Unfortunately, the applause never came. Instead, there was some nervous laughter, followed by something along the lines of, ‘but obviously you want to go through it, right? I mean, jokes aside Rosie, it’s important for a woman to experience birth the proper way . . .’
He laughed, thinking I was kidding. I laughed, thinking he was kidding. Then as it slowly dawned on each of us that the other was dead serious, we managed to say an awkward ‘wait . . . what?’ in unison before a very tense silence took hold of the room.
Needless to say, we’re no longer together. But it did plant a nagging seed in my mind that I still find difficult to get rid of. Am I the only one? The only woman with no qualms about planning a c-section in order to avoid pain and keep my lady parts intact.
Is anyone else just not interested in pushing a baby out of their vagina?
My ex-boyfriend isn’t alone; I’ve had both male and female friends react strongly when I’ve told them my future c-section plan. To me (well, for me), it’s an absolute no-brainer. We no longer expect some poor chump to bite down on a leather strap and be brave while we amputate one of his limbs – so why do we still expect a woman to go through even worse agony to have a child? The hyperbolic rants I go on when I knock my elbow should be some indication of how I handle pain. Not well, evidently. I can’t imagine myself in the throes of baby delivering.
I think my birthing anxiety stems back to a book my mum left on the bottom shelf when I was in kindergarten. It was for expectant mothers and had lots of extremely graphic pictures of women with ’80s haircuts and twisted faces pushing out babies. And did I mention graphic?
All I knew was this thing I currently identified as a ‘wee-wee’ was eventually going to be ripped apart while I lay with my legs in the air on some bed of excruciating pain.
I’m guessing that’s the reason I’ve never associated childbirth as some kind of romantic female rite of passage. But don’t get me wrong; I absolutely respect the women who do want to give birth the old-fashioned way. In fact, I think any woman who gives it a go deserves some kind of prize (I know the baby should be prize enough and blah blah blah, but I’m thinking more an ASOS voucher).
In fact, any woman who gives birth in any kind of way deserves a prize (let’s not forget the residual pain of a c-section that many women love to remind me about); even those lottery-winning ladies of legend who orgasm during childbirth had to carry the thing around for nine months.
I guess the trick lies in finding a partner who has the same push values as you do. Because no matter what way a woman decides to remove an entire person from her body, that decision should be accepted with the utmost respect and enthusiasm (and absolutely no comment on your perceived notion of her level of ‘womanhood’).
I may not get the appeal of pushing; you may not get the appeal of having a massive gash healing across one’s stomach for months just to avoid labour. Does it matter? Everyone has a thousand sleepless nights and nappies to look forward to, so what’s the difference really?
I cringe a little reading it now, but all I really wanted was to make people laugh. Actually, because it was the internet and the internet is a cesspool of bored hatred trolls, it ended up making most people really angry, all of whom decided to send me an email. Which I fucking loved.
After that article, I sent Mamamia another, and another, and another. I was publishing on my blog quite frequently, and it was starting to build up a little following of its own. (No doubt helped by my friend Tonz tweeting things like ‘@JustinBieber and @SelenaGomez BABY? This source says so . . .’ followed by a link to my blog. I may have got a lot of clicks from disappointed tweens, but at least they were clicks.)
I loved being published. Every time I made people laugh, it was like fuel for my soul. I started to feel a little more confident, like maybe I could very cautiously think about putting myself back in the game, so I asked Jamila if I could come to Mamamia and do an internship.
I was nervous about my weight, but I wanted to write and Mamamia was giving me a chance, so when Jamila agreed, I put on my most stylish black muu-muu and went for it.
The only thing I remember about my first day is meeting Mia Freedman, the founder and publisher of Mamamia. She edited Dolly when I was reading Dolly, and then Cosmo when I was reading Cosmo. I had been looking at her face in magazines since I was a kid. And when she walked into the office and saw me, she knew my damn name. ‘Rosie!’ she exclaimed, arms opened wide for a hug. ‘I’m such a huge fan! I’m so glad you’re here interning!’ I was a little taken aback. Not only was Mia Freedman saying words to me that sounded a lot like my name, she had just given me a freaking hug.
We clicked straight away. She would single me out in editorial meetings, giving me way more to write than the other interns. We had inside jokes within about thirty seconds of knowing each other. After two weeks, I was offered a job as an editorial assistant. A few months later, I was promoted to editor of an entire section of the website.
I had taken a minor chance, and it had paid off in a major way. I went from hiding in my room, working in a call centre and watching TV, to being an editor at the biggest women’s website in the country. I went from Jamila literally having to drag me to drinks after work, to organising entire office social functions myself. I was starting to feel more like myself than I had in years. I was laughing again, and I was making other people laugh, which I loved more than anything.
But still, the weight. I couldn’t get the weight out of my mind. I was achieving so much, and I still felt worthless because of my damn weight. So, one night I wrote an article saying how depressed I was about how I looked. I admitted that I was fat, and included photos. I know the word ‘admitted’ sounds strange, because everybody who sees you obviously knows that you are. But I honestly thought that if I saw as few people as possible (and covered up around the ones I couldn’t avoid), nobody would ever have to know. Everybody would still think of me as ‘the old Rosie’, ‘the thin Rosie’, and in the meantime, I would lose the weight and they would be none the wiser.
So writing a piece about my obesity and the reality of how it had affected my life was a massively revealing moment for me. Having it published on Mamamia sealed the deal. I was fat. And now everybody knew.
I thought I would be mortified. After all, this was the exact humiliating situation I had been trying to avoid. But my world didn’t collapse. The majority of people weren’t horrible.
Old friends reached out to me and didn’t mention my weight at all. (I’m not sure what I was expecting. Probably something like: ‘Dear Rosie, you’re massive now. Gross. Regards, your old friend Jimmy.’)
Writing that piece and receiving such a positive reaction was like dipping my toe even further into the water of life. Inch by inch, I was stepping more into the game. I admitted I was fat and my world didn’t implode. People still read my writing, still thought I had value and something to offer regardless of my size. That was a big deal for me.
I started to have crazy thoughts, like maybe I deserved to be loved and valued in spite of my weight. I decided to make loving myself the goal, rather than weight loss. I began seeing an eating disorder specialist, who focussed on health and not size. And at that point in time, ‘health’ was getting me to a place where I felt good about myself, at any size. ‘Health’ for me was building my self-esteem, which for years had been nonexistent.
These were difficult concepts to comprehend, since women basically have it drummed into them from birth that their looks are the most important thing about them. But recalibrating what I considered worthy changed my life. I was a survivor, damn it. I had made it through a crazy childhood, worked incredibly hard to fix my mental health, got a degree and was now a popular writer at a major website. I began to write a lot about self-acceptance and self-love, and the importance of teaching girls that they are more than their appearance. I was finally kicking life’s arse! Who gave a fuck if I was fat?
I had that attitude, and was proud of myself for gett
ing there, until the day I realised I couldn’t wipe my own arse. I had finally come to love myself, but nobody wants to walk around with poo residue between their bum cheeks.
I’d also begun to notice that, working in media particularly, my looks were something that seemed to matter. Despite being surrounded by incredible women at Mamamia who loved me and supported me and gently coaxed me out of a very dark place in my life, despite my rising success, despite having what was probably the healthiest attitude towards my body and food in years, I couldn’t control what other people valued in me. And a lot of people only saw fat when they looked at me, which fucking sucked. It seemed so unfair, that after coming so far in my quest for self-acceptance, after jumping so many hurdles in an effort to love and value myself for the right reasons, there was still one hurdle that I would never have any control over: I could never control what other people valued about me.
Also, there was the whole bum-wiping thing.
So, reluctantly, I organised to get weight-loss surgery. I was so ashamed at the time, and so pissed off because I felt like I was doing it more for other people than for me. And even though a bunch of health reasons had contributed to my weight gain and made it difficult for me to lose weight naturally, I still felt like I was betraying people. I had gone through such an attitude transformation, and I had encouraged so many Mamamia readers to do the same. I waxed lyrical about ‘loving yourself no matter what’, and now I was sneaking off for five weeks to have eighty percent of my stomach removed. But whenever I felt like I was doing the wrong thing, or that I was betraying the self-love sisterhood, I reminded myself of one important fact: ‘Rosie. You can’t wipe your own goddamn arse.’
When I woke up from the surgery, I kept insisting my name was Oprah and demanding to know if I ‘was skinny yet’. I spent a week in hospital in a lot of pain, followed by three weeks at home (paid, because that’s the kind of brilliant boss Mia Freedman is), drinking nothing but clear liquids. It was hell. I cannot describe the torture that is desperately wanting to eat something, but physically not being able to. I mostly just sat in bed, feeling very sorry for myself, watching TV and dreaming about the steak that I would never eat again.
The next year was just as hard. It took months before I could even think about eating solid food, and even then, the tiniest amount would make me vomit. I felt sick all the time. I was scared to eat in restaurants, in case I suddenly needed to spew. There was also a lot of emotional fallout that came with throwing up being such a regular part of my life again, since I had worked so hard to stop doing that voluntarily. But I lost a ridiculous amount of weight, and will probably continue to do so. I don’t know exactly how much I’ve dropped, because I refuse to weigh myself. I don’t want that number to mean anything to me ever again.
I’m relieved, though, that I really took the time to learn how to love myself, because my body is definitely . . . different now. Losing weight quickly does things to you. Freaky things. I’m certainly a lot thinner, but everything is squishy and stretched and droopy now. My boobs look like two sandwich bags that have been half-filled with custard. My stomach is covered in stretch marks and hangs down like a sad roly-poly dog. I can take the skin under my arms and stretch it out like play dough. And let’s not even get into my droopy FUPA situation.
But I honestly don’t care. Coming to work at Mamamia gave me the confidence to learn that my weight and my body aren’t the most important things about me. Gaining ninety kilos was the experience that taught me to love myself. To really love myself. And that is probably one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me. Would it be nice to look like Gemma Ward? Sure. But I have an incredible brain and the ability to write, and I make people laugh pretty much every day. I wouldn’t give that up for anything. Those are the things I’ve learned to value. Also, I’m going to have the rare privilege of ageing without freaking the fuck out. I’ve already lived most people’s aesthetic worst nightmare – getting old is going to be a walk in the park for me.
And, I really can’t stress this one enough: it is such a fucking relief to be able to wipe my own arse.
Someone will play Jenga with your face and their penis, and you will consider it a sexual revolution.
I once scared a penis back inside itself.
I was trying so freaking hard to impress a guy with my brilliant sexual prowess that it had the opposite effect. One second his peen was there, and as soon as I tried to be sexy, it was gone. Not unlike when a turtle sees a predator and shoves his head inside the shell for safety.
I actually made a dick feel like it needed safety.
I was trying one of those Cosmo sex tips, and let me just put this out there right now: those tips do not fucking work. But of course, I was young, and because I was getting my sex advice from women’s magazines, I was yet to realise that sex had anything to do with my pleasure. For a really long time, as far as I was concerned, if the guy blew his load and made some kind of audible sound that indicated pleasure, then I had done my job and the sex was over. I could secretly get myself off later in the bathroom – the sex part was all about him.
It was that sad and ridiculous attitude that got me caught up in many unfortunate situations, all while trying desperately to please a man. The first of which was the pretty pink penis bow, which scared the penis back inside itself.
I was young – I think about a year out of high school. I was still with Josh, my lovely first boyfriend, and since we had been each other’s first, we’d done the thing all young people do when they realise their private parts connect – we tried to make our private parts connect in all the crazy ways we could think of. But, as is the way with all relationships, the initial passion, which results in you having sex anywhere there happens to be a horizontal surface, eventually wears off. And that’s when Josh and I found ourselves in a bit of a boring sexual routine.
So I did what any young, misguided woman was supposed to do when a sex problem was getting her down: I consulted a women’s mag. I was immediately informed that I was in what’s called a ‘sexual rut’.
I was also told that this was possibly the worst thing that could happen to any young lady who would like to hold on to her man. ‘Shit,’ I thought. ‘I’m a young lady and I’d like to hold on to my man.’ I actually hadn’t realised my man was trying to get away from me until the magazine told me so, but I suddenly became very desperate to make sure I kept him in my clutches.
I should point out here that I know all this is ridiculous. I know this now.
But back then, I had no clue what was what. It was my first proper relationship; I had no idea that the initial passion grows into something deeper and blah, blah, love, blah. All I knew was that the sex had gone from fifteen times a week to five and this magazine was telling me that was my fault. But, thank the Cosmo heavens, they also had a solution.
I can’t remember exactly what the article was called, but I’m sure it included the words ‘hot’ and ‘sizzling’ and lots of exclamation marks. And probably the word ‘blow’ in capital letters.
There was a bunch of very complicated tips I could use to keep my man. I picked the one I thought would be the cheapest (I was a student) and the simplest (I was terrified). Basically, I was instructed to find a bow, like the one you put on top of a gift box. Then, I was meant to tell my man I had a ‘present’ for him. My job was to get him excited by sending him texts all day reminding him of the aforementioned present. Then, when he was sufficiently excited, I had to tell him that it was time for his present, but first he had to lay down on the bed and close his eyes . . .
Then I was supposed to give him an erection (no explanation provided – just get him there). Once he was sufficiently aroused, I was to take the bow and put it on his penis. At that moment, he was finally allowed to open his eyes, and he would immediately look down to see his penis gussied up like a present.
That was when I was supposed to say something along the lines of ‘Surprise! Your present is a sizzling hot head job that wi
ll blow your mind!’ I can’t quite believe the level of naïveté that convinced me this would be sexy, but I went for it.
I texted Josh all morning about the ‘amazing’ present I had for him. But by the afternoon, I had lost interest in the game, so the texts trailed off and I forgot about the whole thing. So when he got to my house and demanded his amazing gift, I was a little thrown. ‘Oh . . . yeah,’ I thought. ‘That thing I was going to do . . .’ I told him to close his eyes.
‘Oh!’ he said, clearly excited now. ‘Is this a sexy present?’
‘Yep,’ I said, rummaging through my craft box, looking for a bow. I hadn’t planned this very well. Not only did I not have a bow handy, I was also wearing flannelette pyjamas. And I was tired and in no mood for giving a head job.
Actually, I was never in the mood to give a head job, really. Still not. Can we all just take a moment to acknowledge that giving head is the fucking worst? (It’s okay – you’re reading this in your mind right now so nobody has to know that you agree.)
I understand, as unjust as it is, that most ladies (and I suspect a lot of guys) feel like they can’t admit to having unpleasant feelings about sausage-shaped chunks of rigid flesh being shoved repeatedly into their mouths.
There seems to be a general feeling that one must pretend to enjoy performing oral sex or risk a life of loneliness, listening to Taylor Swift while getting into Twitter fights with people about Jennifer Aniston’s romantic future.
I get it. There’s pressure to conform. But this is a safe place, and I think we all just need to admit that eating penis isn’t enjoyable.
Don’t get me wrong – I totally accept that giving lady-head would be just as unpleasant an experience. I can’t imagine that having to swim through my pube garden would be easy by any means. But it’s all about doing something nice for someone else and taking one for the team. So while I understand that enjoyment can come from doing something that your partner enjoys, that doesn’t mean you have to actually enjoy the sweaty-balled, sperm-inducing act itself.
The Anti-Cool Girl Page 18