For this girl
International day of the sex worker,
The oldest and largest industry in the world,
Commoditizing for profit
The one crying, all-encompassing need,
That one will always give anything to have
And will secretly choose again and again
In those moments of torment and shame
When one finally feels alive.
Who holds the key to the means of production?
It’s time to arise like Lysistrata’s wives!
All the butterflies of programmed Monarch sex slaves;
The sexualized nine-year-olds from steroid milk and S&M cartoons;
The headless mannequins of the 24/7 sweat-shop fashion factories;
The S Factor debutantes learning high-end slut culture;
The May pole dancers trained in counterfeit intimacy;
The emaciated teenage girls in underwear on the cover of every ladies
magazine;
The surgeon-disfigured, Photoshop-altered, eating-disordered model of
earning love that is broadcast out in threatening signals to the heart
of survival at the core of every woman;
The casting-couch script doctors who turn every female character into
heroines to be fucked, victims to be saved, or dreamers after
marriageable men;
The women in China sold to their husbands' mothers, and the mothers
who own them;
The ho’s who teach the tricks to dutifully play the role of predatory boys
without mercy or restraint;
The mothers who shun reservation girls if they’re not grateful to be alive
after ultra-violent rape for the crime of drinking with the boys;
The daughters who let Indian widows flock to Vrindavan to die;
The deer-thin waifs who starve themselves for love, the acne-covering
make-up fetishists and body-piercing cutters of the soul,
all trying to fit inside a world they can never understand;
The mothers in Somalia who allow 95% of that country’s teenage girls to
have their genitals mutilated;
The underpaid executives in paralyzing heels trying to keep up with the
Jones-boys by revealing something others won’t;
The promoted secretaries who’ve been stripped of all respect by every
man, woman and hr generalist in the large, remembering building;
The Saudi wives who say not so fast on allowing women to drive or live
a portion of their lives not under a legal male guardian;
The well-spoken spokeswoman who makes it seem so kind and
reasonable to make fearful pregnant girls take a vaginal probe
after they’ve been raped by their fathers as condition for an abortion;
The kindly mother superior who says wives are required by scripture to
go back to cheating, strangling husbands who control every moment
of their lives;
The nurses in South Africa who scream at delivering mothers on their
knees to clean up their own blood;
The women who take male attention as their only means to power;
All the hard ways women learn to get a man to do what's right before
the universal judge.
Sacred prostitutes! It’s time to reclaim your body parts, your moral
center, your souls!
It’s time to stare down the male gaze, so that when the poles shift
We won't wonder why the most terrifying thing in this world was the
perfect beauty of every woman!
Unconscious the majorette raises her sceptered wand.
Unconscious we march to the beat of our wounds.
Let us pause to be conscious, to know what we do to ourselves in the
guise of others.
No parades until our sisters are respected!
No peace until the Goddess is set free!
