@amalthea
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I received public school sex education in the mid 80s and early 90s during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I read SPIN magazine’s coverage of the epidemic month after month; pictures of men wasting away haunted me. Some of our family friends who were gay died. One day they were here and the next not.
I ended up absolutely terrified I was going to die from having sex. This phobia persisted for years, even after moving into having regular sexual partners with frequent testing. Finally in my early 30s I studied with yoga teacher Darren Main. He began all his workshops telling the class that he was HIV+ but that he took no anti-retroviral drugs and had no disease. This was before prep. He told us that he controlled the viral outbreaks with yoga, meditation, and lifestyle. I trusted Darren. I believed him. When he adopted a child as a single father, I realized this man isn’t going to die like every gay man I knew in the 80s. I started to drop the grip of fear I had been raised with.
I still have remnants of that childhood fear. But I see how everyone around me is free of that fear; it’s a non-issue, especially among my young friends and gay friends. I am continually sitting with my 12 and 14-year old selves who were convinced that sex equaled death and trying to show them that there is another way.
One of the things I am getting out of this discussion is that early education is irreplaceable. If pregnancy were framed not as something dangerous on the one hand or virtuous on the other, but rather as a biological fact within a woman’s control, then motherhood would be supported. The biological fact of pregnancy is politicized and weaponized against women beginning in health class in elementary school. If our society could take responsibility for the possibility of life, then there could be support for what follows— miscarriage, birth, sexual assault, child rearing. Everything about sex and child-rearing becomes intentional because it is not dangerous to those in power. Education and resources are freely given.
The biggest thing I learned was about menstrual extraction. Honestly, I had never heard about that and I wonder why. I am reflecting on my personal biography and experiences.
The image of Carol handing out specula at a women’s conference is blowing my mind. It’s deeply poignant how simple all of her methods are and how much we have been indoctrinated into the medical model of women’s health where someone else knows better than we do. I feel like we argue incessantly as women about politics and choices, rather than simply giving ourselves the life-saving information we need to manage our bodies.
Carol’s perspective on the USAID agenda in the Middle East during the Iraq War also gave me deep pause. I live in Washington, DC and so many of my friends and neighbors lost their jobs when our president shuttered USAID. But I am now sitting here wondering about all of that aid money and how much of it was funding right-wing, women-controlling actions. This is something I will be thinking and talking with my neighbors about.
My experience has been marked by two trends: the fear of everyone around me and a total re-evaluation of my womanhood and sexual life.
My friends and I tend to talk about our fears about our bodies at this stage– vaginal pain, sleepless nights, rampant anxiety, heavy bleeding, exhaustion, emotional irritability. Most of us are experiencing one or all of these things, and more. For me, the fears have been compounded by remembering my mother going through perimenopause and how emotional and unhappy she was.
Some of these symptoms have been truly unbearable for me, mostly the vaginal pain and the sleep interruption.
Lately, I’ve noticed though that when I address my relationship to my womanhood, my sexuality, my body, the uncomfortable symptoms ease up. I am also doing what I can to address these symptoms with interventions like topical hormones and homeopathy. But I am finding that all of this is bearable when I get to the root issue: my relationship to myself, my desires, and my self-esteem. I must say that this Bodysex course is invaluable for helping me work through this phase of life and address these issues.
For years, the information I have been given about menopause has a negative slant to it. It is presented in our culture as another thing to bear, rather than another miraculous phase of womanhood. The questions that I am asking myself are, “How can I approach this phase of life with greater joy and curiosity than I did my menstruating phase? What do I love about myself now? How can I become even more confident in myself (rather than facing menopause as a decline or a problem)?”
As I reflect on all of the thoughts and feelings I had during this module, a few things rise to the surface:
– Carlin’s sharing about sex during pregnancy helps to dispel the myth that men aren’t attracted to pregnant women. Or that pregnancy is somehow a horrible condition that makes you lose all sex appeal.
– Another myth that I confronted in my life is that a woman can’t play the role of mother without giving birth. My story is that I wasn’t able to get pregnant and did not have children despite having a loving partner who wanted children with me. Early on in the grieving process, I realized that I had already been a mother several times over since I had been full-time nannying from the age of 12. And I have gone on to be a godmother, an aunt, and perhaps soon I will become a grandmother in a chosen family arrangement.
When my friends started giving birth 15 years ago, no one would tell me their birth story. They acted like they had been through a war and had terrible PTSD. Only recently as my younger millennial friends have given birth have we talked openly about how orgasmic birth is. It is very restorative to be able to talk about these truths, as my mother and I have terrible trauma from my birth which prevented open conversation.
I would like to release the belief that “women in our family have difficult periods.” I always got my period during milestone events in my life— the first time was the day I “graduated” from primary school. My celebration had to be cut short. This continued with my sixteenth birthday party where I had such debilitating cramps my mother insisted I use her codeine prescription to get through the party. I was told that the pain would always be there, just like it was for every woman in my line. Recently I had my period during my fiftieth birthday celebration. As I look back, I have compassion for my younger self that didn’t receive any other option besides, “This is too painful to bear.” My last period wasn’t painful at all, simply a celebration of what it meant to be a woman and menstruate for nearly 40 years.
Because my cycle has always been accompanied by migraines and strong cramping, it has been a true battle to accept menstruation. Yet as I look back, aside from a few years on birth control pills, I never followed my doctors’ recommendations to stop having periods. I wanted to get through the mystery of the intense pain by myself. The best thing I did for self-care was to notice how cramping responded to my thoughts. Every time I felt like, “Oh no, this is awful. I can’t do this right now,” the cramping got worse. Eventually I learned to relax into the pain, talk to my body lovingly, and allow the energy to release, even with pain. I took this approach with migraines as well, weaning myself off the heavy drugs and talking myself through the migraines as much as possible.
I’m three months without a period at the moment. I know it could come back (and probably will), but I am enjoying a respite from lifelong migraines. I have not known myself to be without headaches since I was 10 years old– now I’m 50. It has been startling to realize as I reflected on this journal prompt that I have lived pain-free for even more than a few weeks now. I celebrate my body’s ability to change and cast off the well-worn groove of migraines. It gives me an immense sense of freedom and accomplishment. Living through all of that pain was horrible, but possible. My body and I did it together.
For the past three years, my left knee hurts consistently.
I have tracked it through hormonal changes, exercise changes, and stretching routines. It seems to be an ailment that responds to perimenopausal symptoms. I spent a year letting the pain dominate my perception of myself and preventing me from exercising. It got so bad that I couldn’t walk down stairs for a few months.
Eventually, I realized that this pain was only debilitating to my self-esteem and not my actual mobility. I joined a gym and started working out with a trainer that helped me to focus on areas of strength, not pain. Now I know what helps keep the discomfort manageable. And I no longer think of myself as deteriorating in age!
I had pubic, underarm, and dark leg hair from a young age, around 9 or 10. I felt ashamed when other girls would comment on it in the locker room or sleepovers. “Grooming” has remained a source of stress and shame, as it feels like I can never get it right: grooming my pubic hair makes it too course, leaving it wild creates a huge curtain over my clit.
Recently I started looking at 1980s Playboys and marveling at all of the natural bushes and how beautiful and curly they are.
I am in a practice of embracing my inner wildness. That not everything is neat and groomed and nubile. And that I’m the only one who cares.
The Bodysex experience is not one of “personal privacy.” Being nude allows participants to confront and acknowledge that we all have the same human apparatus— a body— despite perceived differences between bodies. The time spent nude helps to slowly address shame, fear, and sadness about our bodies and gradually bring in acceptance and comfort. We see ourselves mirrored in every other woman’s body which heals our personal stories and self-blame.
I have been very shy and reserved most of my life as a survival mechanism. This trait completely shut down my true orgasm, which is often very loud and devotional. I will praise the Great Mother and/or my partner as I rise to climax. It took time to adjust to my true nature and the devotional frenzy the process of orgasm puts me in. On a good day, my orgasm connects me to my body. On a great day, it connects me to the cosmos and the Divine Mystery. This “larger than life” connection keeps me coming back, exploring, and observing whether I have the self-confidence to bring myself there on any given day. My orgasm is a miracle and mystery.
I spent the first six months of my life in the NICU and then most of my childhood with constant illness. I began having migraines at age 10 and then horrific menstrual cramps at age 12. I developed the belief that my body was something the self had to survive, not enjoy. And I believed that all of my physical pain was my fault. It has taken decades of compassionate work to unwind and make sense of all of that pain. A tremendous help has been my partner of the past twenty years who has not once seen my body as broken. Now I let my body be the primary driver of my awareness, not my mind. All of the answers to any questions are in my body; my body knows before I do. It takes constant mindfulness to return to this truth, but my joy, calmness, and orgasm are the rewards for returning to the body over and over again.