Cunt (4 page)

One fine spring day, after the lunchtime recess in sixth grade, Miss Cothran announced
that all the boys were to join Mr. Rogers out on the playground for a game of softball,
while all us girls were mandatorially invited to accompany her to the cafeteria.

My friends ’n me knew what was up. We had heard about the infamous Period Movie around
fourth grade. Most of the boys were no less familiar with this legendary film and
teased us relentlessly as they filed out to the softball diamond.

In the cafeteria, the girls from Mrs. Wolffs class, Mr. Rogers’s class and mine assembled
into tittering rows. The school nurse stood in the front of the room, between the
pullout movie screen and a table displaying all of the various disposable bleeding
paraphernalia we would one day come to know so well. She explained the ways to affix
pads to our panties and dabbled a little into tampondom; then the Film Projector Monitor
was called to do her duty, and the Period Movie started.

To date, it is the most intellectually impaired film I’ve ever seen, taking into account
the
combined
fatuity of
Basic Instinct
and
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

A cartoon of the female form demonstrated how this dot in your head travels down to
your cunt and makes you bleed. The doctorly sounding male narrator insisted that we
not take baths or exercise during this “special time,” but be sure to keep
spotlessly clean
with lots and lots of soap and showers because menstruating girls tend to stink up
the room if they’re not completely at one with personal hygiene. He also informed
us that any pain or discomfort we might feel resided “in our heads,” and had been
collectively imagined by womankind for thousands of years.

Were we told anything about how our uteruses are almost exactly like the moon, shedding
their linings, growing new ones and shedding all over again? Did the Period Movie
teach us
thing one
about how miraculously cool and sublime the human body’s reproductive system is when
you’re a girl?

Fuck no.

All I truly gleaned from this experience was that my cunt was the yucksville reason
I had to sit in that stupid cafeteria watching some hack nurse show me how to safety
pin a three-mile-wide wad of cotton to a pair of brief underpanties even my grandma
wouldn’t be caught dead in, while the other half of the sixth grade population was
out in the sunshine playing softball. This was the first formal instruction in estrangement
from my cunt—within a lifetime’s barrage—that I consciously recall.

With all the prepubescent hoopla surrounding periods, I was inclined towards totally
vivid nightmarish visions of complete humiliation that would usher in my initiation
to womanhood. A recurring one was related to the shower scene Carrie endured—where
she was pelted with tampons—in the Hollywood/Stephen King rendition of menstruation
commencement. I was
wholly unprepared
for the simplicity and intuition I encountered at the inauguration of my blood.

In seventh grade, I was walking home from school with Teresa and Joyce. We were halfway
down Tunnel Street and suddenly I
knew
I was bleeding. It was the first time I remember
knowing
something in this manner. I told Teresa and Joyce, “Hey, I just started my period,”
and that was that. I went home, grabbed a pad out of my mom’s store and bled on it.

Tampons didn’t come along until my fourth period, when Amy Ajello instructed me in
great detail over my teen talk phone line. It was tricky holding the phone to my ear
and inserting a tampon for the first time but, thank god, I managed, ’cause pads creeped
me out the door. Whenever I wore one, I imagined Jimmy Vallejo and Andrew Vasquez
pointing at the gigantic bulge moshing up my ass as I walked down the hall. In my
vision, they howled, à la Beavis and Butthead, and everyone else, of course, would
hear about it and I’d be the laughingstock of the whole middle school.

Shame kept a close watch on me and all my girlfriends.

It was shameful to bleed, to be seen bleeding, for blood-soaking paraphernalia to
be visible on or about one’s person at any time whatsoever, to speak of bleeding,
to look like we were bleeding, to be excused from P.E. because of the crippling cramps
which sometimes accompany bleeding, to display frailty, vulnerability or mood swings
because we were going to be bleeding soon and to express any emotion other than contempt
and disdain in reference to our blood.

No one, least of all my peers—who, verily, whispered about this proscriptive subject
in hushy undertones, behind closed doors, in only the most trusted of boyless locales—thought
bleeding a pleasant reality.

Girls are told bleeding is a
bad thing,
an
embarrassing thing,
a
secret thing
that we should hide and remain discreet about come hell or high water.

Boys are told to go outside and play sports while the girls learn about some creepy,
cootie-laden mystery that makes blood ooze out from our you-know-whats.

Given my swimmingly fetching cultural milieu, getting used to this bleeding business
took quite a while. In the meantime, I fervently asked people why the hell this happened
to us girls. Various sources consistently informed me that it was (big sigh) “just
part of being a woman” (big sigh), or the good ol’ standby curse we inherited from
Eve.

My period was not only a “curse,” but for the first years of bleeding, I was completely
incapacitated with mind-numbing spasms of pain. For at least one day out of every
month, I didn’t go to school or work. I lay in bed and cried, unable to do anything
about the agony of my uterus. Frequently, because of this “imagined” pain, I fainted
and puked.

I find it fascinating that men’s description of the pain enkindled by a knee to the
groin sounds awfully similar to what I have experienced for up to thirty-six unflagging
hours. And yet, imagine the hue and cry if men were informed that the horrifying symptom
of pain accompanying a swift kick in the nuts was purely psychosomatic.

A coupla years after my period started, the newspapers across our fair nation announced
that women
weren’t
imagining those intense pains.
Scientific studies
proved that the pain
is real!
As you might surmise, this was but a
load
off my mind.

After all those days I vomited because the mid-section of my body was clenched in
a fist of throbbing excruciation; when I sat in the bathtub crying for five hours
straight; when I couldn’t get out of bed or leave the house for fear of fainting in
public; suddenly, because a group of men took the time to study a group of women and
found there was indeed a rational reason for these symptoms to wrack our bodies once
a month, I was allotted the pale comfort of knowing this pain
actually
existed!

Oh, joy.

Cynic that I am in such arenas of contemplation, I wonder if perhaps this generous
allotment wasn’t bestowed upon womankind because pharmaceutical companies came to
the magnanimous conclusion that sales for pain relievers would skyrocket if only they
invested in a little “research” to counter the “in her mind” myth and re-condition
the general public into believing there was a veritable malady at hand.

In the spring of 1995, I had the momentous honor of interviewing Barbara G. Walker
at her home in New Jersey. Among many other things, she told me about menarche parties
women in her community have for the newly menstruating. Ms. Walker described a menarche
she attended a few months prior to our interview. The honoree wore a red dress. Her
mother made a beautiful, red cake for her. A bunch of women, young and old, brought
her red gifts wrapped in red paper. The older women talked about the symbolism of
the moon and the miraculous joys of both bleeding and not bleeding anymore, while
the younger women who hadn’t yet started to bleed duly expressed reverence for the
honoree, and enthusiasm about starting their periods.

I mean, wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Wouldn’t you feel like a total princess if your mom or whoever did that for you? Wouldn’t
that put a whole new slant on bleeding from the get go?

I was deeply moved by Ms. Walker’s account, but in all honesty I must acknowledge
my bittersweet envy. My mom’s a dang smart lady, and I admire her above and beyond
all women on the planet, but it was a bummer to realize that if she hadn’t been so
busy dealing with the social constraints of single motherhood during the early ’80s,
sans the aid of a supportive community of women, she might have had the inspiration
to hostess a menarche for my sister and me. Whereupon, I sincerely doubt I would’ve
spent almost a decade of my life teaching myself to love the blood that coursed out
my stunning cunt every month.

Throwing menarche parties for our younger sisters, nieces and daughters is a very
simple and profound way of effecting positive change for the next generation.

Get off your ass and do it.

If Pippi Longstocking were the nation’s covergirl, rest assured that women would have
a superlative role model in the fine science of accepting ourselves. Ms. Longstocking
is extremely outspoken in response to negative social beliefs:

Unfortunately, Pippi Longstocking is
not
the nation’s covergirl.

All the way through my teens and into my twenties, I loathed my period. “Menstruation”
was synonymous with unmitigated physical pain on a monthly basis.

But then I got to thinkin’.

Maybe because I was in college, and what are you supposed to do in college if not
think? Maybe because I noticed a marked difference in the way women reacted toward
menstruation at this point in human development. Maybe because for the first time
in my life, I found myself surrounded by women who were greatly intrigued by the workings
of our bodies. Maybe because by the time I went to college I’d taken enough psychotropic
plant forms to feel more or less At One with the Universe, instead of lost at sea
in the swimmingly fetching cultural milieu I’d previously more or less accepted as
reality.