Dedicated to Lola Kiepja, the last pureblood Selk’nam (b.?–1966)

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People who met Dr Megrelian for the first time believed it was his real surname. They also assumed he was a college-educated physician well-versed in the complexity of human malformations and similar afflictions. His birth certificate, however, revealed his true identity. He was Benjamin Cecil Calhoun, also known as Benny, a half-literate resident from Harlan, Iowa, a remote village with only a church, a general store, and a scattering of 10-acre farmhouses in various stages of disrepair. 

Born and raised in poverty, Benny received his first pair of shoes from the very man whose name he would eventually assume and whose five-cent nomadic show pitched tents on a vacant parcel of land behind the Calhoun homestead one fateful morning.

“Three dollars for the lot, and you can also use the outhouse and the water pump,” Benny’s father, Silas, offered.

“How about we strike a deal?”  Dr Megrelian, a shrewd businessman with a good eye for a lucrative deal, engaged in the age-old art of haggling.

“I’ll give you two dollars and ten cents for the whole thing, plus one day’s work for your kid. He looks like a smart boy who can help us get ready for the show.”

Silas hesitated.

“That, plus a new pair of shoes—Macy’s patent leather. Phil the Midget got his legs chopped off a few months ago,” Megrelian added.

Phil’s legs had been sliced off at the Sioux City station by an Akron train when he was unloading trunks and other equipment on the wrong side of the tracks. His friends had worried for weeks that Phill, who’d lost three pints of blood, would check out.  But despite the accident and his achondroplasia, he was able to pull through since he had just married the Giant Woman and had not yet consummated the marriage.  After the accident, he sat in a wheelchair customized to his even more petite body, selling popcorn, beer, and show tickets, and he no longer needed the shoes he’d bought for the wedding and wore only once.

“Two dollars and fifty cents,” Silas, who could drive as good a bargain as Megrelian, responded. “And you can have my boy for a dollar a day. With the rye and soybean harvests months away, there’s no work in Harlan.” 

“Deal,” the good doctor agreed, handing over the money and the shoes.

But after two days, the circus had barely recouped its investment in a town whose farmers could ill afford to pay five cents to watch mediocre freaks, including a legless midget, and their clumsy antics, so the troupe decided to leave—this time with young Calhoun in tow.

“There’s no future in Harlan,” Benny said as he waved goodbye to his father.

“With the Doc, I’ll travel the world and make a name for myself. I might even send you some money,” he claimed, which, in retrospect, turned out to be not exactly a lie but an empty promise.

During Benny’s third year of touring with the circus, Megrelian, who was approaching his seventh decade and suffered from crippling headaches, lost interest and hunger for all worldly pleasures, including booze, food, and sex. Most of the performers had moved on to greener pastures, and the Giant Woman, unable to deal with Phil’s condition, had fled with the Siamese twins who had joined P.T. Barnum.  The nomadic act was on the edge of collapse, with only Benny, Megrelian, the Midget, and an elephant named Bertha remaining.

The Doctor’s headaches turned out to be aneurysms that one day exploded like quasars, so they buried him under a saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert while Benny, blessed with a good nose for business and a dislike for poverty, inherited not only the entire traveling spectacle but Megrelian’s name as well.

To get some cash permitting him to recruit fresh attractions, Benny sold Bertha to a park ranger who’d always wanted an exotic beast to keep him company in Arizona’s Lost Dutchman State Park.

“How the devil will he feed her in the desert?” he pondered, handing over the animal but did not inquire. He needed the money, and the pachyderm was old and emaciated and would have seen the wrong side of the grass very soon anyhow.

With no performers to exhibit, Megrelian-Calhoun was eager to find someone to pique the macabre curiosity of freak show spectators. He happened to run into Sergei Levchenko, an 18-year-old from St. Petersburg and figured out that people would pay big money to view the Russian’s tiny third leg, the remains of a parasitic twin dangling from his crotch. Benny gave him Phil’s leather shoes for his two good feet and had a shoemaker create a two-inch copy of a third one.

While passing through Wickenburg,  the circus stopped at a local diner where Karl Peters, a sous chef and an Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome sufferer with velvety skinfolds all over his body, caught Benny’s eye. Amazed by the man’s flesh trying to escape from the confines of his buttoned shirt, Benny offered him a job.

“We’ll showcase you as the Elastic Man. You can stay in Phil’s caravan until you get your own,” he promised.

Peters, bored with sous-cheffing and the customers’ threats to do a wedgie with his butt skin, accepted gratefully, hung up his grease-stained apron, and moved into the Midget’s wagon.

Charlene Atkins, aka the Lobster Girl, joined the show in Tennessee. Her genetic condition caused her fingers and toes to merge into claw-like extremities.

“All you’ll need to do is sit in a barrel filled with seaweed and water and make crustacean-like noises with a pair of castanets,” Benny instructed, and she was overjoyed to become part of the troupe.

The rest of the artistic ensemble they picked up on the road included Susie, the bearded woman, and Stephen Jefferson, who could twist his joints and play the piano with his back to the instrument. In all honesty, he was a lousy performer, and the only two tunes he played reasonably well were Ta-ra-ra Boom De Day and Oh, My Darling Clementine.

As years passed, the traveling spectacle went from state to state and village to village. With the original Megrelian long gone and fertilizing the Sonoran Desert flora, Calhoun, now in his thirties, vowed to make the show bigger and better than any other. And, remembering his boyhood hunger pangs, he promised never to return to Harlan or any other region of Iowa, rural or otherwise, until he became rich and famous.

“I’ll be damned if I go back,” he told his employees as they gathered in the evenings after each event, calculating the proceeds and fantasizing about making it big.

Although his mathematical skills were limited to adding dollars and cents with the help of an abacus, Benny worked hard to make the business a success. He fought his way through the cryptic language of newspaper articles and stored information for future use. That’s how he learned about two opportunities that were meant to make him rich and turn the freak show into an international attraction.

The first was the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, also known as the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. The organizers estimated that over twenty million people would visit the technological marvels and amusement rides, each paying a dollar a day.  Benny reasoned that even if only a fraction attended the circus’s performance, he could retire before the age of forty.

The second piece of news came from an ad in the Kansas Gazette which said that Sam Dixon, a wool and hide merchant recently returning from the continent’s southernmost edge, had brought a female aborigine and her offspring. He won her playing poker in the Straits of Magellan and reasoned that exhibiting the two for the enjoyment of county bumpkins would get him extra cash.

“A buck to view, two bucks to touch,” the sign in his shop window announced. 

Everything was fine until the mother bit off the finger of a man who tried to touch the kid after paying his two dollars.

“One clean snap and his pinkie was gone! The dumb expression on his face was worth the money I paid for the doctor’s bill. And I also had to return the two bucks!” Dixon chuckled at the memory.

“That woman’s teeth are as sharp as a piranha’s. We can’t find the finger because she must have swallowed it. The only problem is that no one is bold enough to clean her cage now, so she sits in her muck all day, clutching the baby and crooning some crazy stuff no one understands.”

Fed up with the situation, he placed the ad.

“Real South American savage. Young and healthy. Price: 30 dollars. Child, cage, and chain for free.” 

If Benny got there in time and offloaded the woman and her infant from Dixon, his show could compete with P.T. Barnum or the Ringling Brothers, who were also heading to St. Louis.

“Just imagine!” he said to Phill.

“We’d make a fortune! Two bucks to touch!”

After three days, they finally reached Lawrence, a hamlet on the bank of Clinton Lake where Dixon’s house competed in grayness with lichen-covered boulders squatting on the shore like overturned tombstones in a derelict graveyard. 

When the convoy arrived, the merchant was cooking something in a large aluminum pot that smelled like rotting haddock, overcooked rice, and green kale.

“I try to get a pot ready for the week. There’s no way I’m getting into the cage more often than that,” he explained, stirring the foul-smelling liquid with a wooden spoon.

“Just remember. Don’t stick your hands through the cage bars. The chain is long enough for her to move around. Do as I say, or you’ll end up as one of the freaks in your show,” he chuckled, pleased with his joke.

The cage, which was about 10 yards from the lake, had a tin roof and a floor lined with an old carpet.  The mother, entirely naked, slumped in one corner, her infant on her hip, sucking on one of her breasts.

As soon as he saw her, Benny knew she was the one he’d been hunting for – a true Amerindian savage never previously exhibited in the human zoo industry. Although she was huddling on the ground, he could see she was plump, with milk-busting breasts. Her entire body was painted crimson with black and white stripes and dots, and a white stripe encircled her eyes like a scary mask. Her hair was long, black, and rigid, most likely oiled with animal fat.

“Ain’t she cold?” he asked Dixon.

“She’s used to it. The sun barely rises above the horizon where she comes from. Her people live just a stone’s throw from Antarctica -that massive sheet of ice at the end of the world where there is nothing but snow, snow, and more snow.”

His tone was scornful as if he could not understand why anyone would want to live in such a place.

“She probably swam with seals in the half-frozen ocean,” he continued.

“Her people can outswim dolphins and often compete with humpback whales for speed and resistance. I tossed her a blanket to cover the baby last week, but she just chucked it back. She has some pride, that one.”

Throughout the conversation, the woman never looked up, muttering to herself. 

“J-ák t-ēlken, j-ák t-ēlken…”

“What’s she saying?” Benny asked.

“How would I know? I’m not even sure it’s a language. The shepherds down by Tierra del Fuego call them Selk’nam. They say they are barely human, but apparently, they communicate whistling like parakeets or puffins.”

“The European settlers are trying to get rid of them because they’ve no notion of private property and slaughter their sheep as if they were wild sea lions. They pay two dollars for a pair of testicles or a breast and one dollar for a child’s ear. Fewer than a thousand are left, so you’d be getting a collectible at a discount.”

“Before they’re all gone,” he added as an afterthought.

Phil, who sat in the wheelchair behind them, inched towards the cage. 

“She’s one unattractive lady. And the young’un… phew, I’ve never seen an uglier child. Despite her size, my ex-wife was really pretty…” he said but stopped under Benny’s warning stare. 

“Watch out! Not so close, or you’ll not only have no legs but might also lose an arm!” Dixon warned, laughing uproariously.

Phil beat a hasty retreat.

“So, whatcha say? Taking her or not? Thirty bucks for the lot—woman, child, and cage. You can also take the pot of grub for the road, ” Dixon urged.

“Done!” Benny exclaimed.

“We’ll load her onto Charlene’s wagon and head out.  Must make it to St. Louis in three weeks.”

“Just give me the money and take her. I no longer want anything to do with her. In the payout for the lost pinkie, I spent more than I got from her. Just be careful when you drag her out. She might not look like much, but she’s fierce. And fast. I saw her people snap tree branches like twigs,” Dixon said.

The merchant pocketed the six five-dollar bills Benny gave him, then moved away to a safe distance, watching him approach the cage.

“There, there…” Benny chanted softly.

“I won’t hurt you or your child. Just come out nice and easy, and I promise you’ll have a good life with us,” he continued, knowing she couldn’t understand a word he said. And anyway, everything he said was a lie. She and the kid would be chained to the cage for the rest of their lives.

“Be careful, boss; she might lurch, and then you’ll be gone,” the Midget said, wriggling in his wheelchair.

Benny inserted the key into the keyhole and unlocked the door. The woman didn’t move.

“How dangerous can a woman with a baby be?” he wondered as he moved farther into the cage to loosen the chain.

He kept saying, “Easy there, easy,” as he’d heard horse whisperers do in Iowa. He relaxed because she still didn’t stir and seemed unaware of his presence.

Then fate intervened again. She was on top of him in one great leap, the infant still clutching to her breast, and from someplace, perhaps from under the carpeting, she retrieved a bone fragment sharpened to razor-blade sharpness.

Slash…

Blood spurted from Benny’s severed jugular, coating the woman in sticky red. Before dying, he comprehended where the missing pinkie had always been.

Phil tried to back out, but it was too late. The woman flipped the wheelchair over and sank her teeth into his shoulder, tearing into the muscle and cutting through to the bone. Phil screamed, trying to shake her off, but she clung to him as a hungry puma might stick to a seal before the coup de grâce. When she noticed he had fainted, she let go and stepped towards Dixon, who ran for his life.

She was breathing heavily, surveying the carnage around her, while the child, still on her hip, sucked contentedly on her blood-splattered breast.

                            ***

Leluachen ran. She ran as never before, not even when she’d hunted the swift Magellan guanacos for meat and fur. 

“Hold on to ahm’s neck, Kreeh. Hold tight, and ahm will run like the wind that whistles along the Wintek plains. We’ll be home soon,” she whispered, never missing a step. 

“J-ák t-ēlken, j-ák t-ēlken… my child, my child,” she repeated over and over.

Baby Kreeh, hardly two years old, held onto ahm’s neck unquestioningly. She would not let go. Mama said they would go home. Mama knew. 

Leluachen ran as if she were racing along the K’ami Lake shore far, far away, where the world ended abruptly, where there was no more land, grass, or trees but only a vast, limitless ocean. A cool breeze ruffled her hair, singing a Selk’nam melody her grandfather used to play on his whale jaw harp. 

 Mahuin, mahuin hikuenkr, 

Now the kloketens are far away.

Their ankles are tired.

Beautiful heart,

Head of rock…

 She chanted into Kreeh’s tiny ear. The ear that white hunters would pay a dollar for but which they would never have.

She looked back. No one was following…She stepped into the lake, holding the child close to her chest.

“Listen to ahm carefully. Close your eyes really, really tight, and don’t open them until ahm tells you to. Until we are back home. Until we are free. Do you understand?”

The little girl nodded.

One step, two, three…

When Kreeh’s feet touched the surface, Leluach was up to her waist in the water.

 Four, five, six…

“Now, Kreeh, now! Close your eyes.”

Her lips grazed the girl’s head.

“It’s a pity my daughter was born after the cruel white man had destroyed the Selk’nam. We should have been allowed to keep our way of life with bows, arrows, and fur clothes. Our way of life in the land the foreign men call the Land of Fire, but that truly is the Land of Ice,” she reflected, saddened.

She knew there was nothing to go back to. The only thing awaiting them was men with sticks that roared like sea lions and spat out flames. Nothing but to be killed, maimed, or exhibited in human zoos like her and baby Kreeh. A buck to view, two bucks to touch…

Seven, eight…

Water sloshed around Leluachen and her daughter, hugging them in its comforting arms. She was swimming again with dolphins back in the cold, cold canal that the foreign invaders called the Beagle. 

Nine… 

She extended her hand towards Temaukel, the Selk’nam God and the only witness to their departure, ready to gather them into his embrace.

Ten…

She disengaged Kreeh’s arms from her neck, letting the child sink to the bottom of the foreign lake that, from then on, was to be their home.

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J.B Polk is Polish by birth. Currently living in  Chile. First story short-listed for the Irish Independent/Hennessy Awards, Ireland, 1996.  Since she went back to writing fiction in 2020, more than 80 of her stories, flash fiction and non-fiction, have been accepted for publication. She has recently won 1st prize in the  International Human Rights  Arts Movement literary contest for her story about Victor Jara, a Chilean folk songwriter. 

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Alexis Levitin has been a literary translator for over half a century. His fifty books include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. A recipient of two NEA translation grants. he has participated in literary retreats in Banff, Canada, Straelen, Germany, and Bellagio, Italy. His own short stories arose unexpectedly during the fear-tinged isolation of the pandemic. So far sixty-one  stories have been published in literary magazines in the USA, Italy, Turkey, Norway, and Sweden. A collection of his chess-related stories, The Last Ruy Lopez: Tales from the Royal Game, came out in 2023.

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The Fiesta of Forgotten Negras

Yo Georgia D. Johnson is here!! and she got

enough drinks for e’erbody, though she

rarely turnts up, those poetgirls can

get so fussy so we are looking especially

to MIZZ JEZEBEL over there, spiritual girlie

twisting and shuddering

them Biblical hips and kicking that man coming over

with her high heel’s silver spine. Don’t forget about

(oh, no, she already twerking), rapper Lisa M

to the left gyrating to Lisa Lopez, who

got them bars as Saweetie-sweet as Rapsody, who

fished all the Scrubs from the gutter and

is presently

shooting ‘em down with her bullet-raps.

So we dancin’, dancin’ to the pump and full bloom

of the beat; the big sound smudges and bunches

until it’s something you feel like you know

something thick enough to block your throat,

something huge enough to revive or kill you,

but look at us, us damn beautiful women,

we only revive.

Our hips shake shake shake shake

to an ever-living bass.

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SARAH BAARTMAN MARY MAG SWAG

is what I got GURL

you got to see me shake and pounce.

What I got behind me,

you don’t need to know, it ain’t for pageantries

never was, that backside flopping huge,

the tigolbiddies are just for my own

loving pleasure.

We ain’t body-shapes, we full-blooming,

plush and pondering plunder, we got that

forgotten woman swag, we got that

theydon’tknowus bounce we got that

ne’erdowelltill we DO IT, ride.

Hey, Mary, let’s shake it for ourselves

if anyone wants to come along,

that’s all on them.

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Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the short story collection WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME (Counterpoint), a New York Times Editors’ Choice; SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), an IPPY-award winning cross-genre collection; and Kinds of Grace (Flowersong Press), a poetry collection called a Must-Read by Columbia Daily, Bookshop, Letras Latinas, Hip Latina and elsewhere. Her speculative fiction collection NEON STEEL (Cornerstone Press/U.Wisc-Stevens Point) will be released in February 2026. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and Canto Mundo and her work has been called a Must-Read by Today, Kirkus Reviews, Columbia Daily Tribune, Elle, Latinx in Publishing, and Ms. Magazine, among others. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, summer faculty at the Yale Writers’ Workshop, and fiction editor at Pleiades.

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Flashback: My father in his dark room, with my older sister, teaching her how to develop photos while doing things to her that she has only now in her seventieth year told me.

The dark room faced the kitchen, the busiest room in the house. We were a door away. My mother cooking, my sisters and I playing with our dolls on top of the grey army blanket, under the kitchen table, my brothers running in and out from the back room, and not one of us realised, or had we realised, no one did a thing about it.

Forced into complicity and denial by the silence of those times.

When the #MeToo movement came to my attention, well after 2006 when the expression was first made public to give voice to women and girls of colour, I joined the throng of white women on Facebook and put up my small contribution.

I wrote of a man I met in childhood while scavenging in the tip under the railway bridge in Camberwell. A man, tall and indistinct, wearing clothes that were unsuitable for scavenging. As the sun shone down on us, out of the shadows a man appeared. In a business suit. Not the clothes of a scavenger. Whenever my brother was out of sight, the man offered what looked like a silver coin to us girls. It glinted in the sunlight. With one hand he held the coin aloft and with his other he jiggled his penis in a beckoning motion.

‘Come here,’ little girl, he seemed to say, ‘I have something for you’. My brother had disappeared over a hill for the umpteenth time when the man beckoned once more. I accepted his offer, though hazardous, because I wanted the money.

My shy, younger sister held back while I went over to him.

‘Hold this,’ the man said, ‘and watch the cream come out.’ In the dissociated state of one who knows what she is doing is wrong yet urged on by my childish greed for money and the lollies it would buy, I took hold of the man’s hard penis, warm in my small fingers.

I did not need to shake it for long before the man’s body shuddered and out came the cream, a thick stream, into an empty paint tin strategically placed between us. After it was over the man gave me the coin, wiped his penis with a hanky, tucked it behind his zippered fly and walked away. In no time my brother returned, and we were off to the milk bar to spend the money I had earned. But not until I fended off my brother’s curiosity about the money as a lucky find.

This whole event must have troubled me because it stays in my memory. For two reasons, I suspect. One related to my mother’s response when I told her about the man and the money and the penis and the cream that came out. I told her the next day while we sat alone at the kitchen table after breakfast—a rare occurrence in the large family of my childhood. We had been toasting bread on the end of forks. Forks we held over the top of the single bar radiator that warmed our kitchen, near enough to the glowing bar to crisp the bread to a light brown, but not so close it could burn black.

‘I held a man’s thing and watched the cream come out,’ I said in my bravest voice. My mother looked up from the newspaper spread across her lap. She brushed away the scraps scattered there and plunged a finger down her cleavage to dislodge any loose crumbs.

‘Take this to confession’ she said. As if this was both a solution to any concern I might have felt, and also a sign I had done something wrong. Or perhaps she had forgotten I was a child. As if in accepting money, I had become a sex worker who trades sexual acts for monetary reward.

All this comes to me in hindsight. In this way, young girls of my generation, or at least those of us baptised Catholics, learned to deal with the sexual desires of men.

The second reason why I remember this event and why I might have participated more willingly than another child rests in my knowledge that my father was visiting my older sister in her bed at night and doing similar things with his penis, or so I imagined, though I never dared to look.

Late at night, I heard my father pad into our bedroom on bare feet and turned to face the wall. My sister slept in a bed parallel to mine with a small corridor in between. My father tiptoed along this corridor and leaned over her. The rustle of blankets, his murmurs, soft sighs and it was over. In the mornings my sister said nothing. Though she took to climbing out the window just as day broke and went off to church to attend Mass and then to visit the priest. At the time, I thought she was excessively holy. 

In the sacristy behind the church, when my sister met the priest, he took her into his arms and comforted her in ways that seemed much kinder than our father’s, or so my sister told me years later when she gave me permission to write her story, in so far as it hinges on mine. When my sister told the priest what our father was doing to her in bed at night, he said, ‘Some fathers are like that’ and proceeded to do the same.

The church was another place where my friends and I were wary of priests. Some were creepy, like Father Flynn, who offered religious instruction when I was thirteen, and who insisted whatever teacher in charge leaves the room while he instructed.

‘Do you know the meaning of the word procreation?’ Father Flynn asked once during his class, as though we were still in grade three and didn’t have a clue. He chose words from the bible that had a salacious ring, despite their formality, words like ‘virginity’ and ‘promiscuity’, and the stuff that happened in Gomorrah. We sat wriggling in our seats, desperate to leave yet powerful in our group cohesiveness. Somehow confident we would be safe with one scrawny, bald-headed man who shuffled on the balls of his feet as if to give him greater height whenever he introduced a new word.

‘You’re welcome to visit me later girls, to speak in private if you wish.’ He turned to wipe the words ‘womb’ and ‘prodigal’ from the blackboard, to hide his lesson from the nuns.

Father Flynn lived over the road from our school in the presbytery of St Ignatius Church. He was a Jesuit, one of the top priests for education, my brothers told me. The Jesuits were also the geniuses of the church, according to my brothers, but to me, Father Flynn was no genius, just a creepy old man who wanted to get something we girls would not give him.

Beyond the lecherous priests we avoided, there were other ones we couldn’t get enough of. Like our curate in Our Lady of Good Council in Deepdene, a younger priest than the one who headed the parish. A priest who spoke in the lilting tones of the Irish, a man who took an interest in my family, and stirred up all manner of unspoken desires in my young self, even during what Freud describes as the latency period – from around age six to puberty – where all thoughts of sexual desire are supposed to be dormant.

Not for me, I was hot with it. I did not know then that the Irish priest was the one ‘comforting’ my sister in the sacristy after Mass.

Hot with desire, at night, I slid under the sheets (on the nights my father did not visit my sister) and imagined myself as the luscious Maid Marion awaiting the ravaging Sherriff of Nottingham. I was confident that Robin Hood would arrive in the nick of time and take me to another place in the forest where he too would ravage me, but not in an unwelcome way. I rubbed at my imaginary breasts not yet developed, but did not touch the bottom half of my body. It was an unclean place, too close to the stuff that went into the toilet. I was tormented by guilt for the impurity of my thoughts.

The nuns taught us about impure thoughts during religious instruction. Impure thoughts were the worst and must be confessed to the priest, for fear of accidental death and direct to hell. Mortal sins. I carried many such sins in my tortured mind as a child. Those unwanted impure thoughts gave me pleasure but horrified me at the filthy state of my soul. It was lodged someplace down below in my body, somewhere under my stomach and too close to my bowels for comfort.

In 2019 I responded to a call for papers from an academic journal that asked several questions related to the MeToo# Movement: This one caught my eye:

Do narratives of sexual violence linked across people, media, and time disrupt our understanding of single stories of individual injury?

Such a good question and one I try to address here. Yet how do I link my own experience of sexual abuse to the universal without watering it down or solipsising?

Sexual violence runs the risk of becoming what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the single story. One that ‘robs people of humanity’. It becomes a narrow view of that most complex of human emotions, the proclivity towards violence directed against another, an impulse that begins in infancy when a baby is frustrated but powerless to exert any influence on its caregivers other than seeking a response to its cries. Put an infant who cannot learn to handle those impulses into an adult, especially an immature male adult overtaken by rage, and violence can ensue.

Sexualised violence is so named, not because it is about sexuality itself; more it’s about power and the way sex is used to demean another, as in rape. Add to this the overriding message from the pornographic industry that women enjoy being demeaned. I don’t, despite my childhood fantasies of being ravished by the Sherriff of Nottingham.

As the psychoanalyst Muriel Dimen argues, sex is hard for everyone to think about, not just those with a history of childhood sexual abuse. On top of this, perceptions of whether something deemed sexual is desirable or unacceptable, change from one generation to the next and within different cultures. In some cultures, for instance payment for sex is frowned upon. In others, it is applauded. The confusion between sex and violence, sex and the desire for power can confound us further.

Our stories are diverse and not singular. We can become so immersed in a narrow image in our minds that sexual violence becomes one thing only: a fist raised about to thump a cowering woman, or a would-be rapist hiding in the bushes ready to attack an unexpecting passer-by. Furthermore, we are particularly vulnerable and impressionable to the power of stories as children. Stories that aim to help us understand our world, better filtered through the magic of fairy tales and allegory. But through these universalities, stereotypes can evolve, and stereotyping is dangerous.

Stereotypes tend to diminish and dehumanise us as people. We use them defensively to protect ourselves from the unfamiliar. Telling our stories in all their multiplicity helps us take a broader look at the many stories of sexual violence that beset us. My story and yours, in all their complexity. The #MeToo movement has offered many women a platform from which to speak, but the hashtag also lends itself to a type of massification. As if every individual story is somehow condensed into a stereotype of sexual abuse, one that fails to recognise the complexity of our individual stories. At the same time, MeToo# allows for more and more stories. Is there a danger that comparisons distort? Your story is worse than mine. As happened in my family of nine children, each of us with our own experience of living in this paradoxically sexualised and simultaneously repressed Catholic family with our abusive father at the helm.

As a psychotherapist, I work with women whose experience of sexual abuse pales in comparison to mine. Women who have known the terror of rape, the cruelty of having their child bodies taken from them by men who have treated them as though they were merely receptacles for their sexual fantasies. These men, my father included, the man at the tip, the lecherous priests, these men have taught us women shame. They taught us to hide our bodies, to hide ourselves, to hide our desires even from ourselves.

I have become obsessed with matters such as these. The way the men I watch on trains sit with legs akimbo, and the women with thighs squeezed together. I sit in my consulting room, knees crossed even though I know it is not good for my spine. I train myself to sit straight, with knees pressed together, while the man opposite, a good enough person who has come for help in dealing with his anxieties, sits legs wide open. And although I say nothing about it to him, I find myself wondering when and where this imposed postural positioning of men and women started.

We women have learned early about how to sit and how to stand and how to walk so that we will not be like the women whom the serial killer Ted Bundy described. He claimed he could tell a victim by the way she walked. Always a ‘she’.

In this day of more fluid gender positions, wherein people are beginning to challenge the straightforward notion that we are simply one or another sex, is there hope for change?

What drove my father to use my sister as his sexual plaything? What led him to conclude it was okay to go under the cover of darkness to masturbate her and ask her to masturbate him?

What gave him the idea it was okay for him to talk to her about his wish to prepare her for womanhood; to make her ready for her husband when she came of age, to stretch her vagina so that it could be ready to receive her man?

What drove such confusion and madness in my father’s mind that it was okay for him to treat all his daughters as though they were potential partners; to talk dirty to all and any of us; to say things at an Easter lunch to my aunt about her breasts. He was drunk that day, and my aunt blushed, but not one of my uncles told my father he was out of line, or if they did, they did it quietly and no fuss ensued.

What gave my father the view that his children and wife were his to possess in this way, such that we were his sexual objects, there for his amusement?

What led the priests to believe they too could do as they pleased with certain people in their care?

Was it merely a wish to control? The power to subject a vulnerable person and get them to bend to their will? So many people who have been sexually abused as children report their confusion and distress, their guilt and self-loathing at the fact that they were aroused by the experience.

And what of the difference between desire and arousal?

It is worth noting that arousal is a physiologic response to stimulation. Being masturbated can give a boy an erection and cause a girl to lubricate involuntarily, even without any conscious desire. Is it a case that the adult imposes their desire on the child and the child is taken over?

My focus is on the issue of gender-based violence, which relates most closely to the objectification of women’s bodies and the degree to which women, as Iris Marion Young writes in her essay ‘Throwing like a girl’, tend to be self-conscious and cautious with their bodies, thereby feeling less certain about themselves. Men and women inhabit their bodies differently. According to Young, society conditions women to limit their bodily capacities, and to take up less space. Part of this sense of female fragility and diminishment comes out of the objectification of women as mere sexual and biological beings.

In a paper entitled ‘Why you shouldn’t tell that random girl on the street that she’s hot’, Miriam Mogolovsky writes about the common assumption certain men have when they comment on women’s appearance; that it’s okay, especially when their comments are seemingly positive, even though uninvited – similar to the tendency of some people, both men and women, to touch the swollen belly of a pregnant woman uninvited. It relates perhaps to the infantile and omnipotent notion of ownership of the mother, which fuels the belief some hold, however unconsciously, that they are entitled to women’s bodies.  

Furthermore, gender inequality comes out of language. As Jackson Katz, in his 2013 TED talk, tells us it is easy to exclude men from conversations on how to decrease violence against women. It’s also easy to get into victim blaming. Katz argues we need to ask different questions like:

‘Why is domestic violence still a big problem?’

‘Why do so many men abuse physically, emotionally, verbally and in other ways, the ones they love?’

‘What’s going on with men?’

‘Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and boys?’

‘Why is the sexual abuse of children such a common problem in our society?’

‘Why do so many men rape women in our society, or why rape other men?’

‘What’s the role of institutions that help produce abusive men? The religious, sporting, pornographic, class, race etc.’  

The fault does not lie entirely with the perpetrators or the victims alone, Katz argues. It also rests with the bystanders, those people like you and me and others, those who represent the institutions. 

How then can we be transformative? One way is to adopt what Katz calls the bystander approach, namely call out the abusive behaviour when you see it. Stop shooting the messenger; shouting down the women who complain about it. Encourage men who are not abusive to speak out against men who are.

To quote Samuel Jones on the constructed nature of gender:

There is a generation of young men out there, who are sick of being told to “man up”, who tire of the patronising way they’re treated by the advertising industry and who hate the fear of being ostracised by many of their peers if they don’t participate in “banter” or acquiesce to social pressures to objectify women. Those for whom “being a man” is a daily burden.

Women are not the only ones to benefit from feminism.

For me, as a witness to the abuse, and someone who made it my aim to avoid my father as much as I could, I was doubly confused. I was jealous of my sister that my father chose her. I was jealous of my sister that the priests chose her, too. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted to be wanted. To be wanted in this way, singled me out as special.

That I wanted to avoid my father at the same time and freaked out at the thought of being touched by any of the grownups, even a friendly hug from an aunt or uncle, pulled me in opposing directions. How awful that touch should feel dangerous. That touch could be experienced as an invasion. And so, I learned to hold myself tight against any intrusions from the outside world, including, in some instances, new knowledge.

My oldest brother once wrote what I consider to be a sanitised version of my parents’ and older siblings’ arrival in Australia from Holland. The sort of story you might read in history books. In it, he describes my father as a man I do not recognise, so different from the father I knew.

Even in the same family, parents behave differently with each child. Thus, each child has a different experience of parenting, even when they share the same biological parents and are raised by these parents. When we nine children who span nearly twenty years were young, we ate at the same breakfast table. We shared evening meals, watched the television together—depending on the state of my father’s sobriety. When he was on the bottle, then not one of us ventured near the television room where he sat alone. But when he was sober, which happened more towards the beginning of each week, we watched television together.

Twenty-five years ago, when I began to take my family experience more seriously than my earlier years allowed, I wrote letters to my various siblings scattered throughout Australia and asked whether we might cooperate in the writing of a book. I had in mind that each one of us could contribute a chapter on what it was like to live within the same troubled family. I kept a series of files on each of my siblings, including one for me, in which I held our correspondence. I have it still.

The project fell over. I did not have the determination needed to compete with the few of my siblings, brothers mainly, who believed they should oversee such an enterprise.

So now I write my own story, knowing that others in my family shared those grim nights, crouched on the bed with my mother, praying the rosary while my father stormed through the house, visiting us repeatedly and threatening to hurt our mother, or any of us who challenged him.

One night, one of my brothers swore at our father, who then lurched towards him ready to punch; my brother leaped out the window. It was late at night when he returned with two policemen in tow. They had picked my brother up on the streets of Canterbury and interrogated my mother and my father as to the circumstances of this ten-year-old boy out alone. In the end they described the situation as a ‘domestic’, one they could not respond to unless our father hit our mother or one of us children and we had the bruises to prove it. All of these factors reflect tensions in our understanding of what constitutes sexual abuse and violence. It can be difficult to settle on any certainty about this, other than our increased understanding that too early an introduction to adult sexuality for children and unwanted sexual advances among adults are abusive. And a clear suggestion, we need to respect one another’s body boundaries better.

The boundary between disgust and pleasure, between varying social pressures as to what’s okay and what not, the nature of pornography as distinct from erotica, the imposition of sexual ideas on children exposed to too much too soon, all of these factors reflect tensions in our understanding of what constitutes sexual abuse and violence. It can be difficult to settle on any certainty about this other than our increased understanding that too early an introduction to adult sexuality for children and unwanted sexual advances among adults are abusive. And a clear suggestion, we need to respect one another’s body boundaries better.

My story is one of many stories shared by women who find themselves demeaned by the desires of men to fit into their fantasies as sexual objects even in childhood, well before we are ready for such encounters. Such versions of sexuality are not about loving attempts at connection and pleasure, but far more to do with power and what the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips calls the desire to feel big by making others feel small. The actions of a bully or an oppressor. They can’t be good for anyone.

The only way out is to speak out. The only way we can step out of being victimhood is by protesting.  #MeToo is one such channel for our voices. For many women’s voices, women and girls, to call out together, to oppose the treatment we received; to shame those who have shamed us into a recognition that this way of relating is not good for any of us.

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Elisabeth Hanscombe is an Australian born psychologist and writer who completed her doctorate in 2012 on the topic ‘Life writing and the desire for revenge’. She has published several short stories and essays in the areas of autobiography, psychoanalysis, testimony, trauma and creative non-fiction in anthologies, psychotherapy journals and magazines, including Brevity Blog. Her childhood memoir, The Art of Disappearing was published in 2017. She blogs at http://www.sixthinline.com

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Secret bleeding

They convinced her she was not immortal, and she

became mortal, a rhythm drilled into her,

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a sweet disorder. She secretly bled and knew somehow,

the cave is full with uncontrollable light.

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What she needed was a cave, yes, an occasional prayer,

a door among all doors, one simple greeting.

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She wants to hear the lullaby of her delicate unfinished

business, what sort of scapegoat is she anyway?

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She can almost remember the kiss, the honeysuckle breeze,

the anti-gravity. A woman in a child’s body, solemn

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with tenderness, sipping her cup of tea in this bloody ordinary

afternoon, she dreams of all this in utter oblivion.

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But all things glow darker in forgetfulness. What am I now?

she asks again. A stranger. Diminished. Returned.

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x

After the lotus flower has opened

The soul splits in two:

One has been found buried in her own garden

The other re-awakened in gardens of omniverse

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Elif Sezen is an Australian/Turkish multidisciplinary artist, bilingual poet/writer, based in Melbourne. Her collection of poems ‘A Little Book of Unspoken History’ was published by Puncher & Wattmann (2018), and ‘Universal Mother’ was published by Gloria SMH Press (2016). Her poems appeared in national and international journals and anthologies. https://www.elifsezen.com/publications

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Trinity Lutheran Church

          Ellison Bay, WI

A nave so steep,

the builder must’ve

thought he would

ascend. That avocado

paint might just

get you into heaven.

Hope invested to save

hundreds—construction

for a congregation

marked by then in

churchyard graves.

X

X

Feather

I come to

find it is

off the wing,

among the longest

on the bird,

a pattern only

found in males.

Barred white

and brown-

grey, I hold

it in my hand—

a scratch, a sail

as long as my

arm. How I

sat there as

you wept,

unable to move.

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Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more at: https://sandramarchetti.net/