Sex, Just Another Commodity

There Are No Hot Chicks In Mostar

Armed to teeth with the newest tech gadgets and dressed in tailored jeans and a fitted blazer, a middle-aged British man drank his macchiato and fiddled with his iPad a few tables away from where I was sitting in a crowded bar in Mostar, Bosnia. The waitresses wore clingy miniskirts and even tighter low-cut t-shirts, and whenever they walked by our fashionable tourist’s table, he leered at them unabashedly.

Since he was by far the best dressed and most attractive man in the whole place, the waitresses eagerly danced around his table, showing off their linguistic skills and attending to his every wish.

When the time came to order another drink, the spiffy British tourist confidently took hold of the blonde waitresses wrist and asked her for her number. Without a moment’s hesitation, the young girl wrote it down on a napkin and then drew (and mimed) some directions which I wasn’t able to decipher.

Not more than 10 minutes later, a different waitress approached the smoothly shaven and audacious guest to ask him if he would like to try one of the local cakes or pastries. In the same manner with which he procured the first girl’s digits, the Omega-wearing vacationer serenaded the second waitress, who promptly scribbled her contacts on the flip side of the same napkin that held the first girl’s number.

After concluding a prolonged gaze at the waitress’ behind as she walked away towards another table, the British tourist suddenly looked in my direction and our eyes met. He gave me a crooked grin as he folded the napkin and put it in his wallet, and then said: “Man, there are so many hot chicks in Mostar. So little time, and so many of them.”

Surprised and susceptible to peer pressure, I raised my eyebrows at him and smiled awkwardly. I wish I had frowned instead and shook my head in disgust. I wish I had stood up and shouted the following screed in his direction:

‘If you only knew that the girl you plan to use shares a nine square-meter bedroom with her younger brother and her grandparents, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to see her as nothing more but another hot chick. If you knew that three sacks of flour are stacked next to her pillow because her family cannot fit them anywhere else in their shabby one-bedroom, then maybe she would be a bit more than a piece of ass to be enjoyed during your Balkan excursion. If you knew how many times she had to blush in embarrassment and apologize to her friends and guests for the uncontrollable farts and burps that emanate from her bedridden grandfather, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to reduce her to a mere sex object. If you only knew that she had to heat up water in buckets to wash herself and to serve her family a three-day-old cabbage soup before coming to work, then maybe it would have been a bit more difficult for you to reduce her to an expendable commodity.”

The reason that I knew all of these things was because the second waitress is my cousin.

I wanted this man to know that objectifying women anywhere is detestable, and that it takes a real jackass to do it in a third-world country. But next to my lack of courage, there was something else which prevented me from speaking out: I recognized a bit of myself in this man. I was reminded of numerous occasions on which I had “accidentally” dropped my American passport on the floor, or inserted a word or two of English into a conversation when in the company of attractive Bosnian girls.

Regardless of how hard I tried to link my indignation at the British man’s actions to some kind of corresponding personal virtue, I wasn’t able to come up with anything convincing. It didn’t work. There was nothing there. Upon arriving at this realization, I suddenly felt petrified.

Milan Djurasovic is a Bosnian American collage artist, blogger, and a book author.
from here with one of his collages