on c**ts and other gross stuff

mottos:
- "Sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of."
- "Sometimes, straight men freak out when I talk about my period. I don't talk about it that much... considering how much it happens. I barely mention it. But I guarantee if straight men had a period, you would never hear the end of it. Because, you know, they would never have protection. They would be using old socks. Coffee filters. 'Dude, let me get that sports section when you're done.' Every bachelor apartment would look like a murder scene." - Margaret Cho

recently, i posted one of my favorite poems: "down there" by sandra cisneros. it's her reply to another poem, by john updike, called - yup, you guessed it - "cunts." in it, she proceeds to take apart updike's "bad boy" bravado and machismo, adding in a dose of her own good stuff - namely, a thorough description of menstrual blood. it's one of the funniest and truest things ever written. the poem's pretty long, but the good stuff starts here.

the reason i posted that - together with the title poem from cisneros' book "loose woman" which beautifully reclaims words that are usually thrown at women as insults - was that i'd just gone through a period [no pun intended. really.] in which i saw all of those words used to attack various women, a lot, and i'd had enough. and yes, i was also having my period at the time. and my period is a serious and traumatic thing, physically speaking. my life really revolves around this horrible experience i go through once a month. and yet i don't get to talk about it, because it's... you know, such a gross, shameful, inappropriate subject. as margaret cho says, talking about it freaks guys out.

thing is, maybe it shouldn't matter if it does. i want to talk about it and i will.

i'm NOT ashamed.

when i get my period, if i don't do anything about it i throw up continuously for a whole day. once i have nothing left in my stomach i just retch up bile. i have serious diarrhea. the cramps are so severe that i lose consciousness from the pain (which is a good thing because that way it's "bearable"). i've tried to figure out what's wrong but the only conclusion i've been able to come to is that it's hormonal. nobody really knows, including the doctors i've seen - but there's always the old stand-by advice (including from the doctors) that i should give birth and "it will all sort itself out." of course, because it's neither bearable nor "sortable" i've had to find actual solutions. going on birth control helped a little - it brought the intensity of the cramps down a bit. however, i don't like the idea of the pill, of messing with my hormones in uncontrollable ways - i care about that, even if women are told not to (since worrying about birth control is considered entirely our responsibility, we should do whatever it takes and nevermind the side effects) - so i chose to go off it after a few years (and by the way didn't get my period for about six worry-full months afterwards). other than that, i have to drug myself. (and sodium naproxen is the answer - i got a prescription for it for a while, but that was basically just an overdose. so i overdose. i don't recommend overdosing, but i do recommend this medicine, for anyone with severe menstrual pain who's tried other painkillers and found that they don't work.) let's see, what else?!... doing exercise helps. i've also heard that not consuming dairy is supposed to help, but i haven't found that to be true since i've been vegan for almost 10 years and the problem has stayed the same during this time - not that i should be any yardstick for what happens "normally," i guess. and that's about it.

honestly, i never thought that it could be worse for anyone. i've met many women who suffer quite a bit during their periods, but never anyone who complains of experiences worse than mine. then i discovered that one of my favorite writers, gloria anzaldua, had a much worse history with her menstruation. here's some of it and what the consequences of going through it and hiding it meant throughout her life:

... I think my mother felt OK until I was three months old and blood started appearing on my diaper; i began having a period. She probably thought, "What did I do wrong? ... Oh, it's the result of sin." My mother has a pretty healthy attitude towards sex, except that she's adopted all the standard ideas - that it's dirty, that all men want is your body. ... The kids liked me because I was smart without being obnoxious about it. ... I was extremely sensitive ... I was wide open to everything people were feeling, thinking, sensing. ... I must have been this walking sponge. It was amazing ... I always felt so alien and so strange, because I was bleeding. I had these breasts I wasn't supposed to have, and I was smart. I think I survived by cutting my body off, by blocking certain feelings. I didn't know how bad it was. And I always felt so alien and so strange becasue I bled. The kids didn't know I bled or had breasts. ... My sister suspected something was going on, but the only people who knew were me, my mother, and my father. It became such a good secret that we forgot. ... I couldn't talk about it until ... I was operated on. I went into this pain. I just fell on the floor and went into convulsions. ... I'd have these very high temperatures and then I'd have these very cold flashes. It was the hormones. A year before my operation ... I went to six gynecologists and they wanted to do a hysterectomy. They said my uterus was abnormal - lopsided or whatever; my cervix opening was abnormal, I had the opening of a woman who's had a child. The ovaries were enlarged, especially the left ovary. I had fibroids, scars in the uterus. I started reviewing my past and it just came back to me: "Oh, I had started bleeding at an early age." ... [I had forgotten prior to that o]ff and on during my life. I remember thinking about it when I was a teenager and then forgetting it, but to really talk about it with my mother. ... I called her and told her what the gynecologists said, and she said, "Yes, you started bleeding when you were three months old. The doctor said it was because you were a throwback to the Eskimo." (I have a lot of that very old Indian blood in me.) She told me that she had to make these little girdles so that the kids wouldn't see my breasts, and she had to make sure I had a piece of cloth in my panties in case I bled. Guess we couldn't afford Tampax or Kotex. I remembered it all. I remembered washing the bloody cloths: I'd take them out into this shed, wash them out, and hang them really low on a cactus so nobody would see them. It was painful ... I was a child with no way of protecting myself. Dealing with my sexuality was bad enough, without having to deal with the bleeding! It became a black monster and grew out of all proportion. And the pain was horrendous. Waves of pain would sweep through me. It felt like my insides were going to come out when I threw up. Then there'd be these jabs. When the waves receded I'd be really weak. In my autobiography I describe it as a vulture picking my insides. ... [When that was happening I couldn't really deny it because it was so painful.] But I got used to it and repressed it so that I had no way of gauging when I was hurting, when I was ill. ... Pain was a way of life, my normal way of life. My mother was concerned [about the blood showing, about people finding out], but I wasn't. She was scandalized because at a very early age, I was the only one in the extended family to wear shorts or a bathing suit... No, I don't think I've ever been ashamed to show the body. The shame was something I internalized from my culture, from my mother and my grandmothers. Women have internalized from men the belief that a woman smells and is dirty when she has her period. I had no defense against that belief; I was three months old. When I found myself, it was the beginning of my spirituality, because it was like getting in contact with who I really was, my true self. My body wasn't dirty. ... [I was a part of the big secret, me and my parents,] for the first thirty years of my life. That was the big secret, the big shame. During the operation - it came as an initiation - I discovered that I didn't feel the shame about my body; I feared and hated my body. But it wasn't me; it was something I was taught. ... It was like there were two people in me - one part saying, "This is bad, this is dirty, you're evil. You're bleeding," and the other part saying, "No, that's their perception. I don't feel that way." The two didn't come together until ... I found out that I couldn't possibly have caused the bleeding because I was only three months old. ... So then the guilt split and I didn't feel evil. Part of the reason I helped people by teaching was to compensate, because evil was always tied in with what my mother and sister called "selfishness." I realized that being selfish was being myself, that they called me selfish only because I didn't do what they wanted me to do. But it took me thirty years to realize this. During this time I had terrible guilt and I blamed the body. I thought I was bleeding because I'd done something bad, there was something in me that caused it. [I had taken on more my mother's view of it -] my mother as a personality, no[,] my mother representing the culture's laws, yes. She represents a whole culture: her mother, and my father's mother - all grandmothers, all women. I think it's because women are the law givers, the carriers of tradition. My mother is a pretty amazing woman. She gives lip service to the culture's laws, but it wasn't really her stuff, you know? When you're little, though, you don't distinguish. ...
[Gloria E. Anzaldua, Interviews/Entrevistas, Edited by AnaLouise Keating]

amazing, isn't it?! you don't hear this stuff, nobody talks about it. at most, you hear of "pms" - one term everyone's comfortable with even if they have no idea what it might actually mean (that's PRE-menstrual stress syndrome).

and i don't believe in "pms," not the way it exists in pop culture (let's blame all female idiosyncrasies on it: their periods make women crazy and unreasonable); in fact, i think it's an american invention - certainly in romania it's just starting to get popularized as a concept and used for female bashing and/or for explaining away a variety of other phenomena and behaviors that women go through. when i first got my period, i'd never heard about such a thing as "pms" - menstruation was menstruation, i learned about the physiological basis, what to do (to use old rags as padding, which had to be washed - yes, romanian women didn't yet use commercial pads even as recently as 15 years ago), and that was it. i saw from the very beginning that different women have different experiences with it. but what can't be denied is that menstruation is very much a thing of the body, that it involves hormonal changes, and that it's natural. it can be "bad" or "good" but it's certainly interesting. and NOT GROSS, no matter what everybody says and in spite of the fact that even "sanitary product" ads don't usually show any red colors, let alone real blood.

-> edit for illustrative purposes:
what we get in ads: uh-huh...] [extra-real version, anyone?

] [

the idea that women's bodies are dirty, polluted, unclean - best exemplified by menstruation - is one of the clearest patriarchal manifestations we have. it's been used to relegate women to an inferior status in so many ways throughout history, whether by religious dogma or popular "wisdom" or everything in between.

- read -
thinking girl's "medicine and women's bodies" [one of my favorite blogs lately]
- see -
Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health and Our Bodies Ourselves, of course

and, yeah, like other riot grrrls and feminists before me, i'm reclaiming "cunt" and "bitch" and "slut" all the way. i know that what those terms are, in fact, is a compliment - women who get called those things don't fit people's old-school expectations and fantasies of what a woman should be like, and do, and talk about. or not talk about. mostly, those terms reveal things about the people who use them and their personal issues, which they can't articulate otherwise. so call me dr. cunt, dr. bitch, dr. slut - and let's move on!

this is dedicated to all my fellow cunts. you know who you are :)