I am a trainwreck actress’s vagina and I just thought I’d say hello. You seemed keen to see me, the throb of your flash piercing me with its up-skirted glare. You seemed grateful when spreading me over four pages of EXCLUSIVE! NSFW! RING OF SHAME (LITERALLY!)! coverage in your magazines. You seemed excited when slipping words into articles like ‘shameless’, ‘sinking’, ‘new’ and ‘low’. You kept asking ‘what was she thinking?!??!’ so people would post their poorly punctuated opinions online. They insist that a vagina belonging to a woman so ‘vapid and talentless’ deserves to be exposed and degraded. Deserves to be called ‘mangey, misshapen meat-curtains’ by paunchy late-night TV hosts. Because they all believe that I – a trainwreck actress’s vagina – has no right to any dignity. This is the mid-00s after all. I’ve no right to the sanctity of fresh air underneath this VPL-free Hervé Léger dress. Instead, I deserve the crush of bodies at the front gate making it impossible to safely leave. I deserve a throng of photographers shouting never-ending questions like, ‘when’s the next rehab stint?’ or ‘can your career survive another box office bomb?’. I deserved the online countdown to the day I became a legally penetrable orifice and I now deserve the blog-posts predicting how soon it’ll be until this body I’m a part of dies. Because, what else should I expect? I am a trainwreck actress’s vagina and you’ve reduced me to this Basic Instinct tribute act, legs and self-worth akimbo. You don’t care that I’m bald and shivering, like one of those terrifying, hairless cats. You don’t care that a musician wrote a song calling me an ‘opiate-dipped flower’ that ‘lost its allure within the hour’. You’re conditioning me to be grateful – to want the dry, pleasureless fuck of your lens. You want me to feel flattered by the $50,000 payday my photos bring to paparazzi thrusting their cameras upwards. You want me to accept the trainwreck actor’s rebranding as ‘edgy’ for his full-frontal scene in an indie with Oscar buzz. And to resign myself to the kiss and tells where ex-boyfriends lie about how regularly they got me off. You want it to seem normal for me to be plucked, chafed, swabbed, insulted, cajoled, policed, itched, rejected and never-endingly groped.
Because I am a trainwreck actress’s vagina and I just wanted to say hello, to introduce myself properly and maybe disprove rumors I’m in the throes of chronic thrush. I thought you might like me if you got to know me. But I guess you’re never going to give a fuck.