My glittery middle finger to the Grace nightmares
Iheld my breath, gripped the tweezers and manoeuvred a minute, flat-backed pearl into the hot glue glob on my bra. This was the tricky part of the rhinestoning process and required intense concentration, precision and no sharp movement.
‘‘Motherf ..... ,’’ my friend screamed, slamming on the horn and brakes and executing an emergency swerve tight enough to make Vin Diesel gulp. The car in front that had almost careered into us pulled the finger and zoomed away across the lanes.
OK, I thought as I watched the pearls slide sadly off the bra and on to the floor, a car during rush hour wasn’t the best place for an emergency costume rhinestoning session.
I’d wanted something to distract me, though. We had a five-hour journey to the burlesque gig ahead of us, and my guts were already full of hot, queasy restlessness that had nothing to do with stage fright. It was the trial.
This was last weekend, when even in the rolling, soporific hills of back-road New Zealand, the ongoing news of Grace Millane’s trial unfolded relentlessly across our phones, radios and sleepy service stations where everyone was shoeless and eating sausage rolls.
A hot surreal stickiness clung to the tour van. It almost felt wrong to be performing. As though it was sacrilegious to be talking about holographic undies, glittery stockings and who’d had their butt pinched most, when in the back of all our minds was Grace.
She could have been any of us. We’re all the same age, we’re all adventurous, we’re all outgoing and bubbly.
Some of us use Tinder, some of us like to play breathing games during sex, some of us like to sleep with different men on different nights.
And all of us want to gallop through the world and drink it in with the giddy excitement of being young. She was all of us.
She was also all of our nightmares. We all grow up as young women knowing that there’s always the threat of being attacked or raped or killed. Whether that’s on a date, by your partner or even just walking home.
That shared subconscious knowledge among women is weighing particularly heavily this week. It gets heavier and heavier every time we see a story about Grace.
Or Amber-Rose Rush, or even the jogger in Auckland who was attacked in broad daylight by a man with a history of assaulting women walking alone. Dragging around the threat that comes with having a vagina isn’t woe-is-me-paralytic, but it is tiring.
It’s particularly heavy with young women when it comes to sex and our sexuality. Even just going on a date, especially now a Tinder date, comes with the question mark, is this guy going to kill you? And we also have to remember that, even in relationships, we’re not safe: half of all female homicide victims in New Zealand every year are killed by a partner or ex-partner.
The other day one of the guys was talking about his night. He’d gone home with a girl, then walked home after via the gas station in the wee hours, got icecream and sat in the public gardens watching stars. God, I thought, how great would that be? A carefree one-night stand, a light-footed walk home with icecream and the starlit whispering streets. It just sounded so . . . free.
But young women know we can’t have that, so the question is, how do we fight this heaviness we’re feeling? Especially when it feels overwhelming. For me it happened on stage that weekend. See, burlesque is outrageous, fun, celebrates women through unashamed sensuality, and is largely performed for a female audience. And I looked out into a sea of women laughing, really laughing, and felt them letting go of something. It’s the same thing I’m letting go of when I get up there, covered in nothing but rhinestones and a few feathers.
That moment was a rare chance to celebrate female sexuality in an empowering way, but more importantly it was a deliberate, outrageous, feathery, glittery middle finger to the heaviness.
We have every reason to feel vulnerable as young women, especially when it comes to our sexuality. So it is more important than ever to take every chance to also celebrate moments of fun and lightness as an act of strength – however that looks to you.
It’s not a solution. But it may keep you going while we work at glacial speed to make a world where young women feel safe.
Grace Millane ... was all of us. She was also all of our nightmares.