A Novel “Mind Games” “Manufacturing Consent”

I was besotted, I could see it but it is only later that I realised that everyone in the world falls for them.

I stood by, on the rampart, protecting, hiding all the abuse, and being shut down or even raped or held hostage when I tried to tell them. I was worried about their big futures. I was privy to scary conversations, threatening conversation, ominous conversations that they weren’t. Were they as disposable as I seemed to be? Or was their level of talent a threat ? Sometimes when people far outshine others, other men are not happy, if they want to be the only alpha. Those men, the sick men, the odd men, the ones have clearly have something wrong with them, they are like the men who have taken a hostage and then rape and kill the woman in front of the who tied up and unable to help. Destroying a helpless woman deliberately in front of them, and secretly when she has left, telling them that it’s just her, there is just something wrong with her.

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He was gross. He said everyone wanted him, everyone wanted to be with him, “everybody loves me love.” Women knew how to remove themselves from his presence or refuse to be alone with him. He just couldn’t seem to accept that some women did not want to be with him. I gave him his very first lecture on consent. I was alarmed you just could not make him not be hypersexual, you could just not penetrate the armour of the ego. It’s very uncomfortable to turn down someone famous for a woman, even one who was not really considered to be what was considered to be beautiful or desirable.

I was sick with worry about other women, younger women, women at the label, women he came in into contact with. “You are the powerful one in the room. You have the power. They might think they have to, or they will get into trouble.” “Not everyone wants to I reiterated.” He offered his rebuttal based on his look, his glamour, his fame. “Everyone does love”. I said, “No they don’t. What if they are Muslim, Hindu, Christian. What if they have a husband, a boyfriend or the love someone else.” I hope it worked. I did it as a favour for other women, who weren’t wealthy, who needed jobs, he didn’t have expensive cars and holiday, holiday homes, and a beautiful harbourside apartment. What if they had to say yes, what if they had to cheat to keep their job. No, I said, “You always have to ask.” He asked me to sleep with that day. He got a lecture on consent. When he asked the next day I was sick. I was happily chatting and beyond bliss chatting to men I couldn’t have adored more in the other room when he came up to interrupt. He marched over preening and said, “Be at my place at 8, I’ve set it all up, I’ve decided I’ve wanted to sleep with you.” He had a canny way of making it sound like he didn’t ask just the day before, that he had never ever asked before, that this was a brand-new thought that (apart from setting everything up) had just struck him out of the blue like lightning. What an impulsive thought. I think they fell for it. I was cranky because I was feeling camaraderie with the men I wish I had known at university. A number of people were begging me to stay but I was already out the door in my mind. I couldn’t wait to go. Wrong timing, for lovely people. I was being offered apartments, even the very one we were sitting there in on floor chatting. He destroyed me for those guys, but they don’t know, they were led to believe that it was just happenstance and not the plan at the outset.

He deliberately destroyed my destiny. My right to write and to become a journalist. My right to family. My right to choose my own partner. My right to have the children the children that I wanted to have. He destroyed me while I was dating the next man I was dating. Right in front of him to. Then he went after the business “Because it will be too successful soon”. That’s why the bagman had popped up again.

 

Well I made a quip, he ruined the vibe. I don’t think it was a clever one, I hadn’t factored in his ego. After I made a very public and foolish show of turning down the most famous man in the room. I was curvy, you could see up my skirt, my butt cheeks were showing. He mumbled “Sorry, I forgot to ask.” He was mortified.

Turning to everyone he said. “What if fans find out that she turned me down.”

He shouldn’t have been shocked. I turned him down the day before too. Before that, I have refused to go to his house other times.

Now he just to give me the appearance of consent. Even the bagman tried to procure a type fo consent. To berate a type of consent out of me, that just wasn’t there, because it never was. The music industry, it takes away the right to say no.

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I thought that when I was a bit older I could be tempted to have implants, I had already had a little bit of surgery and didn’t resent it, but erasing ethnicity? Whitening my skin? Removing every mole from my body? Having an Anglo-Saxon nose? Being forced to have my buccal fat removed? Having liposuction so I had a tiny little bottom, and tiny little legs? That just wasn’t how I liked my body to be and I wondered if I would hate it. Why have buccal fat removed and have cheek implants, who would I look like? He told me I had to have surgery to look like Katie Price, and that I had to start wearing tube tops and leggings and fluro colours and to wear stilettos everywhere. I was troubled by it and turned it down. I mentioned that I had a degree in literature, changing from someone who wanted two Master’s degrees to someone who looked like a page 3 girl hadn’t been in my plans. The men I was dating who knew billionaires, would they just think of me as that idiot wife with all the weird surgery? The class of people I knew, those who I was dating, those around whom I had been raised wouldn’t accept me back.

What I wanted was “Hollywood Teeth”, maybe another nose surgery, I would consider buccal but a surgeon has told me a buccal can look bad as you age, that you can wind up looking gaunt. It’s not that I wanted a natural look, remember I was an inured woman, I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup, or designer clothes that I had back at the apartment.

 

From the age of 12 I had a blow-dry every week, and I had a facial once per week from the age of 11, I had a full designer wardrobe purchased for me twice per year from David Jones by the stylist/buyer. I bought makeup weekly in London, to get away from the people who were forcing me, I had bags of top French makeup, I just wasn’t allowed to wear it near the men. I loved a luxury lipstick, and I am pedantic about foundation. The colour matches were better in England because they are used to different skin tones.

 

I think I would have been embarrassed to draw that much attention with size double G breasts, and dramatic cheekbones. I was just the big fat ugly 57 kilo ethnic woman who he could have forced to do anything, forced to take lyrics, forced to not be paid, forced to sleep on a floor, just the big fat ugly girl who at 57 kilos that he could do anything to because she was in another country. It irritated me that he knew the weight of all the famous women.

Just the big fat ugly F-ing whore. He used regale everyone with humiliating stories about refusing to participate in rape?” “You want me to set you up with free lyrics mate, we are forcing the ugly F-ing bitch so I can steal me F-ing lyrics, and say they are mine, more people have to use them.” “Safety in numbers mate.”

He mentioned a rape as if it were sex, and the perpetrators did not like the sex, he quoted my rapists on repeat. I thought that capitulating after all the times I had been asked and firmly said no. It was embarrassing for him that he couldn’t pull the ethnic chick. But sleeping with him would make me complicit in helping them to steal all my lyrics. Of course, I didn’t want to sleep with anyone who was even near this guy.

 

Without legal recourse as an employee, I wanted to be a part of a union who wanted to meet female artists, male artists and to be able to work back in Australia. I didn’t want to be complicit. I had free will then and it was none of them, because I was being forced right under their eyes.

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