Crushing

by Genevieve Novak

This is what it is to be a woman: to give. To give life, to give support, to give herself, to give in. And in return she receives: contempt, indifference, more requests, his load. She gives until she breaks, a spiderweb of cracks in her porcelain skin, holding still until she shatters into a thousand tiny pieces. And men take. Take the love, the support, the credit, our patience. They take and take and take what isn’t theirs, what never was, what was designed to be shared, not stolen, until she is tired, angry, broken and useless, only then is she granted freedom from it all: the male gaze, the pedantry, the entitlement. They lose interest when she can no longer do anything for them; when they’re no longer a doe-eyed plaything with pillowy cleavage and endless capacity.