Free Girls by Nic Kelman

use that word — I don’t like it,” if they say they don’t want to try being handcuffed to the towel rack in the bathroom, they’re never any good in bed. They may be brilliant. They may be nice. They may be witty, charming, etc., etc. They may be doing something for women’s liberation (over what? over whom?). But they’re never any good in bed.
    And it’s not because we feel threatened, it’s not because they’re taking control. It’s not because of that and that’s not what they’re doing anyway. Every man likes a dominant woman once in a while, a woman to order him around, to tell him what to do in bed, to say, “Eat my pussy,” and, “Good. Now fuck me. But don’t cum until I tell you to.” Some men like that all the time.
    No, it’s because they want there to be a balance of power. They want things to be equal. It’s because they don’t understand good sex has nothing to do with equality.
    It may seem like a minor thing when we tip a waitress a little more because she smiles.
    It may seem like a minor thing that corporations employ more beautiful women in sales than in other departments.
    It may seem like a minor thing that being a centerfold has become a perfectly legitimate route to celebrity.
    These all may seem like minor things.
    And when we began looking for a house, you loved everywhere. You loved the place where the kitchen was too small. You loved the place with no land. You loved the place next to the school yard.
    Eventually I teased you about it and you said, “It’s because anywhere will be wonderful if we live there together so it doesn’t matter what it’s like.” I let you choose in the end, I also didn’t think it mattered what it was like.
    Before we moved the furniture in, you insisted we have sex in every room. “To baptize it,” you said. “To make it special.”
    “‘A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much. Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions in forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. For as to her unwinged young ones the mother bird brings back morsels, wherever she can find them, but as for herself it is suffering, such was I, as I lay through all the many nights unsleeping, such as I wore through the bloody days of the fighting, striving with warriors for the sake of these men’s women. . . .
    ‘All the other prizes of honour he gave the great men and the princes are held fast by them, but from me alone, of all the Achaians he has taken and keeps the bride of my heart. Let him lie beside her and be happy. Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? And why was it the son of Atreus assembled and led here these people? Was it not for the sake of lovely-haired Helen? Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, loves her who is his own . . . as I . . . though it was my spear that won her.’” — Achilles,
Iliad
9:320
    You look in the mirror — you take care of yourself but you still have those ridges now, they have grown above your pelvis. They are not ugly, exactly, but they are weight. You cannot make them go away.
    One out of every two marriages ends in divorce.
    Four out of five spouses admit to cheating on their partner — we don’t know how many of the remaining 20 percent are simply not admitting it.
    Thousands of people are employed by sports teams and film shoots and companies, by men with enough money, to “look after” wives. Ostensibly their job is to make sure the wives are happy and comfortable and get taken shopping, whether it’s to exclusive local hand-painted scarf boutiques or to remote villages known for their blue-glazed pottery. But in reality their job is to assist in keeping the wives away from the husbands when the husbands want to “play.” And, truth be told, the majority of the wives know precisely what these “assistants” are being paid for, the majority of the wives have