Capitalism, the market economy and democracy are still mechanisms in which we move uncertainly. We continue to bear the high costs of change. We are becoming more independent, but at the same time more indifferent to those who cannot adapt or are weaker. The motto of this reality is: “I somehow managed, so let others manage too.” The weakest are the victims of such thinking. The problem of mall girls and bodywork girls is a problem of children in dysfunctional families. They do not necessarily have to be poor or pathological families. Although in this environment the problem is most visible and urgent.
The phenomenon of girls and young women turning themselves into commodities, and of men taking advantage of them, is multifaceted, and we must not deceive ourselves that it concerns only the social margins. Bodywork girls and mall girls, let us remember, were first unborn children whom everyone loved and protected. Once grown, made up and undressed, they are treated without respect by society, their parents and themselves.
The question is: when do we stop loving children in a country where the family has been elevated to the status of holiness? What stereotypes about female sexuality and proper conduct allow us to keep hurting those who have not experienced love in their lives?
All the information contained in the material below comes from three girls, residents of Bolesławiec County, who know this environment, observe it and are able to describe it. They are brave girls who think for themselves. The environment they observe and live in is brutal. It is a bad world in which no child should be raised.
Warning! The material contains profanity and descriptions of indecent behavior. This is intended to illustrate the environment and problem being described.
The Bodywork Girl Is Looking for a Dad
Agnieszka is not a bodywork girl, but she knows girls like that. They walk through the city streets and see every man looking at them. He stares at their tiny miniskirts, plunging necklines and bare stomachs. They know exactly who is interested in their provocative appearance: a gentleman walking hand in hand with his wife, a man taking his dog for a walk, an office worker, a laborer, a teacher and a daddy with a child in a stroller.
This male interest is, for them, the father’s lost gaze. The absent father because of whom they run away from home. The one who tells them that if they do not like it at home, there is the A4. They do not know that to say something like that, one must hate one’s own child. They love their dad. Justyna says that this judgment hurts viciously.
Who are bodywork girls? They are mall girls from cities without shopping malls. Bodywork girls give themselves to men with cars. Their man picks them up outside school or takes them to places where they can show him and his car off to their friends. Then they go together for a drink or lunch at a good restaurant. They drive around for hours. They have sex in the car or in the woods.
In Bolesławice there is a clearing where couples camping in fogged-up cars could once be seen. From this place stretches a beautiful panorama of the city: the towers of public offices and churches, the homes of respectable citizens. Someone deepened the ditch between the road and the entrance to the field. Now cars cannot reach the place where, for several years, the owners of fancy cars and the bodywork girls present at the time parked them. This is the only noticeable protest by an anonymous, outraged citizen against the indecency that had flourished there.
Bodywork girls are thirteen or fourteen years old. They come out of the bushes behind the nightclub and wipe their mouths. They have given blowjobs—that is, had oral sex. They enter their adult world in the first year of lower secondary school. They abandon childhood quickly because they have nothing to regret. To become adults, two months of summer vacation after primary school are enough for them.
Their mothers are often helpless, their fathers aggressive, sometimes convicted. Usually one of the parents is an alcoholic. Sometimes they are children born of marital rape. In that case, they learn passivity toward male aggression from infancy. Sometimes their parents disrespect each other so much that humiliation and degradation are ordinary expressions of human contact for their children.
Casanova with a Mercedes
– Hey, baby, how are you?! – outside the nightclub, a man who looks about thirty stops in his Mercedes. To Magda, who tells us about it, he is an old man. He has a list of villages from which he will “score” girls.
He thinks of a woman as a commodity to be used. He knows how it works. Sex has to be paid for—with a car ride, preferably in a Mercedes, dinner at a restaurant or a drink. With a life different from that of their parents. He is not a failed loser; he has his own car and a collection of girls to fuck. He drinks more expensive alcohol than the old folks. He picks them up, pays for them and scores. Sometimes, in a drunken stupor, he falls asleep during a blowjob. In his bachelor room. Behind the wall are his parents, or his brother or sister with their spouses and children. They all treat visits by these made-up teenagers as something natural. After all, a man will not bring a bastard home. He has to sow his wild oats. That is how they are, and those little whores throw themselves at their beds and provoke them.
Casanova with a Mercedes will become a father. It is possible that he will have a daughter with a bodywork girl. He will be another absent dad, disappearing without taking any responsibility. The mother will be responsible. She gave herself, she wanted it.
Casanova drives up to the nightclub to take another girl who is eager to show her friends that a man does want and need her. And she will give him her entire self in return. If he does not use a condom, she will not ask him to. She will not refuse sex either, because for a moment of feeling needed she would give her still-childlike life.
I’ll Rape You Because You Love Me
In the world of bodywork girls, a man does not defend, care for or look after a woman. When girls are clever enough to drink from a bottle and not accept drinks from strangers, a close friend slips a rape drug into a beer and serves it as a safe drink. The stories could go on. The girls protect one another. If they are with a sister or friend, they do not abandon each other in need. They see that a friend has brutalized another friend. He served draft beer, and it was the only drink the victim had not checked. Then they take the unconscious, crawling girl home. In the taxi they hear once again that they are whores, that what is happening now is beyond human comprehension.
But there are also those who come to the nightclub alone intending to get drunk and have sex. No one wants to understand why they behave this way or cannot respect themselves. There is no special leniency for a bodywork girl. No one will care about her. No one will want to understand the girl who provokes men. And although it seems unbelievable, many will suggest that she provoked the rape herself. She cuddled up to them, showed everyone her breasts, kissed and put her hands down the boys’ trousers. No one will ask what kind of man considers rape normal intercourse.
When considering the cause, we know that these children learned to communicate with one another in precisely this way. When a girl is raped, she does not blame the man, because she may have heard her own father say many times that a mother in such a situation deserved to be treated that way. In addition, men have society’s permission to hurt women who behave provocatively.
The number of unreported rapes of teenagers in nightclubs and at private parties could horrify us respectable citizens—if anyone reported them. Ashamed victims, however, speak of them only in the strictest confidence. They are raped twice—by the aggressor and by a society that blames the injured party rather than the rapist. There are known cases in which the parents of rapists attacked the injured girls without mercy. After all, they wanted it themselves, and the innocent son was provoked because that is male nature.
Good Teddy Bears
When a bodywork girl comes across a more sensitive, caring boy, she falls desperately in love with him. She does not analyze his character, behavior or manner. As long as he is jealous, as long as he desires her, as long as he hugs her. Nothing is then as important as a man who replaces her father.
Most conflicts among girls in this environment concern their relationships with men. To pull a beloved man from the arms of his new lover, they may come to their homes and involve the parents in the conflict. They may tell on their daughter, saying she sleeps around and that the man is too old for her. Justyna says that the girls will do anything to get their man back. And the woman is always to blame. Even if he leaves without explanation. The man must be understood and his behavior explained. He is the beloved teddy bear replacing daddy—a bear who is jealous, does not look at other women and possessively loves his one and only.
Such a teddy-bear man is like the plush toy they did not receive as a gift from their fathers in childhood. They go to bed with the bear, holding him in their arms. He is their lifeline in a world without toys and without parents who leave a bedside lamp on in the children’s room at night, read bedtime stories and run to help in the middle of the night to soothe every nightmare.
When a teddy-bear boy appears, the girls calm down somewhat. They think about starting a family, having children and getting married. About being loved until death.
(information: Grażyna Hanaf)