Hello, Helen.
Helen Harlot, Helen Home-Wrecker, Helen Whore. Most beautiful woman in the world, hatched from a swan’s egg, product of yet another rape perpetrated by your divine slut of a father, the “omnipotent” thunderer. His many bedfellows tell a different story.
In all the myths, you are glittering, resplendent. And always, always, you are being taken.
Women all around you are constantly being turned into plants and beasts, chased, abducted, vaporized to ash, raped and then killed in a jealous rage. But none so much as you. Men cannot seem to keep their hands off you. When you are a child, less than ten years old, the great “hero” Theseus kidnaps you for marriage. Your brothers have to fight their way through a city to bring you home. Not a decade of life and already a victim of pedophilia, child-trafficking, sexual slavery. Why have I known your name since childhood yet not learned of this story until now, years later? History does not want you known as Helen the Child Bride, you are Helen the Slut. It is fine for your father, but not you. For a man in your world, sex is a domination, an assertion of power. For a woman, it is a transgression. A sin.
When you finally come of marriageable age, men come crawling out of every hidden crack and dusty corner of Greece to bargain over the right to possess you, like a prized cow. The one who wins you isn’t even present; he sends his brother to haggle for you in his absence and wins because his coffers are filled with the most gold. Your father hands over your leash without hesitation, counting the coins with wide eyes. This newest husband is rough and his beard scratches, but you cannot complain. You are his property now. You are a teenager.
Even the possession laws of men do not save you from another abduction. This time some prince rapes you and drags you across the ocean, starting a war in the process. Hordes of men flock to Troy to fight over you, to reclaim your husband’s “property” and their pride, so very fragile. Ten years and hundreds of dead men later, the war is over, the prince is in his grave, and you are handed back to the Spartan king—returned to your rightful owner. Always being bought or stolen, changing hands, carted from place to place. Whenever you look behind you, your footprints stain the ground with your former owner’s blood. But you are not the knife, nor the hand that wields it. You are the pilfered cattle, the object of argument that incites the murder. The blood is not on your hands, it only stains you from proximity. People do not blame cattle. But you are a woman, and that is enough.
In every retelling of your tale there are women pointing their fingers at you to save themselves. So many tell your story for you, but no one ever asks your opinion. No one permits you a voice. Now I ask you,
When you pushed through the white membrane and shattered the eggshell, new hands grasping for air, did you know you would be blamed for ten years of bloody war, the destruction of a great city, the deaths of hundreds of men, for your own abduction and rape? If you had known, would you have crawled back inside and sealed the fragments of egg closed again with your own spit and blood, with the birth fluids still clinging to your newborn skin?
Did you know that other women would point to you as the most vile of your sex? That not even they, those Grecian girls who had been nothing but things to be raped by gods and stolen by men, would raise a voice in defense of you, but instead against you? Harlot, homewrecker, bitch, slut, whore. Barbed words aimed at you like arrows, your abductions and rapes held against you like knives. Every direction you turned, sharp and unforgiving. Everything that happened to you was because you flaunted your beauty, because you tempted them. You wanted it. You asked for this.
Did you ever think of slashing your face, of scarring it beyond recognition? Of jumping from a bridge and diving deep into the stone-hard waters, down further and further until you washed up on the black shores of Hades? Or would that have been self-mutilation, and grounds for banishment to the pits of eternal screams? These gods, always so clever with their sins. They don’t like to let their playthings slip away so easily. But perhaps your revenge lies in that you lived. Every time they say your name—no matter what unsavory titles follow—at least they will never forget how many you dragged down with you.
Ivy Jong (she/they) is a queer writer focused on Classics and Greek myth. She is a bookseller at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon.