genesis 2018 final digital.pdf


Feminine Bodies
Piper Rowley

“
turn her into literature.” – Henry Miller 

virgin, a saint, a mother, a daughter. Too precious for sex, too pure for 

inedible. 
Or worse yet, they turn us into literature. They describe our bodies 

as beautiful plains. Write songs and novels about how they want to fuck 
us, devour us, dismiss us, forget us. They compare us to birds, landscapes, 
nymphs, anything imaginable. 

on albums playing on the radio this morning. 

mind, experience, history. They want to spread our legs and write poetry 

necks, bed us or kill us, one of  the two. 

“Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women?” –
Virginia Woolf

displayed for every distracted eye to wander to, lust and compare standing 

wives, casting quick glances, maybe a disparaging, longing comment. The 
wives who hungrily lap up the captions. Lose 20 Pounds! Trim Your Fat! Tone 
Your Abs! They want us to disappear, to whittle and carve ourselves for a 



Feminine Bodies
place in the world. 

“Women think with their whole bodies and they see things as a whole more than men 
do.” 

these parts. I dismantle myself  in the shower where I cannot avoid my 

measuring the swell of  my waist with shaking, wide palms. I drip in the tub 

eight of  those years I have systematically and at times, sloppily, tried to 

while stirring enticing/repulsing food on my plate. 

No thank you, I am not hungry. I ate earlier. I already ate. I didn’t eat at all. 

For none of  those years did my body feel like my own. 

Now, my body does not feel like my own.  

bodies. Meticulously crafted, embellished with tailored clothing, painted 
nails, makeup to look natural even though no one looks like that naturally. 

The bags beneath their eyes have been concealed, their eyelashes 
extended. We do not see the: stretch marks on their legs, folds of  their 
stomachs, slope of  their uneven breasts. Those things do not exist in: the 

literature. 

“Be not ashamed women. . . You are the gates of  the body, and you are the gates of  the 
soul.” –Walt Whitman 

They write about us. They sing about us. They talk about us on the 



Piper Rowley

when they don’t care they are being recorded. Their paintbrushes are 

they paint our bodies. They give us passive, inviting expressions. 

I am not a gate, a bird, a rolling mountain, a thing to be desired, 
pursued, neglected. I do not exist for their consumption, loving hands, 

My thighs are perhaps a little too big and breasts noticeably uneven. 

dragging my soles on the treadmill. Glance at the other feminine bodies. 

disembodied, driven. When I hear, watch, read a man compare a woman 
to an idea, an unhinged concept, an animal, a place in nature, I turn them 

I am not here for memorable quotes, romantic thoughts, how 
women are this, women are that. How our feminine bodies drive men 

sickening, annoying at best. They do not own a feminine body, they do 
not understand. They can never have us, through their stilted similes and