Response to Ferris State University's Vagina Monolouges

I just came back from seeing The Vagina Monologues again.
There is one statement that they open the show with that sticks with me tonight:
That, although women are at first very uncomfortable about the subject, once they open up it turns out that they love talking about their vaginas. It's a freeing thought, that maybe it's okay to have one and okay to talk about it. I mean, seriously - If you are a woman, it's a part of you.
Of course the great Mission of the show is to stop the silence surrounding domestic violence, but there's also a lot to be said for the overall sense of empowerment that it provides.

I laughed in recognition.

I cried in recognition.
I laughed and cried out of empathy and compassion.
I was inspired.
Frankly, I was actually kind of turned on. If I'd had a date tonight, it would have been a perilous thing. The show certainly makes you want to go out and do something!
Should I volunteer at the local women's shelter, or get laid? Hell, I can do both! It's my vagina.

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It was October and I was seven years old.

Our family was going to the school Halloween Party, back in the days when you didn’t have to claim it was a Harvest Party. My father had spent considerable time on a robot costume for my brother, who was now clumping around inside a box that was spray-painted silver with vacuum tubes sticking out of it – for arms, maybe. No Polaroid pictures exist, so I have to draw from my own spotty memory.

I had chosen to be a ghost. A ghost seemed like a powerful and scary idea, although the reality turned out to be two holes cut in an old bed sheet that rubbed my hair all around until it was static-charged and insisted on sticking into my eyes and getting sucked into my mouth. I was hot and tired before we’d even walked the few blocks to the school.

It was a grand party in the traditional sense – bobbing for apples with no mention of catching diseases from mouthing around in the same water as everyone else. I had to pull my costume off even to attempt this game, and was as disappointed by this as I would have been if my parents had made me wear a coat. What was the fun of being a ghost if everyone knew it was me? I was surprised at how difficult it was to actually clench a chunk of apple with my teeth. I’d make contact and then the apple would bob away from me. I tried repeatedly, until the closeness of the water made me fear drowning and I had to stop. I had similar difficulty with the apples dangling on strings from the ceiling. A volunteer tied my hands behind my back and I had to bite the apple and eat it from the string before my competitor. The apple bounced repeatedly off my face as I circled it like a puppy chasing its tail. Thump. Thump. Thump.

My brother won the costume contest that year. I remember being jealous. No one had spent any time at all on my costume, and it wasn’t as if he’d made that box himself.

I hid hotly beneath my sheet and scuffed along the sidewalk behind everyone, disturbing the crisp leaves. Enticed by the lit porches of the neighboring houses and joyful cries of “Trick-Or-Treat!” my brother and I begged Mom and Dad to let us get some candy. Kids in costumes were pushing past us to get to the houses. Mom and Dad were tired and didn’t feel like stopping anywhere on the way home. One of the jostling kids was the Bigger Boy who lived across the street from us. Gallantly, he offered to take us to a few houses along our route home.

This Bigger Boy was the one who organized all the neighborhood games – races, contests, soldiers, vampires, tag, colored eggs, hide-and-seek. He always told everyone what to do, everyone did it, and he was about as self-assured as anyone I had ever seen. People did what he wanted them to. I didn’t know what  bullying means.

As Mom and Dad wandered off up the street without us, we stopped at a couple of houses and yelled, “Trick or treat! Smell my feet! Give me something good to eat!”

The Bigger Boy – he seems in my memory to look about seventeen or eighteen – comes up with this brilliant Divide and Conquer Plan wherein we would each take a different side of the street – therefore getting twice as much candy. I was seven years old – I didn’t know the math. I didn’t stop and think to myself, “Wait a minute – If my brother goes on one side of the street, and I go with this Bigger Boy to the other side of the street, we will actually be getting half the candy we could be if we were all to go on all the sides of the street!” Nope – the Divide and Conquer Plan made perfect sense to me. What did not make sense was that the Bigger Boy didn’t take me to any houses across the street. Somehow we ended up in an abandoned parking lot next to an old brick building.

I remember the glass – those hexagon-shaped sparkles of broken windshields scattered across the cracks with weeds growing up out of them. Chunks of broken pavement. The roughness of the crumbling bricks in the wall. Heavy breathing. The pressure of the Bigger Boy’s hands against my shoulders, against my hip. The horrible, stomach-dropping feeling as he jerked up my sheet and pulled it against the wall until I was pinned there against it with my sneakers barely touching the gravel. How do those bits and eddies of gravel always collect outside old buildings? I could feel the tug of the elastic of my underwear as he thrust his hand down inside – inside, and  I had what I couldn’t describe except to say that it was yucky, a yucky feeling that scared me because it hurt and the more I struggled the tighter went the sheets.

I could hear my brother, not much older than me after all, calling us from across the street uncertainly. Where were we? He wanted to go home.

I wanted to go home. I told the Bigger Boy that I needed to go home. I think he told me to stop whining.

I became a ghost that night. Ghost-girl. It did not matter what I thought. It did not matter what I felt. It did not matter what I wanted. I couldn’t stop it. I was scared, but I physically could not get away. This was wrong. This was – this hurt. It hurt and I wanted to go home but I couldn’t get away. I did manage it, though, in a way. I went far far away inside my head someplace safe where nobody could find me. I don’t remember when we went back to my brother. I don’t remember when we came home. I think I ate a lot of candy, and it made me feel sick. The candy made me feel sick.

The next day, I told my mother what had happened. What I thought happened. Her reaction – I don’t remember her reaction but it scared me or embarrassed me because I hid behind the couch. I hid because I had told her. I told her, and I didn’t like it when she had to go and tell my father. I knew instinctively that he would be angry. And I didn’t know whether or not he was angry at me. I remember his face, red and screaming. I thought he was screaming at me. I remember the front door, wide open and swinging in his wake.

I was a ghost now. No one ever talked to me about what happened again. I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t want anyone to be angry. And I spent my entire childhood that way. I tried to go unnoticed. Don’t look at me – I’m not attractive. I’m not someone you want to get too close to. I’m not anything at all. I will hide inside myself, far far away inside my head someplace safe where nobody could ever hurt me, I thought. But they did. Someone always did. And no matter how much I wanted to get away, how much I wanted to stop it, I always felt trapped. Trapped. Alone and afraid. I couldn’t tell anyone. No one would understand. They would tell the wrong people, and someone would be mad at me, and for some reason the anger of others – especially of men – terrified me. Please don’t be mad at me. Please don’t hurt me. Please. Can’t you see that I’m scared? That I can’t find my way home?

My ex-husband was complaining recently about sex education and how they’re going to start “teaching masturbation in schools, starting as young as five years old!”

“Whatever,” I thought.

I mean, first of all: Masturbation is normal. For crying out loud, our own daughter had begun much younger than five. She found her vagina and for whatever reason had decided that it was a pretty cool place to explore. I remember one of the daycare ladies who watched the kids while we were at work came to me and asked me in shocked tones if I had any idea if our daughter had been molested. ‘ For pity’s sake,’ I thought, ‘You need to get educated!’

Secondly, it’s not like the agenda of the government (as he would claim) is to actually demonstrate or show videos of masturbation. They’re going to say things that are established facts – such as that it isn’t dirty and wrong and sinful. Such as that a lot of toddlers do it, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wicked or have been molested. Maybe they’ll actually prevent some zealot-idiot parents from burning their children’s fingers as punishment for their so-called wickedness, for God’s sake.

I think I started masturbating when I was seven years old. In my case, I do think it was because I was molested. I was trying to figure out why the hell someone had wanted to touch me there so badly. I was surprised to find that it didn’t feel bad if I had control over it. After awhile, it got so that I couldn’t relax and sleep at night if I didn’t do it. Maybe there was something sick and sad about it – or maybe not. It is what it is.

What I do know, however, is that a little sex education could have gone a long way. I needed to know that I had a vagina, and I needed to know that someone else might want to have it for some reason. I can’t imagine how my parents, in that day and age, could have expressed this to me, but I say Thank God for The Vagina Monologues.  Thank God that someone somewhere decided to break the silence and speak up about what is happening in our society to women and little girls. Thank God that I do not have to be ashamed of my body anymore. Thank God that I am no longer anything like a ghost.

It took a long time for me to even see it: what I had become. I was a frightened little girl way past the actual ages of innocence. I got married too young because I thought somehow that then I would be safe from harm.

I found out that the sheets could still pin me down and that my mind and then my body would snap back to when I was seven years old – a powerless little girl who could not save herself. Ghost-girl. It did not matter what I thought. It did not matter what I felt. It did not matter what I wanted. I couldn’t stop it. I was scared, but I physically could not get away. This was wrong. This was – this hurt. It hurt and I wanted to go home but I couldn’t get away. I did manage it, though, in a way. I went far far away inside my head someplace safe where nobody could find me. I wanted someone to love me and to hold me, to be gentle and to be kind, to stop and think for just one moment that maybe they’d lost me somehow. To notice that I was scared and that I’d gone away from my body for a time because I didn’t know how else to feel safe.

My marriage became a horrible thing.

Maybe if my ex-husband had been a little more intelligent, a little more thoughtful, a little more patient or kind…

Maybe it was my fault. I tried to explain.

It became a ritual, a thing that happened once in awhile because he couldn’t resist the urge. He seemed to think that he should. After all, masturbation was an evil thing, an unspeakable thing. Truthfully, we never spoke about sex. It was something that happened sometimes. I was seldom present.

It’s funny. It’s funny because I couldn’t sleep without it. I couldn’t sleep. But if I were to touch myself, it was like cheating. It was wrong. It made him angry, and I couldn't handle anyone being angry with me. I wasn’t just a ghost – I became a ghost who could never relax and sleep.

I thought about these things tonight. I watched The Vagina Monologues and I thought about how ashamed I had been of my body all of those years. How I always thought I was too fat, too plain. Or, conversely, how I was too much. How, if I were to truly come out from under that sheet and be my full self, I would be rejected. I would be embarrassing. My thighs would be too fat, or the damage inflicted by the knife in my emergency C-section would be too hideous, or the varicose vein that I’ve had running down my right leg ever since I gave birth to my last child.

My last child. Because my ex-husband hadn’t even wanted two children, hadn’t wanted the last one – and I, pinned beneath that sheet, couldn’t speak up for myself and voice the opinion that I didn’t want to have any part of my body cut and cauterized, mutilated so that any other little children that I might ever have held in my arms were now dead before they’d ever had a chance to live. It was a grieving thing, to “get my tubes tied,” as if something inside of me had been murdered against my will. Nothing special. Just another piece of my heart.

I watched The Vagina Monologues tonight.
I laughed at the woman who complained about how angry her vagina was at all the mistreatment.
I cried at all the women who had been abused.
I smiled at the story of the woman who had a good experience with a man. I smiled at how he seemed to adore her body just the way it was, and what a relief that was to her. What a release.
I thought of somebody that I know, and I smiled. Because not all men are assholes, and it's nice to remember that sometimes, and nice that the show is not such a militantly feminist show that it doesn't recognize that.
I cheered when the men who ran the technical aspects of the show came out at the end - particularly one dedicated husband who had helped out with the Ferris State University productions of the Vagina Monologues for the entire ten years of the show. Because he loved his wife and his daughter, and he wanted to promote a better, safer world for them to live in.
I cheered at the women, all of the women, because they stood up and talked about what had happened to them and were not ashamed.