Twenty-nine days. I\’m twenty-nine days.
No, not on the wagon. On the fucking rag. That\’s right, my cunt hole has been gushing for a little over four weeks now.
I\’m watching this huge centipede slither across my floor (because it\’s spring outside, and raining, and all the bugs have decided to come live with me) and it is reminding me of the last time I had sex. It\’s been more than a week. That\’s too long.
Sex on the rag is one of the more interesting things you can do as a female. It is also one of the more radical sexual acts. Actually, far more radical than having penetrative sex during your menses is having someone perform oral sex on you while you\’re free flowing without a stopper. Detriot is home of my favorite team for a reason. You gotta make your partner earn it, with all those clots zooming on out of you. Please don\’t choke.
There are few things, actually, that turn my stomach more than to look down after sex and to see gummy bits and streaks of blood all over legs, crotches, surfaces, or my least favorite – faces. I feel like such a woman hater admitting this! (Uhh… misogyny is my middle name at times, but not generally in the physical sense.)
When I first heard of radical menstruation, I felt so disgusted. What the hell were these women doing? When I obtained and forced myself to sit through my first reading of Cunt, I kept thinking to myself that women — excuse me, womyn — had gone mad in this day and age. You want me to do what with my flow? Squeeze it out of its receptor into a pot in order to feed my plants? I understand that it has nutrients and it will be helpful for the plants, but come on! I want my plants raised vegan! No animal products!
In a fit of rage, I once accused a girl I had been involved with of finger painting with her own menstrual flow as an act of radical feminist art. Tara was a hippie who smoked too much pot. A lesbian who did her best to perpetuate the most stereotypical \”womyn-loving womyn\” stereotypes. She dressed in long, bohemian skirts, wore Birkenstocks, listened to Ani DiFranco, volunteered with the Green Party, was strictly vegan, considered herself \”an emotional painter,\” had a cat named \”Tigress,\” had not cut the hair on her head since she was thirteen, and never, ever removed her body hair — in fact she kept her pubes corn rowed and dyed with Kool Aid. I was going through my \”I must face my fears of women and cement my position as a feminist by embracing females\” phase, and when I met her at Kiva Han, she seemed like an interesting person that I could get to know better.
She was insane. After seeing her for a little more than a month she announced her intentions of artifical insemination and asked me to be the other mother. Tara, Tara, Tara — always looking for a tie, she wanted to put everyone she met in an emotional noose. I told her she was looking in the wrong place — \”But you said you wanted to have kids!\” \”Not at eighteen with someone more psychotic than I am!\” in the most mature way I could muster in my shocked rage, and a huge fight was aroused.
\”What are you doing with your life? Nothing! Why not focus your attention on the future instead of fucking up the present? Why not give all that passion, love, and support to a new life?\” (Tara is six years older than I am, by the way.)
\”What am I doing with my life? That\’s a good one coming from someone who comes home from answering phones all day only to sit around drooling her goddamn period onto the nearest canvas, calls it \’art,\’ and then whines when no one will buy it for $250!\”
\”You don\’t like my paintings?\”
\”They make me never want to look between my legs again.\”
At which point she justly threw a clay goddess sculpture at my head.
I was rarely so glad as to get out of there. I never got my original copy of Go Away From My World back, but I did learn a few important lessons. Number one, never attempt to buy into that \”opposites attract\” bullshit. Number two, never hook up with someone you meet at a coffee house. Number three, Kool Aid can stain your face. Number four, no animal is meant to be a part of foreplay, no matter how much they want to lick your face. Number five, feminism is the worst sexually transmitted disease.
Yeah, that\’s right. I actually came out of my relationship with Tara a more devout, though more misogynistic, feminist. Tara had used a Keeper and sponges and taught me all about not relying on tampons because they were a product of the patriarchy.
Personally, I kind of like being under someone\’s thumb, as long as that thumb happens to be on top of my clit and I can tie them up and smack them around after I have come. But I digress. Anti-patriarchy…
After I left Tara I got my own tube of rubber, however I am immature and would never admit to her face that she influenced me to embrace the dark side of the flow. I never got so far as finger painting or feeding my roses, but I had no qualms about rinsing my contraption in a public restroom. The Keeper, I believe, is supposed to be good for life. Well, some lover got a bit overzealous and managed to tear mine. Don\’t ask. I switched to sea sponges.
Well, pardon me for being a bad feminist (but we knew that), but I loathed using the sea sponges. I am so squeamish! I despise the look and feel of body fluids of all sorts, including saliva. Using the sponges was torture for me. I bought a separate box of latex gloves for the sole purpose of menstruation, but that wasn\’t enough. Having to reach up, pull a drenched little wad of dripping sea creature out of me, squeeze it out into the toilet and watch the blood ooze (or drain, depending on the day of my flow) into the toilet where it would stain the sides a rust brown and turn the water below into what I imagined the floors looked like in certain Nazi concentration camps. I then had to carry the little yellow-brown receptor to the sink — however far that might be — and rinse it in hot water. Watching the water flow over it reminded me of how surgery floors in Nam must have looked like when they watered them down. Are you seeing a theme here? I was supposed to be liberating myself and all I felt like I was doing was revisiting a war zone six times a day.
It is not that I do not like my womanhood — fuck that shit, I revel in it, and I revel in being a woman, and I think it is awesome that I have the ability to have some mad flow — but that I have always had an aversion to things coming out of my body. I don\’t like to be wet from human fluids. I don\’t like to look at them. I have never learned to embrace that, and may never. After a while I stopped feeling guilty about that, and when my extra supply of latex ran out, I stopped using the sponges and went back to tampons. Using the sponges may have been slightly better for me, but think of what I was doing to the environment with all those gloves! Shizer.
This was back in the summer. Actually, come to think of it, I think I really gave up on sponges when my last steady boyfriend and I broke up and I started staying out at night with other people. Sponges just were not convenient for the \”I gotta get ready, be right back… now I have to go plug myself back up again\” routine. And try explaining all those bloody latex gloves in the trash bin. Unh uh. So back to the tampons.
The problem with tampons is that I am more likely to forget they are there, string or no. Back in September I was with a lover who was going down on me, then went to stick his fingers in me. When he hit cotton he stopped and said \”Ooooooh, guess you had better go take care of that.\” (Hint to people who give head to women, there is more to us than our clits, and if you understood that you would not later be surprised to find a string hanging out of us.) I had completely forgotten it was there. A few weeks ago I had an even closer encounter. As I was straddling a nice, big, stiff, lovely, I\’m-getting-wet-just-remembering-this, cock, it wasn\’t until it had penetrated me by about two inches that I remembered I was stopped up. I jumped off him as though I had been set on fire and hastily said, \”Shit! Shit! I\’ll be right back!\” \”Are you okay?\” \”Yeah, yeah — I just forgot I\’m still on the rag!\” Then he laughed at me.
I would like to see if guys would laugh if they had to put up with this, remembering to arrange your equipment so that you can enjoy a good boinking without having to go fishing for a string afterward. Sure, I could use Instead, but I don\’t particularly feel like fishing out what looks like a condom for stubby guys out of my poonani every twelve hours. If I wanted to do that, well… I would do that. But Cassandra don\’t want no short short man.
For a while this past fall and winter, I was fortunate. I did not have my menses for four months. Of course, one of those months I chose to completely abstain from all sexual activity, so what was the point of it? Still, for those other three months, it was a joy to be able to run around and not have to worry about my little dark shadow staining the sheets of some poor schmuck\’s bed.
Actually, funny side note. Years ago when I was living for a little while with my boyfriend at the time, I got my flow in the middle of the night. The next morning he was in the shower, and I stripped the black sheets off the bed with the intention of washing them. Of course, he was young, dumb and full of cum, and didn\’t have a bed pad, which meant the mattress had a huge, deep, red stain on it. I tried to scrub it out but in the few minutes I had, I was ineffective. My mister was known for his materialism, and I lived in fear of pissing him off, so I did what any meek woman would do — I flipped the mattress and didn\’t mention it. I intended to put some bleach to it later but forgot. Months later he was crawling on the floor under the bed with one of his male housemates (don\’t ask) when he noticed the stain. \”What the hell is that?\” His housemate reminded him that he had a woman sharing his bed every night — \”What the hell do you think it is? Girl muck.\” Girl muck. And I felt dirty, not for hiding it from him, but for feeling the need to hide it in the first place. That was almost three years ago. I feel far more secure now.
A few weeks ago, pulling off of my lover\’s cock after a long and very hard fucking, I looked down to find the blood smeared across my lips and down my leg, over the condom and in his pubic hair. He doesn\’t mind this. I remember thinking to myself as I headed to the bathroom to wipe up the goo, that \”Today, I am a woman. Great.\”
But hey — we\’re the ones that get to have multiple orgasms… but that is another ramble for another time.
