Trafika Europe 14 - Italian Piazza

LESSONS IN TORTURE AND SEDUCTION By Irene Chias (NOVEL EXCERPT) Translated from the Italian by Jeanne Bonner

CHAPTER 1: AT THE ER

Never simi lar, our women’s bodies. Never safe, never the same as theirs. We belong to the sex of fear, of humi l iation, the foreign sex. Virginie Despentes, King Kong Girl I’ve always nourished an instinctive skepticism of male gynecologists. What exactly steered them toward a profession in which they explore a woman’s internal organs? Don’t they find it dul ls their sexual appetites? That ’s why I’ve avoided them whenever I could. But an emergency is an emergency, and with hospitals operating according to a particular set of rules, there’s not much else you can do if a fol l icular cyst happens to burst somewhere between your fal lopian tubes and your ovaries (a rupture that you learn about because whi le visiting a Lichtenstein exhibit with your married friend, she squints her eyes and 167