That Takes Ovaries!

by Rivka Solomon

  From the beginning, the store attracted a wide range of customers, from heterosexuals who heard about us through the grapevine to lesbian couples who lived in the area. Lots of men, eager to learn about sex from a woman’s perspective, came in alone, too. I admit, I got a certain perverse pleasure out of talking with customers about “shocking” things, like dildos and masturbation, in a no-nonsense, straightforward way. And it was a relief for others to realize they could talk about those things. No one I spoke to about my work and mission was so conservative that they couldn’t at least respect what I was doing. Most, in fact, sang my praises. Mine was an idea whose time had come. It had been a sexual wasteland for women out there. My clean, well-lighted store, a discreet shop with nice curtains, was an oasis.

  One of my favorite memories from those early days is of a man who came in one afternoon when I was the only one working. He walked over to my one little shelf of books and stood in front of it for the longest time, totally still, with just his head moving back and forth looking at the titles. After a while, I started to feel slightly nervous. Is this guy a creep? I wondered. We did get those from time to time. Just as I was working up the nerve to ask if I could help, the man turned to face me and said in an awed voice, “I can’t believe I’ve gotten to be thirty-six years old and I obviously still don’t know the first thing about sex.”

  “Well,” I responded heartily. “You’ve come to the right place.”

  joani blank’s San Francisco store did not fold within a year. Instead, it expanded to include a very popular mail-order service and a second location. In an unusual move, Joani (www.joaniblank.com) restructured GV to be a worker-cooperative so that each loyal employee became an equal owner. GV now has close to seventy owners, and grossed close to $10 million last year. You can buy your very own vibrator at www.goodvibes.com

  Declawing Catcalls

  julia acevedo

  The Saturday after Thanksgiving is a real pain if you’re in retail. But there I was, working on the busiest shopping day of the year, and on what was supposed to be my day off, too. It was a bad, bad Saturday. I was pushed, shoved, yelled at, and on my feet since opening at 7:00 that morning. By 2:00, I was ready to deck a few halls, not to mention a few surly customers. Stella, my sympathetic manager, took pity and gave me the rest of the day off. I had to relax. I needed coffee.

  It was chilly outside and I tugged at the thin sweater I wore and smoothed my skirt against my legs. Stella liked the store tropically warm; anything more than a bikini was overkill. But now that I was outside… brrr. I slung my purse over my shoulder and headed for the corner coffee shop. That’s when I saw, halfway between me and the café at the other end of the block, the group of men standing in the middle of the sidewalk as if they owned the universe.

  These guys were unreal. There were usually a dozen or so of them standing in front of the bar, their home away from home. Within the thirty-five to sixty-five age range, they smoked cigars, talked loudly, guffawed like donkeys, and made wild gestures when they conversed with one another. At work, we called them “those guys,” and I avoided them whenever I could because, frankly, they were kind of scary. In their dark glasses, shiny suits, and black leather jackets, they looked and sounded like escapees from a Martin Scorsese movie. But, alas for them, because I was in a mood, I had to (wanted to!) walk right through them.

  As I got closer, I kept my stride even. I was thinking they could probably smell fear. When I was within ten feet, they all stopped talking and turned to stare. The congregation parted like the Red Sea so I could pass, and more than a dozen pairs of eyes burned holes into me. At one point I was surrounded, which was so intimidating because not one of them said a word. I became very conscious of myself and felt awfully small and alone.

  I walked the disturbing gauntlet in total silence. After I passed, I heard the Oooo, babeeeee’s and kissy-kissy noises start up. One even said, “That is one BEE-YOO-TEE-FULL piece of ass.”

  Now before I go on, you should know one thing about me: All my life I was taught that “nice” girls never spoke up or voiced an opinion about anything, even things that were bothering them. That was how I was raised. But the last line—that one specific line—was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It filled me with a blinding, unstoppable fury that had to be released. I’d been taking abuse from harried holiday shoppers all day, and now I had to listen to this crap from these bastards … and just let it slide? Absolutely not. I stopped in my tracks and turned to face them.

  Heated blood surged through my body. I felt my skin flush and my eyes narrow. I planted my feet apart, put my hands on my hips, and asked, “Did one of you assholes just call me a BEE-YOO-TEE-FULL piece of ass?”

  They certainly weren’t expecting this response. They looked incredibly surprised I had said anything at all.

  “How dare you talk to me like that. You don’t even know me! What gives you the right to talk to anyone like that? How would you feel,” I continued, “if someone talked that way to your daughters? Well, I’m somebody’s daughter, too, and I demand the same consideration.”

  I know, it sounds a bit Thelma-and-Louise-ish, but I stared them down, daring any one of them to say or do anything. But they didn’t. It was as if they were frozen in shock, so I turned to go. I was a bit shaky—standing up to more than a dozen catcalling freaks all by myself was something I would normally never do—but I also felt this incredible rush from what I had just done, and I certainly wasn’t cold anymore. The whole thing was strangely exhilarating.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said a voice behind me.

  I spun around and spat, “Why, did you think of a clever comeback, like ‘Nice tits,’ maybe?”

  I looked at the man who’d spoken: about forty-five, dark eyes, dark hair, black jeans, black leather jacket. This one probably thinks he’s Fonzie, I thought, and suppressed an amused smile. He raised his hands to his chest in a palms-out gesture and said, “We are sorry we offended you. Some of us don’t know how to behave around ladies, see. That stuff you said, you’re right. We have no right to say things like that to you, okay? We’re sorry we disrespected you.”

  “You shouldn’t disrespect anyone like that.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Spokesman-for-the-Group. “And I apologize. We all apologize.”

  I looked at him over the tops of my sunglasses, and then into the eyes of the silent, nodding others. Now it was my turn to be shocked at their response. At last I said, “I accept your apology.”

  Long story short, over the next few months I got to know all of “those guys,” and they got to know me, and now we are friends. Sometimes they can annoy, but aside from the occasional “doll” or “sweetheart,” they have now learned some manners; they call me by my name and give me the respect I deserve. And that is the most important thing.

  julia acevedo now believes “nice” girls shouldn’t wait for the last straw before they speak their minds. Nice girls have mouths, and they should learn to use them. Early, loudly, and often.

  MTV, Bite Me!

  sabrina margarita alcantara-tan

  “Wanna be part of a rock video?”

  I was pretty excited about this call from my casting agency, since the band doing the video was one of the biggest heavy-metal groups in the country and I really liked their music. They needed a bunch of girls to drink beer, get wasted, and essentially trash a house. Hey, I can do that.

  The next day I dressed in the required gear—’80s rock sleaze—and was driven to a house purchased specifically to be trashed for the video. It was deep in the boonies, a remote area of Brooklyn. In the chilly November air, I joined other extras lined up at the catering booth, got some veggie gumbo, and went to a side tent where power heaters warmed our freezing butts. There, we waited to be called for a scene.

  I looked around. Though there were more than a hundred of us, I noticed immediately, and was not surprised, that I was one of only a few women of color. Many extras were in jeans; some wore revealing cutout tops a
nd pants. The more glamorous-looking ones sported leather pants, cowboy hats, and high-heeled boots.

  A handful of girls from the shoot the night before had been called back for another day’s work. One, a major glam girl with lip gloss slathered on her mouth and her hair teased up, was standing around, so I decided to find out what was happening.

  “Hey,” I said, “is the band in the house?”

  She gave me a haughty look. “No, they were here yesterday. Today it’s just the girls.”

  I was disappointed but still excited.

  As the day wore on, lots of us, including me, still weren’t called. When we saw a few women coming back after doing scenes, we all crowded around and asked what they had done.

  “Did you start wrecking the house?” asked a woman in black suede boots.

  “No,” answered one of the returning women, looking tired.

  “We just made out with the other girls and then they sent us back to makeup for more lipstick.”

  Made out? I was confused, and curious enough to leave the warm tent and brave the cold to check out what was happening in the house.

  I saw two mixed-Asian gals standing before a group of white guys. One of the men was yelling and gesturing. Then both women took off their shirts and pressed up against the wall in a tight embrace, kissing. The men ran around filming for a few minutes before waving the women away.

  “What was that about?” I asked as the women approached me.

  “I don’t know,” answered one. “I guess the director is some famous European dude, and he got this great inspiration yesterday to do a lesbian sex thing for the video.”

  “Are you okay with it?” I asked.

  She looked embarrassed. “I guess,” she muttered. “It felt kind of awkward. I didn’t really want to do it, but you know …” Her voice trailed off.

  I found out the video was originally supposed to showcase the band playing in the house with all these women hanging off them, kinda like a whorehouse … and it gets better. They’d also had a bunch of hard-looking biker guys, but they were fired when the director experimented with having two women make out, and thus the direction of the video blossomed.

  Back in the tent, women who had already done scenes were telling their stories to the rest of the extras. A few looked like they were about to cry.

  “It’s not just kissing,” reported one girl. “They’re having us do heavy petting now, like real sex stuff.”

  Other women nodded and added their two cents.

  “They told me we were just going to trash a house.”

  “Yeah, they told me that, too.”

  “Where are they going to show this video, anyway? This is soft-core porn.”

  “I signed a release. They can show my image anywhere,” a punk girl said, and started crying. “I was just in a scene where I was pulled towards this girl and told to make out. They didn’t say what they wanted me to do until they started shooting. I felt pressured to do it.”

  “I don’t know if I want to do this anymore,” said a woman near me. “I think I might go home.”

  “How?” demanded another woman. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Do you know where the closest subway stop is?” Most of us shook our heads.

  Just then the production supervisor, a short woman with headgear attached to her walkie-talkie, pushed her way into the tent and called my name and three others. We were led to a room and left there. I was trying to figure out how I felt about the whole setup. Unlike a lot of the others, I had no problem kissing girls. But I felt bad for the straight women: They’d never kissed girls before, and now they looked traumatized, being made to do it for the first time with total strangers, in front of all these guys. Besides, did I want to be part of a bunch of straight white boys’ sick lesbo fantasy?

  Though I still felt some of the thrill of being in a real live music video, it was fading fast.

  When a production person came in, I asked, “Am I expected to pull my pants down for this scene?” He nodded. “Then I’m out of here,” I said, making up my mind. “Who do I talk to?”

  “The production supervisor,” he said.

  I went back to the tent and spoke with the other girls who were also feeling uncomfortable. Dozens of us decided to voice our complaints to the supervisor as one united front.

  First she tried to convince us we were turning down the chance to be Art. “The director is brilliant,” she said. “This video is his vision of the world’s chaos culminating in a lesbian group-sex scene.”

  Great, I thought. Lesbian sex is part of the world’s chaos?

  “If you walk off, you’re not getting paid,” the supervisor insisted.

  I was livid and reaching my boiling point: Some of the girls are crying. This is enough already!

  Together, as a group, we argued with the supervisor: “You brought us to the middle of nowhere and then pressured us to perform sexual acts that were not in the job description. We’ve been here since 11:00 A.M.” It was now 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. “You are going to pay us.”

  In the end, with fifty women crowding around her and demanding to be paid, the supervisor gave in. She paid us and arranged a van to take us home. By the time we were dropped off in Manhattan, we all felt as if we’d known each other for years. As the van pulled away, we broke into a group scream, howling out our frustration and triumph in the cold city night.

  sabrina margarita alcantara-tan (bamboogirl@aol.com) is an adventurous New York gal and editrix of Bamboo Girl zine (www.bamboogirl.com), a publication hell-bent on empowering young women of color, especially those of Asian descent.

  Spreading My Legs for Womankind

  molly kenefick

  Ever wonder how doctors learn to do pelvic exams? Well, I can answer that question for more than six hundred medical students: I taught them—on my body.

  At some medical schools, students learn to do the exam on cadavers, women under anesthesia, or with “pelvic models” (women who function simply as bodies for professors to demonstrate on). Students on the campuses where I teach learn from “pelvic educators,” women who instruct students in anatomy, physiology, palpation techniques, and various emotional and cultural issues that arise in a clinical setting.

  When I first heard about the job, it sounded amazing. I’d already been working to overcome negative feelings about my body (the same body-image crap most women internalize growing up in our culture), and this seemed like a good next step. More important, I felt that teaching future doctors to do sensitive, thorough pelvic exams could positively impact the lives of many female patients down the line. I thought of Joan Rivers’s joke that there should be a commemorative stamp of a woman on an examining table, feet in the footrests, to honor those who keep their annual appointments. I remember thinking at the time, Joan is right: Many women do dread the exam. But it shouldn’t have to be horrible. Now, years later, I take pride in teaching my students the many details that can make an exam a positive, comforting experience.

  I was scared at first. I’d take the hospital gown into the bathroom to change, and then climb onto the table, holding the johnny tight to make sure nothing extra was exposed. I felt shy about opening my legs to strangers (especially without any foreplay!), so as I did this, I avoided looking students in the eyes. I steeled myself by acting nonchalant and businesslike, and held onto the idea that this was important to women. Now, after six years, I simply turn my back to change (yes, in front of students), wrap a sheet around me, and casually hop onto the table.

  Working with two to four students at a time, I first go over psychosocial issues. I tell them that though their patient may be an adult, it could be her first exam. I suggest they offer her a hand mirror so she can see what they are doing, and that they explain what they’re doing as they do it. We discuss asking questions without making assumptions about a patient’s sexual orientation or practices; looking for signs of sexual abuse, and, if they suspect it, how to handle it; words patients use to describe their anatomy; and c
ulturally specific sexual customs.

  Then it’s time for the physical exam. I undress from the waist down and sit on the exam table, feet in the footrests (“Not stirrups; it’s not a saddle”). I teach draping technique (“Expose only the area you will be examining”), the physician’s first touch (“Put your hands by the outside of her knees, and ask her to bring her knees to meet your hands—that way she touches you first”), and subsequent touch techniques (“Clinical touch should feel as different from sexual touch as possible”). We start with the external exam, checking beneath the pubic hair for redness, lice, and scabies (“Don’t mention lice and scabies unless she has them”). The external exam includes inspecting the vulva, perineum, and anus (“Always avoid touching the clitoris”).

  The internal exam is next. I teach them to insert an index finger to find my cervix and check my glands for infection and my vaginal walls for laxity. I demonstrate how to put in and open the speculum (“Warm it first, for patient comfort”). Then we view the cervix (a first sighting and a thrill for most students) and practice the Pap smear.

  Next, the bimanual exam. With two fingers inside me, a student checks for cervical tenderness and feels for the uterus. The outside hand palpates the abdomen, pushing down toward the inside fingers. The most rewarding part for students is finding an ovary (yet another first), which feels like an almond hidden under layers of pastry dough (“The number of layers depends on how much pastry I’ve eaten”). Lastly, a student inserts one finger in my rectum, another in my vagina. They are often surprised at how much better they can feel my uterus from two angles.

  In separate sessions with students, I also teach breast exams. The first time I did this, I looked at my 38-C breasts (heavy and pendulous: nipples soft, not pert) and wished they were perkier. Then I thought, Who the hell looks like a centerfold in real life? I’m a real woman, and this is what women look like. More important, this is what their patients will look like. My self pep talk ended with: You’re healthy. Get over it. Focus on the work.