#06.
I like to be a hero, like to come back to my island full of girls carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here on Lesbos our doors are always open.
Stay inside, don’t walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck, don’t wear valuables, don’t look up, don’t talk to strangers, don’t risk it, don’t try it.
He means she but not when He means Men. Mainland is a Private Club.
That’s all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot invade.
-Jeanette Winterson; The Poetics of Sex (1993)