A Tale of Two Trampolines; Also, Vaginas

My goodness, reading the news is hard. All day, every day, I engage myself in the tedious and unprofitable business of news-reading, attempting to extricate some random series of coherent thoughts from it in order that I might bore you, the reader.

Sometimes, when I am reading the news, I read Jezebel, or Salon! Today, Rebecca Traister and the fine publications mentioned above have done me a service: they have provided an article about TMI(ASV) or, for the acronym-illiterate amongst us, Too Much Information (About Some Vagina).

Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation... Other recent, mainstream expressions of the form have included Elle magazine's brutal piece last summer by Miranda Purves, called "The Ring of Fire," about how giving birth to her child tore her vagina asunder. An English translation of Charlotte Roche's German bestseller "Wetlands" ("It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel," read a story in the New York Times about "Wetlands," "and hard to describe in a family newspaper") is due in April. It opens with the sentence, "As far back as I can remember, I have had hemorrhoids." And this month, a younger iteration of the lay-it-bare form: the publication of "My Little Red Book," an anthology of more than 90 women's stories of the first time they got their period.

Oh, thank God. Finally, I can stop trying to understand what happened with Tom Daschle (back taxes?) and get back to thinking about what all girls love to think about most: their periods!

Periods, as you may have heard, are scary and stinky and un-sexy and drive you clinically insane, which is why whenever you are angry with a dude you must be having one. They also, according to landmark feminist novel The Mists of Avalon, allow you to bewitch and kill a man with your dark magic. Yet chicks are writing about them now! Who would have thought?

Yep, chicks love period talk. They also love white leggings, or did in rural Indiana circa 1995, which is where I was vacationing when my two older female cousins decided to invite some boys (including one my age, for potential making-out purposes: his name was Chet, he had a trampoline) to their majestic rambling farmhouse so that we could watch Speed, and made me wear said white leggings so that I would not scare the boys away with my decidedly un-sexy pants. Oh, God, white leggings. Leggings, which were white, worn in the place of pants. Guys liked them! Or so my cousins explained. I went with it, but there was terror in my soul.

At that time, I had been having my period for a year, in Imaginationland, and also in the lies I told my cousins and any other girls who wanted to compare stats. In reality, I was thirteen, and periodless, and therefore convinced that I was a barren freak, a Benjamin-Button-style womanchild whose body would never reach the ripe flower of sexual maturity. The lies were meant to spare my family and friends the stark reality of my fate. Also, other girls kept talking about their periods, and I didn't have one, and was jealous.

I got a stomachache while watching Speed. Whatever. Maybe I was caught up in the pulse-pounding action! Maybe I was nervous about sitting next to Chet! He had a trampoline, after all: would I ever see it? If I saw it, would we make out? How would that work? Was I, perhaps, sexually aroused by the prospect? Nobody had ever told me what getting turned on was supposed to feel like, just that you'd know it when it happened, which seemed like a cheat to me; at least boys got boners, like their penises waving "hi" and letting them know what was up, whereas I would just have to make out with people until I felt some thus-far-undefined sensation. Abdominal pain seemed as likely as anything else. Also, I'd heard there was moisture involved, and I was definitely starting to feel some of that going on in the old white leggings. Yep: I was turned on by Chet, I decided. We were going to do it. Probably on a trampoline. The prospect seemed less thrilling than one might hope.

As I pondered the inevitable and rapidly approaching loss of my virginity to Chet, I decided to get a Coke from the refrigerator. Did Chet want one, I inquired? He did. We'd been together for such a short time, and yet I had already demonstrated my essentially giving and generous nature. In our relationship, Chet would always have Coke. So I stood before him, ready to make the long walk to the refrigerator that had come to symbolize our love.

Now, Speed is a violent movie. People get blown up. Dennis Hopper is beheaded. This, at first, is what I thought Chet was reacting to, for the look of raw horror on his face was something I had never before seen in man or boy. You know that scene in The Shining, where the twins are like, "come play with us, Danny - come play with us forever," and then they're all bloodied, and then a tidal wave of blood gets aimed right at Danny's face? Well, that was what my vagina had done to Chet.

"Ummm?" Chet squeaked at me, and then I looked down.

"Oh, that's my period!" I said. My cousins' eyes reached maximum censorious boggling width. One of them shook her head slightly, warning me off this disastrous course, as I proceeded to wow Chet by dropping some menstrual knowledge. "Well, it happens every month, you know! It's totally natural, all girls my age have one. It just means that you can get pregnant! Well, I guess I'd better go put in a tampon now!"

Reader, I put in a tampon. And lo, I have been putting in tampons these many years since. Nor have I ever lost the sense of gratitude I had that day. I was not a freak. I did not have to sleep with Chet. Neither I nor anyone else would ever again be forced to wear those hideous white leggings. The thing that I had been fearing and coveting for two years had finally happened - and it didn't hurt as much as I'd been told, it didn't make me crazy, it wasn't terrible or wonderful, it was so fundamentally unremarkable that I didn't even know it had happened. Once upon a time, I had no period; now, I had a period. It didn't change me. It was just there.

Which is why girls talk and write about it, often in a detailed and explicit way. It's just there. Vaginas are not the mystical dictators of a woman's inner experience; they just happen to be around. The shame or fear or worship of anything related to the vagina, the mystification and heaping of positive or negative values on it, is fundamentally silly, like being scared of your left ankle. TMI? Oh, spare me. There are nine million articles published daily about women's skin and hair and teeth and noses and waistlines and upper arms and every other part of their bodies; assuming that the vag is the one unspeakable thing, or demanding that we always present it as a clean perfect man-pleasing baby-making machine, only contributes to women feeling estranged from their own experience.

There was only one regret I really had about the incident of the white leggings: I never got to see Chet's trampoline. I rued that one for a while. Then, a year later, my family got one, and it was all OK.

BREAKING: Lily Allen, I Apparently Had Exact Same Childhood

Hey! Do you care about Lily Allen's (apparently toolish) dad? NO? Well, here he is anyway:

"As a man, I could drink, snort, and fuck to my heart's content without major detriment to my career," Keith Allen says. "A girl cannot do that. The tabloids are shameless in trying to create a race to rehab between any girl out there who has a drink. But Lily's learning what Daddy learned long ago: Fame is a pain in the fucking arse. And I don't mind saying this, because I've told her already: She needs to know when to fucking shut up."

NOW. Were I in a contemplative mood, I could perhaps expound at length on the obvious double standard at play - when dudes go out and have a wild time, they are just boys being boys (which they will be, obvs) but when girls drink, or smoke, or go to a lot of parties, they are huge trainwreck messes who need to be brought in line.

I could also reflect on the culture of celebrity (which Lily Allen's Dad touches on here, albeit toolishly) as it relates to misogyny - the way we subject people, and especially women, to round-the-clock intense scrutiny, and then revel in demeaning them whenever they slip up or suffer, and how that often is linked very closely to promoting misogynist stereotypes that may or may not apply to the women in question. You know, Jennifer Aniston is a pathetic spinster who can't keep a man and will never have a lasting marriage or make babies (oh, noooo) and Angelina is one of those crazy women that you just know has to be good in the sack, huh, right, she'd probably let you stick it in her butt, heh heh, and Madonna is an aging woman who insists that she has a right to be sexual and to exercise power in her personal life and/or career and therefore is an ugly, domineering hag, and pretty much any young woman who is sexual in public is a stupid slut, and when famous women are thin they're anorexic, and when famous women are not thin they've let themselves go, and the best thing a female entertainer can do for her career these days is get all heteronormative and have a pretty pretty princess wedding and knock herself up and sell the baby photos for eighteen bazillion dollars, and the picture, when you put it all together, is (a) really ugly, and (b) insidious, because it is (c) fucking everywhere. I'm not saying I like any of these women - I don't, as a matter of fact, care about them either way - but tons of people actually do get their views on everything from Rick Warren to Lindsey Lohan's sexual orientation from Perez Hilton and his ilk, and that is a problem, because on sites like his the lady-hating runs rampant and stereotype is promoted as reportage.

Then, of course, there is the problematic relationship between fathers and daughters, a subject which I am told I should stop talking about! Because it makes me sound like I am about to promote my memoirs on Oprah! But it's not about personal suffering, it's about a pattern I have observed in lives other than my own, the lives of certain female friends and now maybe the life of Lily Allen: you've got your mom, and you've got your dad, and you understandably get large parts of yourself from both of them, but when you hit puberty, there is suddenly this antagonism that develops between you and Dear Old Dad, who is of course complicit in maintaining patriarchy (there's a reason it's called that, childrens) but needs to love you even as he demeans or degrades or looks down on other women, and who therefore develops this need to punish you for being a woman, for resembling in any way the other women in the world, and an equally great need to enforce correct gender roles as they relate to your behavior, because the only thing worse than a woman who acts like a woman is a woman who acts like a man, so when you start doing the very same things that your father does, like drinking or smoking or kissing people or speaking your mind unapologetically (and maybe occasionally giving an infelicitous quote or two to the press, MISTER ALLEN) you are punished for it, and it is all very screwed up and gives you Issues and also maybe an inability to tolerate the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, which I walked out of at the precise moment that Kevin Spacey tells his daughter "if you don't watch out, you're going to wind up a bitch just like your mother," and I understand that he comes around in the end and learns to appreciate plastic bags and the finer points of not being an abusive sonofabitch? But at that point he is dead, so Thora Birch really doesn't get anything out of the deal. Boooo.

I could go into all of this. However, it would be an overshare, which I have been instructed to avoid, and also I don't know the full context and don't want to jump to conclusions (which I never do, as you know) so I will simply say this: SPIN Magazine has only strengthened my abiding love for the persona and works of one Lily Allen.

Lily! Mon amour! We will wed in the South of France!

Linking Time: Had I a Tumblr, I Would Tumbl Thus

I do not, so let me say: I am so glad this blog exists. Also, its latest post. I'd always known that Modern Love was iffy, but seeing all of this at once? I mean, do you all remember the woman who complained that her (convicted rapist) boyfriend was too much of a pussy? ("I found it harder to love an emasculated boyfriend than one accused of rape." Oh, and also: "During sex, any sound I made alarmed him, and he’d recoil, so I learned to stay silent." FREAKSHOW FREAKSHOW FREAKSHOW.)

Anyway, Ashley "What the Hell Happened There" Cross and her rapey boyfriend aside (oh, OK, one more: "I believe he was a boy who endeavored for hours in the dark to express his drunken, fumbling desire in a way that, fair or not, ended up unraveling his life. I wish he had found me first." AUUUUGHHHHHHHHHHH) there is one portion of the post that, had I a Tumblr, I would Tumbl so:

perfectratio:

Due to my unshakable professionalism and/or the laws of human and/or Internet decency, I will restrict my comments to: well, that explains a lot.