It’s a long time since I endured the blood trickle of a period. That event we learn about before we enter womanhood, usually from experience even as we are warned ahead: one day it will happen to you.
I was late to the party, fifteen years old. It had bothered me for twelve months earlier because my elder sister alerted me to its existence after an aunt with whom we stayed one weekend suggested we go to the beach for a swim. My sister declined, and my aunt asked, ‘Do you have your period?’
The word ‘period’ baffled me. It shuddered in my ears. I’d heard of periods from my sister’s attendance at secondary school where she talked of blocks of time in which different subjects were taught, but this was different. So, back home, I asked her its meaning. Her explanation left me little but my imaginary wonderings.
Soon after I woke one night, went to the toilet and there in the dark I imagined a great dark stain at my pyjama’s crotch. It was a false alarm and when it finally happened, again another night, I went to my sister for support. These were not things I could discuss with my mother. My sister handed me a tampon box and urged me to read the directions. I did not know then I had a vagina, nor where it was located. In my family we did not use such words for genitals. Nor did we hear the word penis bandied about. Certainly not vulva or labia. These parts of our bodies were secrets.
My vagina, this foreign hole, somewhere between my legs I knew, and somewhere close to my anus. But where? Even as I write these things a chill sets in, a yuk. How can you write about such things? They are unseemly.
Recently at a seminar on misogyny, Michaela Chamberlain talked about gendered blood and the way women’s bodies get policed. All aspects of misogyny and how to fight a perspective that dominates our lives and seeps into our bones from earliest days.
I doubt men are much better at talking about their bodies and the changes to them as they enter adolescence and old age: the wet dreams, nocturnal emissions – if that’s the word. In later years, an inability to get an erection, or other aspects as when a young boy’s voice breaks and an Adam’s apple appears at his throat.
But I suspect if they don’t, it’s because adolescent changes and the ravages of age, bespeak a certain vulnerability which men meet with coming-of-age events: the tough training run; a few nights out camping alone. Whatever rituals they can devise, to harden their bodies on the way to manhood, and later onto death. Or else into denial
Whereas we girls endured no such experience. Still, we also needed to be hardened for life. So many things on the road ahead and no one ever talked about it. The way period cramps can be torture. Not that they ever hurt me, nor my mother or sisters, from what I understand. Looking back, I wonder whether this is also about a disavowal of our bodies.
In my childhood household, besides the unseemly arrival of our periods, which in later years my sisters and I called Charlie, like the perfume, we did not speak about it.
The night of that first encounter with a tampon, I misjudged and shoved it up my anus. The discomfort in my spine as I lay in bed later thinking something had to be wrong was overwhelming. I reported back to my sister who was trying to sleep. She sighed. ‘You’ll have to learn one day and I’m not about to show you.’ The thought of my sister fiddling with my bits below put me off. ‘Try these,’ she said handing me a pad and suspender belt.
The belt was easy and the pad self-evident. But it took many years before I located my vagina and dared to use tampons, well after someone else, a man, found my vagina and penetrated it. After which I entered the realms of womanhood.
All this a secret to everyone, even to myself.
How do we escape from the tyranny of the past that says we cannot speak of these things? These bodily excrescences that hint at our vulnerability.
Even when I was a child in love with television series like The Brady Bunch and The Swiss Family Robinson, I could not understand why no one left to visit a toilet on screen. They might use the bathroom or on their deserted island take a dip in the sea to clean their face and hands, put on makeup, but they never spoke of a need to relieve themselves.
Michaela Chamberlain talked about Freud’s case of Dora. A young woman whose father brought her to see the great doctor for help with hysterical symptoms. Her loss of voice, choking, migraines, difficulties breathing.
Freud writes her story as the case of a failed analysis and ascribes the problems to her resistance, and his failure to deal with the transference. Her refusal to use the couch. Her decision to leave abruptly after 18 sessions.
No wonder she left. She had told Freud her story. When she was fourteen, a family friend, Herr K sexually propositioned her. And then repeatedly at sixteen and again, she believed with her father’s knowledge. Freud ascribed her struggles to jealousy of her father’s lover Frau K and Dora’s desire for her father. Freud twisted the narrative.
The good old Oedipal Conflict, which I imbibed in my early years of psychotherapy training as if drinking mother’s milk. But there’s something in the business of jealousy, I know from experience. My aching jealousy of others whose achievements within the writing world are greater than my own, and when I was young, my jealousy towards a younger sister who was more beautiful than me alongside my brother, seventeen months older, who was so clever. The family genius.
Sandwiched between both, with neither brains nor beauty, the past assaulted me like a sledgehammer of self-loathing. But when one of my early therapists suggested I wanted my father for myself, as if I was in love with him, I refused to oblige. Like Dora. He had it wrong.
I did not want my father any more than Dora wanted hers. These fathers who betrayed us. Who used our bodies and minds for their own comfort, and sexual desire. Who could not find what they wanted in their wives, sexual satisfaction that was built on a misogynistic and patriarchal view of the world that urges women to stay in their places as receptacles for men’s desires, for the penis and whatever else they might want to put inside.
In another book on misogyny, Kate Manne’s Down Girl, I read about the 2014 Isla Vista killings. A young man, Elliot Rodger, enraged that no women took an interest in him, murdered as many men and women he could locate on a university campus and beyond as a way of assuaging his rage. He aimed his weapons from his BMW. He would show them how wrong they were before he crashed his car and shot himself in the head.
He is a hero for the craziness of Incels who see themselves as victims of rejection because no woman wants to gratify their desires. The fault of women, of all women. This then is the essence of misogyny, and we learn it early. It’s in our blood. Even women fall victim to its thrall. We pander to our men like they’re small boys in need of love, instead of demanding they pull their weight. Insist they take a greater share in parenting.
I recognise it. My tendency to care, especially for men. When I was in my first significant relationship with a man I adored, I took to ironing his shirts as a way of winning his love. I cleaned his flat every Saturday from floor to ceiling. I scraped out his toilet and vacuumed his floors simply to satisfy my belief this was a way to his love. This was my job. This he’d find irresistible and love me for it.
The pleasure of his pleasure overruled my own and I did not consider the boredom of housework or the loneliness of those Saturdays at home alone cleaning his flat while he was away at the races. And when he came home, whether he won or lost, we would take to his bed for peremptory sex. It satisfied something in him while for me it was not so different from the housework, only I could doze if there was time later.
Across the map of time this was what a good relationship looked like to me then. And as much as I see it differently now, I’m still bogged down by the urge to do the lion’s share of housework. My duty to clean and wash; my job to tackle the dust as it piles on every surface. Only these days I let it settle.
Life has a way of needing more than just submission to another’s wishes. It’s time to make room for all of us as humans. Not bogged down by gender divides that are as false as they are constructed.