Stupid ovary
Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 8:25 am*Before reading - what started off as a minor whinge turned into a rant about strange thoughts of mine. There’s potentially offensive material below. Normally after writing something like this I would delete it, but I feel I actually should post this for some reason, not sure why. Not so much the urge to confess, I think, as that of being a public witness to a human feeling that I have access to and the documentation of which might be of use to someone somewhere.
I have mid-cycle pain today. Meh. I don’t get it every month. I think it’s when the ovary on the left happens to be the one to fire off an egg that I get the twinges of ouch and the weird feeling of something going on in the dark in there without my permission. In the mid-months when I get pain I also seem to retain fluid and get kind of panicky and depressed - and not just because I suddenly feel like I’m getting fat.
I start thinking about how much I hate having a female body. I was always a tomboy, never wanted to be a girl, and certainly didn’t want to be a woman. Which is odd because I am, as Stu says only half-jokingly, effeminate. If I were a man I’d not only be very short, but very camp. I mean, I’d be Queen Victoria. No, I don’t want to be a man. But I don’t really want to be a woman, either. I guess I’d like to be some kind of adolescent androgyne. That seems the least uncomfortable option out of a range of iffy choices.
I have thoughts that my superego tells me are not really ok, not healthy. There are parts of my body that I love. Namely, the bony parts. I like my Skeletor hands and my pointy elbows, my collarbones and the ribs on my chest; I love the thin days when my hipbones show. I don’t mind some of my muscles, either, especially the flat, intricate ones on my back that show when the light’s from above. But wherever there’s more than a thin layer of flesh, or the flesh is soft, I don’t like it. It frightens me. This has nothing to do with wanting to be attractive to men, or women, or anybody. I think it has to do with wanting to be unattractive, in some way. I want the desiring gaze to knock itself out against a wall of bone, injure itself on fingernail points. I don’t want to look anything like a nest for your sons. I don’t want you to want to take me home and keep me. I want to be a sea urchin or an arthropod. I want an exoskeleton.
I consider myself a feminist, so I feel guilty for having these thoughts. Many of my girlfriends have had children, so I feel like a traitor for disliking my own hypothetically childbearing body. I try to understand these thought processes - or rather non-thought processes, because thinking has nothing to do with it. It’s all visceral and emotional. But I haven’t unravelled all the contradictions yet. I like men, and I like to flirt. But my flirting is always only about minds. I like to meet in the mental plane because this physical thing seems both vulnerable and shameful. Shameful because of the imprint on it not of sexuality but of reproduction, the possibility of milk, the sense that I am not in control of every cell but must be vigilant and ever watchful in case something grows inside me, which is what this blind flesh in the darkness of the pelvic orbit wants. You’ll become like your old great aunts, it seems to say. Magnificent, perhaps, but thickened and floral.
I won’t, of course. But the fact of the potential is unsettling. I don’t know what I am. Female but not a woman? An ageing teenager? A child afraid of women? Darth Mavis is no doubt a demon of my subconscious. The other night I dreamed about axolotls (Mexican walking fish), which live in a larval stage all their life. Maybe that’s what I am. A friend of mine who recently had a baby said that she felt the process transformed her and completed her. Whereas I would like to be transformed into something metallic. A cyborg? A Cylon in nylons? Something without ovaries, in any case. Something armed, and safe. A ghost in a machine that’s really a machine, perhaps.
August 15th, 2007 at 9:12 am
A ghost in a machine that’s really a machine, perhaps.
… I wonder how many besides me (us?) find this a lovely thought?
August 15th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Everything about my body feels so beyond my control and it scares the crap out of me. The menstrual cycle just seems like a symbol for it all. I’ve tried to overcome it with the non-stop pill thing, and it didn’t work. (Which just seemed like a greater symbol of how all my attempts to bring my body’s behavior to heel usually fail.) To me pregnancy and childbirth seem terrifying and unnatural and gross, and I’m sure this is a pretty unhealthy viewpoint, but try as I might, I can’t reconcile myself to it. Someone whose journal I read commented just the other day on how the process of childbirth seemed to them to be indicatory of something deeply wrong with the world, and I found the statement surprising, because the person was a very staunch feminist - but I was really glad I wasn’t the only person who felt that way.
I also feel like being female doesn’t quite fit - I don’t feel like I should be a man by any means, but I’ve always felt a little… baffled and embarassed by my body, sort of like walking out and noticing your shirt’s on backward. “Wait, how’d this happen? Shit, I bet everyone’s noticed.”
August 15th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
And thats why it’s great being me.
These things frighten me to no end. right to the point when i am on the floor screaming don’t talk about it.
but women never listen to the screaming man on the floor do they.
for the love of things that don’t bleed and make people feel uncomfortable. don’t talk about it around me.
thank you.
this rant was brought to you in part by: All the suckers who still belive in love. This one’s for you.
August 15th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
axolotl. has a slightly different meaning when you read Dune.
Considering that axolotl tank is just a woman tied to life support and her uterus used to grow things like Sligs and Gholas.
but pay no attention to me.
I’m just the guy who wanders around aimlessly with big headphones on
August 16th, 2007 at 4:47 am
Dave - I rather like the idea. The machine could be so many things too.
Laurie - I tried the pill thing as well, but it did my mood no good. It kind of faded me out. I’ve met a few other women who say the pill dampens their creative drive, and one who, when she went back on it after having a baby and got almost suicidally depressed. And doctors don’t tell you about this stuff, or they simply don’t know.
After mulling it over, I think that for a feminist there probably has to be something wrong with childbirth. It’s dangerous, for one thing. And society doesn’t honour the danger. (Where are the memorials to women who die in childbirth, vis a vis soldiers who die in war?) Human babies are giant-headed, helpless things, and women pay the brunt of the price for the human brain, really. Patriarchal society isn’t friendly to childbirth and child rearing - it’s unpaid work that you have to fit in around your real job working for The Man. So it’s a kind of slavery imposed by biology that may conflict enormously with the desires of you, a rational thinking being. (I know there are positives, I’m just not looking at them here.)The fact that women bear children probably has to be at the core of any practical feminist agenda concerning maternity leave, birth control, education of girls, working hours, etc.
On the personal level, horror of pregnancy and childbirth is actually pretty well known, I just discovered. It just doesn’t get talked about, maybe because it’s an elephant in the room. I don’t know that men really understand how women’s bodies can panic and frighten and inconvenience the minds that inhabit them.
And I totally know what you mean about the shirt on backwards. I have trouble rationally explaining it. I don’t know if it was always there. It either started or got worse at puberty, though.
Colin - You ought to know that a person who can write a scene where a boy’s intestines get fed to dogs is more than capable of writing about blood and ovaries - neither of which are as gruesome as axolotl tanks. In fact, very little crystallises female body-horror as perfectly as an axolotl tank.
August 17th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
I always did think that if everything about our world was the deliberate design of some god he must be one hell of a sexist asshole. I mean, we’re given cumbersome bodies and painful and inconvenient cycles and then we’re expected to squeeze out these watermelons through tiny openings to perpetuate the species. It seems terribly unfair.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
untill you can show me a better way to continue my gene line. I think i will stick to using the cumbersome bodies with small ports for exit and entry.
and i shall enjoy my 20% shorter life span.
and you don’t know what real pain is untill you get your own phallis caught in a zipper.
August 18th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Laurie - yeah, you wouldn’t ever think “Oh, God must be a woman”, that’s for sure. Actually, the problems human women have with giving birth is one of the gazillion arguments agin creation and pro evolution - our pelvis is designed for a quadruped, and pulling it up and tilting it forward made giving birth much harder. As for periods, I don’t know why we can’t just reabsorb the endometrium like most other mammals do. Maybe gene therapy will let us do that one day.
Colin - you’ve been dead 18 times (you say) and you reckon getting your foreskin caught in a zipper is bad? You didn’t die of zipper-related injuries, did you?
August 19th, 2007 at 9:32 am
did i say foreskin i said Phallis, there is a big difference.
Besides death is the ultimate end no more pain or traxes living well that leave room open for gettingan exotic assortment of body parts caught is simple machines plotting to take over the world.
no zipper related deaths but its a fear i have.
August 19th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
The female body, and the myriad of hormones, chemicals and general plumbing that ties it all together, can be mysterious and cruel at the same time. Try taking onboard 7 miscarriages in 7 years - at one stage 3 in a 9 month period - to really understand the limits of what a person can bear physically and emotionally.
Men would not cope under such stresses, and are not built for such things. The emptiness is devastating, and stays like a scar.
August 21st, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Al - which makes me feel bad for complaining about my insignificant problems. A friend of mine recently had a baby. The child was spine to spine with her, she had too much relaxin, and put her sacral spine out as well as having to have an emergency cesarean. Without modern medicine she might well be dead. My mother certainly would be (I was another emergency C-section), and I wouldn’t be here at all. And the male world (I don’t mean individual men) just pays it all no mind.
I don’t know that women do always cope, really. There are scars, as you say. Women will endure for the sake of their children, when there are children, perhaps, where a man might go down to the garden shed and blow his brains out. But I think the labelling of women as mentally strong can lead to depression and other medical and psychological problems being ignored.