To: Male Instagram poets who romanticize sad girls
From: A romanticized sad girl
Inspired
by Sallie Lundh
I’m sick and tired of seeing myself in your poems. I’ve built
myself up to be a strong and powerful woman. But you’ve worn me down into this
sad, broken, little girl who needs your love and only your love to turn into
the person you want me to be. You say your poetry is to bring awareness to
women’s struggles, but you only care about our struggles as long as you can
profit from it.
Women are not women in your poetry. We are broken toys for you to
play with and discard once you’ve ran out of material to make from us. We are
your muse, but we are only as beautiful as the poetry you can create from us.
We are your Madonna-whore, your obsession, your fix-her-upper that you think
you can construct into what you want. If it’s a sex poem, we lose personhood
and turn into a sex object. I see my dismembered body parts strewn across the
page. Breasts, thighs, hips, ass, and vagina without ever actually writing the
word “vagina.” That’s too uncomfortable. Instead, it’s a horribly awkward
metaphor like the soft earth in which your carrot-penis penetrates.
If it’s about women’s struggles, why are you speaking for us? You
say you are writing for us, but you are writing over us. Your words are
plastered over the mouths of actual women trying to tell their stories. Your
writing speaks over those trying to scream through their own poetry. You get
book deals while the rest of us hide our truths in diary pages stuffed under
the bed. Some of our pain is hidden. Some of our pain is unspeakable. Some of
our pain is deadly. But you take it, rip it from our hands as though you are
entitled to it; you mold it into something picturesque and tragically beautiful
and then you pair it with a line drawing of a naked woman and you sell it on
shelves at Barnes & Noble with a title like “To Love Her Broken.”
My
sadness isn’t beautiful. My sadness isn’t something to be exploited for money.
My sadness is my own, and I share it with every other woman on earth. We aren’t
beautifully broken – we are whole and complete and we always have been. We
don’t need a male poet borrowing our tears to get likes and comments. Our story
is important and needs to be told, but most of us don’t have a voice. Most of
us don’t have a platform. Don’t use your platform to tell a story that has
never been yours.
