No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.

Original title: Het vergeten weten

copyright © 2016 Sifra Nooter

copyright translation: © 2019 Nathalie Driessen, Hazel Evans

and Sifra Nooter

Edited by: Hazel Evans

Cover design and illustration: Silver van Sprundel

Cover image: Lisa Fotios/pexels.com

Typography: Marjan Landman

Print: Pumbo.nl

ISBN 978 94 6345 660 9

NUR 315

www.magievanseksualiteit.nl

For all women

All sisters, daughters, mothers and grandmothers

For all our men, brothers, friends and husbands

Fathers, grandfathers, and for all our sons

For the seven generations before us

For the seven generations after us

As one tribe

With all colours of the rainbow

Inhoud

1The Power of the Young Woman

Teenage and Kundalini

Condylomata Acuminata

Temple

Phone Sex

The Love of Your Life

The Director, the Writer and the Soap

Aerobics

2The Strength of the Mother

Carrying for the First Time

The Caves

Giving Birth for the First Time

Carrying for the Second Time

Giving Birth for the Second Time

The Bear

Your Babies

3The Strength of the Soul

Shamanism

Your Teacher

A Glimpse of the Wise Old Lady

More Bison

The Magic of the Moon

The Grubby Old Lady

Sjasoo

4The Strength of the Ancestors

Your Parents

Your Father

Your Mother

Ancestral Field

North America

Ancestral Shrine

5The Strength of the Woman

Sexual Energy and Blockages

Sjasoo the Magical Sister

Inner Convictions

The Liberation of Sjasoo

Desperation and Surrender

Megalomania and Trust

6The Strength of the Grandmothers

Thirteen Grandmothers

Blessing

The Gift of the Bear

The Ashes and the Temple

7The Power of the Mooncircle

The First Mooncircle

The Opening of the Circle

Prayer

How Does it Work?

Giving Birth in the Circle

Tired

Sheela Na Gig

Bringing Back the Power of the Circle

8The Power of Desire

Sjasoo is Alive

Tantra

Do Not Pick Up the Child

You and Your Husband

The Guy from the Gym

The Invitation

Your Husband’s Desire

The Confession

9The Power of Sexuality

Welcoming Everything

To Celebrating Life and Love

Sex Parties

Sacrifice

Your Children

Good Girls

Yoni Eggs

Sex Lessons

Healing Tao

The Romantic Dream of the Guy from the Gym

Total Surrender

10The Power of Spirals

Sun

Merkaba

Addiction

Therapy

Daddy

Trusting Women

11The Power of Welcoming Everything

The Long Dark Road

The Lion’s Den

The Castigated Men

Coming Home

The Clear Felling

The Silence

The Choice

12The Power of the Moonsisters

The House in Drenthe

Dying Dry

Passing On Life

Rebirthing

Life

13Coming Home in the Circle

I

The Power of the Young Woman

Teenage and Kundalini

You can still picture yourself in high school, legs under the table, thighs horizontal to your chair, leaning on the table, you look at and listen to the talking head of your teacher. You can’t hear him, you can hear him saying stuff, words. You know it’s stuff you’re supposed to learn but all you can see is this talking head and the life hidden behind it. You wonder if this talking head ever has sex and what that would look like, you wonder if this talking head is able to move at all. Is this talking head capable of making sexual movements? Before you know it you see the sad orgasm that this talking head might produce, or maybe this talking figure lets himself be tied up in his spare time!

Your attention wanders out of the window. The weather is gorgeous, the sun is shining. It’s one of those beautiful first days of spring, one of those days where the only place to be is outside, under a tree, lying down on the earth, with your hands in the grass, your legs flat on the ground.

Then and there, in that moment, on that warm spring day, you vow that whatever it is that you end up doing, you’ll make sure that you’ll be able to go outside on that beautiful first day of Spring. The air in the classroom is stale. Just like you, the other students are lying in their chairs, bored, they’re biding their time. Your leg is trembling. It vibrates and you’re enjoying it. You let it vibrate, nobody sees and nobody knows. You feel the tension vibrating out of your body, through the soles of your feet, through the wooden floor, into the foundation, the earth.

Next to you, your classmate’s leg is starting to vibrate as well and then the leg of the boy behind you. Now it’s getting noticeable, the floor is vibrating as well and without looking up they all join in. One by one all of your classmates legs are starting to tremble. Vibrate. Delicious. All together. The sound swells, the tables are starting to shake, gently at first, but soon louder and faster. Now it’s becoming fun, now things are starting to liven up, now it’s exciting, the talking head will do something, the talking head will take action. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the talking head would join in, vibrate for ten minutes and then business as usual. Ten minutes of discharging energy. Ten minutes of letting go. But the talking head raises his voice and the vibrating dies down.

You can’t take it anymore, you don’t want to be there a minute longer, your only way out is saying or doing something which will make you get sent out of the classroom. At least you’ll be able to stretch your legs and walk around for a bit. At least you’ll be saved from the torture of sitting, listening to and looking at the talking head. You’ll be able to escape this death.

A little while later you walk down the hallway, on your way to the principal’s office to get a note and listen to his lecture. In his room, waiting for the note, enjoying the feeling of standing up for a while, you hear a boy outside in the schoolyard. He’s alone and singing his heart out, full volume. It might be off-key or out of tune, but to you he sounds like an angel in that moment. You hear his heart. His heart, his belly, everything is captured in his singing. You’re happy. The note, the principal, the teacher, everything is forgotten and you close your eyes and enjoy that raw sound. You enjoy the emotion you hear in that voice, that song.

You’re reminded that you’re not alone, not separate. You’re connected. You hear it in this beautiful voice. It’s not a dead talking head. It’s alive; emotion, love, power, anger, freedom.

You have to stay in the principal’s office for a while but at one point the bell will sound and that means you’ll be free. You can then go outside, finally released. Running outside to the singing boy you jump on the back of his bike and ride to the woods and together you lie in the grass, laughing, caressing, vibrating, kissing, outside, alive in living nature. It’s enough to just lie there, to feel, to be, to flow. Together, hand in hand, looking at the clouds, talking about freedom. In your stomach that wonderful vibrating feeling, heat, vivacity, that wonderful sexual feeling that needs no action. Just him stroking you, kissing your neck, how he looks at you and what he says about your skin. How your skin is covered in silvery hair and how it has a silvery glow. How he finds it exquisite. There’s no goal, no striving, just this sweet being, this sweet state of being.

And in that moment you know that this is life, this is what it’s about, in that moment you know that with your sixteen years you’re right, you understand something that you never want to forget. It can’t be good to change into a talking head, that can’t be the meaning of life on this beautiful earth. Life can’t be meant for that. There should be real life. Flowing, vibrating, awaking. So you conclude never to be a talking head and never ever forget that teenagers are right, that puberty is a phase of clarity.

After docily doing everything you were told to as a kid. Docilely following your parents and their opinions, your eyes are open now. Finally you get it. Teenagers rebel because they see the truth, they clearly see the way the world, their teachers and their parents function. How they’re degraded into talking heads, living corpses, creatures short of breath, head people, thinkers without a body and you never want to be like that.

You feel how the wind touches your skin, the warmth of the sun on your body, the earth beneath you, you feel how all the tension flows from your body, you just feel pleasure, pleasure with the boy. There’s no future and no past, just the here and now. You know this is what it’s about and you decide never to forget this. Never to forget that all you need is a roof above your head, food and love.

Condylomata Acuminata

You’re nineteen years old, you’re in drama school and you’ve got a small wart on the outside of your labia. You go to see a doctor who tells you scary stories about women who contracted these kind of warts: acuminata condylomata or something or other. He’s an old doctor and knows of a solution: the women who come to see him with this condition are promiscuous, they’re clearly women who sleep with every Tom, Dick and Harry. He knows these women, they’re all in drama school and say they’re good girls, but he knows better. Huge orgies take place, everyone sleeps with everyone. You don’t need to tell him, he knows all about it. You decide not to tell him about your boyfriend who you love with whole your heart and who you’d never ever cheat on. He brings over a big bottle, some kind of medieval bell jar with a big cork in it. When he opens it a puff of smoke escapes. He enters the bell jar with a long pin with a cotton ball on the end, he dips the cotton ball in the smoking fluid and lightly touches the tiny wart on your labia. Ouch, goddammit that hurts, and the satanic glee of this terribly ‘good nice worthy’ doctor doesn’t make it any better.

When you discover another wart a little while later you go to a different doctor. This one takes a quick look at it and then gives you a little glass bottle to take home so you can do the procedure yourself, no problem, it disappears really quickly.

A while later you discover a last wart, it’s on your cervix and you have to go to the hospital to have it removed. You enter the sterile examining room, everything is white, everything is clean, nice and modern, no scary smoking bottles with corks, no sadistic old doctors but a doctor and a junior doctor. They ask you to take place in the ‘chair’. You’re tough, you’re nineteen, you’re resilient, you’re not easily shocked, you obediently take of your panties, spread your legs in the stirrups and display your vagina. This way it’s easier for them to insert the forceps and reach your cervix. It’s not a problem for you, you’re modern and confident and the doctors are pretty nice. There’s a television suspended from the ceiling, it turns out there’s a camera pointed at your vagina, this way you can see how they treat you, what your vagina and cervix look like.

Without really feeling the humiliation and the painfulness of the situation, you abandon your body, in that moment you totally lose contact with your body. You watch the screen, interested like you’re watching a fascinating documentary about the vagina and the cervix. You choose to forget that this concerns your own body, that they’re entering the holiest of holy places. You choose to forget that they’re entering the gate to heaven. You choose to forget that it’s violence, that your precious temple is entered without prayer, without love, without ritual, without feeling of unity, without respect.

You’re full of understanding, you get that the dear male doctors are working hard to cure you, you immediately forgive the junior doctor’s fumbling. He has to learn; the forceps, the cold hard impassive forceps have to go in. He, who has surely been with women, who surely knows how to penetrate a woman, he who wants to learn everything about the vagina in a scientific, closed off manner, because that’s the known way. That’s just the way it is.

So, he endlessly fumbles with the forceps, breaks out in a sweat, fiddles and twists, pushes and pulls. He can’t get the damn thing in! His face reddens. Meanwhile the doctor has his back turned and is doing something else (no idea what!) and you’re just lying there, forgiving that poor doctor. With your inner voice you say to him: take it easy, it’s okay, you have to learn, it’s a good thing you’re practicing on me, I’m strong, come on, give it a go.

This is less confronting than feeling your own sense of abandonment, your own pain and powerlessness which you don’t fully understand in that moment, after all, there’s nothing wrong, they just want to heal you.

The doctor turns around and remarks that it’s taking a very long time. In the blink of an eye he’s inserted the forceps, and there she is, on the screen, out in the open, your vagina and you see the round shape of your cervix, pink, soft, circular, with a small opening in the middle, a small mouth, and that’s where you see a small unevenness. That must be the wart that they’re going to remove.

The sweating young doctor and the experienced doctor, in their white coats with their interesting chats about everything besides your most precious, most vulnerable, strongest holiest organ which is now reduced to a medical object and you don’t complain. You don’t exactly remember how they do it, the wart is cut out and the pain is unbearable, like there’s an army trampling around on your uterus. You pull yourself together, you’re brave and strong, a necessary evil. Thank you dear doctors, thank you clumsy junior, thank you beautiful scientists, you have cured me, healed me, fixed me - You incredibly insensitive assholes, sons of bitches, godforsaken stupid idiots, you know nothing about the energy of life, about being connected. Next time I’m going to kick you in the balls, hard and long so you don’t have any other option than to feel something.’ You guys know nothing’ yells something inside of you and there’s a deep pain because you don’t know anything either.

You came to the hospital by yourself and you leave by yourself. A minor procedure, you can barely walk due to the pain, you drag yourself to the subway and hold on to a pole, you can’t sit and you can’t stand. You get yourself through it. You’re strong, young and brave. You’re a woman and you think of all your sisters. Sisters who endured much worse things, their uterus, their ovaries removed for whatever reason. Sisters who had to give up their babies, who had to have an abortion, sisters who have had to abort themselves without anyone knowing, sisters who died because of that. So you feel lucky that you’re alive now, that these doctors helped you so skillfully and that it was only a tiny wart and that everything will be okay soon.

Temple

You enter a circular room, there’s soft light everywhere, there’s a circle of women, beautifully colored drapes are hanging on the walls, the women sit very still, they’re praying. The room is clean, the prayer sounds like a song, a soft song, a holy song, drums sound in a soft, even cadence, in the middle there’s a bed. A woman cleanses you, with feathers and sage she cleans your body, a few of the women rise, they dance, one of them puts her hands on your head and on your heart, one on your belly and your vagina, another one on both feet. They let you feel that you’ve got a body, that through your body you’re connected with the earth, with the air around you and with these sisters, they make you feel that you’re not alone.

One of them prays out loud, her words reassure you. “Be welcome sister, in this temple, welcome goddess, welcome in this temple, we’ve gathered here to heal you. It might hurt a bit, it might be hard, but know, woman, that what we touch is your strongest, most beautiful, most powerful organ. Know, beautiful woman, that you will recover and know, beautiful woman, that you’re not alone. Your sisters have experienced this. They have all gone through stuff like this. We’ll enter your sanctuary with care, love and respect, we’ll pray for you over and over again, we’ll sing and play the drum, we’ll keep reminding you that you’re connected to something much bigger. Darling woman, you’re our sister, you’re our moon sister, your womb moves in time with the moons, your womb has the same rhythm, the same pulse, the same cycles and you with her, sister, moon sister.”

You lie down, the surroundings are sacred and sterile at the same time. There’s a camera here as well, here too you can see your cervix on the screen above your head when the iron forceps are inserted, your legs in stirrups, your vagina visible. Maybe you’re crying, you’re afraid, maybe you’re screaming, you’re in pain, a sister is holding your head and stroking your hair. ‘Well done’ she says, ‘express yourself, let yourself be heard, yes, it’s painful, you’re doing well’. And the operation takes place while the circle of women keep singing, praying and playing the drums throughout the procedure, like a lullaby that carries you, a primal power that keeps reminding you that you’re a divine creature, that you’re connected and that everything is as it should be.

Phone Sex

You’re twenty-one and you’re biking to your part-time job in a fancy building in South Amsterdam, previously a residence, now converted into a sound studio and office. In the studio your co-worker is waiting for you, she’s going to interview you as ‘the lady from the job agency’. You’ve got some notes in your pocket with outlines about the stories you’re about to tell; The cafeteria lady who does an office guy in the elevator; A female tennis pro who accommodates a student in the shower; A nurse ‘taking care’ of her patients; A flight attendant who has a beautiful encounter with two horny passengers and A commuter with a rendez-vous in the empty compartment of the night train. All of them gorgeous women, horny as hell, always with skirts that are too short, heels that are too high, without panties and with willing, wet pussies. The women are too horny to contain themselves. They entice men by ‘accidently’ letting their blouses fall open for example, or hike their skirts a little higher or drop something on the ground so the men can see they’re not wearing anything under their skirts. The women are always bold and cheeky. The stories are just preludes with always the same ending.

‘So Lize’, says the interviewer, ‘it’s Lize isn’t it, you’re a cafeteria lady, has anything raunchy happened to you?’ In great detail you tell her how you seduced the office hunk in your short black dress, without panties. Wearing high heels and stockings and a white cafeteria apron. You’re in the elevator together, the coffee trolley at the back. ‘Ooh it was so hot’ you say, ‘he looked so fine. I was sure he would have a delicious dick, I couldn’t contain myself, it was torture, his body alone and how he was standing there’. ‘Oh really? And what happened next? What did you do?’ asks the interviewer.

Off you go. You narrate and she interrupts with short outbursts of excitement, horniness and admiration. Greedily she’s asking for more details, seductively you narrate with as many details as possible. ‘I looked him straight in the eye while I licked my lips, his eyes were gleaming, I could see in his eyes that he was as horny as hell, I was unstoppable, I reached behind him and pushed the emergency button so the elevator came to a stop between two floors. I stood in front of him with my legs wide apart and slowly pulled up my dress. While he couldn’t stop looking at me I swayed my buttocks and my pussy. I turned around and let him have a peek inside, first inside my pussy, then inside my ass. I saw all kinds of movement in his crotch, I saw his wonderful dick swelling and swelling.’

‘Ooh, that’s so hot, you make me all wet by telling me this!’ ‘Yeah, isn’t it awesome, me too, I can feel my pussy getting wet all over again. I couldn’t stop myself, I just grabbed his dick, it was hard as steel, immediately I felt my pussy juices starting to flow and I opened his trousers and there it was, that delicious, hot, hard dick, not very big, but very hard and willing. I became so greedy, I got down on my knees and I started licking his balls, I let my tongue glide over his balls until his dick was almost ready to burst. Then I took his whole dick in my mouth and started sucking him, deep and slow, till I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up, he yanked my dress aside and took my breasts out of my bra and gave me a wonderful nipple treatment. He squeezed them, he licked my nipples and that made me so horny.’

Oooh, and then you fucked him hmm, ooh, aah?’. ‘Yes, I couldn’t take it anymore, I took one step back and put my butt on the coffee trolley, and sat in front of him with my legs spread. He looked at my pussy ecstatically, came closer, put his glans against my wet pussy, I felt the heat, my pussy opened automatically, my labia swelled up and my pussy wanted his whole dick. But he very slowly entered only a little bit, I felt his glans inside me, touching the inside of my labia, into my hot horny wet pussy. And very slowly he entered a little more, bit by bit, I felt myself being filled up by his cock, I felt it pulsate with arousal and delight, I felt my juices flow. I wanted him. And he slowly started to fuck me. He thrusted inside me, very hard and slow, the pleasure drove me crazy. He held on to my buttocks and guided me on his cock. It drove me insane, I used my fingers to massage my already swollen clit. Slowly I massaged the skin over my clitoris while he thrusted, I wanted that cock, deeper, longer, harder, more!’

‘Ooh, aah, ooh, I want that too, hmmm, your story gets me in the mood, did he shoot his cum?’ ‘Yeah, in the end, but he lasted so delightfully long, he kept on fucking, I had to use all my control not to come straight away, I kept massaging my clit and stopping again until he started to suck my nipples like a crazy man. I felt the heat flow through my body as I started to tremble and jerk, I lost all control, his dick in my pussy, his pubic bone against my clit, his mouth on my nipples, his hands around my buttocks. And then the heat raced through my body and I came, he withdrew his cock and sprayed his cum over my belly.’

‘Ooh, aah, hmmm’, moans the interviewer. ‘Yep, it’s a wrap’ says the technician. The microphones are turned off.

You laugh and chat a little bit, drink some tea and start on the next story. Within the hour you’ve recorded five stories and you jump on your bike to go home, a hundred guilders in your pocket. It’s a dream job because you’re a hit, the men stay on the phone a long time to listen to your stories and you’re in demand.

The Love of Your Life

At home there’s your Italian boyfriend, the love of your life. You two are having a lot of good sex, in bed, on the couch, in the kitchen and outside, on the many deserted Italian beaches. You’re faithful, you don’t have sex with other men. He’s your true love, you’re his true love. You found him on Santorini, a Greek island with black beaches, Ísola d’amore’. ‘You like New Wave dance?’, he asks while making some funny movements with his arms. You’re a lost cause and so is he. A while later you walk along the beach at night and skinny dip in the lukewarm sea and you kiss and you go back to the club where you just met. While he makes his New Wave moves again you try to let him know his shirt is buttoned askew but you can’t hear each other. He looks at you with so much love in his eyes, so open and innocent, that you forget about the askew shirt, you laugh, dance and kiss together, leaving the shirt for what it is. The next morning, after sunrise, you kiss under a tree. He picks something from the tree, takes a bite and lets you have a taste. It’s juicy, red, sweet, a fig like you’ve never seen before, never tasted before.

You’re enchanted, stay together for a long time. It’s easy for you to conquer the distance Torino-Amsterdam. Years of waiting and yearning and saving up for tickets. Endless romantic nights on warm Italian beaches or in your student apartment. Ardor, passion, love, his heart, your heart, forever connected, few words, not a lot of language.

In the meantime there are your own (secret) sexual fantasies. When you satisfy yourself, you always fantasize that it’s not your fault, you’re always the innocent girl that’s being seduced, forced a little. They put a pill in your drink that makes you horny, a vibrator in your vagina with a remote control which is turned on by a man at unexpected times, or you have to do it for money with five men and you secretly enjoy all of that. The surroundings are always dark and dim and you’re aware that you’d never want to do these things in real life because you wouldn’t be able to control what’s happening. You might be forced in your fantasies but you can always fantasize how precisely you’re being forced, you certainly don’t want to be forced for real. That’s why it’s always the women in the phone stories who are so blatantly horny and the men just the lucky bastards who run into these women on heat.

But in your own sexual fantasies you could never be one of the horny women you make up in your sex stories, you’d be too embarrassed. Neither in daily life because that’s way too dangerous: appearing like a slut without underwear is asking for trouble. It’s better to seem decent and save the sex for your boyfriend. It’s only possible to play these women when you know they’re not you.

The phone sex stories, the fantasies, the experiences with your boyfriend, it’s all bewildering: it’s all about sex, but the meaning behind it, the background story, the imprint is different on each occasion. Out of love, being forced out of horniness, being allowed, not being allowed, to want to but not to do, to do but not to want, complicated constructions. Being allowed to be horny, wanting to be sexy, not being allowed to be horny, or sexy. To be a sexy desirable woman but not too overtly sexy. Showing a little bit that you enjoy sex but not too much, or is it better to show nothing at all?

What you do know is that you and your Italian boyfriend are doing well, you know how to enjoy, have sex, make love and how to cherish each other. Everything else is a tangle.

The Director, the Writer and the Soap

You’re twenty-four years old. The director is a movement teacher and the writer a dramaturge. The writer wrote the piece and the director is going to direct it. They’re friends and they’re looking for an actress, or actually they’re looking for a beautiful vessel. The audition consists of drinking coffee with both men. You just lost the love of your life, your Italian lover left you, you could be the actress, you could be that beautiful vessel. The men are funny and clear, they don’t dress things up and you’re just happy to be working.

You’re to play Madame Bovary, the woman who marries the nice older man who takes good care of her and gives her everything her heart desires, but there’s no passion. Madame Bovary is made for passion and she falls in love with beautiful, young, untrustworthy men. When she’s with them she feels her body, her sexuality, with them she blossoms. She feels like a woman, she feels the spark of love, titillation and arousal which remind her she’s alive. She’s connected, she’s wild and beautiful. At every turn she jumps into carriages and takes wild rides over the cobblestones to meet her secret lovers. She’s not tactical about it at all, she covers nothing, she does what she wants and doesn’t think. This Madame Bovary is pure passion, pure fierceness, a glorious being that chooses bliss. She goes from bliss to bliss. Nothing is more important than bliss.

There’s no happy ending of course for this thoughtless, evil woman, this eager, sick, uninhibited womb carrying woman. She’s abandoned by her lovers and drinks arsenic, this will be her dramatic suicide. The beautiful creature, the resplendent sexual woman poisons herself because she doesn’t know how to live without passion, without sex, without arousal, without love. She represents all the beautiful vessels. All those women who spice up men’s lives, give it passion, light, love, spark, titillation, everything that’s lovely and sensual. The women who take men from their heads to their pelvis, the men who are goal oriented, want to create something, who work hard and want to bring something tangible into the world, and who love these beautiful vessels. These crazy hysterical vixens, they’re welcome, but they’re also very dangerous. For themselves as well as for the men, because if you get addicted to a woman like that, you’re in big trouble.

They’re enslaved to their lowest instincts, they follow the most primitive impulses, these women drag you down into their passionate crevasses. Before you know it, you disappear in their immense depths, melt into their all-encompassing arms, lose yourself in their burning hearts. Before you know it there’s nothing left of you, they eat you up. These women eat you for breakfast, these rudderless vessels, these angels, these gorgeous beings.

Oh my, if you surrender to them you’re done for. Done with the big talk, with the stories, with the trivia and the tricks. So you keep them at a distance, these characters, to play with, to look at, as a pet, as beautiful vessel, to amuse yourself. And the power of these women, the beauty, the passion, the sexuality, yes, that’s going to be their downfall, because they’ve got no idea, they’re a bit dumb, these women, a little over-emotional. So never take them seriously. They take you down in their inevitable downfall, their inevitable undoing. Put them on stage, on a chair, in your kitchen, put them next to you at a party, but never let them in your heart.

Or you know what, we teach them how to suppress their emotions, that’s even better. We teach them how to think and philosophize and speculate, we teach them to never speak before their turn and if they can’t do that, we invent a pill. Pills to stay calm, pills to relax, pills against anxiety, against hot flashes, against emotions, pills to make them apathetic, less sparkling, less vibrant, less threatening. Or else we put corsets on them. Corsets that are so tight around their waists that all life will be squeezed out of them, that their pelvis is completely separated from their head, so the problem is solved. The lower body is ours, there’s nothing they can do with it, much better. Maybe they won’t be able to hold their water and poop, they’ll become hysterical. No problem, we’ll lock them up, we’ll treat them, we’ll inject them and they’ll calm down, these animalistic creatures. Or the doctor will subscribe them weekly treatments with a vibrator to stimulate the womb. That will calm them down, these primal creatures, vaginal douches, long and short vibrating objects, we’ll put them on a bench and insert the object until they’re crying out with animalistic pleasure or pure misery. Why don’t they just behave themselves, sit upright and fetch and be the beautiful vessels they are? And if they don’t want to, well, why don’t they go to college? So they can learn to make the same smart observations as us? Or go into politics? Or become a doctor? Why can’t they develop themselves just like us? Civilized men?

The director makes a pass at you and you willingly let him. You laugh at his ridiculously obvious Don Juan-like efforts, flirt and make jokes You are charming and you’re hurting. Your heart is broken, your big love, your Italian boyfriend is gone and you’re glad about this distraction.

When you move in with the director the writer has also recently moved in. The writer stays in the director office for the time being, so he can rent out his house during his one year sabbatical and finally write his book. They are creative minds. Their cognition has developed to artist brains, they are knowledgeable about a lot of things. About Picasso, about Dali, about the great playwrights and painters, about Hemingway, bullfighting and Kissinger, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. In their conversations they’re idealists, with a great sense of humor they create new worlds right there at the kitchen table. A lot of language, a lot of words and a lot of hot air. You’re the beautiful vessel, you’re there, you’re the muse, the kitten, Monroe, Bovary, you’re the beautiful woman who makes them feel seen.

The director is a perfect lover for you, he has a lot of tricks up his sleeve, he’s ten years your senior and surprises you over and over again with his knowledge about the female body. He knows exactly how to touch you. Arouse you. He brings you to an orgasm just fine. The right buttons at the right time, no soul, no passion, no heart, it’s a game. When his sister visits while you’re in the shower he pulls the door open to introduce you to each other. The sister appraises your naked body. ‘Hmm, at least she’s not as young as your last one’ she says and they call your mother ‘well preserved’.

Every day the director mentions to you how many pages he’s read. The writer wakes up every morning with a feeling of a tight band around his belly, that’s very puzzling. The three of you don’t know what it means or what to do about it.

During your week in Prague the director tells you all about the buildings, the years, the history, all kinds of trivia. You look with curiosity at the enormous tubs filled with carp standing on every street corner, the Praguers carrying carps, the truck with a slide rolling out of it and releasing a full load of carp in one of those tubs. The director doesn’t notice this day-to-day wondrous phenomenon, he needs you to draw his attention to it and as soon as he is aware of it he pretends to have invented it, he appropriates it.

They get their motorcycle license, the men, the writer and the director, they buy a chopper and leave for the south of Spain. You’re the Barbie on the back of the chopper. You’re never scared, you enjoy the speed with which you cruise along the freeway and amidst the Spanish arid scenery, you enjoy the red earth, the wind in your hair, the little blond chubby curly haired angels dangling from his mirrors and his handlebars. The big angel, the protective white light shining down on you. When you race along the ring road in Sevilla (you with bare legs and high heels like a Barbie) and almost slip because of a puddle of oil, the director puts his boot down on the tarmac at exactly the right time. One tap is enough to bring the balance back, the chopper continues, the danger is gone, the angels are radiating, it’s not your time yet, you’re not afraid.

He’s also the man who brags about the expensive lingerie he’s going to buy for you, the satin sheets you deserve. ‘Darling, darling’ he says, ‘baby, baby’. ’Kitty kitty kitty’, is what you hear and you can’t resist the temptation to coax him into buying you the expensive dress, the fancy lingerie just above his budget. Simply because he’s asking for it, simply because you’re playing his game. When you tell him he doesn’t show emotions. He’s only surface and form, but he manages to squeeze out a couple of tears. There, you see, of course he can cry.

The role in the daily soap opera you land after you’ve been the beautiful vessel in their show makes you feel the same way. In the soap you’ve become a speaking doll, a television tart. When you see yourself, you see only a diminished copy of who you think you are and you’re embarrassed about the dull appearance on the tv that seems to host your soul. Your bank account has never been this healthy, frequently you confuse the number of zeros. In the street you’re asked for your autograph and check-out boys, baker’s wives and fishmongers treat you like they’ve known you for years. You live with two successful men and you’re successful yourself, if you can measure that in the amount of money you make.

For one year you play the doll, you are the Barbie, the beautiful vessel, the long-legged kitten. By then the worst of your love sickness over your big love, your romantic Italian, has healed and it’s time to take care of yourself again. You break things off with the director (with a lot of drama of course, yes/no, go back for a while and leave him again) and you do a couple of really stupid things so your contract at the soap is not renewed.

Aerobics

It’s the early nineties and you’re twenty-six. Your education to become a drama teacher is turning out to be useless, there’s no money to be made unless you’re content to play a beautiful vessel or a well-behaved doll. After five years of theater education and three years of mucking around you get your aerobics certificate and for the coming twenty years that will be the way you’re going to make money. You can be proud again, you can gradually become who you are, bit by bit.

Exercise is what saves you. Biking across town to the gym, stand in front of twenty or thirty women, turn on the music and off you go. You lead them like a colonel leads his troops, you jump, shape and step. You squat, kick and box. For years you enjoy what you do, you enjoy the music and the easy choreography. You enjoy all the women who come to you to become stronger, to feel their body, to improve their fitness. Every class is like a short journey. You start gently and slowly quicken the pace, you take the women on a trip to exercise more intensely, you build to a climax, jumping, running and stepping. The music does what it’s supposed to do and the women create tremendous energy together which everyone takes advantage of.

2

The Strength of the Mother

Carrying for the First Time

Yes, you’re thirty and yes, you’re pregnant. You’ve conceived, your belly is growing, your body is fully dedicated to this new life. Your breasts swell, you feel all woman, the primal woman. You’re strong, stronger and the strongest. You still take all your aerobics classes, you jump, step and shape up while your belly is growing slowly but surely. You go full steam ahead, you’re unstoppable. You love it, you love your body, you love the growing baby, love your man who has planted this seed inside of you. It’s the first time, you’re together, you and your man are young and in love and happy.

Yes it’s true, you work hard but you make sure you take plenty of rest as well, you take naps, eat well and have endless sex marathons with your man. For nine months long you make sweet love. You’ve never felt so sexual and sexy, you wish you could be penetrated everywhere, every moment.

Hmm, weird, a horny pregnant woman, you never knew such a thing existed. The bigger the belly, the more sensational the sex. Every penetration stimulates the womb. Your womb pulsates with every orgasm and because it’s so big and the baby is almost fully grown, the pulsating is enormous. Your body throbs and pulses and sizzles and tickles and sparkles, and the extra life, the extra little heart pulsates with it.