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This is a story about power.
This is a story about gender.
It is about society’s constructions of the female and the male, about feminine and masculine, about girly-girls and manly men, about frilliness and delicate beauty on the one hand and rough skin and ruggedness on the other.
This story is about the balance of power between a woman and a man. More precisely, it is a story about a woman and a man establishing a balance of power.
* * * *
In my forty-four years, nobody has questioned my masculinity. Whatever gods (or goddesses) may be, they endowed me with all the trappings of manliness: sinewy muscles; strength enough to chop woods and move refrigerators; the athletic ability and resolve to do Ironman triathlons; a deep, resonant voice; a thick salt-and-pepper beard; and a degree of hirsuteness that recalls an ancient uncivilized past.
Scarlett appears to be just as thoroughly the archetype of femininity, a pre-Raphaelite model come to life. Her narrow face and delicate chin, high cheekbones, just-full-enough lips, and porcelain skin could be a model for classic beauty. Her wide hips and full chest, separated by a narrow waist, veritably scream “Female!” Scarlett’s thin hands equally demonstrate the feminine ideal, with her long elegant fingers and long painted fingernails.
* * * *
How did we meet? Does it matter? Perhaps we met at a holiday party, reaching for the same morsel of brie. Conceivably, we rolled our mats out next to each other at a yoga class. It’s possible that she and I ran side-by-side in a marathon and fell into conversation as the miles slipped by. It’s just as likely that we backed into each other in a used bookstore, in the aisle for the metaphysical poets. Maybe she is my supervisor at work. Or then again, maybe she works for me.
How we met is different story for another time. This is a story of how we negotiated power. A physical negotiation.
* * * *
Men aren’t supposed to cry.
Society tells us that. I hadn’t cried in thirty years.
Scarlett made me cry.
* * * *
When we first began to struggle against each other, when we first realized that we had a yearning—a veritable need—to dominate the other physically, my strength advantage was obvious. I gripped your slender wrists and twisted your arms easily, forcing you to the ground beneath me. Your muscles strained in my grasp but the power differential was too great: you could not escape me.
Staring down at you, squirming defiantly yet hopelessly in my grasp, I basked in my strength.
“I’m too strong for you,” I said, my voice full and commanding.
You paused in your struggles and looked me square in the eye. And you smiled.
* * * *
As the tears rolled down my cheeks, as I begged Scarlett for mercy, a small part of my mind detached itself from the present and mused about the nature of power and gender. Was she any less feminine, or perhaps more feminine, for battering and emasculating me? Was I any less masculine because she had controlled and dominated and violated my body so completely?
This line of thought was interrupted, quite rudely, by the piercing sound of my own screams.
* * * *
I don’t remember exactly when or how you shifted the balance of power. The first trace of tarnish on my shining confidence came when you refused to submit, when you smiled rather than acknowledging my superiority. How could a mere woman dare continue to compete with me? Didn’t you realize it was futile?
For ten minutes—then twenty, then thirty—you wrestled from a position of inferiority. I pinned you on your back, or held you captive in one dominant hold or another, never allowing you a momentary chance to escape or gain an advantage over me. And yet this entire time you refused to quit, refused to whimper, refused to acknowledge my strength.
Our bodies glistened with sweat as I twisted and controlled you. I tasted the salt on your neck, on your cheeks, as we struggled. At times your full breasts and your ample bottom rubbed against me as though we were making love instead of war, and I marveled at your feminine perfection. And yet I remained focused, bent on dominating you, asserting my power over you.
* * * *
Now, later, after the event…when I see you, back at yoga, or at school, or in the office…how will I react? Will I hang my head in humiliation when you enter the room? Will I wonder whom you have told about your subjugation of me? And how will you respond: will you tease and torment me, reminding me constantly of your absolute victory?
* * * *
It is a fallacy, of course, to read too much into the study of a person’s physical features. A superficial physical appendage cannot really reflect the nature of one’s personality, character, heart.
And yet…Scarlett’s hands.
Scarlett’s thin, long fingers, tipped by perfectly shaped and pink-polished nails, clearly provide a window into her combination of strength and beauty. She takes care of her hands, pampers them, spends time making her nails objects of splendor…and yet her long fingers possess a prodigious, even frightening, strength.
* * * *
The tide had long since turned. We both knew that you had won, that you were the victor. It was clear that you honestly owned me, more completely than a person can own a dog or a tract of land. And still I was trying to fight back. I refused to admit what we both knew I would eventually admit.
You were behind me, beneath me, your long legs snaking up around my waist and wrapped around my own legs, your feet hooked inside my calves, and you were spreading my legs apart in a torturous grapevine. Your left arm was wrapped around the outside of my left elbow, and with your left hand you grasped my right forearm tightly, more tightly than I could have imagined, and you held my right arm captive across my chest. Your free right hand was draped over my mouth, creating a powerful, airtight seal, and your thumb and index finger pinched my nose shut. I felt your sharp nails digging into my skin as I pathetically thrashed in your grasp. I fought to breathe, knew I would pass out soon. Your breath was warm and soft in my ear as you whispered all the ways you were going to hurt me, torture me, humiliate me. Periodically your tongue snaked out and the wet pink tip traced the outline of my ear and I squirmed even more, still in vain.
“I spy with my little eye,” you whispered. “An erect penis! Why is your penis hard, Matt?” you teased. “Is it because that is the only part of your body that you can move? I’ve got your arms, your legs, even your head all at my mercy. Were you looking for the one piece of your anatomy you could still control?”
I strained against you feebly, pathetically.
“I’ve got news for you, Matthew,” you continued to whisper. “I control your penis, too.”
As you spoke you unlaced your right leg and pulled your thin size eleven foot up to my crotch. I couldn’t see, as you were holding my head back, your hand still taut over my mouth, but I could feel your big toe and second toe open up to grasp my penis, first gripping it at the tip, then working their way up and down the shaft. My entire body quivered.
All the while my vision was narrowing, the edges growing grey and dim, as you controlled my oxygen.
“What a lovely position, Matthew,” you said, your moist breath in my ear. “I could kill you”—you pressed hard against my mouth and nose for emphasis—“or I could jack you off”—now you jerked my penis with your agile toes. “Whatever should a girl do?”
That’s when my first tears appeared.
* * * *
At one point in the contest, early on, I held you off the ground, my arms like iron bands around your thin body. Your feet dangled above the floor, your arms hung helplessly at your sides, and you grunted incoherently as I squeezed the life from you.
Or so I thought.
An hour later your right foot was still off the floor. It rested solidly on my throat. Your wiggled your toes, with their perfect pink toenails, into the skin on my neck as you balanced your weight on my fragile windpipe. I pawed impotently at your calf (your beautiful, milky white calf, shapely and deadly) while my eyes tried to focus on your face, seemingly twenty feet above me. Your gentle teasing laughter brought your visage into focus.
“Please,” I tried to say.
Your pink lips exaggerated into a feigned pout of sympathy. “Aw, does the little boy have a problem?” you taunted, twisting your foot and forcing me to gag. My vision began to fade at the edges again.
Helpless beneath you, my eyes traced up your leg, insanely sexy in another context, to your waist, upon which your long fingers rested, up past your shelf-like breasts to your smiling face…your beautiful face.
Then the edges of my vision collapsed, leaving your smile as the last image on my brain.
* * * *
A man’s power is in his arms. Hammering, chopping, sawing, punching, lifting: those are the activities that define a man’s life. We control nature, control our environment; we clear land, erect buildings, plant seeds, harvest crops. When we fight we hit and grab and throw.
A woman’s power is in her legs. For all of men’s manipulation of the world, there’s one thing they can’t do: they cannot create life as women do. A woman squeezes life into the world. Life enters the world between a woman’s legs.
A woman’s legs are for squeezing.
* * * *
The first time you trapped me between your thighs I easily forced my way out. You tried to lock your ankles but I pried against your creamy skin and escaped.
The second time you wrapped your legs around my torso I couldn’t free myself so quickly. You laughed—that giggle of superiority, how I grew to hate it, to fear it—as I struggled in your velvety vise. But I used my brute force to break free.
Was it the third time? The fourth? Eventually you captured me with your legs, crossed your ankles, and squeezed until I couldn’t breathe. Your long thin fingers, the fingers of a Tiffany’s ring model, seized my wrists and pulled my arms slowly away from your constricting legs, your pink fingernails digging into the skin on my wrists, pulling my arms over my head…leaving me helplessly trapped between your crushing thighs. I remembered how easily I had broken free only moments ago, but now I could only kick and twist and curse and—worst of all—listen to your delighted giggles as my rib cage felt as though it would burst. And as I struggled, a part of my brain focused on your feet, your ankles locked across my stomach, and marveled at how slim and delicate your toes were, how perfectly your toenails were polished.
You constricted your legs around my body in waves, thrusting then relaxing, each time weakening my walls…my physical walls…my emotional walls.
* * * *
“How do you rape a man, Matthew?” you asked.
I didn’t reply.
“Can a woman rape a man?” you continued. “Is it even possible?”
I didn’t speak, just grunted and moaned as you wrenched my body. I had stopped resisting; at this point I hung limp in your grip as you abused me. At that moment I was sitting on my bottom, my legs in a vee in front of me. Your pelvis rested on my shoulders, your legs like thin marble columns on either side of my head, your feet inside my inner thighs, forcing my legs outward. Your hands grasped my forearms, next to the elbow, your grip surprisingly strong, so tight in fact that some of my tears came from the pain in my arms. But most of the pain was in my shoulders as you pulled my arms upward, forcing me to salute the sky, yanking with such force I thought you’d tear my arms from my shoulder sockets. I was, again, completely at your mercy, completely unable to move.
“I mean, of course I could sodomize you. I have a few lovely strap-on dildos. A pretty pink one would look so sweet in your mouth. Is face-fucking the way to rape a man? Come on, Matthew, answer me…this isn’t supposed to be a monologue you know. I’m no Prince Hamlet. OK, if you’re not going to answer…
“I could sodomize you without a dildo. My fingers are long, my nails are sharp. I could use my birdie finger…give a new meaning to ‘up yours,’ right?” You laughed as you gave me a renewed stretch. A small pool of my tears formed in front of me.
“Maybe raping a man means forcing him to ejaculate against his will? Is that it? Or, how about this: what if I rolled you up and forced to you shoot your load into your own mouth? Is that humiliation enough?”
* * * *
For a man, power is not just about winning. It is also about making sure the other knows that he has lost. Humiliation.
Scarlett wanted me to know that I had lost.
* * * *
When we first spoke, the first time I heard your voice, the first time I saw the way your lips curled ever so slightly, so endearingly before you smiled…at that point, could I ever imagine that I would submit to you? Fear you?
Worship you?
* * * *
I was stretched out into an X. You lay atop me, your pelvis grinding into mine. Your legs wrapped around mine and then forced them outward, as though they were vines that were tearing my limbs from my body. Your hands grasped my forearms and you stretched my arms out at 45 degree angles, and though I am no weakling I couldn’t break free. It felt as though you were drawing and quartering me.
Your face, your elegant face, hovered above mine.
“You want to kiss me, don’t you?”
I didn’t reply.
“You only resist because it’s not on your terms. You don’t want me to force you.” You paused and let this sink in.
Then your eyes widened slightly, and your lips spread slightly, and I saw your glistening teeth and a hint of your tongue…
and suddenly your mouth was on mine, and I fought because it seemed I had to, but your tongue plunged in, forcing my own tongue aside, and I squirmed and strained but you held me more tightly than chains, while you probed me and used me with your tongue…
* * * *
“Kiss it,” you said, proferring your foot and wiggling your toes.
“Kiss it,” you commanded, your calves pinning my arms to the floor as you lowered your milky derriere to my face, reaching back to spread your cheeks with your slim fingers, positioning your anus directly above me.
“Kiss it,” you whispered, lowering your left breast toward my mouth, your nipple huge and hard.
“Kiss it,” you demanded, scooting forward on my chest and settling your moist vagina on my mouth.
* * * *
“Will I see you again?”
Pause.
“I don’t know. That’s up to you. Do you want to see me again?”
“After all this…how can you ask?”
Pause.
“Thank you. For everything.”
“Thank you.”
Hug.
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