December's Memoir: Brutalities
Margo Steines writes about her draw to violence and pain.
Brutalities: A Love Story (2023)
by Margo Steines
Do you ever get annoyed when an author’s photo is too good? There’s something about a good-looking author that makes me not want to read about their life. How interesting could life be, when you’re that good-looking? I felt this way about Margo Steines, but you know what they say about book covers and all that.
Within the first ten pages, Steines details being hit with a camel whip by an older man she is in a relationship with while in her teens, after which I mostly just felt sad for her parents who by her own account provided a stable and loving environment:
I did not grow up in violence, did not witness it as a child, did not have a relationship to it until I sought it in my sexual life. It didn’t make sense that a girl who was offered all the support and cultivation my family tried to give me would have ended up where I did.
Steines’ memoir is about her draw to violence and pain, a desire she developed by the tender age of seventeen. She tells her story without self-pity or melodrama, providing both subjective reflection and hard facts to dispel assumptions society makes about risky behavior like hers. For example, she considers how at seventeen she could have been both trafficked and a sex worker, although she wouldn’t have applied those labels to herself back then:
“It is a breathtaking (and I don’t believe incidental) loophole of the American legal system that in most states, a minor can at once be legally considered to be both the victim and the perpetrator of the crime of selling sexual acts….[in 2019] 290 minors were arrested in the U.S. for ‘prostitution and commercialized vice.’ Forty of those children were between ten and fourteen years old.”
Steines worked as a dominatrix and a welder. She runs for miles on a broken heel, starves herself, and endures physical and emotional abuse. She finally discovers comfort and beauty in a loving relationship. She was drawn to pain and then she wasn’t, and she takes the reader on a journey to find out why.
