Cunt (5 page)

During this period of thinking, I read books and watched the moon.

All women throughout time have had the
opportunity
to see the moon. From Africa and Asia to the Americas and Europe, plenty of these
ladies started noticing that the moon grows, recedes and grows again, over and over
every twenty-eight days. Those not detached from their menstrual cycle couldn’t help
but trip out on how their own blood rhythm also occurred over the span of approximately
twenty-eight days.

This is how the moon links one up with a form of history none of the textbooks can
possibly touch upon: a
psychic
history with all the women who’ve ever bled on this planet.

By reading some books, investing in a lunar calendar and poking my head out the window
every night or so, I figured out how to tell time by the moon. I learned her phases
and moods. The springtime full moon has a much different luminescence than the autumntime
full moon. When I went to a party on a dark moon, I generally had a shitty time. When
I went to a party during the moon’s waxing phase, or better, when it was full, I had
a whopping good time.

And on and on.

Soon after me and the moon got to be buddies, the strangest thing happened. The simple
act of
hanging
with the moon invoked beliefs my brain had never computed before. Suddenly, all the
period propaganda shoved down my throat since that fateful day in sixth grade was
far away and beyond ridiculous.

Lo and behold, my period stopped hurting!

I designated the first day of my blood a Special Time where I consciously guarded
my quiet. I soaked in mineral salted baths, read Pippi Longstocking, mended clothes
(before this, shortening a skirt involved the use of duct tape and an iron) and cooked
Creole Tomato Soup.

I quit taking ibuprofen. My period mellowed out even more. For the first time in my
life, I actually
enjoyed
bleeding. I gauged myself with the movements and rhythms of the moon. I still got
cramps, but I didn’t faint or puke at all.

Hip, hip!

One month I had pretty bad pains and took some ibuprofen. The following month, the
pain was even worse. Then I did an experiment. Some months I took pain relievers and
some months, I didn’t. Every time, the month
after
I took pain relievers, I’d have, as Holiday Golightly would say, the Mean Reds.

Though the medication brought
immediate
relief, the following period was excruciating. Taking menstrual-pain drugs became
a vicious cycle. I never realized it before, and it was so obvious once I saw it,
but I needed more and more ibuprofen to keep the pain at bay each month.

This little experiment resulted in an
absolute mistrust
for everything I had ever learned about being a woman in this culture. I began the
arduous task of questioning, re-evaluating, researching and rewriting the entire information-cataloging
system in my brain.

For two years, I did not watch television, read newspapers or any magazines which
did not reflect a standard of womanhood with which I identified. Dr. Leo Daugherty,
one of my esteemed instructors at the Evergreen State College, told me that for one
whole year he read books only by women writers, and I did that too.

All this activity started with my period, but it soon encompassed my entire life and
history as well as my way of perceiving the lives and histories of every woman with
whom I came into contact.

The way I had learned to deal with my bleeding ways was a reflection of what our society
teaches us about everything cuntlovin’ and female and rhythmic and sexual. These are
things which must be somehow “controlled” with shame, embarrassment, taboo, violence
or drugs. In order to serve the destructive tendencies of our society, everything
that is cuntlovin’ must be sequestered away far into deep recesses of the collective
unconscious
somehow.

Therefore, like our cunts, our blood is weird, messy and ugly. The negativity surrounding
menstruation is an illusion that falls, falls, falls away the instant perspective
shifts.

And all this mental activity started with me and the moon.

The moon has consistently proven herself to be every woman’s ally since the beginning
of time. The moon renders fearful illusions of social conditioning petty riffraff
that gets in the way of a cuntlovin’ lady’s life. The moon fucken rules.

Once you decide your body is your fine-tuned hot rod to tool you around this earth
as you desire, buy a lunar calendar (I highly recommend the one published by Luna
Press). Put it where you’ll see it every morning. Slap it up by the coffee maker,
the bathroom mirror or above your bed. Wherever. Look at it every day. Notice where
the moon is on the calendar. As often as possible, notice the moon in the sky. That’s
all you have to do, nothing fancy, just notice the moon. The clincher here is
consistency.
Watch the moon grow and recede every month. Be able to eventually wake up in the
morning and know where the moon will be that evening without looking.

This is aligning yourself with the moon. Since, like I say, the moon has been teaching
us ladies about our insides since we developed the eyeballs able to see that high,
there’s no wrong way to do this. The moon will teach you just as it taught your distant
ancestors.

When you get your period, make a (red) mark on your moon calendar. What did the moon
look like when you got your period? What did it look like last month? Sooner or later,
you’ll get a rhythm going with the moon. You’ll have your period every new moon or
every waxing moon, or maybe one month you will get your period on the full moon, the
next month on the waning moon, next on the new moon and next on the waxing moon. It
varies just fantastically. There is no way of knowing what your cycle is until you
lunarly track it. Even then, it is likely to traverse the moon’s phases throughout
the year, but if you keep a good record and watch what goes on between your cunt and
the moon, you’ll be able to predict,
to the day
, when you start your period,
even if you are “irregular.”
Again, I can’t stress enough: This takes time. You may not have a full grasp on your
cycle for six months or even longer.

Patience is this: a virtue.

As you begin to groove with your fine cunt workings and the moon, you’ll be able to
perform all kinds of neat-o miracles. You can figure out if you’re in for a hellish
period. Nasties like yeast infections can be easily nipped in the bud because you’re
so
utterly hip
with yourself. What were once faintly clairvoyant premenstrual dreams take on more
lucid clarity and depth. Sex becomes more intense and ecstatic. Menstrual cramps diminish.
You can determine when you will and won’t get in the family way—if you investigate
the matter fully.

Our society creates a hospitable climate for cuntpower to be generated into profits
amassed by large corporations. Pharmaceutical and feminine hygiene companies, plastic
surgeons and weight-loss centers are designated to care for our bodies in our stead.
We learn to rely on various “experts” and authority figures who patronizingly inform
us how we should respond to our bodies. We are not offered the opportunity to consider
how we’d like to respond to bleeding, nor are we presented with how women menstruated
in the past or in other cultures.

Becoming responsible is about quitting the “expert” addiction, feeling and listening
to what is going on inside of us and responding in ways that feel good and right to
us. Learning to be responsible for your body
takes time.
It’s taken you
all your life
to learn how to alienate yourself to the point of total irresponsibility.

If it took society, say, twenty-five years to teach you that you have no control,
it’ll take you less than a tenth of that time to learn yourself otherwise. In the
long run, that’s not much time at all, but still, it does indeed amount to roughly
two point five years.

It is of utmost importance to be patient with yourself, your ignorance and your curiosity.
Any stockbroker in her right mind will tell you: The return on an investment is wholly
dependent upon the investment itself. By the time we’re twelve or so, society has
convinced the vast majority of women that it is in our best interest to remain incontestably
oblivious to our bodies, outside the realm of tormenting ourselves into reflecting
a certain standard of physical beauty. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable that we
never pause to invest in ourselves on terms that we ourselves define. Our subjugation
continues because women are estranged from our actual realities.

Taking responsibility for one’s bleeding ways is part of the reality-based revolution
founded between the soft, luscious thighs of every woman on the planet.

A more material aspect of this revolution is downsizing the percentage of our funding
to corporations that exist for no other purpose than to constrain women in the throes
of body-alienation and perpetuate our deleterious relationships with our cunts.

Here is my story about that.

I went to Anystore U.S.A. to buy a box of tampons. I had but eleven dollars to my
name. I went down the aisle where I would find “feminine hygiene” products, bitterly
playing that term through my mind.

Why are words like “hygiene” and “sanitary’—which imply that a woman’s cunt is unclean—acceptable
in our society? Why are these people trying to sell me feminine deodorant spray? That’s
like hawking floral air freshener to a lady who lives in a rose garden.

Also, excuse me, but what’s so clean about dicks?

One never hears of sanitary jock straps, deodorant condoms, perfumed Hershey-Squirt
protection pads or hygienic ball wipes, whereas I’ve heard tell of need for such products.

So anyway, with thoughts such as these playing through my mind, you can imagine my
dismay on tampon-buying excursions. If I happen to be in a good mood, it’s simply
annoying. If I happen to be in a bad mood, I am a green monster who lives in a trash
can with a grand piano. On this occasion, I was in a bad mood.

I grumbled down the aisle, openly sneering at all the products on the shelves. New
Freedom this and Light Days that.

Comfort, security.

Plastic applicators.

Discreet disposal pouches printed with flowers that do not exist.

I positively
fumed
as I scanned the prices. Five, six, seven bucks for
a box of cotton.
Sixty, seventy bucks a year.

Why the
flying fuck
should a woman have to
pay
some huge corporation over and over because the lining of her uterus naturally,
biologically
sheds every month?

Amongst my small circle of friends, I tally seven hundred dollars spent on tampons
and pads a year. I estimate the women in my apartment building spend thirteen thousand
dollars a year to swell the already enormous profit margins of “feminine hygiene”
companies.

Reluctantly, I made my selection: a box of Tampax Slender Regulars for $7.19. I stormed
my way to the check-out line. In front of me was a young man who said hello.

I replied, “Do you realize that I will have barely three dollars in the whole wide
world after I purchase this box of tampons because my period is coming and I find
it unsavory to bleed in all my clothes and on every seat I occupy for the next few
days?”

He told me that he’d considered this very conundrum. His girlfriend had bitched about
the same thing at length.

We fell into a check-out line conversation on the matter, comparing men’s hygienic
expenses to those of women and also, how the moon is totally disregarded in our culture
in relation to womb-type activities.

The couple behind us—a well-to-do looking pair in their lawn-bowling sixties—kept
clearing their throats, saying ehh-hemmm and harrummphh. The woman, especially, gave
me extremely disdainful looks for speaking so tactlessly and loudly in the Anystore
U.S.A. check-out line.

A few days later, I related this experience to my friend Panacea Theriac, who, at
the time, had just organized a small women’s health collective in Olympia, Washington.

She said, “Oh, Inga! I’ve been using sea sponges! Have you heard about them?”

I said no.

Panacea told me all about them. She bought three sea sponges for $1.59 apiece. Besides
their obvious economic virtues, she said, you use them over and over, so they’re more
ecologically desirable; when your sponge gets soaked with blood, no matter where you
are, you just haul it on out, wash it real good with hot water and mild soap, then
pop it on back in; you never have to trouble yourself with remembering to bring a
tampon reserve; they’re totally comfortable and fun to play with in the bathtub. Also,
you can squeeze the blood out into a jar, fill it with water and feed it to your houseplants,
who, Panacea assured me, “absolutely adore the stuff.”

I asked her about Toxic Shock Syndrome and whether sea sponges harbor yucky things
that can make a girl sick.

Panacea said that it is very, very important to keep your sponge
super duper clean
, washing it thoroughly every time you use and re-use it.