I WAS TWELVE. MY MOTHER SLAPPED ME.
Second grade, seven years old, my brother was talking about periods. I didn’t like the way he was laughing.
I went to my mother. “What’s a period?” I said. “It’s punctuation,” she said. “You put it at the end of a sentence.”
My father brought me a card: “To my little girl who isn’t so little anymore.”
I was terrified. My mother showed me the thick sanitary napkins. I was to bring the used ones to the can under the kitchen sink.
I remember being one of the last. I was thirteen.
We all wanted it to come.
I was so afraid. I started putting the used pads in brown paper bags in the dark storage places under the roof.
Eighth grade. My mother said, “Oh, that’s nice.”
In junior high—brown drips before it came. Coincided with a little hair under my arms, which grew unevenly: one armpit had hair, the other didn’t.
I was sixteen, sort of scared.
My mother gave me codeine. We had bunk beds. I went down and lay there. My mother was so uncomfortable.
One night, I came home late and snuck into bed without turning on any lights. My mother had found the used pads and put them between the sheets of my bed.
I was twelve years old, still in my underpants. Hadn’t gotten dressed. Looked down on the staircase. There it was.
Looked down and I saw blood.
Seventh grade; my mother sort of noticed my underwear. Then she gave me plastic diapers.
My mom was very warm—“Let’s get you a pad.”
My friend Marcia, they celebrated when she got hers. They had dinner for her.
We all wanted our period.
We all wanted it now.
Thirteen years old. It was before Kotex. Had to watch your dress. I was black and poor. Blood on the back of my dress in church. Didn’t show, but I was guilty.
I was ten and a half. No preparation. Brown gunk on my underpants.
She showed me how to put in a tampon. Only got in halfway.
I associated my period with inexplicable phenomena.
My mother told me I had to use a rag. My mother said no to tampons. You couldn’t put anything in your sugar dish.
Wore wads of cotton. Told my mother. She gave me Elizabeth Taylor paper dolls.
Fifteen years old. My mother said, “Mazel tov.” She slapped me in the face. Didn’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
My period, like cake mix before it’s baked. Indians sat on moss for five days. Wish I were Native American.
I was fifteen and I’d been hoping to get it. I was tall and I kept growing.
When I saw white girls in the gym with tampons, I thought they were bad girls.
Saw little red drops on the pink tiles. I said, “Yeah.”
My mom was glad for me.
Used OB and liked putting my fingers up there.
Eleven years old, wearing white pants. Blood started to come out.
Thought it was dreadful.
I’m not ready.
I got back pains.
I got horny.
Twelve years old. I was happy. My friend had a Ouija board, asked when we were going to get our periods, looked down, and I saw blood.
Looked down and there it was.
I’m a woman.
Terrified.
Never thought it would come.
Changed my whole feeling about myself. I became very silent and mature. A good Vietnamese woman—quiet worker, virtuous, never speaks.
Nine and a half. I was sure I was bleeding to death, rolled up my underwear and threw them in a corner. Didn’t want to worry my parents.
My mother made me hot water and wine, and I fell asleep.
I was in my bedroom in my mother’s apartment. I had a comic book collection. My mother said, “You mustn’t lift your box of comic books.”
My girlfriends told me you hemorrhage every month.
My mother was in and out of mental hospitals. She couldn’t take me coming of age.
“Dear Miss Carling, Please excuse my daughter from basketball. She has just matured.”
At camp they told me not to take a bath with my period. They wiped me down with antiseptic.
Scared people would smell it. Scared they’d say I smelled like fish.
Throwing up, couldn’t eat.
I got hungry.
Sometimes it’s very red.
I like the drops that drop into the toilet. Like paint.
Sometimes it’s brown and it disturbs me.
I was twelve. My mother slapped me and brought me a red cotton shirt. My father went out for a bottle of sangria.
Over the course of my interviews I met nine women who had had their first orgasms in the exact same place. They were women in their late thirties and early forties. They had all participated, at different times, in one of the groups run by a brave and extraordinary woman, Betty Dodson. For twenty-five years Betty has been helping women locate, love, and masturbate their vaginas. She has run groups, has worked privately with individual women. She has helped thousands of women reclaim their center. This piece is for her.
THE VAGINA WORKSHOP
[A slight English accent]
My vagina is a shell, a round pink tender shell, opening and closing, closing and opening. My vagina is a flower, an eccentric tulip, the center acute and deep, the scent delicate, the petals gentle but sturdy.
I did not always know this. I learned this in the vagina workshop. I learned this from a woman who runs the vagina workshop, a woman who believes in vaginas, who really sees vaginas, who helps women see their own vaginas by seeing other women’s vaginas.
In the first session the woman who runs the vagina workshop asked us to draw a picture of our own “unique, beautiful, fabulous vagina.” That’s what she called it. She wanted to know what our own unique, beautiful, fabulous vagina looked like to us. One woman who was pregnant drew a big red mouth screaming with coins spilling out. Another very skinny woman drew a big serving plate with a kind of Devonshire pattern on it. I drew a huge black dot with little squiggly lines around it. The black dot was equal to a black hole in space, and the squiggly lines were meant to be people or things or just your basic atoms that got lost there. I had always thought of my vagina as an anatomical vacuum randomly sucking up particles and objects from the surrounding environment.
I had always perceived my vagina as an independent entity, spinning like a star in its own galaxy, eventually burning up on its own gaseous energy or exploding and splitting into thousands of other smaller vaginas, all of them then spinning in their own galaxies.
I did not think of my vagina in practical or biological terms. I did not, for example, see it as a part of my body, something between my legs, attached to me.
In the workshop we were asked to look at our vaginas with hand mirrors. Then, after careful examination, we were to verbally report to the group what we saw. I must tell you that up until this point everything I knew about my vagina was based on hearsay or invention. I had never really seen the thing. It had never occurred to me to look at it. My vagina existed for me on some abstract plane. It seemed so reductive and awkward to look at it, getting down there the way we did in the workshop, on our shiny blue mats, with our hand mirrors. It reminded me of how the early astronomers must have felt with their primitive telescopes.
I found it quite unsettling at first, my vagina. Like the first time you see a fish cut open and you discover this other bloody complex world inside, right under the skin. It was so raw, so red, so fresh. And the thing that surprised me most was all the layers. Layers inside layers, opening into more layers.
My vagina amazed me. I couldn’t speak when it came my turn in the workshop. I was speechless. I had awakened to what the woman who ran the workshop called “vaginal wonder.” I just wanted to lie there on my mat, my legs spread, examining my vagina forever.
It was better than the Grand Canyon, ancient and full of gra
ce. It had the innocence and freshness of a proper English garden. It was funny, very funny. It made me laugh. It could hide and seek, open and close. It was a mouth. It was the morning.
Then, the woman who ran the workshop asked how many women in the workshop had had orgasms. Two women tentatively raised their hands. I didn’t raise my hand, but I had had orgasms. I didn’t raise my hand because they were accidental orgasms. They happened to me. They happened in my dreams, and I would wake in splendor. They happened a lot in water, mostly in the bath. Once in Cape Cod. They happened on horses, on bicycles, on the treadmill at the gym. I did not raise my hand because although I had had orgasms, I did not know how to make one happen. I had never tried to make one happen. I thought it was a mystical, magical thing. I didn’t want to interfere. It felt wrong, getting involved—contrived, manipulative. It felt Hollywood. Orgasms by formula. The surprise would be gone, and the mystery. The problem, of course, was that the surprise had been gone for two years. I hadn’t had a magical accidental orgasm in a long time, and I was frantic. That’s why I was in the workshop.
And then the moment had arrived that I both dreaded and secretly longed for. The woman who ran the workshop asked us to take out our hand mirrors again and to see if we could locate our clitoris. We were there, the group of us women, on our backs, on our mats, finding our spots, our locus, our reason, and I don’t know why, but I started crying. Maybe it was sheer embarrassment. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life-consuming fantasy, that someone or something was going to do this for me—the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms. I was used to living off the record, in a magical, superstitious way. This clitoris finding, this wild workshop on shiny blue mats, was making the whole thing real, too real. I could feel the panic coming. The simultaneous terror and realization that I had avoided finding my clitoris, had rationalized it as mainstream and consumerist because I was, in fact, terrified that I did not have a clitoris, terrified that I was one of those constitutionally incapables, one of those frigid, dead, shut-down, dry, apricot-tasting, bitter—oh, my God. I lay there with my mirror looking for my spot, reaching with my fingers, and all I could think about was the time when I was ten and lost my gold ring with the emeralds in a lake. How I kept diving over and over to the bottom of the lake, running my hands over stones and fish and bottle caps and slimy stuff, but never my ring. The panic I felt. I knew I’d be punished. I shouldn’t have worn it swimming.
The woman who ran the workshop saw my insane scrambling, sweating, and heavy breathing. She came over. I told her, “I’ve lost my clitoris. It’s gone. I shouldn’t have worn it swimming.” The woman who ran the workshop laughed. She calmly stroked my forehead. She told me my clitoris was not something I could lose. It was me, the essence of me. It was both the doorbell to my house and the house itself. I didn’t have to find it. I had to be it. Be it. Be my clitoris. Be my clitoris. I lay back and closed my eyes. I put the mirror down. I watched myself float above myself. I watched as I slowly began to approach myself and reenter. I felt like an astronaut reentering the atmosphere of the earth. It was very quiet, this reentry: quiet and gentle. I bounced and landed, landed and bounced. I came into my own muscles and blood and cells and then I just slid into my vagina. It was suddenly easy and I fit. I was all warm and pulsing and ready and young and alive. And then, without looking, with my eyes still closed, I put my finger on what had suddenly become me. There was a little quivering at first, which urged me to stay. Then the quivering became a quake, an eruption, the layers dividing and subdividing. The quaking broke open into an ancient horizon of light and silence, which opened onto a plane of music and colors and innocence and longing, and I felt connection, calling connection as I lay there thrashing about on my little blue mat.
My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. I am arriving as I am beginning to leave. My vagina, my vagina, me.
VAGINA FACT
The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure. The clitoris is simply a bundle of nerves: 8,000 nerve fibers, to be precise. That’s a higher concentration of nerve fibers than is found anywhere else in the body, including the fingertips, lips, and tongue, and it is twice . . . twice . . . twice the number in the penis. Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semiautomatic.
—from Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier
BECAUSE HE LIKED TO LOOK AT IT
This is how I came to love my vagina. It’s embarrassing, because it’s not politically correct. I mean, I know it should have happened in a bath with salt grains from the Dead Sea, Enya playing, me loving my woman self. I know the story. Vaginas are beautiful. Our self-hatred is only the internalized repression and hatred of the patriarchal culture. It isn’t real. Pussys unite. I know all of it. Like, if we’d grown up in a culture where we were taught that fat thighs were beautiful, we’d all be pounding down milkshakes and cookies, lying on our backs, spending our days thigh-expanding. But we didn’t grow up in that culture. I hated my thighs, and I hated my vagina even more. I thought it was incredibly ugly. I was one of those women who had looked at it and, from that moment on, wished I hadn’t. It made me sick. I pitied anyone who had to go down there.
In order to survive, I began to pretend there was something else between my legs. I imagined furniture—cozy futons with light cotton comforters, little velvet settees, leopard rugs—or pretty things—silk handkerchiefs, quilted pot holders, or place settings—or miniature landscapes—clear crystal lakes or moisty Irish bogs. I got so accustomed to this that I lost all memory of having a vagina. Whenever I had sex with a man, I pictured him inside a mink-lined muffler or a red rose or a Chinese bowl.
Then I met Bob. Bob was the most ordinary man I ever met. He was thin and tall and nondescript and wore khaki clothes. Bob did not like spicy foods or listen to Prodigy. He had no interest in sexy lingerie. In the summer he spent time in the shade. He did not share his inner feelings. He did not have any problems or issues, and was not even an alcoholic. He wasn’t very funny or articulate or mysterious. He wasn’t mean or unavailable. He wasn’t self-involved or charismatic. He didn’t drive fast. I didn’t particularly like Bob. I would have missed him altogether if he hadn’t picked up my change that I dropped on the deli floor. When he handed me back my quarters and pennies and his hand accidentally touched mine, something happened. I went to bed with him. That’s when the miracle occurred.
Turned out that Bob loved vaginas. He was a connoisseur. He loved the way they felt, the way they tasted, the way they smelled, but most important, he loved the way they looked. He had to look at them. The first time we had sex, he told me he had to see me.
“I’m right here,” I said.
“No, you,” he said. “I have to see you.”
“Turn on the light,” I said.
Thinking he was a weirdo, I was freaking out in the dark. He turned on the light.
Then he said, “Okay. I’m ready, ready to see you.”
“Right here.” I waved. “I’m right here.”
Then he began to undress me.
“What are you doing, Bob?” I said.
“I need to see you,” he replied.
“No need,” I said. “Just dive in.”
“I need to see what you look like,” he said.
“But you’ve seen a red leather couch before,” I said.
Bob continued. He would not stop. I wanted to throw up and die.
“This is awfully intimate,” I said. “Can’t you just dive in?”
“No,” he said. “It’s who you are. I need to look.”
I held my breath. He looked and looked. He gasped and smiled and stared and groaned. He got breathy and his face changed. He didn’t look ordinary anymore. He looked like a hungry, beautiful beast.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said. “You’re elegant and deep and innocent and wild.”
“You saw that there?” I said.
<
br /> It was like he read my palm.
“I saw that,” he said, “and more—much, much more.”
He stayed looking for almost an hour, as if he were studying a map, observing the moon, staring into my eyes, but it was my vagina. In the light, I watched him looking at me, and he was so genuinely excited, so peaceful and euphoric, I began to get wet and turned on. I began to see myself the way he saw me. I began to feel beautiful and delicious—like a great painting or a waterfall. Bob wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t grossed out. I began to swell, began to feel proud. Began to love my vagina. And Bob lost himself there and I was there with him, in my vagina, and we were gone.
In 1993, I was walking down a street in Manhattan when I passed a newsstand and was suddenly struck by a deeply disturbing photograph on the front page of Newsday. It was a picture of a group of six young women who had just been returned from a rape camp in Bosnia. Their faces revealed shock and despair, but more disturbing was a sense that something sweet, something pure, had been forever destroyed in each of their lives. I read on. Inside the newspaper was another photograph of the young women, recently reunited with their mothers and standing in a semicircle in a gymnasium. There was a very large group and not one of them, mother or daughter, was able to look at the camera.
I knew I had to go there. I had to meet these women. In 1994, thanks to the support of an angel, Lauren Lloyd, I spent two months in Croatia and Pakistan, interviewing Bosnian women refugees. I interviewed these women and hung out with them in camps, cafés, and refugee centers. I have been back to Bosnia twice since then.
When I returned to New York after my first trip, I was in a state of outrage. Outraged that 20,000 to 70,000 women were being raped in the middle of Europe in 1993, as a systematic tactic of war, and no one was doing anything to stop it. I couldn’t understand it. A friend asked me why I was surprised. She said that over 500,000 women were raped every year in this country, and in theory we were not at war.