Bitter Bitch

by Maria Sveland

  Everyone grew quiet and slowly turned to look at me. I took a deep breath as a Vaxholm’s ferry blew its horn ominously outside the window. I immediately realized this was unwelcome, and that my voice was shrill and loud.

  I could feel my neck turning red and blotchy. Everyone stared at me as I tried to explain my idea for a piece about how all military resources are invested in fighting international terrorism. But imagine if the entire defence budget were used to fight all abuse, all of the rapes and murders committed by men against women every day?

  No one said a word, and everyone stared.

  ‘A report which turns the concept of international terrorism on its head …’ I tried clarifying.

  Seconds of compact silence slowly crumbled the weak courage I had managed to muster.

  The male producer looked at me sceptically and uttered the phrase I would later hear every time I presented a new idea, ‘I don’t really understand what you mean.’

  Obviously he had not had any difficulty understanding any of the ideas that had been presented by the men throughout the day. I tried to explain and expand on my idea in a vain attempt at getting someone to nod in agreement, but everyone was sitting quietly, staring, and the male producer had, with his expression of doubt, opened up even more questions. Some of the men followed suit.

  ‘I mean these so-called unknown cases that everyone’s always talking about; it’s really just the opposite when it comes to rape. Most so-called rapes aren’t, because the line between consensual intercourse and rape can be pretty fine,’ said one man (who by the way had been awarded a big journalism prize).

  ‘I’m actually a bit offended that you seem to think all men are rapists!’ said another. The discussion was taking off, the mood was vicious and I was history. This continued late into the night and then, after a few glasses of wine, my neighbour at the table (yet another prize-winning and well-known documentary maker) came out with another familiar statement.’

  ‘So this thing with rape is actually really difficult, I mean, who hasn’t been horny at some point and kept pushing even though the girl didn’t really want it?’

  I had always complained about the veteran bosses at Swedish Radio – now I realized they were harmless compared to these young cocks. A year of struggle followed, one filled with a longing for understanding and an even greater disappointment when I failed to get it.

  While my male colleagues surfed along on encouragement and well-meaning understanding, my female colleagues and I wrote small pieces packed with facts before we even dared to present an idea. Seeing how it affected my self-esteem was both interesting and painful. When you are constantly met with scepticism and furrowed brows, it is impossible not to start to doubt yourself, your ideas and your abilities.

  Once again I became the bitter bitch with fiery eyes who longed to be just as sloppy and spontaneous in her thoughts and ideas as the men, to be able to walk up to the producers and editors (I always had to make an appointment to present a new idea) and say, ‘Hey, I saw a lemon in the cafeteria today. Wouldn’t it be fun to do something on lemons? I haven’t really thought it through yet, but you know what I mean, don’t you?’

  I longed to hear, ‘That sounds like a really fun idea. We’ll have a look together and come up with an angle for it.’

  In situations like these it is important to keep things in perspective, so I tried not to bury myself in self-hate and self-doubt. As luck would have it, the system sometimes reveals itself. This time things became clear when two of my female colleagues presented an idea which the editor and the producers dismissed as uninteresting.

  One of our male colleagues heard about it, thought it sounded really good and wanted to try running it again. He went to the editors and the producers on his own and presented the same idea as his female colleagues had just had turned down. And by chance both the editor and producers now suddenly thought it was a fabulous idea for our television programme. (We were often told that our idea did not quite match the target audience.)

  It also became clear when my male colleagues suddenly got full-time positions while I got to continue working part-time.

  It went on like this for an entire year, a year filled with stomach aches and a feeling of general worthlessness, until my contract ended and shockingly enough was not renewed. I felt quite relieved at my farewell dinner; it had been such a prestigious job that I had not had the strength or the courage to quit. If I’d been asked to stay I doubt I’d have said no. Or as my sensible therapist would say, ‘You’ve found yourself in an abusive relationship and now the man who was abusing you broke it off. Be grateful!’

  The entire editorial staff was invited to a nice bar at Stureplan in Stockholm. I was surrounded by some of my male colleagues for the last time and SVT treated us to food and wine and we drank and ate way too much. I ended up next to a man I had not spoken to very much during the past year. On paper he had been listed as a reporter, but he had not done a single piece in all that time. In the beginning he’d talked about doing a piece on Iran, but for some reason it had not panned out, or as he said now, ‘I’m not suited to doing short and sweet reports, I’m more into portraying documentary events and processes …’

  Men have such an amazing ability to transform their flaws into assets by bragging!

  His way of speaking was reminiscent of the actor Mikael Persbrandt, his relaxed way of just releasing words impetuously yet still with nonchalance. He was about the same age as Persbrandt, had worked with art galleries in New York for a long time, and lived with one of Sweden’s most well-known female designers. He was, in other words, a bigwig. Now he was sitting next to me, raising his glass of red wine to say cheers.

  ‘Sara, it’s been great getting to know you.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, truly surprised.

  ‘Yes, it’s been fun having you push your ideas. I’ve actually learned a lot about feminism from your pieces.’

  ‘Oh …’ I said, even more surprised.

  ‘But I don’t agree with everything you feminists stand for.’

  ‘No, I can imagine,’ I said, no longer as surprised.

  ‘Just as everyone, especially feminists, assumes I visit prostitutes because I have a flat in Bangkok.’

  ‘It’s a shame they see it that way,’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, because it’s probably been at least ten years since I’ve been with a prostitute.’

  I checked to see if he was pulling my leg, but he did not move a muscle, just took yet another gulp of his red wine.

  ‘What?’ I said, and laughed a little to show that I could take a joke. ‘Do you seriously mean that you’ve gone to see Thai prostitutes?’

  ‘Yes, but now I can see you’re a bit upset by it. You should know that I’ve never been with a prostitute while I’ve been in a relationship with someone. I’ve never been unfaithful to any of my girlfriends,’ he said, and looked at me wide-eyed as if to emphasize what an honourable fellow he was.

  ‘But I don’t care if you were unfaithful. People can screw around as much as they want, but I do care when I hear that you took advantage of poor Thai women who are forced into prostitution as the only means of survival. What does it feel like to fuck someone who has to do it for the money but isn’t the least bit interested?’ I asked angrily.

  ‘Now it’s not that simple, saying that they aren’t up for it,’ he said, and I looked him in the eye again to see if he was kidding.

  Apparently he saw how serious I was because now he started almost pleading with me.

  ‘Have you ever been to Thailand?’

  ‘No,’ I said. He nodded in confirmation.

  ‘No, I didn’t think so! It’s pretty hard to understand if you haven’t been there. It’s a different culture when it comes to these things.’

  ‘You don’t mean that prostitution is ingrained in Thai society?’ I said, and felt how my voice rose shrilly, all the way to the top of my throat.

  ‘This is bloody hard to explain to someone who has never be
en there, but these are girls who don’t want to stand and sweat in a factory sixteen hours a day, so they have chosen an easier way to make money.’

  ‘Just stop. I don’t want to hear any more,’ I said and drank three quick gulps of my red wine.

  Just then the male producer came over to our end of the table and sat down.

  ‘Listen, do you two realize that everyone thinks you’re hit ting on each other? You’ve been sitting here talking for a damn long time and everyone thinks you’re getting together.’

  He was talking nonsense and was struggling to focus.

  ‘Nope, we’ve just been talking and Sara is pretty angry with me,’ my colleague said, staring down at the table.

  ‘Whaa?’ the male producer said and grinned so wide his snuff patch could be glimpsed where it was hanging, staining his teeth black. You get what you ask for, I thought to myself.

  ‘Dennis was just telling me he used to visit Thai prostitutes and I became pretty upset about it,’ I said and stared at the male producer. His eyes went wide and for a second he managed to focus before quickly getting up and walking to the toilets without saying a word.

  My male colleague got up too and went and sat at the other end of the table. I remained sitting alone and felt the tears burning in my eyes. Fuck. Do not start crying now, not now, do not start crying now, lampshade, lampshade, lampshade.

  But it was late and I was too drunk, so I biked home in the cold spring night and cried so hard I was forced to stop below the castle and walk my bike. I looked up at the men in uniform who were standing, guarding the castle in stiff positions, and I thought about the poor king and his poor queen and their poor children. What a fake life, those poor, poor, fools!

  I sat down and rested on the edge of the footpath and thought about all the games we’re always playing and how hard it is to be straight and honest and, most of all, how hard it is to be honest with yourself. I cried about all of the damned Johns, all the male producers, veteran bosses and all the female producers and editors who play the same male game. (There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!) I cried about all my boyish journalist colleagues. I cried because I was drunk and I cried about being human.

  The circle was complete and when I finally got up from the footpath and started biking home I had stopped crying and started to realize what a shitty place I had been in for the last year. Or, if one is going to be honest: what a shitty place I find myself in every day that I work as a journalist.

  There are statistics on several other professions – evidence that women only get part-time positions while their male colleagues get full-time ones, permanent positions, better pay, etc etc …

  Women medical students are forced to be four times more qualified than their male counterparts in order to get research positions. Of course the same holds true for journalism, but oddly enough there has not been a study of journalism or the media yet.

  I am really trying to find my worth. To feel my worth. I just wish it did not require so much effort. It is as if it does not matter how many prizes I get, how many good reviews, what I feel is furious: peacock.

  ‘Hampus! Cornelia!’ a woman is yelling in desperation at her two small children who are wildly chasing each dangerously close to the edge of the pool. She is trying to make eye contact with her husband but he is busy inspecting his beer bottle, a Heineken, which they sell cheaply here in the hotel’s Supermercado.

  You see lots of fathers drinking beer by the pool here at La Quinta Park while the mothers run around madly after their children. There are always struggling women and distant men, and pure and simple anxiety. What would happen if women just said enough is enough! When I see the man start on his fourth Heineken, I cannot resist a bit of wishful thinking: leave now, lady!

  I think about Mum. Beloved Mum! A rough diamond who never realized what exists inside of her. Maybe with different parents, different big brothers, she would have understood. If she had realized her value as a diamond maybe she would have left Dad the first time he said how worthless and ugly she was, looked at him as if he were crazy and calmly said, ‘No one talks to me like that. Pack your bags and get out.’

  Instead she kept on doing the dishes with her back turned towards Dad, towards us. And Dad continued yelling and now I am sitting here at the edge of the pool watching Heineken Dad, realizing just how angry I am at him. Not so much because he was an absent, second-rate father, I could have lived with that. But because of all the horrible things he said to Mum.

  There is a raw justice in the fact that, being the one who took care of us all those years, she has the best relationship with us now. She always took care of the social contacts with friends and family and she also got to keep in touch with them. She is even in touch with my Grandma, his mother, and his sisters Kristina and Solveig. I think Dad on the other hand has never sent a birthday card during his entire adult life.

  Mum is a living example of what we know, that women often blossom when they get divorced, while men suddenly realize how lonely they are. Men pay a price for their superiority as well. That must be a difficult pill to swallow when you have had everything served to you on a platter for so many years. Now he sits there, my father, alone and helpless in his attempts at staying in touch with his children, who respond only out of politeness. Is he filled with guilt? Does he realize anything? Or is he just a happy mess of forgetfulness and suppressed feelings?

  Maybe he cries at night. Just like that time, when I was little, and I saw him crying over the popcorn. Back then, a long, long time ago, he could comfort me when I was sad. I will not forget that. But I also will not forget how he frightened me when he tormented Mum. How afraid I was of him. How he always remained a father I could not count upon. A father with a dark side which sometimes made him cross the line.

  The anxiety I feel as an adult is the same as that of my childhood. It is an abyss which opens up and I have no idea how I am going to get across. Pitch black darkness in a vacuum.

  And deep down inside there is a bottomless longing for the safe father who would comfort me. But my disappointment is bottomless too, and it stands in the way of reconciliation. That is why I sound like an operator when I talk to him every now and then. And because he has never sent a birthday card to me I have also stopped sending them to him. I just call and say Happy Birthday.

  Birthdays make all the crap visible. A colleague at the radio station, a woman in her fifties, said to me one day, ‘When it’s his birthday I’m the one who cleans the flat, invites everyone, does the shopping, makes the food and buys the presents. When it’s my birthday, I’m the one who cleans the flat, invites everyone, does the shopping, makes the food and buys the presents.’

  When it was Mum’s birthday, Dad reluctantly dragged himself out of bed only after Kajsa and I had woken him with silent, persistent poking. He finally came down to the kitchen where we had already made breakfast and set it on a tray. We had picked purple violets which Mum had planted in the front garden in order to hide everything that was missing. Then we went upstairs and sang as loudly as we could in order to drown out Dad’s silence.

  Mum still says that she doesn’t want anything for her birthday. But even the little things make her happy. All of the horrible years she lived through have made it so that she still stands at the counter with her back to us, vacuuming, peeling potatoes, or has bread rising at the same time as she is taking a gulp of her lukewarm coffee and a drag on her cigarette. She has a hard time just being and thinks her only worth lies in serving and cleaning.

  Lasse, her partner for the last ten years, is nice and wants the best for her. He watches TV, walks the dog, is unhappy with his job, plays golf and reads the evening paper. He sits in his very own TV chair and asks, ‘What are we having for dinner?’

  And Mum answers proudly, ‘Pork loin and potato wedges.’

  I think they have a good life together – despite the ancient pattern which seems impossible to change.

  It still hurts to
see her though, and I wish she could understand how wonderful she is. I wish she understood how grateful I am to her for always being there. I am grateful because she came up with things to do, skiing outings in the winter and swimming in the summer, and because she sometimes made hot chocolate with whipped cream for us for breakfast. She sewed a Madicken apron for me when my primary school celebrated its one hundredth anniversary. She came to the parent-teacher conferences, and the chats, and sometimes she made real banana-shaped pastries. I am grateful because she was happy so often, even though things must have been so difficult.

  Sometimes she is just as eccentric as Isadora’s red-headed mother, laughs loudly and disco dances. Then I am so infinitely proud of her, of my inheritance. I have not been robbed of everything.

  When I see her chasing Sigge on the jungle gym, I am grateful too. She laughs, overjoyed that she’s a pirate! She takes great pains to climb up to him, while all of the other Grandmas remain standing on the ground, watching on, embarrassed. Maybe they think she is a bit over the top? She yells and shouts after Sigge. I hear her loud, shrill voice across the entire park and it makes me warm all over. Or like when she sang karaoke at my aunt’s fiftieth birthday party, even though she is tone deaf.

  My aunt Ulla had rented a karaoke machine for the party and was looking forward to her guests letting lose, but no one, not a single one of the guests, a religious, frightened gathering of selfish souls, wanted to sing, despite the fact that they sing in the church choir every damn Sunday. I love my aunt and I was filled with such contempt towards all of those mean, quiet people.

  Finally Mum went up and belted out ‘Four Jigs and a Coca-cola’, tone deaf as she is, and it was fantastic. None of the guests applauded, they just looked at each like they were about to puke. It was shocking. I was so angry I asked one of the old bags who looked the worst off if she was feeling unwell.