Category: Uncategorized

Brown paper parcels

One day out of the blue the chemist shop stopped housing its pads and tampon supplies in neat layers row after row wrapped in brown paper.

Rather like the way these days they sell cigarettes in what they call plain packaging, they did the same with products essential to women once some brainwave landed on a way to manufacture materials that soak up our period blood and leave us more able to function in the world during that trickly time of the month. 

Something of those ancient attitudes and disgust towards female bodily stays with us, with me. The yuk factor, again not unlike the yuk we experience when we talk of shit and defecation.

I suspect our response to faecal function comes out of childhood and toilet training, a necessary part of life, otherwise we’d none of us be able to manage our shit and where we put it. Hygiene would be a major problem. 

We need to learn to distance ourselves from our own toxic waste otherwise it makes us sick.

But period blood is not toxic waste in the sane sense. It’s blood, dry and stale and like any blood if left out to dry and curdle it will start to smell unpleasant but it’s not inherently unpleasant unless we think it so.

A few of my husband’s wowser friends from many years ago when he was still a school boy were communicating about their distress at what they see as ‘cancel’ culture. The way they imagine the so-called minorities are controlling the public discourse these days. 

All this emerged from their concerns about the renaming of Australia Day to invasion day From their privileged position as older white males. But also from their sense of lack. They believe indigenous people who to their minds have been well cared for want more than their share. 

They have no idea of what we as a nation have done to our indigenous people and the extent to which no amount of money thrown at them will undo the damage.

The damage will only be undone through a united effort at changing the story from one of our entitlement to a recognition of what our ancestors did and how we have profited ever since.

The final insult – to my sensibilities at least – came in the form of a message from one male friend to another.

He quoted an interview between major General Cosgrove on an ABC radio program. I do not know how true this is or whether its another example of fake news, so I try to hold it lightly.

It follows:

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The comparison of rifle use to prostitution alarms me. 

It’s not exactly wrapping pads in brown paper bags, but it has the effect of silencing. And sure, the interviewer might have been out of line likening teaching kids to use rifles with teaching kids to become violent killers, though if you follow it through, why else would anyone use a rifle other than to kill, whether people or animals. Or to practice hitting inanimate targets. 

But to suggest that women are equipped with an innate skill to be prostitutes using that old fashioned word as well, not sex worker. That women are born with a capacity to sell their bodies for sex for the pleasure of another, as of it’s a given, alarms me to the pit of my gut.

This is what I call misogyny.

An insult hurtled towards a female because she has dared to challenge, albeit in a clumsy manner, the man’s use of guns. 

Why did we ever hide pads and tampons behind brown paper other than to imply there’s something secret shameful about them? They must be hidden. This means that their function also needs also to be hidden. The secret nature of women’s bodies need to be hidden.

And then if we call out the secret nature of any desire to use a gun, to kill or maim or assert oneself, even in the pleasure of being able to hit a target, needs to come out of its plain paper wrapping to expose it for what it is, a dangerous activity, especially in the wrong hands. 

The function of periods: they’re part of the procreation cycle and of fertility, life giving stuff in women.

The purpose of guns: to kill. To end life. 

Audacity and shame

Not much to go on. A hint of something that nags at the periphery of my mind. The joy of the new.

Those five words and I’m transported back to a time when everything was new, as it is for my twelve-month-old grandson who has a habit of pursing his lips into a tight O whenever he sees something that enthralls him.

Oh, he says. Ohhhh, something new. 

I scratched my lips in my sleep last night. I felt it as it happened, a brush of my hand across my face to dislodge a few loose hairs that were pressing on my neck, and my fingernail came in contact with my lip and scraped off the top layer.

I ignored it till this morning. The congealed blood of a tiny wound on that most delicate of surfaces, my topmost lip, which is prone to cold sores and fungal infections, so I must take care.

It’s so easy to hurt yourself, so easy to stub a toe or walk hip height into a cupboard and bruise the bone and surrounding tissue. So easy to be careless and fling your body around as if its ability to preserve its walls is endless, even as it’s not.

‘Audacity always flirts with shame.’ An Adam Phillips’ special.

The analyst comes out with sentences like this, short and pithy and filled with resonance. Breathtaking and yet, I want to scream out at him,

‘What gives you such confidence, to state your ideas with such conviction when so many others grapple with the possibilities of other meanings. Never certain of anything.’ 

Audacity ALWAYS flirts with shame.

Is it possible there are moments when an audacious gesture, when an effort to rise above your years can travel unaccompanied by any such fears whatsoever? Though I take his point. 

Even writing this here now is accompanied by the ever-faithful internal voice that says, who’d want to read this crap?

As a writer you know this voice so well, you learn to ignore it. You learn to press on with fingers at the keyboard, pen on paper, you learn to push ahead despite the nagging fears you have nothing of any value to say. 

In a novel-writing class several years ago, I threw out a quote from AS Byatt’s novel Still Life, about the need for a wool-gathering time.

” She remembered from what now seemed the astonishing free and spacious days of her education the phenomenon of the first day’s work on a task.  One had to peel one’s mind from its run of preoccupations: coffee to buy, am I in love, the yellow dress needs mending, Tim is unhappy, what is wrong with Marcus, how shall I live my life?  It took time before the task in hand seemed possible, and more before it came to life, and more still before it became imperative and obsessive.

There had to be a time before thought, a wool-gathering time when nothing happened, a time of yawning, of wandering eyes and feet, of reluctance to do what would finally become delightful and energetic.  Threads of thought had to rise and be gathered and catch on other threads of old thought, from some unused memory store.”

I was tired of listening to people go on about where they might send their manuscript and how they might get a foot in the door of the publishing world. As if they were selling sausages at a marketplace. 

I wanted to worry myself with these concerns only when I had what felt close enough to a finished product.

‘All very well for you,’ one man said. A tall man who once walked the pilgrimage Via Francigena in Italy and described how when he reached the shrine his feet were red raw, his sandals in tatters.

Here was a man who knew how to persevere, but now in his sixties, he was wary of life sneaking past him. He did not have time for wool-gathering. He needed to get on with it.

When we started the novel writing class that year Janey Runci, our brave teacher, challenged us to look into our motives for writing. 

‘Let’s face it’ she said. ‘Most of the books you’re working on in this class will never reach publication.’

It was a sobering thought and enough to stop some people from returning to complete their novels. But a good fifty percent of us persevered.

I sometimes wonder where they are now, those would-be writers from my novel writing class. I do not hear of their book launches within the small sphere of publishing in Australia or at least not among the awards.

But awards are another notch up, several notches up from even being able to complete the writing of a novel, or even a short piece of writing like this.

The internal voice that screams at you to be silent is always there hovering over your shoulder like a banshee screeching death is not too far away and then you can have a rest, for now, if you continue like this, you’ll only bore your audience.

If you can find one, and for the rest, consider it a writing exercise, going up and down the musical scales of words, repetitive notes up and down, rehearsals behind the scenes, but far from the real thing.