The vagina rants

I still find it strange to say the word ‘vagina’. It’s actually a beautiful sounding word, I don’t know why it feels strange to say vagina, which is beautiful, but there’s no strangeness when I use another word, ‘cunt’, which I do, frequently. Cunt is an uglier word, but with it’s own beauty, it is also full of power. I wonder why the beauty of the word vagina scares me a little, still, while the ugliness of ‘cunt’ is appealing.

My super-religious upbringing dictated a kind of fear and, I suppose, disgust – dressed up as respect and honour. Vaginas had to be shaved or plucked, for ‘cleanliness’, for ‘purity’, but really it’s about control and invading boundaries. Is hair dirty or impure? Why weren’t we instructed to shave our eyebrows or our heads? It’s not hair they consider impure or unclean, it’s the vagina itself. The womanliness of it. The implicit messages that get internalised – the ones that aren’t said – those are very telling. What does it say about a culture that expects young girls (& boys too, to be fair) to start thinking of even the little things that happen to our bodies naturally as a part of becoming an adult as dark, foreboding, sinful – to be ripped out & disposed of? What fear must have dictated this loathing? To see something so ugly in nature’s beauty? They want to infantilise us all, they want little girls, not women. Grim.

A little bit of blood changes you in the eyes of these fuckturds too. Suddenly, because of some little red drops, you become an impurity. Too impure to stand and pray in front of God (if that’s your thing – it was never mine – I used to fake my periods in school to get out of prayers), if you’re married, too impure/disgusting to have sex with (I faked my periods in my first marriage too – guess why). You can’t be touched or be considered clean enough to touch again or be in a pure or holy place until you’ve ritually washed away whatever it is they are so afraid of. Womanliness is so threatening to them and I wonder what womanliness means to them that makes it so. How they have polluted vaginas in the minds of the people. How cowardly.

For some, who are the most afraid of womanliness and vaginas and what they mean, their best defence is attack. The cutting & destruction of the clitoris, the only bit of humanity made only for pleasure. Horror and revulsion at womens’ pleasure leads those in fear of it to destroy it in desperately cruel ways. I think those people see women as big walking vaginas. Nothing but the sum and an extension of their vaginas. Or perhaps, it’s not so much fear, as jealousy. Who knows what goes on in the minds of those women hating psychosociopaths?

 

The first cut was the deepest (the imaginary circumcision that was)

Since https://mascarastreaks.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/a-strange-post-my-imaginary-circumcision/

I’m still processing things and am a little headfucked.

As the indignity of having (albeit a very lovely) doctor shining a light between my legs & peering and poking and prodding me unfolded, I was under the impression that this indignity would just confirm that I might be a bit over-imaginative and anxious.

In spite of my worries leading me to the doctor, I was VERY BLOODY SURPRISED to find out that my suspicion that everything wasn’t quite right down there, was not something created by my imagination, but something that was done to my child-body. I thought I may have been cut, I thought that perhaps a part of my clitoris had been cut out, but I was not right about that. My clitoral hood had been stitched over my clitoris.

Man, I still can’t believe I’m writing that – perhaps I’m in shock still. Am not sure how I process this. I do not think that it was my parents or done with their knowledge, but by relatives in one of the countries that I am from, over the summer when I was 7 or 8. It makes sense of some of the memories I have from a particular summer I spent there (I was sent there to stay with relatives & learn the culture/religion every summer). I’ll maybe talk about that another time, when my mind is less headfucked.

Gen-it-al mu-til-a-tion the words sound and feel so ugly in my head and my mouth. I know I’m so angry, I’m so humiliated, I’m so violent, I’ve been robbed. But I can’t feel. I can just sense myself, I can’t feel yet. I’m too scared to feel. I’m so betrayed. I’m so ashamed, but am not letting myself be ashamed, it’s not me that should be, but I am, somehow (I just can’t feel it, just sense it). The rage is somewhere & I’m worried about when I will feel it.

It seems strange that my immediate reaction was relief when the lovely doctor told me. Relief that my clitoris was there (typing that sentence feels like an indignity & a humiliation), relief that I hadn’t been cut in the way that I’d imagined. The type of mu-til-a-tion (argh!) that I suffered is of the most minor variety in female genital mutilation. What a fucking sentence. The most minor type – none of is minor. Child abuse is not minor, in anyway. I posit that any child abuse that involves their genitals is child sex abuse, actually. What kind of adults are interested in the genitals of kids (unless it’s for some medically necessary reason?)? Huh? It is very fucked up. Am so violated. Meh. I can’t imagine how those women who have had more brutal mutilations than me must feel if I’m feeling this bad. I’ve felt the joy of orgasms (even if I can’t at the moment due to headfuck) and I don’t know of a more fulfilling feeling than an orgasm with the someone(s) you love. Imagine not knowing what that felt like? Instead of pleasure, to only feel pain or fear of pain? I can’t. I know I’m being a little orgasm-centred right now, but they’re on my mind, because they’re not in my body.

I’m usually a woman of many words, but I don’t know what to say or what to think. I have been using the word cunt quite a lot for the last couple of weeks. Not as satisfying as it usually feels.

Boobie Prize

Ah, be still my beating breast… My beautiful beating betraying breast.

Which has a lump in. A small lump, but it’s size is entirely disproportionate to the amount of anxiety it has awakened within me. I keep telling myself, this shock could ultimately be a good thing, that it might be the kick up the backside I need to figure out what I want to do in life & to go for it – make the most of it, more often. But mostly, my mind is filled with fear, and betrayal, by my own body.

On Christmas Eve, I’ll be at the hospital while I have my boobie poked & prodded by clinical strangers, something necessary that I absolutely hate. I feel alienated by my own body & I know it’s about to be violated, even if it is for my own good. For some reason, I can’t shake this sense of self-violation – especially after having my home burgled a couple of weeks ago. First, my home violated, now my body will be too. Not sure what to do to shake this feeling, I want my autonomy back.

I feel strangely proprietorial over my own flesh, too. If they take some of the lump out, what will they do with it? I want it back. Strange to think that there’s a living part of me that will be extracted. A small part of me will be dead. A small part of what it’s suppose to be to be a woman. Will I be diminished in some way. Will I miss it? I already feel haunted by this phantom bit of my now-still-living breast.