by Denisa-Maria Tudor
I was a bit of an untamed beast. This is why older men liked me. They couldn’t quite understand if I would lash out and slap them for their audacity, offended and disgusted in a full feminist belief, or if I would slightly adore them, for their braveness of touching uncooked teenage meat.
They knew they could get their hands bloody, but most of them didn’t care, they lusted over me on the streets. I could feel their gazes scanning my body and lingering across my breasts as I walked by. If you would ever catch them doing that, some would smile devilishly, others would bury their eyes into the ground, terrified of the consequences. But this didn’t change anything; their reaction after the immediate suspense of getting caught didn’t change the internal turmoil of ardour for an inherently obscene action.
I once heard from an ex-lover that girls, just little girls, at the most vulnerable age of 14, are fresh meat. I couldn’t get that out of my head, even if I was shocked and my guts turned inside out, I couldn’t protest at this awful reality of what the male sex thought of us. I just shrivelled up at this thought and digested it quietly.
Later in life, when I hit my 20s, his words appeared in my head again. As I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw, somehow surprised, that I was no longer “fresh meat”; the softness of my face was replaced by stronger features, contoured bones and a slightly rebellious personality that somehow resembled the inner teenage spirit. My skin was soft, pale, plump, but I felt all angled in all the ways life bent me to fit the standards. I decided, since then, to do my best not to conform. To never feel like prey under those gazes, to never pursue the damsel in distress trope for an itching, ungrateful, degraded man.