calling rape victims whores during their testimony. The first time I interviewed this type of lawyer was when I was making a documentary about a gang rape in Södertälje. A girl thought she was getting a ride home from the bar, instead she was repeatedly raped by several different men, who simply drove her around during the night, raping her at different places: a school playground, a swimming pool, in a car park, in a flat. There were people present the whole time, while she was alone and drunk.

  In the trial that followed, the court wasn’t able to make up its mind. The Court of Appeal interpreted the law in such a way that she had been too drunk for it to be considered rape – in order for it to be deemed rape you have to have physically resisted and she obviously had not. But she was not drunk enough for it to be deemed sexual exploitation either, the milder form of sexual assault. Because, according to the Court of Appeal, she remembered too much of the events of the night, and in order for a case to be deemed sexual exploitation the victim needs to be completely impaired so as to be practically unconscious or otherwise powerless.

  Despite the fact that she was alone and there were several suspects, the court did not regard her as powerless. Their ruling was just the opposite, that it was remarkable she had not tried to escape when she’d had so many opportunities to do so.

  Björn was the first defence attorney I met, a man in his sixties with a large office on one of the main streets in Södertälje, who loved to play golf. What Björn thought was most remarkable about the entire case was that the victim had a reputation as a whore.

  ‘She said herself that when she moved to Sorunda she was singled out as a whore, and she doesn’t know why. It’s a bit strange if you move to a new neighbourhood and you become known as a whore without the residents even knowing you.’

  ‘But in what way does this, in your opinion, have anything to do with her trustworthiness?’ I asked.

  ‘It diminishes her trustworthiness because if the rumour exists there must be some reason for it. That is to say, she previously had sexual relations, loose sexual relations.’

  I did not really follow the reasoning and I was not prepared for this type of argument, so I pressed him to explain what he meant. Björn dug himself deeper into a hole filled with peculiar explanations and f
inally he described how drunk she was and that she was not particularly attractive – implying that she had been so flattered by the attention of these men that she had gone along with almost anything.

  The other two defence attorneys, whom I met separately, also talked about how drunk she was and that she was rumoured to be a whore and that a rumour like that does not stem from nothing …

  ‘She was no Greta Garbo,’ one of them said.

  I will never, ever forget their elegant suits, spacious offices or estimable ages. They will forever be etched in my memory. They represented the key to understanding what the concept of a whore is really about: power over our sexuality.

  During the trial the lawyers successfully referred to her reputation as well as her ‘ugliness’ as a part of their clients’ defence. The judge didn’t interrupt them; the Swedish Bar Association didn’t suggest that there had been any injustice in her treatment. (I called the Legal Society and asked if lawyers could really say such things at trial, which they could, according to the chairwoman Anne Ramberg.)

  A few years later at another rape trial, several women gathered to be present during the Court of Appeal proceedings. It turned out that in the district proceedings, everyone attending had been men, except the victim, Charlotte, and her plaintiff’s assistant. As a result, the questions coming from the lawyers were insulting and to a large extent focused on her previous sexual experiences, her ‘morals’, and her drinking habits. So when the case went to the Court of Appeal we sat there, about twenty women, staring angrily at the lawyers as they cross examined the witness. Afterwards the plaintiff’s assistant explained that there was an entirely different mood in the court room. The questions were quite simply more respectful and relevant.

  Of course it is obvious that lawyers and judges are just as affected by each other’s pats on the back as by the women’s angry stares. At least it is clear to everyone else that the legal system and the law are in no way objective, nor created in a vacuum free from value judgments.

  And I think that as long as we have a legal system that sanctions this archaic view of women, then we will also have young boys calling their classmates whores. And Isadora and the rest of us horny women will be met by limp, dangling spaghetti each time we have the desire to take the initiative.

  EVERYTHING STINGS

  I am thirteen and I have just realized that I am not so ugly after all. I am standing in front of the mirror at Cissi’s house and she is standing next to me, we are looking at our reflections and feeling sorry for ourselves. The silent rule is that she says how ugly and fat she is, and I protest loudly and say that I’m the one who is hideous. Then Cissi screams, ‘Nooo! You’re not ugly!’ And we stand there like that for an eternity, going around in circles.

  But my secret, which I have never ever told Cissi, is that I no longer think I am that ugly. I feel a pleasant tingle in my stomach sometimes when I look at myself in the mirror, and I feel ashamed because I am supposed to despise myself as much as possible, anything else would be disgusting. So I continue to stand in front of the mirror with Cissi, pretending to cry and say, ‘Why, why am I so damn, horribly ugly?’

  And then Cissi really starts crying and says, ‘If you think you’re ugly, then you must think I’m grotesque!’

  And then I have to protest again and say, ‘That’s not what I meant!’ Then I cry even more and finally Cissi’s mum knocks on the door and asks us what is going on.

  We look at each other, our faces red and swollen from crying, and now we are almost ugly for real, so Cissi says ‘Nothing! We’re not doing anything!’ We go out to the kitchen and make toast with thick layers of butter and marmalade, since we are so damn ugly and fat it does not matter any more. We might as well become even uglier and fatter with even more pimples.

  We eagerly cultivate our self-contempt, and when others want to offer stupid comments we play along eagerly. Our maths and physics teacher introduces himself as Nils and says that he likes fishing and moose hunting. During our physics lesson he talks about his stupid wife who did not understand that she could not use her hairdryer in the hotel in Spain. There was a different voltage there, and even though he tried to explain the laws of physics to her she was stubborn. He asks if we know what happened. Henrik raises his hand and says that the hairdryer broke.

  ‘That’s absolutely right and it confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time, that women seem to have a harder time understanding maths and physics than men.’

  The whole class laughs, even Cissi and me, and it seems as though Nils was right, because after a few weeks several of the girls are struggling to keep up with both maths and physics. I do not understand his lessons and our first physics test provides the proof, I only get three out of twenty-five answers right.

  Nils likes to talk during class, especially about his moose hunting, and we listen attentively and ask lots of questions, because it is a lot more fun listening to his encounters with moose than learning maths.

  ‘Please Nils, show us how you lured the moose bull by sounding like a female,’ I ask, and Nils happily puts his hands to his mouth and pounds out a trumpeting bellow.

  When everyone laughs Nils seems to wake up from his daydream and he immediately becomes serious and looks at the clock.

  ‘Well, class is over for today. Sara, would you stay behind a minute so I can speak to you?’

  I give Cissi a questioning look and she whispers that she will wait outside.

  Nils walks over and sits down on the edge of my desk.

  ‘Well Sara, I’ve noticed that you aren’t very interested in either maths or physics.’

  ‘Nope, not really.’ I squirm in my chair.

  ‘No, and it was also clear from the physics test, in which you got a terrible mark. I won’t tolerate you disrupting the class by asking a lot of nonsense about my moose hunting, so that’s why I want to suggest an agreement.’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘If you sit quietly and leaf through Illustrated Science I will give you a pass regardless of how well you do in the exams.’

  I look at him in surprise and quickly try and consult with myself. I had not realized I was disrupting the class, but I know that I am stupid and Nils thinks so too and it does not matter how hard I study.

  ‘OK,’ I say, embarrassed.

  Nils smiles and pats me on the shoulder.

  ‘Good, then we’re agreed. You’re an attractive girl Sara, you don’t need to know maths or physics!’

  ‘OK,’ I say curtly, and I go to meet Cissi who is waiting outside.

  Something has happened, something has changed, and I feel it and Cissi feels it and one day when we are standing outside the mall Stefan comes walking towards us. He is twenty-two years old and has curly dark hair and black, skinny jeans. He is so grown up and so damned good-looking and now he is walking this way. I have seen him in the city several times and longed for someone like him and now he is coming over. He is actually walking straight towards us, and he is looking at us. He looks at me and smiles and I smile back and I am frozen on the spot because I know that if I move now I am going to start shaking uncontrollably.

  ‘Hi!’ he says, and looks me right in the eye.

  ‘Hi!’ I say, and look back.

  ‘I’ve seen you around town. My name is Stefan, what’s yours?’

  ‘Sara,’ I say and try and understand what he is saying, that he has seen me. Where has he seen me? In the city?

  ‘Do you want to come over to my place for a cup of coffee? I live right behind the mall.’

  I look at him and then at Cissi who is staring at the ground, embarrassed, and I feverishly try to work out how I should act, and then I decide I do not have the energy to care any more. This is a new game, different from our usual ugliness contest and I do not know which rules apply now. A warm tingle overpowers me and spreads from my legs to my pelvis, up through my stomach and finally reaches my mouth which, I realize in panic, has broken into a wide, open smile directed at Stefan. He grins b
ack and holds out his hand, I take it and I follow him. I turn around and say bye to Cissi who has stopped staring at the ground and is now watching us.

  We walk hand in hand, grinning, back to his place. His hand is warm and every now and then he squeezes mine and looks at me with his nice, brown eyes which are glittering.

  He stops outside his building, pulls me towards him and kisses me. A deep, intense kiss that makes everything spin and pound. If he only knew – how amazing my dreams have been, how I’ve longed to be worshipped, how I’ve hungered for closeness! If he suspected my starvation, my hunger, he would never dare touch me in this way. But he does not know and I push myself against him hard and I can feel myself becoming damp and swollen.

  He lives in a small studio flat with a kitchenette; there are IKEA shelves filled with LPs, a bed and a small coffee table. He offers me coffee and cinnamon rolls his mother has baked and he tells me that he always eats cinnamon rolls for breakfast. I think that is why his breath is so bad, a small detail I am happy to ignore when my body feels happy and feverish.

  We kiss each other on his unmade bed and he caresses my small breasts and it feels good. I am lying with my arms stretched above my head, my eyes are closed and I am just enjoying. I let the hours pass while I become even sweatier. His stubble scratches me and when we take a short break I look in the mirror and see that my lips and cheeks are scratched and red.

  Stefan stands by the shelves and shows me his LPs and talks about different albums which are particularly valuable, and I smile wide and say uh-huh and we have nothing, absolutely nothing to talk about so we continue to kiss instead.

  Suddenly it is evening, late at night, and I feel defiant when I think about how Mum and Dad are probably worried and wondering where I am, a pure and clean malicious pleasure. They can go ahead and wonder, I think to myself and I decide to stay the night. Something has grown inside me, a feeling of wanting to challenge and let things happen, a feeling of letting go.