Sides for MARIA

(The word “Sisters” is projected on the back wall, then disappears. Lights come up on MARIA BRATISLAVA. She stands in the middle of an empty stage, smoking. She inhales.)

MARIA: If you dislike my smoking…

(She exhales.)

MARIA: …you should go somewhere else.

(Pause)

The other day, I was walking down a street in Manhattan when I saw a picture of myself. This in itself is not uncommon, but it was a very unusual picture. The artist, if that is what you would call her, had taken a picture of my body and placed it at the stuffing point of a meat grinder. Coming out the exit was, of course, ground meat. The implication being, I suppose, that I was being ground up. Like meat. Not so very original. But a striking image nonetheless.

I approached the woman whose table displayed this picture. She wore a shirt that said “Women Fighting Pornography.” I asked her how much money was in her little jar.

She looked at me curiously. She recognized my face but was unable to place it.

I said, “Since you are using my picture to sell your product, I believe that I am entitled to a portion of the proceeds.”

Her face lit up. She was, I am embarrassed for her sake to admit, star struck. She was also, I believe, a lesbian woman, so she made a quick study of me before remembering her scruples. Then she became very angry.

She wondered how I could “prostitute” myself as I did. She wanted to know if I knew the damage I was inflicting. On the world. On women. On, as she said, my “sisters.”

Her passion was quite striking. Her face became red as she spoke, and I believe I saw the beginnings of tears in her eyes. I was…surprisingly moved.

I reached into my wallet and took out all the money I had, which totaled several hundred dollars. I placed it in her little jar.

I said to her, “Your crusade is fundamentally misguided as well as being utterly hopeless. But your passion for your cause and your concern for your “sisters”, as you call them, is very touching. Best of luck to you.” And I gave her a kiss on the cheek. She leaned into my kiss, breathing in my smell as I pulled away.

(MARIA stops speaking. She smokes for a moment in silence.)

There is a misunderstanding in the feminist community about the work that I do. It is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of men. In the feminist community, men are viewed as powerful foes to be battled with and overcome. They are not. They are, truly, pathetic creatures.

Women are, I think, very ignorant about what drives men.

Men, you see, spend their entire lives in a kind of sexual exile, forever seeking a satisfaction that is totally unavailable to them. In the sexual act, they attempt to submerge their loneliness in something greater than themselves. But when it is over, they find themselves even more isolated than when they began. They are spent, diminished, alone.

Because of this, they need to create an alternate world. A pornographic world. Only there are they free from their anxiety. Only there can they live out their ludicrous fantasies. Only there are they triumphant.

It is quite silly. And very sad.

I act in this world. I give them what they think they want. It is, I think, a profoundly interesting, not to mention lucrative, way to earn a living.

(MARIA takes a drag on her cigarette. She smiles.)

There is also a wonderful final irony. Men, of course, fetishize the female body to absurd lengths. They focus, in a logic that only they could ever understand, on that body’s flabbiest parts: the breasts and the ass. They are slavish in their devotion to these things. But this body that they fantasize about every moment of the day, is, in fact, completely irrelevant to their experience. For when one is actually engaged in the sexual act…really, one vagina is as good as the next. There is little to no difference in sensation. So this obsession is, even in it’s simplest form, totally meaningless.

(MARIA laughs. It is a deep, rich laugh.)

Men do not understand that is the mind, not the body, that is sexual. There was an American woman, a Mary Baker Eddy, who said, “it is not matter but mind that satisfies.” This is something a woman understands instinctively, but will baffle a man until the day he dies.

Not anger. Not revenge. No, my “sisters”. Pity. Pity.

(MARIA drops her cigarette. She steps on it. Blackout.)