Context N°22
There is something in the following that will certainly be offensive to almost everyone, which is why Vedrana Rudan is generally a well-kept secret outside of Croatia and not very beloved within. Her writing is both satiric and blunt, as evidenced in her novel Night, which Dalkey Archive published a few years ago to resounding silence. This will be the first in a series of pieces by Rudan that will be published in CONTEXT.
One of my husbands once told me: all women are whores, you’ve just been controlling yourself lately. From a purely medical point of view, when is a woman a whore?
A woman is a whore when she gets her first period; until then, is she just a future whore?
Not at all, a woman is a whore even when she screams no, no, no, when her daddy thrusts his huge prick into her five-year-old pussy.
She’s a whore at fourteen, when she leaves the house in a miniskirt, tights, and a low-cut T-shirt . . . It’s her own fault if someone grabs her in the park at five in the afternoon and rapes her.
A woman is a whore when she doesn’t tell her fourteen-year-old daughter that all little girls in mini-skirts, tights, and low-cut T-shirts are whores.
A woman is a whore when she goes into a bar alone in the evening, when she goes into a restaurant alone at two in the afternoon, when she goes into a café alone in the morning. If she weren’t a whore she wouldn’t go into these male spaces unaccompanied, her body is itself a clear message: I need a dick.
A woman is a teasing whore when she refuses a man who sits down beside her and says: I’ve got what you need.
A woman is a whore when she doesn’t give her ass to her best friend’s father.
A woman is a whore when her best friend’s grandfather grabs her tits.
A woman is a whore when she doesn’t want to work overtime with her boss in his office, on his desk, with him between her legs.
A woman is a whore when she leaves her husband for another man.
A woman is a whore when she leaves her husband for her own sake.
A woman is a whore when she goes to the hairdresser once a week, when her hair is gray, when she refuses to cook every day, when she doesn’t drive her children to the nursery, when she takes time off work because her child has chicken pox, when she doesn’t want to do the ironing herself but hires another whore to do it. When she’s ill, a woman is a whore, and when he’s ill, a woman is a whore when she makes the tea too hot, the coffee too weak, the soup revolting, when she brings warm beer, pokes a thermometer into him, asks him to wash even though he’s ill.
A woman is a whore when she has a breast cut off because of cancer.
A woman without a breast who wants money for a silicone tit is the biggest whore around.
A woman is a whore when she won’t grant a divorce without a fuss, she’s a whore when she wants a divorce, she’s a whore when she spends part of her salary on a handbag, boots, and a coat if she already has a handbag, boots, and a coat.
A woman is a whore when she doesn’t take the garbage out, when she refuses to worry about his parents, when she reads a message from a whore on his cell phone. Only whores fiddle around with someone else’s cell.
A woman is a whore when she gets mad because he takes out loans for gambling, and she’s the last to know.
A woman is a whore when she talks on the telephone to her own whore of a mother.
A woman is a whore when she talks on the telephone.
A woman is a whore when he can’t get it up.
A woman is a whore if she wants to be alone when she has him and his children. A woman is a whore when she cries loudly at his funeral, a woman is a whore when she cries softly at his funeral, a woman is a whore when she doesn’t cry at his funeral, he died because his wife was a whore.
A woman is a whore if she’s badly paid, only the biggest whores earn good money. All singers are whores, and so are actresses, and TV-show hosts, and journalists, and women politicians and women writers. If they weren’t whores, no one would have heard of them.
If a woman takes up sports, she’s a whore if she doesn’t break the world record.
When a woman breaks the world record, she’s a whore who only wants fame and glory.
A woman is a whore when he leaves her for a younger whore, a woman is a whore when she is left and finds someone younger, when she finds someone older, when she finds someone of her own age, when she doesn’t find anyone.
A woman is a whore if she’s a doctor and would like to be head of her department.
A woman is a whore if she’s a journalist and would like to be an editor.
A woman is a whore when she gives birth to a female child who’s a newborn whore.
A woman is a whore when she’s a mother, but no longer wants to be a mother. A woman is a whore when she’s not a mother and doesn’t want to be one. A woman is a whore when she’s a mother and wants to be a mother again. A woman is a whore when she’s a mother but would like to go to the movies, the theatre, out for a coffee.
The greatest whores can’t even give birth to a whore.
A woman is a whore if she prefers to watch a movie on television rather than football, a woman is a whore if she talks while Croatia is losing, a woman is a whore if she’s not delighted when we’ve scored a goal, a woman is a whore if she laughs when we haven’t scored.
A woman is a whore if she doesn’t tell him to take antibiotics, a woman is a whore when she tells him he drinks too much—if she wasn’t a whore, he wouldn’t drink.
A woman is a whore when her children get bad grades and are sent to detention in school, a woman is a whore when she doesn’t go to a parent-teacher meeting at the invitation of another whore.
A woman is a whore if she dresses up for him, a woman who dresses up is a whore wearing war paint.
Women have themselves photographed naked because they’re whores, women who don’t have themselves photographed naked are ugly whores.
A woman is a whore if she drinks gin with lemon and ice, a woman is a whore if she drinks wine, beer, whisky, brandy. A woman who never drinks alcohol is a bullshitting whore. All the women at checkout counters are lazy whores, the babysitters at the nursery are lazy whores, the clerks in banks are lazy whores, nurses take blood lazily from your veins, your old mother has been dying for months but still won’t die, we live in a world run by lazy whores.
A woman is a whore if she doesn’t realize he’s tired after work, a woman is a whore if she’s tired after work, a woman is a whore when she doesn’t want to fuck, and she’s the biggest whore around if she does.
A woman is a whore when a man grabs her ass in the bus, the train, at work, at a dance. Only whores walk around showing their asses.
A woman is a whore when she’s old. All women are old whores when they’re over thirty.
You have to keep on hammering it home: all women are whores.
The author of these lines is a whore more than any other whore, only a whore like that could come up with the idea of writing about what makes a woman a whore.
In Croatia, at least one whore every month pays with her life for being a whore.
When does a woman stop being a whore?
When she dies?
When a woman dies she doesn’t stop being a whore.
She becomes a dead whore.
From Kad je žena kurva / Kad je muškarac peder [When a Woman is a Whore / When a Man is Queer]. Zagreb, Croatia: V.B.Z., 2008.
Translation by Celia Hawkesworth
