by Emilie Pine
For three decades I have lived within a silence that declares periods too embarrassing, too unwanted, too female to talk about out loud. I have done this for so long that I almost no longer notice it. Almost. But now I am sick of the silence and the secrecy and the warped idea that blood is taboo when it comes out of a vagina. Because it is just not fucking good enough. To hell with covering up, with being embarrassed, with being silent. For most of my life I have had a monthly period. For most of my life I have smiled through PMT and heavy flows and cramps. And for most of my life bleeding has been painful, physically and emotionally. And so for the rest of my life I will not be silent about it. I will talk it, write it, spill it. Blood will not just be my ink, it will be my subject.
I have a body that bleeds. Once a month it squelches, wet and hot, with blood. This blood runs out of the side of the pad, it stains the crotch of my jeans, it drips onto the bathroom floor when I forget to replace the tampon. It is inconvenient and messy and necessary and vibrant and drenching and awe-inspiring. And it is red. And it is loud. And it is mine.
OR, RATHER, IT WAS. If I felt shame at the onset of bleeding, those feelings are multiplied ten times over at its ending. I am filled with dread as I check my body, inserting a finger into my dry vagina to feel if there’s blood coming, in a parody of my teenage fear of pregnancy. Let there be blood. Lots of blood.
What do other women do when confronted with the ways their bodies change? My internal monologue used to complain about luxury tax on tampons, but now I’m nostalgic for those pubic-hair-ripping night pads. Of course, it’s not sanitary products that I’m really mourning. The gradual shift towards menopause – which started in my late thirties – is an incontrovertible sign that my body’s childbearing years are almost over. The fact that there was no actual childbearing (can you bear a miscarriage?) makes this an even greater loss. One I need to find a way to articulate.
When a friend mentions her menopausal symptoms, she half apologises. ‘No, keep talking,’ I say. I’m so grateful to her for saying it matter-of-factly – cramps, sweats, smelly discharge. Because I’m discovering that the greatest social embarrassment is not the one concerning periods, but the one that muffles and obscures the unproductive female body. We know the debates about HRT (or do we all just know there is a debate?), we know about hot flashes and night sweats, and we concede that maybe there’s a bonus to contraception-free sex. What is not said, or what I’m not hearing being said, is what it feels like. How the absence of blood feels. How your body starts surprising you. How what was wet is now dry. How what was vivid red is now brown or gone entirely. How it smells different. How it smells old.
And what are my symptoms? Orgasms can now give me cramps that could floor an elephant. My breasts look less … perky. I am too hot all the time. Except, of course, when I am too cold. PMT is worse, not better. There are days I experience what can only be called despair. And my bleeding is rare, unpredictable, unrecognisable. I get the occasional heavy day, a series of blood clots, a viscous, ferrous, tarry substance I can almost roll between finger and thumb. I look at this old blood on the toilet paper before I flush it away. This is my body. But it feels alien. I have to learn it all over again. I have to learn to be a woman who does not bleed.
One night last summer I had an argument with a friend who said we were middle-aged. He wore it as a badge of honour. ‘I’m not middle-aged,’ I said to him, over and over. Why did I defend this position so passionately? Perhaps because the signs that I am no longer young are unavoidable. Perhaps because the label ‘middle-aged’ was, for him, just a phrase, not an actual bodily change. Perhaps because if getting my period was ‘becoming a woman’, I fear that the end of my period is the end of being a woman.
AND THIS MAKES ME THINK AGAIN about what part of me – not just the rhythm of my life, but actually me, who I am – is constituted by my body. What does my body say about me? And what do I say about my body? I ask these questions of myself as if they can point the way forward as my body changes, as I accept that I am middle-aged, as I think about what being a woman means.
And it’s not only the internal signs of my femininity that I am suddenly analysing with newfound vigour. On a recent holiday I stayed in a hotel with full-length mirrored wardrobes. One morning after my shower, as I sat on the edge of the bed, the towel fell, and I saw my body, in its entirety, for the first time. As a teenager I had stolen my mother’s copy of Our Bodies Ourselves. I had read it avidly, turning the pages, riveted by its descriptions and diagrams of women’s bodies. But when I got to the section that recommended I look at my own body, my own vagina, I shut the book. Why on earth would I want to look at my vagina? Having never seen it, I assumed it was ugly. And, amazingly, I had never revised that assumption. Thirty years later, I opened my legs and I looked and I touched and I explored. And it was not ugly.
By some bizarre coincidence, on the flight home, as I skimmed through an airline magazine, a tasteful two-page monochrome spread caught my eye. It was an article on vulval health. I started to read. But quickly I realised that it was not about health at all: it was an ad for labiaplasty. The ad was aimed at women who felt their labia were too big, or too loose, or too unsightly. I turned the page. Later that month, as I flicked through a women’s glossy, I spotted another long article on labiaplasty. Though the tone was more sympathetic than that of the airline magazine ad, I was disheartened. I know that there are women for whom this is a necessary treatment, particularly post-childbirth. But these pieces were not aimed at those scenarios, these were advocating labiaplasty as a cosmetic procedure. I remembered back to my teenage self and my disgust at my own body. I remembered back to when I realised I had cellulite and how, at thirteen, I had added this fact to the list of things to hate about myself. I remembered all the battles over all the years that I had fought in order to accept my body on its own terms. But still I couldn’t help it – I read those ads and articles about labiaplasty and I wondered if I had to start hating myself all over again. Was I too big, too loose, too unsightly?
Women are well-rehearsed in the rituals of bodily self-appraisal. We look at the women around us, we look at ourselves, and we compare. Are we alike, are we superior, are we inferior? There is a terrible solidarity to this ritual, given that almost no woman can avoid it. It is like living with a negative cheerleader, this constant background hum that our bodies are not desirable, not acceptable, not normal.
These acts of negative self-comparison most frequently kick in when I look at the hair on my body. From my top lip to my armpits to my legs to my bikini line – I am hairy. And so for even longer than I have been bleeding, I have been shaving. And for almost as long, I have been regretting shaving. But it is not easy to stop. As a sixteen-year-old I rejected the razor, until a friend (clearly a frenemy, but we didn’t have the word back then) told me I was being ‘gross’. She said she did not want to be seen sitting next to me with ‘those legs’. I went back to shaving. Then, in my twenties, I gave it up again. It all went well until one hot day on a crowded subway train my hairy legs were spotted by several children. They pointed at me and cried. ‘Mummy,’ they asked, horrified, ‘is that a man?’ I smiled at their mother, but she would not meet my eye. I wish I could say I struck a blow for hirsute women everywhere, but I went back to shaving. And, actually, it came as a relief to end the experiment, to have bald legs once more like all the other women. I am torn, you see, between championing the cause of accepting women’s body hair and just wanting to fit in.
Sometimes there is no choice, though. I used to shave off the hair that grows in my armpits. But shaving aggravated my eczema, so much so that my skin would get red and raw and infected, and when it was really bad I had to have pus drained from my swollen and throbbing underarm. I have scars from those procedures. I say ‘scars’ because, each time, though the doctors warned me, I returned to shaving and the cycle of infection began again. I only ended that particular form of self-harm after I fainted while having a painful abcess lance
d.
Once I stopped shaving, I was initially ashamed of the hair that grew under my arms. I avoided sleeveless tops. When I had to wear a swimsuit, I kept my arms clamped to my sides. One of my friends told me, consolingly, that she thought the hair was sexy. It was a nice thing to say, but I knew she shaved hers, so it can’t have been that sexy. Nowadays I barely think of my hairy armpits at all. Until, that is, I see another woman, a woman with visibly smooth under-arms, and I realise that my body hair marks me out as different.
My difference came home to me recently when I found myself sitting and watching twenty naked women dancing. The dance was part of a theatre show aimed at challenging porn culture. The point of the naked dancing was to show women expressing themselves physically but not as sexual objects. It was all very good-spirited, and the women seemed to be having fun. So much so that when they asked for audience members to join them, I actually felt tempted. But then I looked again. And – here’s the thing – I realised that there was not a single full bush on display. I crossed my legs. Some of the women were neatly shaped, others had more elaborate designs, a few had barely any pubic hair at all. I was puzzled. After all, the women were dancing to defy the patriarchal gaze. So why were they waxed? And why were so many of them so very bare, in a show that supposedly confronted the beauty standards of porn? Of course, I hear you say, they were doing it for themselves. No doubt.
It does not matter that I think hair removal is a sadistic, time-consuming and expensive tax on women. It only matters that not fully paying this tax makes me weird. And so I scour magazines and social media in a quest to feel normal. Occasionally I find a public image of a woman with body hair and I feel the pure happiness that comes with external validation. It’s not just me! This other woman has hair too! We are a sisterhood of hair! But since it is still so rare for a woman to publicly display anything hairy at all, this sense of joy is equally infrequent.
When I look at women – whether they’re dancing naked onstage, or they’re in a magazine wearing a bikini – I do not really care if they are smooth or hairy. I do not care about their bodies and what they do with them. I do not care if they think hair is unsightly or unsexy. Because I am not really judging them, I am judging myself. I judge myself for not sufficiently grooming my pubic hair. I judge myself for not shaving my legs as often as I could. I judge myself for not shaving my underarms at all. I judge myself all the time. And this constant act of judgement is the most pointless thing I have ever done.
Sometimes, when I am in the company of more glamorous women, I wonder if I – a white, Western, middle-class, heterosexual, cis-gender woman – am a ‘proper girl’ at all. Just like that, ‘Am I a proper girl?’ I look from myself to the women around me and I feel that I do not measure up. And then that’s when I know that I am a girl, that I am proper. Because, of course, this paranoia, that I am not feminine enough, not desirable enough, not good enough, is the ultimate performance of femininity. This paranoia is a crucial part of how women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.
A FEW YEARS AGO, while travelling in South East Asia, I treated myself to a full body massage at a beauty salon. It’s kind of a funny story, and it may seem incongruous to tell it here, but bear with me. I didn’t speak the language and the salon staff didn’t speak English, but we smiled and nodded, and a young woman, my masseuse, led me to a private room. She gestured for me to get undressed. I shyly left my underwear on and, seeing this, she laughed. I took my pants off, tried not to think about how hairy I was, and lay on the table. And she started to stroke me, rubbing my sore muscles, and covering my skin with an aromatic paste. When she wrapped me in towels and left me to relax, I exhaled. Okay, I thought, this isn’t so bad.
Then I began to warm up. Heat up, really. The paste was spicy and itchy and hot. Within a few minutes, my skin was on fire. The towels were tucked too tightly and I quickly realised that I couldn’t move without the risk of throwing myself off the table onto the floor, and the floor looked kind of far away. Think of something else, I told myself. Something not itchy. But I couldn’t not think of the itch. ‘Breathe,’ I told myself, but the deep breathing made the fire burn hotter. I considered calling out for help, for the masseuse to come back and rescue me from being a spicy, itchy, giant kebab. But I imagined the staff’s wonder at my inability to enjoy – or endure – the treatment. How exposed would I feel then?
At last the masseuse returned to remove the towels. She helped me off the massage table and led me over to the corner of the room. Where she proceeded to hose me down. With cold water. I shuddered but said nothing, just smiled through teeth that were now chattering. And after I was dry and clothed and walking away, I actually felt great.
But I also felt something else, something unpleasant: I felt humiliated. Not by the staff, or the nakedness, or the paste, or even the hosing down. I was ashamed of my inability to call the masseuse back, to ask for help, to object to the cold water. Too scared of being perceived as weak, I had given up my power and my voice. And though the spicy massage was a unique event in my life, in some ways it was not an isolated occurrence. Because lined up right next to it are all the other examples of how I have acted as if my body is just too embarrassing. From the fear I have felt at revealing my period to a friend or a boyfriend, to the times I shaved under my arms for the sake of appearance, from the ridiculous to the health-threatening, I have repeatedly denied my body, its importance, and its pain. I have had sex without a condom because I simply could not say the word ‘condom’ out loud. I have stayed silent during a smear test, trying to ignore the pain caused by a badly wielded speculum. I have stayed equally silent, refusing to allow myself to cry out, during an excruciating cervical ultrasound, as if I thought my silence might improve the test results.
And I have risked a cancer diagnosis because I could not take my top off. No, that’s not true. I could take my top off, but I could not treat what was under it as important. In the shower one morning I felt a lump. I looked up ‘breast exam’ on the internet and I compared my breast to the one on the screen and I read the description of what a lump felt like and I knew that something was wrong with me. And then, for more than six months, I did nothing. I was afraid it was cancer. But instead of being motivated by that fear, instead of going to the doctor, I stayed quiet. I did not tell my family, my friends, or my boyfriend of the time. And when I finally went for a biopsy, I did so alone. I got lucky. It was benign.
Why do I let embarassment silence me? And why is it so hard for me to treat my body well? Perhaps it is because I associate having a female body with suffering. From the first day that I bled, and I felt crap, and I said nothing, I have gritted my teeth and borne it because I believe that’s what other women do, that’s what women are expected to do. Because, as a woman, my body is supposed to be a site of pain. And pain is something women are meant to be silent about, from the pain of bleeding to the pain of waxing to the pain of not measuring up. Our pain is not important. Our bodies are not important. Pain is the real tax we pay, and poor health is the dividend we reap.
AS I THINK ABOUT THE CONFLUENCE of bodies and silence, I remember back to when pain was something to talk about, when our bodies were the subject of a show-and-tell. Aged seven, I would roll up my trouser leg and narrate the scars – from the dog bite, or from jumping off the shed roof, or from the rusty nail scratch that got infected. Those childhood scars were not just signs of pain, but badges of honour, external proof of internal daring. But as adults our biographies have become rational stories in which we focus on what’s in our heads and ignore what’s inscribed on our bodies. We might roll up metaphorical sleeves and talk about our heartbreak, our sadness, or our stress. But our bodies are silent, and I think this is perhaps as true for men as it is for women.
It is time to recapture the childhood acceptance of our bodies as a sign of who we are, of what we have done. My body is healthy, it has survived some challenges. It is a body that makes me feel good more than it makes me feel bad. My body
enables me to do things. My cellulite thighs are strong, they have carried me up mountains, and I love them. And when I see my lumpectomy scar, a pale white line across my right breast, it makes me happy. The scar is not a sign of weakness, it is a symbol of how I reclaimed my body. I need this scar because I need the reminder that I am the owner of this body.
Sometimes it is hard to look in the mirror. Sometimes it takes years – in my case, decades – to look at ourselves fully. Sometimes the most courageous thing is to look at ourselves without mirrors at all. This kind of nakedness takes work. Getting naked, after all, is not just about how we look on the outside, but admitting how we feel on the inside about how we look on the outside. It is about reversing the dialogue, about throwing out the pretence that I am small and flat and quiet. It is about recognising that my body is not a source of grief, but that all too often the story I have told about it is.
What if my body could tell the story?
What would it say?
I think it would talk about blood. Its mesmerising flow and its ebb. About ending and renewing. I think it would talk about the touch of my fingers and my hands and another’s lips. The feel of skin on skin. Wet and slow. Soft and hard. The shock of cold, the pleasure of warmth. I think it would talk about the delight of orgasm and the delight of laughter and the delight of sating hunger. About tasting sharp and spicy, soothing and creamy. I think it would talk about looking out and pulling in. I think it would talk about perfume and stink. About clean and dirty. I think it would talk about illness and recovery, about fortitude and growth. I think it would talk about loss and grief. About standing solo and holding together. About longevity and transformation. About satisfaction. About happiness. About joy.