Our bodies are a fascinating thing, something we're stuck with and judged by, something that we are supposed to flaunt but know little about, something simultaneously stigmatized, idealized, and real to those of us who live in them. Yet often, we are unable to talk publicly about our physical experiences, faced with anything from disdain to violence simply for voicing what society wants to suppress, for pulling the curtain back and revealing the sacred/profane/mundane mysteries.
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
Our experiences can be vastly different. Some of us have grown lives inside us while others would never want to or aren't able to. Many of us bleed as a part of our womanhood but the regularity and effects of that bleeding can vary greatly from woman to woman. Our different positions on society's scale of beauty means that each of us can have completely different experiences depending only on glances from others. The ultimate no-no for females, aging, can change our bodies in unexpected ways. And these are just some of the most common, sex-based aspects of our bodies. We can accomplish intentional modifications, like plastic surgery, tattoos and piercings, or making sure our genitalia match our selves. Most illnesses don't care about our sex designation, and the state of health of our bodies can determine the quality of our lives. But the vast possibilities of our bodies, and the unique lives that each of us live in and through them, is seldom a subject of conversations - or honest articles, or popular books, or entire movies, etc.
In a society where acknowledging that our bodies are important seems to be about equivalent with masturbating in public, we are deprived of much vital knowledge that can enrich our lives. It is only through open exploration of each other's personal corporeal accounts that we can bring out the significance of this indelible part of our selves.
The events that first made me realize the wonder of women's bodies were my simultaneous experience of puberty and witnessing of the birth of my brother.
I first noticed the physical differences between me and my friends of the same age when I was twelve - I got a horrible eruption of acne while the other girls' faces stayed smooth; my pubic hair came in before my friend's but her breasts developed long before mine. Before that, the only change I'd ever noticed in my body was growth, finding that my body didn't fit into more and more small spaces as I got older. But this was new; not only was the landscape of my body changing in new ways, it felt different as well. It's so hard to explain the difference, our language itself being as useless or downright hostile to physical feeling as our general attitudes, but I do remember clearly a greater awareness through it. My eyesight seemed clearer in that time; my emotions became more than just emotions, they became sensations. The softness of a blanket against my skin was more demanding of my attention. The brush of someone else's skin against mine became electric. I actually began to look down, too, to realize that there was more to me than just thoughts and to discover what was becoming of this inevitable home of mine, which I had never really done as a child.
And yet these physical sensations are all such unclear memories, ones that I've had to comb through and spin into more complete yarn than they have been, because I was taught to ignore them and to care more about what other people thought about what was happening to me. The boys at my school thought I was disgusting and made it quite apparent, while my stepmother's answer was not to reassure me but to attempt to make me more attractive to them. My "womanly" contours didn't really develop until I was a junior in high school and, coincidentally, I didn't have any boyfriends until shortly thereafter. Friends reinforced the emphasis on other people's evaluations of my body. One friend had an eating disorder (PDF); another insisted she could make me really pretty if she could just give me a makeover. My stepmother refused to let me use tampons, thinking that they would take my virginity (and what male would want me then?!), even though the lopsidedness of my scoliosis plus the sticky stuff on sanitary pads made for some incredibly uncomfortable situations.
Meanwhile, I witnessed my stepmother's pregnancy and childbirth. Very little about the pregnancy resides in my memory still (beyond her calling herself "a whale" a lot in the later months, unfortunately) but I don't think I could ever forget the birth. It was fourty-two hours of labor, ended by a C-section when they finally realized there was no way to get him to come out of the birth canal! I watched a normally very vain woman turn into a sweaty wretch, begging for ice, yelling at her husband, and falling into sleep briefly or walking around gingerly between contractions. The lesson I took away was that childbirth and dignity were not companions, to put it mildly. Yet there was some awe to mix in with this event: my brother was born with a full head of black hair (it runs in my family), and I got to see his hair in her birth canal before he was born. I also remember very clearly the plastic chart (not that particular one, but you get the idea) with raised rims showing the actual size of each of the ten stages of vaginal dilation, along with the doctor and nurses discussing whether or not she was going to dilate enough to let the baby's head out. It gave me a complex appreciation for my own genitalia that acknowledges the wonder of giving life to another person while hoping to never have to go through that experience myself; it brought home quite clearly the fact that my life as a woman would be filled with as much pain as pleasure, and both might happen in the same places.
(It also occurs to me, as I read back over the paragraph I just wrote, how women's bodies are treated vastly different depending on what they are doing: a vagina is considered dirty and shameful and unspeakable until it becomes a "birth canal", as if the act and location of sex is somehow completely separate from the act and location of giving birth. No wonder so many people have a hard time seeing a pregnant woman as an actual person, or understanding how integral the woman is to a fetus.)
My physical education didn't end there, of course.
As I mentioned above, I have scoliosis, and I had to have surgery when I was 15 to correct it as much as possible. Whenever I think about that time in my life, a lot of physical memories come rushing back. The pain of a misplaced IV, the tube down my throat when I woke up in the ICU, the staples that held my skin back together, the vomiting after a dose of Demarol... the only thing I don't remember is the actual pain itself. Some sensations are with me still, such as the spot in between my shoulder blades that always feels like it's dead asleep or the occasional aches where the rib that they used to fuse my spine used to be. I even remember the feeling of wearing the plastic shell that held me in place for a year afterwards while I healed, which dug into my hips and sternum when I bent over, and made hugging a pointless activity.
My two experiences with Plan B were highly educational and radically different from each other. The first time, I was involved with a guy just for sex. Just a week or so before leaving on my first trip overseas, the condom broke and I took the two pills; I'm still not sure if it was that or the stress of everything that was happening in my life then (including 9/11), but I didn't get my period again for over a month and wound up with (the incredibly unpleasant) bacterial vaginosis. The second time, I believed I was in love, and the prospect of being pregnant was almost spiritual. It made me feel as though I were tapping into some mysterious part of the universe that I had the privilege to touch merely because I was born with a body that could give life. It felt like there was a whole new universe inside my humble skin. (At the same time, the reality was that I had no support, couldn't imagine how I would pay hospital bills and/or daycare fees, and the guy was a homeless, jobless alcoholic.)
Sex started out mediocre for me and has gotten better and better. The only value I saw in virginity was not having to worry about pregnancy. I was never afraid to admit that I was a virgin and had nothing but disdain for those who tried to shame me for it, but my only criteria for waiting until I was 18 like I did was that I wanted to make sure I finished high school first; I didn't want to get pregnant and drop out like so many other girls did. Love was important to me, but not necessarily a requirement, and simple lust seemed as valid a reason as any for having sex. Some might deem me a slut for this, but I learned a little more from each partner I had, and now that I'm with only my husband, I get to use that knowledge to make someone I love very happy. Knowing what I know about my own body and my partner's body, as well as getting to work out what both of our expectations can and should be before we ever even met each other, has made long-term monogamous sex more interesting and awesome than I ever expected it to be. It just recently occurred to me that I can accurately say that I like sex. A lot. And I refuse to be ashamed of it. The intimacy that I get to experience with my husband through touch and sexuality is, in my opinion, one of the greatest gifts I've been given in my life, and I can't even fathom why that should be so shameful that I should keep it a secret.
Even getting tattooed was a simple education in my awareness of my own body. I will never forget the peculiar happiness I felt after getting a tattoo in honor of a friend who had just died; if it weren't for that physical pain and the endorphins that flooded me along with it that reminded me that I was still alive and allowed me to smile, I don't think I could have dealt with the incredible depression of facing that first day in a world without him in it.
I've also learned a lot by daring to talk to other women about their experiences.
One of my aunts shattered a myth I carried when she told me that her periods have gotten heavier with each child she's borne; I had always thought that they would get lighter, for some reason.
An older friend would often give me brief descriptions of what she was dealing with while going through menopause. The way she said it was so casual, it never really occurred to me that she was revealing a part of herself that isn't openly talked about in our culture. I can't say that it made me look forward to it, but she did give me an idea of what to expect as well as a feeling that I won't be alone in what I experience when the time comes.
Another friend warned me that my metabolism would slow a little in my twenties long before I could even expect it.
My great aunt has aged a lot in just 4 years, which I'm sure was due in some part at least to the emotional pain of the loss of her sister (my grandmother), while my great great aunt just hit 97 with a back hunched from severe osteoporosis.
But if all of these women had followed the tenets of our society, which pronounces the acknowledgement of our physical selves to be the most base thing we could possibly talk about, I wouldn't have as clear a picture of the varieties within a woman's life and amongst different women.
That's why I hope to inspire all of you to tell your stories, in spite of the strictures of public life. There are things in this diary that I wouldn't normally talk about to most people, whether they were friends or strangers, but I don't think it helps anyone for us to keep them as shameful little secrets. We all have different physical experiences, and yet we all share so much, our most fundamental trait being an indelible tie to our own individual bodies. What is it like to live in your body?