The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term "beaver" comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early 1980s, just like I did, at a time when there was lots of discussion (feminist and otherwise) about "beaver shots" in porn. And so I thought, "Duh! It's because beavers are furry. Everybody knows that."

But then I started wondering. Why a beaver, anyway? Why not some other mammal with a thick pelt? (I'm pretty sure this is what Euchalon was actually asking, and I just didn't get it.) Why not a raccoon, or a skunk, or a lemur? I suppose there's a stripe issue with those critters. Then again, the patterning of kitty fur is infinitely variable, yet the term "pussy" persists even though few of us sport calico or tabby markings. (I wouldn't rule out tortoiseshell, however, especially as we get older.)

Why "beaver," indeed? When I showed the beaver ad to the students in my women's studies capstone class, some of them were totally perplexed. They didn't get the ad, because to them a beaver is merely a furry woodland creature. They'd never heard the term applied to women. And so an ad with a beaver representing a pussy was just incoherent to them.

The reason for this came out in class discussion: The norm for pussies is now hairless, as anyone who's flipped through Cosmo in the past decade ought to know. If you don't take it all off, no guy will want to put his package anywhere near your vajajay (in Cosmo's anatomical lexicon). So our kitties are all supposed to be sphinx cats, and the beaver is on the verge of extinction.

Posted by Flickr user *n3wjack's world in pictures, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a seriously generational phenomenon. It's not really possible for me to fathom it from my perch here on the far side of 40. I know young women, self-declared feminists, who believe that pubic hair is disgusting - that it makes them disgusting unless they're always smoothly waxed or shaven.

Maybe the closest parallel in my generation is that when I hit puberty in the 1970s, people took it equally for granted that girls would shave their legs and armpits. I've lived in hippy co-op houses, I spent years in Europe, I've considered myself a feminist since sixth grade. And guess what? I shave my legs. Inconsistently, irregularly, and often plain incompetently. (Being blind in the shower really doesn't help!) Ditto for my armpits, though more regularly and with less blood.

I choose to do this. But I don't claim that I do it without reference to social norms. That's where I part ways with my friend figleaf, who basically argues that any hairstyle is cool (so far so good) because it's a matter of personal style and choice (um, not entirely).

One of the college-aged women I know told me that a boyfriend pressured her to shave her pubic hair because she didn't look like the women in porn. She, too, made her choices. She shaved it. She hated the ingrown hairs and itching. She grew it out again. She ditched the douchey boyfriend.

She's not the only woman to discover that grooming pubic hair, even just the bikini line, is different from legs or armpits in some crucial ways. It's harder to achieve a smooth result by shaving. Waxing produces a smooth finish for a few days, but it can't be repeated until the regrowth is well past the stubble stage. (There's also some risk of infection, especially with Brazilians.) Laser treatments are expensive and don't work for all types of hair. Whatever the method, it's likely to result in red bumps and ingrown hairs. I'm not a dude, but I assume that red bumps are the very opposite of sexy.

In fairness, men, too, are subject to social pressures to shave. While we women can camoflage stubble under our clothes, they can't so easily hide their chins. Sure, a guy can get away with a ZZ Top beard if he's a lumberjack. For most white-collar jobs, he'd better make sure it looks distinguished and professorial - or just shear it off altogether.

I'm all for choice - but what exactly does choice mean when all the social pressure tilts in a single direction? Where is the pro-growth movement (as figleaf memorably calls it)? What magazine is extolling the glories of the unpruned bush? Organic Gardening, maybe?

I'm not saying women are anti-feminist dupes if they shave, and I sure don't want to shame anyone for doing it. I'm not opposed to grooming. Like I said, I do some of it myself. (And no, I'm not going to overshare on my more personal topiary choices.) But until there's actually a pro-growth faction, our choices will be tightly bounded and subject to pressure and penalties. That's not much of a choice at all. Especially when the pressures are greatest on young women who are still finding themselves and discovering their own bodies and sexuality.

Update on Me: Another Good Reason to Watch Dr. House on TV

If you've ever watched House on TV, you know that in every other episode "vasculitis" enters into the differential diagnosis. If you've never watched it, you should know that Hugh Laurie plays the drollest misanthrope ever to grace the small screen; that it's a medical detective show featuring Dr. House solving impossibly complex cases; and that vasculitis should practically get star billing.

I used to joke about how the diagnostic trail always led through lupus, lymphoma, Guillain Barre ... and vasculitis. (Oh, and the mandatory break-in into the patient's home to see where he or she was lying about their medically relevant recreational drug use/sexual history/other vices and secrets.)

I'm not laughing today, but I am grateful that I googled vasculitis months ago so I could follow the plot of House. Because vasculitis is the leading candidate for what's wrong with me.

Initially, the radiologists' report came back suggesting MS, with vasculitis mentioned as another possibility. However, because the report was frustratingly vague, I badgered my family doctor for clarification. That resulted in a second, more experienced radiologist reading my scans. His opinion was that the lesions in my brain would be unusually small and atypically located for MS.

Now, MS could still be the culprit, and I had some very bad hours in between my two conversations with my doctor. Right now, though, I think vasculitis is probably the correct call. To sort it out, I'll have to undergo various unpleasant tests, and it's possible I'll have to park in the hospital to get them done sooner rather than later. I'll obviously go to Columbus for all of this; Ohio State has an excellent neurology department.

If the OSU guys come up with a working diagnosis of vasculitis, I'd get high-dose corticosteroids (a prednisone relative). Not a picnic, but the prospects would be good for recovery, as far as I understand. (If you start googling "primary CNS vasculitis" or "cerebral angiitis" or variations thereupon, you will find some pretty alarming stuff. I don't recommend you do it. My situation, so far, seems to be serious but not nearly as dire as what you'll find on the intertubes.)

If vasculitis is ruled out, then we'd be back to a workup for MS.

Blogging may be thin through all of this. If I can get to feeling a little better, there's all sorts of stuff I'd love to say. Concentrating is hard, though, and most of my spare time and energy is going into researching my situation.

Yes, I know all that googling can be unhealthy. But I wouldn't have known how vague that first radiology report was, except for my research. I wouldn't have pressed for more answers. I wouldn't have known which answers to press for. And that would've left us with a possible red herring and perhaps a harmful delay in further testing. (Time is more urgent in CNS vasculitis than in MS.)

I've been terrified and I'm still scared. But I'm almost equally swamped by the outpouring of love and support from every direction:

My husband, who is dealing with much of the domestic burden and letting me know that he's there for me no matter what.

My family in California, who are willing to hop on a plane if it'll help.

My colleagues, who have already taken on extra burdens and will carry my classes when needed.

My neighborhood friends, who've held my hand at the doctor's office, brought flowers, and swooped up the kids so I didn't have to act brave the whole time. (I do brave rather poorly.)

And not least, my farawy friends who've poured those same impulses of love and kindness into emails, google detective work, and quiet worry.

For someone with blobs in my brain, I'm greatly blessed. So very blessed that I'm tearing up - again! - as I write this.

My Magnetic Personality

Discombobulated kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

If I seem charmingly magnetic today, it's because I got all the atoms spun around in my brain.

I didn't come out of the MRI in as many pieces as this kitty. I did find it a tad discombobulating, compared to my experience with the breast MRI. Maybe that was because the machine made some remarkably high-pitched whirs. Maybe I could feel those atoms whirling. On balance, I still like the John Cage-like music of the machine. Some of the lower pulsing noises would've made a nice backdrop for a nap, if not for the $3000/hour price tag.

Since I kept my appointment for the MRI, you've deduced by now that it was probably more than just the Bactrim making me sick. I'm going on that assumption, since I still have lots of symptoms. I won't know much more about their possible causes until Monday, when I see my doctor again.

I'm getting checked out for most of the auto-immmune bugaboos. The one that fits my symptoms uncomfortably well is multiple sclerosis. That's not always an easy diagnosis to make, and it can be a very tough one to live with. If that's it, you can hope for a relatively benign form of it. Or you can hope that the promise of stem-cell treaments are borne out: Just today, researchers announced that they had halted and occasionally reversed disability in early-stage MS patients, using their own immune stem cells (not embryonic ones).

For now, I can just say my motor problems are marginally improved; they seem to be worst in the afternoon and when I'm cold. My brain fog is definitely better, though it's hard to keep up with conversations in a group. I have a tough time focusing on very dense prose. Your average blog post is just about at my mental level, conveniently enough. :-)

I'm trying to get enough sleep (even napped this afternoon), avoid my favorite grape-based neurotoxins, and downing fish oil and vitamins (a B-complex and D). I'm going to ask for a B12 shot. Assuming some sort of demyelination has occurred, I want to promote remyelination. Any ideas gratefully accepted!

My colleagues are being wonderfully supportive in word and deed. Everyone on the team for the big class on Religion, Gender, and Sexuality is helping in one way or another. Another colleague found money to pay one of my co-instructors to grade the midterms, which will spare me a lot of stress and gain me some sleep. In women's studies, my students are patient and accepting, while my fellow professors have offered to help in any way they can. I'm blessed, and I know it.

But I'm also scared. And so all of your good thoughts, vibes, prayers, and whisker rubs are gratefully, promiscuously appreciated.

What the Hooman Vets Told Me

Reluctant patient kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So Thursday night I got sprung from the hospital, once the ER doctor called my regular doctor and got him to promise to see me the next day. Feeling much like this LOLcat, I dragged myself to the hooman vet. He examined me pretty thoroughly. All my reflexes appear normal. Nothing seems to be bulging in my eyeballs. My grip strength is just fine.

Both doctors seem to agree that I've got some weird neurological thing going on, but it's subtle and almost definitely not due to a stroke. In fact, I seem to be perfectly healthy except for an unexplained tremor, a sense of heaviness, wobbliness, and clumsiness in my limbs, brain fog, overall fatigue, and - for lack of a better term - a trippiness in my view of the world. Regrettably, it's not a good trip.

My family practitioner seems to think my crackpot theory is probably the leading one: that I'm having a freaky drug reaction. No, I haven't been promiscuously digging into unmarked vials of pills again. The day before I started feeling bad, I was prescribed Bactrim for an infection. Among its side effects are some neurological ones, including peripheral neuritis, ataxia, dizziness, and more. These are pretty rare, but they've been reported. The timing in my case is highly suggestive.

So we're going to wait and see what happens and not spend thousands of dollars on testing just yet. The next test would be an MRI, and we decided to hold off on that unless I get worse. Yesterday, I actually felt better. Ditto this morning. Then I took a Bactrim and within an hour I felt worse. Just now, I began to feel a little better again. I'm thinking this weighs in favor of Bactrim being the culprit. Unfortunately I have to take it for a few more days because the infection is better but not gone.

Now, in the bad old days, I might've been diagnosed with hysteria! At least I'd have a name for it ... But I'm grateful that some seriously scary stuff has been pretty well ruled out (stroke, brain tumor, any kind of bleeding in my head). If I don't feel better once I'm off the Bactrim, then I'll have to get checked out for MS and possibly other conditions that whack the myelin of the peripheral nerves. I'm trying to stay calm about all those possibilities, because logically I really do think it's a drug reaction.

Anyway, thanks to all of you who've sent well wishes. I'll let you know how this turns out. In the meantime, between my clumsy brain and fingers, my blogging may range from sporadic to stupid. (Then again, that can happen anyday!)

A Slightly Scary Hospital Drama with a Happy Ending, So Far

Even though I adore the TV show House, it’s not only the medical facts that it often fudges. It’s mostly wrong about how people behave in hospitals, too, and what a good thing that is.

Just about every time I’ve set foot in a hospital, I’ve been amazed at the kindness I’ve witnessed. Nurses who bring an extra warm blanket. Daughters who teasingly cajole their aged fathers to “be nice to them nurses.” Spouses who manage to appear calm and comforting even when their partner may be in grave danger. Parents who reassure their frightened child. Many of them ought to be wailing and weeping and invoking the story of Job. Instead, they evince quiet courage – for themselves, for their loved ones.

I’m noticing these human details right now because I’m in the ER, on my own since my husband is home caring for our kids. Conversations overheard through the thin drapes separating the beds are a welcome distraction, now that I’ve worked my way through the novel I was reading and caught up on reading other people’s blogs. (Even my small community hospital has wireless!)

Distraction is good. For the past few days, I’ve had some very mild weakness in my left arm and leg, along with a slight tremor in my left hand. I can type but it’s as though my left fingers would rather be jitterbugging across the keyboard. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had a stroke but of course that’s what the ER doctors first have to check. So I just got back from a CT scan, which I think is a very cool thing if it weren’t for 1) the mounting evidence showing that the radiation from a CT scan is more dangerous than originally supposed, especially in kids, and 2) fear.

It’s funny. I wasn’t really scared, just uneasy, until I called my osteopath and my family physician this afternoon and was told I needed to get this checked out. It’s odd how walking into the hospital congeals those previously diffuse fears into something cold and solid in the pit of your belly.

-------------

But because I don’t want you to start sharing that frigid fear: The doctor just informed me my CT looks great. So did my blood work. There’s no sign of a stroke.

(Lucky for me the technology’s still not refined enough to detect half-baked ideas, ‘cause they’d find an awful lot of those floating around in my brain.)

I still don’t know what’s going on with me. I’ve got to come back tomorrow for more tests. But I’m grateful that the ugliest possibility has been largely ruled out. I’m grateful for the nurse who gave me just about the least-painful IV ever. I’m grateful that the doctor appeared smart and competent. (Yes, Dr. House would have found a diagnosis by now, but only after first insulting me and then recklessly endangering my life.)

And again I’m grateful for the supportive murmurs of the couple on the other side of the curtain. I don’t know them. They’re not my people. And yet, they are.

A LOLbeaver? Or The Patriarchy at Work?

I'm not gonna comment on where I stand on this until after I use it in my Women's and Gender Studies class today, but I'm curious what others think of this ad. I'll update with my stduents' thoughts and mine after class. In the meantime, leave a comment! (Via Samhita at Feministing.)

Our Most Naked Selves

Gustav Klimt's Danae, posted on Flickr by freeparking, used under a Creative Commons license.

A couple of weeks ago, Cosmo got piled on - deservedly, in my opinion - for a headline on the cover of its December issue that reads "Your Orgasm Face: What He's Thinking When He Sees It." I haven't read the article. I'm loathe to buy the magazine. I was even more loathe to read it while waiting to pay at the supermarket while my little Bear (age 9) reads over my shoulder. So I'll rely on the précis of it from a long discussion thread on it at Open Salon, where someone who actually had seen the article weighed in and noted that it was relatively benign, apparently intended to reassure women that men like their O-face.

That still didn't make the cover okay! Isn't it just typical of Cosmo that whatever the article's content, its headline fans women's insecurities?! I mean, we all know that the lure to buy the magazine isn't desire; it's fear of what our partner might be thinking. And if the article is eventually reassuring, well, then it's responding to a need that the cover headline helped create in the first place.

On one level, of course, Cosmo is tapping into the way women's pleasure is viewed more generally in our culture: as something to be performed for a male partner's benefit and not just enjoyed authentically in its own right. This is only the latest salvo in the objectification and commodification of women's bodies and pleasure. It totally deserves the snark it got from commenter CrossWord at Jezebel:

Please. He is waaaay to busy being grossed out by your pubic hair/shape of your labia to notice your O face.

Heh. If he's got a kebab fixation, he doesn't deserve to notice anything else.

All snark aside, I also think there's a vulnerability in orgasm that's not entirely reducible to social conditioning. And this, I think, is far more interesting than Cosmo's foolishness. Now that I've got that mini-rant out of my system, I'd like to ponder this vulnerability from a more philosophical angle.

For me, at least, there's an element of trust and intimacy in letting a man see me at that moment, naked in every sense, which I hope would be appreciated, enjoyed, and never treated casually or with contempt. Thankfully, I've never been teased about it; I've never felt judged. Appallingly, several of the commenters at Jezebel mention exes who actually did give them a hard time. The right retort to that comes from their fellow Jezzie commenter Swashbuckling: "If a guy can't deal with an orgasm face, he's well within his rights to give up sex." Indeed.

However, in my chequered past I have experienced partners who did a quick disappearing act, which felt too much like disrespect for my vulnerability (and perhaps for their own). In one case, the guy's retreat was literal and almost instantaneous, as he leapt off of me, into his trousers, and out the door. Other times, the guy conspicuously avoided me once everyone's clothes were on again. Either way, I found it hurtful and bewildering. Note that these were situations involving friends where I wasn't pressing for any deeper involvement. I assume that their reactions had more to do with a general fear of intimacy or unresolved inner conflicts about their own boundaries, but that's all conjecture since, after all, they didn't stick around to explain.

Nonetheless. Even in a supposedly low-commitment situation, when I allowed myself to be that naked and my partner's reaction was a rapid retreat, it felt like a breach of trust. And I think this has to do with the vulnerability of having been seen with every defense down, exposed in every way.

Now, I suppose one solution would be to avoid such vulnerability. The only problem? I think that really wonderful sex, whether with a long-term partner or just a partner-for-tonight, requires precisely this vulnerability. In my experience, anyway, there's a deep need to be really seen, for a partner to look at my exposed self, with all its messy desires and pleasures, and to embrace it anyway. No, more: to be embraced because of that wild nakedness.

If this isn't just my personal quirk (and if I really thought it was, I'd shut up), it sheds some light on why "casual sex" is so often not really casual and even less often meaningless. I also imagine that this is one reason why so many people are sexually unsatisfied even where the mechanics of libido, arousal, and orgasm work just fine. It might help explain why some people seek out affairs or prostitutes. (For me, it suggests why I find commercialized sex so unappealing, but I know it's true that many men seek more from a prostitute than just physical release.) It illuminates why solo sex apparently strikes so many of us as a wholly inadequate substitute for coupling with another person.

And so sex is about much more than just pleasure and orgasms, or even love and affection; it's about the need to be seen and embraced in our orgasmic vulnerability.

I don't for a minute believe that long-term relationships hold a monopoly on this sort of connection. It can happen in the shortest-term liaison as long as there's mutual regard and a willingness to take emotional risks. It can occur between friends with benefits as long as the friendship is real and not a mere fiction. It can be absent in long-term relationships, even in otherwise loving and intimate ones. In fact, familiarity may tempt us to think we know our partners fully, to stop seeing them afresh, and to carry this jadedness over into routinized sex that feels "safe" in all the wrong ways.

When this sort of vulnerability is nurtured over the long run, its rewards can be greater, I think. But this requires a willingness to take risks.

Whatever the relationship context, people may tend to default to emotional pseudo-safety in sex because the need for shared, perceived, embraced vulnerability collides with another need: to protect ourselves against possible rejection. Because what if your partner sees you in your naked neediness and is repulsed - or just alarmed at the too-muchness of it? What if your partner beats a quick retreat (see above)?

This pushme-pullyou of vulnerability and fear isn't only about gender, though it has some gendered dimensions. In the Western world, throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, women were held to be more carnal than men: voracious, sexually aggressive, and just plain out of control. Kochanie recently suggested that

By attributing such power and malice to women, men became, by default, the submissive class. A resentfully submissive class.

This puts a new spin on why men put (respectable) women on a pedestal in the nineteenth century - and why, despite its ongoing costs to all of us, so many men persist in claiming women are the less lusty sex. This historical legacy also suggests that men may put more at risk in letting themselves be vulnerable, sexually, because vulnerability can edge into loss of power and privilege, if not necessarily submission per se.

In the wake of this history, men can too easily conflate vulnerability with weakness. They are not the same.

What's more, the blurring of self/other boundaries that can happen when you risk sexual vulnerability challenges the very notion of the autonomous self. Men have more invested than women in the illusion of autonomy and self-containment. The autonomous and controlled self has been fundamental to Western masculinity. It was essential to John Locke's articulation of the modern political subject. Sigmund Freud saw it as the result of successfully navigating the phallic phase. Jean-Paul Sartre asserted the superiority of transcendence over immanence. All of these subjects were deeply gendered as masculine. And while Locke would probably be appalled, you could trace the association of masculinity with self-contained autonomy all the way up to the emergence of the "pick-up artist" and the Seduction Community, which as far as I can tell is largely about using sex to avoid real sexual vulnerability.

However. Vulnerability is scary for everyone, not just for men. I recently mentioned bell hooks' take on romance as consisting of people putting a false front, trying to impress their partner (and maybe trying to fool their very own selves, too). That false front doesn't just get in the way of love, as hooks notes. It also prevents us from letting our vulnerability show, sexually and otherwise. I tend to think that the people who maintain the facade most ferociously are also precisely those who may feel the most vulnerable under the surface - and who might gain the most from dropping the mask.

And this false front interferes mightily with good sex. This is partly because forgetting yourself is no small part of good sex, which is why anything that makes us judge our performance through external eyes is so pernicious. (Yep, I'm talkin' to you again, Cosmo!) It's also because vulnerability itself can be hot.

In the end, though, the imperative to drop the mask is about way more than just heat and friction. It's about an existential need to convince ourselves, if only for one peak moment, that we're not truly alone. That we're not ultimately disconnected and atomized. That we don't have to be self-contained.

If the existentialists exalted the transcendent, autonomous, self-directed man, they also recognized the anxiety (the nausea, as Sartre would have it) that comes with seeing ourselves as wholly alone and wholly free. If Sartre were around to comment on this post, he'd likely see me as either naively romantic or stupidly mired in immanence.

But Simone de Beauvoir (who I'm pretty sure would hate that Cosmo cover) might have thought I'm on the right track. Here's her final word in The Second Sex on sexuality in a world where women and men would be equals (my emphasis):

It is nonsense to assert that revelry, vice, ecstasy, passion, would become impossible if man and woman were equal in concrete matters; the contradictions that put the flesh in opposition to the spirit, the instant to time, the swoon of immanence to the challenge of transcendence, the absolute of pleasure to the nothingness of forgetting, will never be resolved; in sexuality will always be materialised the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration, and the triumph of existence. To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue none the less to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other.

It's this mutual recognition that I think we yearn for - and that I believe we deeply, deeply need, women and men alike. It's neither utopian nor romanticized. It can only happen, though, when we drop the mask and pretense and allow ourselves to be seen fully, nakedly, as equals transfigured by desire.

Orgasmic Childbirth - Unicorn, Guilt Trip, or Taboo?

Now that I've been nominated for the honor of Hottest Mommy Blogger, I guess I have to live up to it by promiscuously mixing sex and maternity in a single post.

At the New York Times Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin unleashed a storm of debate a few days ago by raising the question of whether childbirth can result in an orgasm. Belkin described a documentary entitled "Orgasmic Birth" that will air on ABC's 20/20 on January 2. (Correction 12/15/08: The 20/20 episode will discuss the topic but only show excerpts from the actual film.) While over the years a small number of women have reported experiencing orgasm during labor, it's quite uncommon. According to its director, doula and childbirth educator Debra Pascali-Bonaro, the film's intent is not to imply that orgasm during childbirth is attainable for all women; rather, she says:

"I hope women watching and men watching don't feel that what we're saying is, every woman should have an orgasmic birth," she said. "Our message is that women can journey through labor and birth in all different ways. And there are a lot more options out there, to make this a positive and pleasurable experience."
(ABC's entire promotional summary is here.)

Fair enough. But why, then, choose such a misleading title? Okay, ABC wants to drive ratings. Pascali-Bonaro wants people to watch her film. But dang it, the title is sure to generate more heat than light. (Oops - no pun intended.)

That's not to suggest orgasmic birth is entirely fictional, even if it is vanishingly rare. More than one commenter on Belkin's blurb reports having experienced an orgasm during birth.

No, it is not ridiculous, because some of us actually experienced it, but were too embarrassed to mention it.

It happened during both of my deliveries, and it’s kind of a relief to read this and know that it has happened to others - I didn’t even tell my husband, because it sounded so weird, and I was afraid it would make him feel really insecure!

— Nell

Nonetheless, orgasmic birth also appears to be very infrequent indeed. It's also not clear that what these women describe as "orgasm" is the same sensation they'd experience during sex. Of course there are different flavors of orgasms, even as experienced by the same woman at different times. But a couple of the descriptions given by those who've been there make me skeptical that this is actually "orgasm" as opposed to some other sort of pleasurable peak experience:

Yes, actually it’s true. I had that experience, and I sure wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t like sex at all, it was more like surfing the best wave ever.

— Catherine

Well, I guess I’m in the minority here, but the birth of my first child was actually an orgasmic experience…So much so that the first thing I said to my midwife after I could see straight was “I want to do that again! Right now!”…What I experienced was not identical to an orgasm during sex, but it was intensely pleasurable and memorable enough that I couldn’t wait to go into labor with my second baby… — rebecca

Even Tamra Larter, the woman whose birth is shown in the film, qualifies her experience in a follow-up post by Belkin:

“I never claimed to have a pain-free birth,” she wrote, “but laboring with my daughter was awesome and for the most part felt really good.” The actual “orgasmic experience” did not feel like the climax of sex, she says, but rather “sensations which were something different than sex, but similar enough I feel O.K. using the word orgasmic. It was a wonderful feeling.”

If some mild skepticism is warranted about the nature of the experience, there are stronger grounds to worry that a few women's capacity for pleasure will get blown into another benchmark for all women's "performance" in labor, much as some women's (reasonable) preference for drug-free childbirth has too often been treated as a modern norm for the Good Mother. Concerned that this film will raise unrealistic expectations, one midwife writes:

As a Certified Nurse Midwife who has worked with thousands of women during their births, I can safely say I have never seen a single one come close to an orgasmic experience. Having said that, I work in a busy hospital, not in peoples homes. Most couples do not “mak[e] out” in the hospital. I could see an orgasm as a remote possibility if someone were deeply relaxed in the comfort of their own home.

— MSW

The thing is, most of us aren't that relaxed. Sure, tension exacerbates pain, but that doesn't mean the pain itself is illusory. The ABC promo for the documentary and its director's comments imply that pain in childbirth is avoidable. It's true that a lucky few women do actually experience a pain-free, unmedicated labor.

I certainly did not experience an orgasm with either birth, but I was quite surprised to find that the 2nd stage of labor (pushing the baby out), did not hurt at all (in contrast to 1st stage, which was like a hellish version of menstrual cramps). At one point, the midwife asked me to “push into the pain.” After a few repetitions of this instruction, I told her that I had NO PAIN. I’m quite prepared to believe that the experience of childbirth differs greatly from woman to woman, and from labor to labor; and I’m sure there may be a luckly few who even experience orgasm in 2nd stage labor.

— Laurel

While pain-free birth is highly unusual (though not as exceptional as orgasmic birth), it does exist, and anyway I would never presume to tell another woman what she did or didn't experience. I don't know what causes painless birth, but I can think of a couple of possible explanations. Maybe it's natural endorphins. Maybe just-right pressure on pelvic nerves cuts off sensations. Maybe mind triumphs over matter.

I do know that given the rarity of painless birth, the rest of us shouldn't be made to feel like it ought to be within everyone's reach.

One Motherlode commenter implies that if you do feel pain, it's because you're, well, a tight-ass. Or too tight somewhere, anyway.

Of course it [orgasmic birth] makes sense. Women’s bodies have been birthing babies for eons. When they are truly open, and energy is flowing, anything can be ecstatic, orgasmic. Same nerves, just have to be stimulated in a system that is open. There can be uterine contractions, but if the emotions are not contracted, of course it can be orgasmic. Proof is in the example given, and in the case of many.

— Robbie

Um, yeah. Those nerves need to be stimulated, all right. How they're stimulated matters very much. Most women have fairly specific preferences about how they like to be touched even under ordinary sexual circumstances. Most of us don't prefer levels pressure otherwise achieved only by pneumatic tools.

An advocate of hypnobirth who believes labor pain is merely a self-fulfilling prophecy chides us for forgetting our animal roots:

Watch animals in the wild who aren’t taught what to expect. They don’t cry out in pain. For others its the most painful thing they ever experience. I believe this is mostly due to that expectation combined with the way many hospitals pressure one to push and to see the whole experience as medical and anxiety producing.

— Erika

Well, wild animals don't generally walk on their hind legs, which necessitates a smaller pelvic outlet. They also don't spawn absurdly big-brained progeny. If you want to appeal to nature, let's be honest about our natural differences from other beasts. We're operating with a system with very narrow tolerances and no real clearance whatsoever. It's a tight fit, and sometimes the fit is simply too tight.

That's why for most of us, childbirth really does hurt like a sonofabitch. We're not deluded, uptight, or removed from nature. We're just responding to pressure on nerves that I'd be tempted to call inhuman if it weren't so characteristically human. Some Motherlode commenters compare labor pain to a root canal without anesthesia. Others just said it was excruciating. I sort of related to this description:

My first birth experience I’d liken to be turned completely inside out and then having a very large tractor run over me back and forth for 30 hours.

— Jenna

In my own experience, even the pain of early labor had nothing to do with mere cramps, whether a "hellish version" or not. When I had my first child, I had debilitating back pain within the first half hour of labor. It didn't feel like cramps. It didn't feel like the regular, five-minute-apart pains that all the books described. It was a wall of continuous pain.

I was one of the best-educated first-time mothers I've ever known, and yet, I had only one thought as I crouched on all fours on the bare linoleum of my apartment's hallway at 4 a.m. and waited for my husband to haul his butt out of bed: I am clearly dying. There was no point in timing contractions, because either I was in labor or I was in mortal danger. Either way, the hospital sounded like a brilliant idea.

Then there was the nausea. More surprisingly, there was the uncontrollable chills and shaking. By the way, that's another experience neglected by the What to Expect squad: the not-uncommon uncontrollable trembling that can occur during labor, and not just during transition. There's a world of difference between this and shuddering in ecstasy.

The other main objection to this documentary that Motherlode readers express is disgust at the idea that the birth of a baby could be a sexual experience (and not just the result of our sexuality). This reaction doesn't come just from defenders of the medical model of childbirth. Even some commenters who chose "natural" (that is, unmedicated) birth are repelled by the idea of orgasmic birth:

I’ve given birth three times. One in hospital, one in birthing center, and one at home. All were so painful I lost my voice. Orgasm during child birth seems gross and weird. Not to mention the midwife/ doctor/ nurse/ whatever around while you are giving birth and who would want to have an orgasmic birth with people watching you. Giving birth is hard enough, let along with people around watching you and then expecting you to orgasm while you are in the most insane pain anyone could possibly imagine. How intrusive and bizarre. I can’t even get my mind around it.

— Jennifer

Everything else aside, I feel like it’s going to be really awkward down the road when Baby Larter reads in The New York Times that he entered the world to his parents “kissing and caressing,” and he may have actually given his mother an orgasm. On camera.

— Ben A

It seems almost self-evident that the "gross" response is rooted in our incest taboos. People are icked out at the idea that you could get an orgasm from your very own baby. I suppose it might sound like it carries a whiff of pedophilia too.

Of course, this is nonsense. It's not as though women set out to have a baby because they think it'll be a sexual thrill to push it out. (Well, at least now they don't. Let's see what happens after this documentary airs!) Nor do women forgo pain relief in hopes of an orgasm. Those who do experience sensations they label "orgasmic" actually sometimes express confusion about it (like the first woman I quoted, who wondered if telling her husband about it would make him feel insecure).

More commonly, women experience sexual pleasure and sometimes even orgasm while breastfeeding. We don't talk about this, either, because it feels vaguely incestuous. Yet it's a widespread enough experience that taboos and silence only condemn women to feeling shame.

But this taboo is the real shame. It alienates women from their bodies, makes them feel freakish, and tries to shore up an untenable line between our experiences as parents and our existence as embodied creatures. That's a conversation I'd love to see this documentary inspire: how can our culture move beyond its anxieties about parents as sexual creatures? Unfortunately, the chance of that happening is about as likely as, well, a woman actually having an orgasm in childbirth.

Update 12/15/08, 1 p.m.: Laura Shanley, a proponent of "unassisted childbirth" who appears in the 20/20 show, has contributed her perspective in comments, so be sure to check them out. Also, to see a trailer for the documentary, go to its website, Orgasmicbirth.com. If you're at work, make sure your computer's sound is muted or pop on your headphones, because the trailer's soundtrack is pretty much what the title implies.

Also, if the film's publicity is not meant to play up its potential sensationalism, then it's doing something wrong. From its website:

Joyous, sensuous and revolutionary, Orgasmic Birth brings the ultimate challenge to our cultural myths by inviting viewers to see the emotional, spiritual, and physical heights attainable through birth. Witness the passion as birth is revealed as an integral part of woman's sexuality and a neglected human right. With commentary by Christiane Northrup, MD, and midwives Ina May Gaskin, Elizabeth Davis and other experts in the field . . . and stunning moments of women in the ecstatic release of childbirth.

It's hard not to read this as a blurb for soft-core erotica. Nothing wrong with erotica, mind you, but this way of framing the film won't focus attention on the larger issues of home birth, support for women, etc. that are supposedly the film's broader agenda.

Back in Trouble Again

Image by Flickr user _underscore, used under a Creative Commons license.

My back flared up today, though not as colorfully as this illustration. The picture does show the state I'm in: laid out, drugged out, and thoroughly sluggish. ("Snailish" doesn't quite work, does it?)

Earlier today I had a few moments where the pain hit eleven on my personal scale. Unluckily, I was in the shower when that happened and had a heck of a time getting out without falling.

The trigger this time? Shaving my legs. Which I suppose tells us that shaving is stupid and unnecessary. I'm an old Deadhead with feminist proclivities, so why do I bother? Still I persist.

I'm doing considerably better by now - no longer in agony, just groggy and stupid and discouraged. Real blogging will resume once my synapses stop misfiring.

Greenlighting the Best Sex Ever

Ampelmännchen photographed in Berlin by Flickr user lsphotos, used under a Creative Commons license.

I've got a big backlog of things I'd like to say about about politics, but I'm coming down with yet another cold and the global economy is crumbling. So I'm reduced to my reptilian brain, and all it wants to write about is sex. Via Biscuit and figleaf, I've been mulling over a deceptively simple thought experiment at Manic Monday:

Which would you prefer and why? To have every stoplight turn green upon your arrival for the rest of your life or to have one week of the best sex any person ever had?

Now, for me the initial answer is screamingly obvious: I live in a small town. I spend most of my time on my bike, not in the car. Anyway, I tend to interpret traffic lights rather liberally while on my bike. Maybe if I still lived in California I'd go for the green lights and reclaim years of my life.

But I live in Ohio, so I'll take the sex.

The questions figleaf and Biscuit raise in their responses are actually more interesting than the original. Biscuit worries that every sexual experience would pale after such a peak. That's a reasonable concern.

When I think back to other sorts of pinnacles, though, I can't say that's been at all true for me. Take dancing, for instance. Back in college, I once very briefly dated a guy who'd danced on American Bandstand. I didn't know that until we were at a party and he picked me up and twirled me around 360 degrees. Without warning. Vertically. It lasted two seconds at most. By many orders of magnitude, it was the most intense experience I've ever had dancing.

Did that take the luster off of subsequent dances for me? Nah. It happened once. It was perfect. It inhabits its own space in my imagination and memory. It didn't impinge on late nights in Berlin clubs, or endless sunny California afternoons at Grateful Dead shows, or the ballroom lessons I took (clumsily but happily) with my husband back when we were planning our wedding.

Or take music. I typically hit a few sour notes (or a lot). Somestimes the phrasing doesn't come out as I imagined. And yet, I have memories of performances that - while still imperfect - far outshone my actual abilities. Fiddler on the Roof, opening night, me on French horn, and I just nailed all the high notes in the wedding dance. A high school friend who was such a phenomenal marimba player, he made my humble piano accompaniment sound brilliant. A ridiculously simple piano duet with me and my eight-year-old Baerchen ridiculously well attuned to each other. A vocal trio with my mom and sister in church that was virtually one voice singing three parts.

Sex is different than that? Well, yeah. I haven't often played music naked. (Though maybe I should try it?) I've never had sex in church. But if these other memories still make me want to dance or toot my horn, why would a memory of near-perfect sex be any less inspiring?

Which brings us 'round to the set of issues figleaf raised for me: What the heck do we mean by "mind-blowing sex," anyway? After saying he'd pick the green lights (figleaf???!!!) he wrote:

Regular sex is already pretty nice, and in my experience "mind blowing" sex, while also nice, is sort of overrated. I mean who in his or her right mind says "oh darn it, that last orgasm sucked because it wasn't the best ever" and/or "my partner's last orgasm sucked because it wasn't her/his best ever?"

For one thing, it's precisely because "regular" sex is lovely that I don't think I'd lose anything by experiencing "the best sex ever." I totally agree with him that we shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But that doesn't mean I'd turn down a one-time experience of "perfection," or some reasonable fascimile thereof.

For another, my idea of "mind blowing" would be pretty multidimensional. I wouldn't sneeze at an orgasm that went longer and took me deeper than ever before, but (as figleaf might well say himself, if he weren't still zipping through those green lights) there's way more to marvelous sex than just shuddering orgasms. There's imagination. There's anticipation. There's the give-and-take, following and leading, of dancing horizontally with a partner. There's the duet of shifting tempos and crescendoes, whether in sweet harmony or giddy dissonance. There's the lure of trying something new, for the first time, and gently pushing each other's boundaries. There's playfulness and a readiness to laugh when something doesn't work quite perfectly after all.

And then there's the shivery thrill of imagining a week spent having sex. A whole week! Speaking as a fuddy-duddy old mother of two, even the prospect of a week devoted to mediocre sex leaves me giddy. (But really: if I had a whole week, it would not be mediocre.)

On a more philosophical level, if I'm given a choice between efficiency or a new and intense experience, I'll never view it as a choice at all. My bias is always to assume that experience is how we grow. So that week might just be deeply pleasurable. It might be transformative. Either way, "mind blowing" is a pretty clichéd term - but even if that single week of perfect sex were never repeated (and the original question didn't say it would be your last great sex, ever) I can't imagine regretting it. The aftershocks would echo, whether with my partner or alone. Because of that, I'd never be precisely the same.

And I'd have a plethora of ways to occupy my imagination while I sat idling at all those red lights.

And I Thought Sex Bias in Medicine Was Waning ...

How wrong I was.

A recent study published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management found that female cancer patients get significantly less adequate relief of their pain than do men in a similar position. Via Reuters (and Medscape, free registration):

The researchers examined pain severity and the adequacy of pain management in 131 cancer patients newly referred to a multidisciplinary cancer pain clinic.

Men and women did not differ significantly in terms of worst pain scores, least pain scores, or pain interference. However, average pain in the last week and "pain right now" were significantly higher in females (p<0.05).

The mean total daily dose of analgesics was significantly greater for males (130 mg morphine equivalent value) than for females (66 mg). Females were significantly less likely than males to receive prescriptions for high potency opioids (32.9% vs 51.0%).

Women were significantly more likely than men to report inadequate pain control, as indicated by scores on the Pain Management Index.

Contrary to my usual practice, I haven't tracked down the original study. So I can't speak to its strength and weaknesses. It definitely dovetails with an existing body of work that shows race and class affect patients' access to adequate pain relief.

In any event, the gender-linked differences in dosages and the percentages of patients getting the strong stuff are striking. When you consider that women 1) seek medical assistance more often than men, and 2) have the reputation of being less stoic than men (never mind what we endure in giving birth!) you'd expect women would be more likely to request and receive the most potent pain relievers. Why is the opposite true?

If you can think of a reason more plausible than sexism, let me know.

Is Porn Virtual Adultery?

Does viewing Internet porn amount to adultery? In his column at the Atlantic, Ross Douthat says yes, it does. Basically, Douthat argues that hard-core porn is not fantasy and that the privacy offered by the Internet allows a degree of intense and personalized interaction that could not happen in the good old days when men stashed a magazine or two under their mattress:

Over the past three decades, the VCR, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up. ...

Masturbating to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model (like Christie Brinkley, once upon a time) or a Playboy centerfold is a one-way street: the images are intended to provoke fantasies, not to embody reality, since the women pictured aren’t having sex for the viewer’s gratification. Even strippers, for all their flesh-and-blood appeal, are essentially fantasy objects—depending on how you respond to a lap dance, of course. But hard-core pornography is real sex by definition, and the two sexual acts involved—the on-camera copulation, and the masturbation it enables—are interdependent: neither would happen without the other. The whole point of a centerfold is her unattainability, but with hard-core porn, it’s precisely the reverse: the star isn’t just attainable, she’s already being attained, and the user gets to be in on the action.

I'm not convinced. I have other problems with porn. Most of it objectifies women while being trite and frankly not very sexy, in my opinion. I'd have a problem if a partner neglected me in favor of a tete-a-tete with his computer. I would definitely be squicked if a partner was into barely-legal porn, or fetishes that would gross me out in real life, or the gonzo stuff that implies women get great pleasure from men destroying their orifices. But even then, while it might be represent a serious problem for our compatibility, it would fall far short of what I'd consider adultery.

To my mind, sex by any reasonable definition has to involve more than one person. It has to involve some sort of reciprocal interaction. Otherwise, masturbation would be cheating - and that's just silly.

By this definition, yes, it's possible to have sex online. But Douthat is not talking about cybersex, or phone sex, or any sort of interactive encounter. In porn, the only people interacting are on screen. The guy (or gal) at home is still a viewer. It's not like he's giving the actors direction. It's not like he can say, "Mmm, move a little to the right so I can get a better view." All he can do is open another browser window if the images aren't doing him right. No interaction - no sex.

I don't think porn is adultery. I don't even think it's virtual adultery. Porn is just porn.

I'm curious what you think. Are there any instances where porn would amount to adultery in your book? Please tell me in comments.

Uncomfortably Numb

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

My back has gone, well, kittywampus on me. I've got an old lower-back injury that dates back nearly twenty years, to the time I got stuck in O'Hare Airport overnight with Grey Kitty and no money for a hotel room.

Technically, the pain in my back is actually located in my backside, which means, as the Bear pointed out, I actually have a pain in the butt. I said that's better than being a pain in the butt. He wisely refrained from further comment.

So I'm stewing in muscle relaxants and opioids, all legally obtained. (Yes, I'm talking to you, DEA, if you're listening in.) The furniture is still in one place, maybe because some of it is bolted to the walls. But I'm not really capable of stringing together a coherent thought.

I'd make a terrible junkie; the buzz is fun for a few hours, but then I want my brain back. More substantive posting will resume once the drugs have worn off.

The Visible and the Invisible

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

No, this isn't a post about the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though I ripped off his title. It's about some really cool science news: Researchers now have the tools to make you invisible. Not just hide you from radar (in case you were worrying about that; I know I was) but really, truly, sci-fi-fantastically invisible.

The AP reports (via the Columbus Dispatch):

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.

The findings, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Xiang Zhang, are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science.

The new work moves scientists a step closer to hiding people and objects from visible light, which could have broad applications, including military ones.

People can see objects because they scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye. Cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.

Metamaterials are mixtures of metal and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite. They are designed to bend visible light in a way that ordinary materials don't. Scientists are trying to use them to bend light around objects so they don't create reflections or shadows.

(Source: Associated Press)

If these cloaks actually became widespread beyond the military sphere, they would radically change our perception of space and embodiment. If you saw someone before you, you could be pretty sure they were for real. But empty space might be empty ... or might conceal another person. Our ideas of privacy would be radically transformed. So would the opportunities for outdoor sex.

So here's my question. If you had an invisibility cloak, what would you do with it?

I made the mistake of telling my kids about this story, in a vain effort to stave off pre-bedtime meltdowns, and now they naturally want an invisibility cloak for Christmas. The Bear says he'd use it to play hide and seek. The Tiger said, "If you was a little kid, you could walk around alone." I asked him if he really meant that - I still have waking nightmares of him running away in crowds, which really only ended this summer - and he said yep, he would like to get around without having to hold onto any grow-mutt (aka grown-up).

I'd like to have an invisibility cloak so I could listen in on the goofy things the kids say and believe when they don't think the grow-mutts can hear. Like the time the Bear and a couple of his friends were talking about what would happen if your brain was too big and your head exploded.

If you had an invisibility cloak, what would you choose to do with it?

A Pain in the Pelvis

Here at Kittywampus we aim to deliver an unpleasant medical fact every few weeks. And no, I'm not trying to gross out my most tender readers. I've got this ongoing obsession - I mean, research interest - in gender and health. You, dear reader, just happen to be on the receiving end of it.

So, now that you've been warned: I read a rather alarming statistic today on the incidence of vulvodynia. That's a fancy Latinate way of saying pain in the pussy. It's sort of a garbage-can diagnosis, in that pain can have disparate causes. It only names the symptoms, not the etiology.

Even the symptoms can vary. In some women, vulvodynia resolves within a matter of weeks. Many live with it for years. Some suffer worse with intercourse, while for others, pain may be independent of sexual activity. Other activities may exacerbate it - or not. Sometimes the pain is more internal, sometimes more external. In most cases, the pain very significantly affects the woman's quality of life.

I've personally had some intermittent experience along these lines. I don't want to go too deep into TMI, and frankly I debated with myself about whether I should even mention this, but if I don't, I'm playing into the same shame that keeps the problem closeted in the first place.

I've never been diagnosed with vulvodynia, but I do know severe pelvic pain. So I'll just say for the record that severe pelvic pain doesn't really respond to painkillers. It laughs at Tylenol or Motrin. You can bring out the big guns, but Vicodin or Percocet doesn't erase it; you just gain some detachment so you can pretend it's not really your own body that's so miserable. Really, this isn't surprising when you consider how sensitive those nerves are. They're wired for pleasure. That same wiring can cause debilitating pain.

And it turns out that this sort of experience is shockingly common. According to the latest issue of Obstetrics and Gynecology (free abstract here), over the course of a year, 1 in 50 women will develop vulvodynia. That's not a lifetime risk. That's the number who report new symptoms of it over a single year.

The study spanned two years and included 744 women who completed the follow-up, though the pool of women who had no symptoms at the outset was smaller, just 372. The study's statistical power is a bit weak, as the abstract reveals:

Of the 372 asymptomatic women controls at initial enrollment, 13 (3.5%, 95% confidence interval 1.6–5.4%) had developed vulvodynia during the 2-year follow-up period; nine (2.2%) of these had ongoing symptoms.

So let's say the low end of the estimate is correct, and fudge it even lower to correct for the fact that the 2.2% figure doesn't supply the range for a 95% confidence interval. We're still looking at more than 1 woman in a hundred.

But remember, this figure only covers a single year. What happens if we make a few reasonable assumptions and estimate a woman's lifetime risk of suffering from vulvodynia? Some of the "new" cases in this study may well be repeat customers, so to speak - women who've experienced these symptoms in the past and are suffering a recurrence. Let's say this accounts for half of all cases. That leaves us with an annual incidence of one woman in 200, or 0.5 per 100.

Even so, 0.5 women per 100 multiplied by, say, 50 years (to account for the age span between 20 and 70) still yields an estimate that's shockingly high: 25% of women, by this reckoning, will suffer from vulvodynia at some time during their adult lifespan.

I don't have any way to test how reasonable my assumptions might be. I tried to skew them in a conservative direction. But even if the number of discrete recurrences is much, much higher and the true lifetime risk is, say, only one in ten instead of one in four, that's still a mighty high number.

This study had the advantage of being prospective - that is, following a group of women over time. A previous, retrospective study (which used a questionnaire that asked women to recall their histories) put the lifetime risk at about 16%.

So how come we so rarely hear about vulvodynia? I'm disinclined to blame simple sexism. I know that men also suffer from unexplained pelvic pain, but there's less consensus on a catch-all name for the male equivalent. Googling "testodynia" gave me all if 18 hits; "penodynia" yielded 11 and led me to a veritable jackpot: "scrotodynia" with 138 hits. Then there's "prostatodynia" with 16,600 occurrences, which is sometimes used as a synonym for chronic prostatitis, which in turn is also called "chronic pelvic pain syndrome" with some 59,400 hits. (I wasn't aware of this last term until figleaf mentioned it a few weeks ago.)

Vulvodynia, by contrast, comes up 168,000 times. I realize Google isn't the measure of all importance, but still! Women have become much less shy than men in advocating for their sex-specific health needs, and the greater visibility of vulvodynia on the Web reflects this young tradition of advocacy.

On the whole, then, women's needs aren't being neglected any more than men's. But when it comes to unexplained pelvic pain, both men and women are being neglected quite sorely. These aren't conditions that kill, and so there's not a lot of glory for researchers in understanding them. Severe pain can rob people of their lives, however, and that alone should concern researchers as well as us ordinary, vulnerable human beings.

I think the problem is that vulvodynia and similar conditions are both too sexy and terribly unsexy. Too sexy, because they draw attention to those body parts that our culture still so often denies. And unsexy, because there's nothing sexy at all about pain in your pussy. Until we as a society get over our confused feelings about sex, we're doomed to be in a state of denial about the real medical needs of our sexual anatomy.

And now, let's get back to our more usual O'Keeffe-ian perspective.

But first an update from 8/9/08: In comments, Alexandra pointed us to this additional resource for vulvodynia, Cure Together. If you're suffering from unexplained vulvar pain and stumbled upon my blog, you might want to check it out, along with the National Vulvodynia Association.

Daylily from my garden three weeks ago, guaranteed to be suffering no pain. Then again, it only lasted a day.

The Face in the Mirror and the Origami of Time

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

I don’t think I’m an exceptionally vain person, but I’m also not immune to wanting to look younger than I actually am. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of time leaving its tracks on my face. This happened most memorably a couple years ago when I was rushing between classes and was ambushed by the view in a bathroom mirror. Looking sidelong, I thought: oh my goodness, it’s my grandma!

Now, matters could be worse. Yes, it’s true that my dad’s mother got rather jowly late in life, not quite Nixon-esque but still quite noticable, and I see the contours of that future in my own chin. Yes, her eyelids sagged by the time she was in her eighties, and instead of getting them fixed, she held them in place with tape. (Why she never pursued surgery remains a mystery.)

But Grandma also remained vibrant and attractive well into her middle years. She adored being the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota. Virtually the only woman on the scene, she basked in the admiration of all those men. Incipient jowls apparently didn’t deter them. And conversely, she appreciated an attractive man well into her nineties, pretty much up to the point when she lost her marbles.

So yes, things could be a whole lot worse. And yet, when I read this passage in a Stephen McCauley novel a few days ago, I thought, whoa, he got it exactly right:

I was barely awake when the doorbell rang at eleven the next morning. I glanced in my bureau mirror on my way to the stairs, amazed at how increasingly unkind sleep was as I got older, as if someone came in every night to practice origami on my face while I slept.
(Stephen McCauley, The Man of the House, 140.)

McCauley is recounting the very particular woes of a gay man around 40 who’s single but would prefer to be paired. But even if you’re not hunting for a mate, that morning tracery can be merciless. My one really noticeable wrinkle is a line near my jaw where I know my chin gets squished against the pillow. I suppose I could sleep on my back, but then I’d never sleep, and that wouldn’t exactly enhance my looks, either.

This isn't just vanity. It's also not merely a slavish response to the beauty ideal, as a unidimensional feminist analysis might suggest. It's partly a fear of mortality. It's also anxiety - as McCauley's anti-hero displays - that no one will want to have sex with you beyond a certain point of decrepitude.

Most interestingly, it's a sense of alienation from oneself, as philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers has argued. In her book Gender in the Mirror, Meyers says when we look at our aging selves in the mirror, we no longer see our familiar, long-known selves. Our face appears as "not-self." It's no longer the image that is invested with and in our relationships. In this interpretation, the desire to look younger, be it through surgery, cosmetics, or merely the approving eyes of another, is an effort to recover what we perceive as our true selves.

Meyers presents this as a gendered phenomenon. It's true that women's social worth is still bound up with our appearance more than men's. I think Meyers may also be right that women's aging faces become a sort of proxy for everyone's horror of mortality. This was likely one strike against Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign.

But that loss of the familiar self is not necessarily gendered. The face with origami folds - and the resulting sense of unfamiliarity - can be male just as easily as female.

In some ways, recognizing myself as my grandma was a moment of pure alienation and unfamiliarity. I literally saw someone other than myself in the mirror. But if I have to morph into someone else, I could do worse. When Grandma died, she was just a few days short of 103. So if I get her jowls, I’ll hope to inherit her robustness, too. Certainly I got my ornery streak partly from her. But I promise: If my eyelids start to sag, I will get them fixed.

More Berks: Reflections on Writing Body History

Along with learning heaps from other people at the Berks, I also had a chance to talk about my own work in a conference seminar called “What is the history of the body?” We pre-circulated the papers and then used the conference time to explore their overlapping themes, which allowed discussion to go both wider and deeper than at an ordinary conference panel. The papers ranged from Heather Munro Prescott’s research on students fighting for birth control and other health services in the 1960s to Jessica Luther’s explication of alchemists’ attempts to quite literally incarnate themselves as men with wombs: hermaphrodites who embodied both “male” creativity and “female” generativity.

My own paper, which I mentioned here when it was still a bundle of semi-formed ideas, was a theoretical piece on the relationship between discourses that shape bodies and actual lived, embodied experiences. I won’t try to rehash it all here, because it’s an adventure in scary theory; anyone who wants to know more about it should email me. Instead, I’d like to muse on the themes I addressed in my oral presentation for the seminar.

Writing my seminar paper pushed me to reflect on why I was drawn to the history of the body in the first place. And as I thought about this, I realized that even as historians or other scholars write the stories of others’ embodied experiences, our own experiences remain at an Olympic height. Yet clearly those experiences are bound to affect our ideas and interpretations. So it makes sense to turn a critical gaze back upon our own experiential motivations for studying the history of the body and ask how they may reveal some systematic biases and blind spots. My guinea pig for this was the test case I know best - myself - but with the idea that my own experiences and agendas may point to some broader themes and concerns. (And yes, this is more navel-gazing than I’ve ever done in an academic venue.)

I first got interested in the history of the body in the late 1980s when I realized that it offered fresh insights into areas that were already long-standing interests of mine: sexuality, motherhood, medicine, and power. When I embarked on researching experiences of pregnancy and childbirth for my dissertation, I was very excited about two books that had just come out: Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction and Barbara Duden’s The Woman Beneath the Skin. I was fascinated by the broad range of embodied experiences that their work depicted. While they both focused almost entirely on women’s bodies and experiences, they also illuminated broader themes in the human condition, which are often though not always gendered – particularly, how power relations within a society are reflected and contested in experiences that result from the interaction of culture and biology. This basically anthropological lens was exhilarating to me both intellectually and politically; it seemed to mesh well with Foucault and feminism, which were the two main avenues for my thinking about power. To this day, I think that the project of making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange (to echo anthropologist Roy Grinker’s phrasing in Unstrange Minds) remains a powerful tool for historians of the body. (Jessica’s paper for the seminar did just that impressively.)

But looking back, I can see that it wasn’t just intellectual excitement. I had other, more personal agendas in play, which I think also have a shared, generational basis. One reason the history of the body resonated with me is that it meshed with my post-hippie youth. My friends and I were ferociously hungry for all sorts of experience, much of which engaged the body. I was younger than the students Heather studied, but in the early 1980s I knew a guy who took acid every Thursday and went wandering in California’s coastal hills; he called it his tripping day. I wasn’t anywhere near that dedicated or foolhardy about pushing the limits of embodied experience, but I did go to a lot of Grateful Dead shows and some of what transpired there might be difficult to explain when I run for President someday.

Boiling it down to “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” might oversimplify it, and yet that not-so-holy trinity absolutely foregrounded embodied experience. Unlike earlier generations of young people, who surely took their own risks, we thought specifically about “experience” as something that was desirable, that we hungered for. This was a motivator for the students Heather studied. It was also an influence on some of us future historians of the body. I realize not everyone who came of age from the late 1960s through the early ‘80s had equivalent experiences, yet it was part of the Zeitgeist. Whether you embraced and pursued experience for its own sake or consciously rejected it, you could hardly avoid taking a position.

So the first question that this examination of my own “experience of experience” raises is how these sorts of experiences have shaped our research agendas in ways that we haven’t necessarily examined. Namely: Have they created a presumption that the body is somehow a privileged site for the workings of liberation and repression, freedom and social control, and can this presumption be sustained? (One influence on my thinking about this - along with a slew of academic stuff - was a discussion along these lines involving figleaf, Kochanie, and others.)

My paper for the seminar argued that this is indeed the case, that the often-unexamined character of embodied experience makes such experience particularly potent. I’m generally convinced that this is true, and yet I’ll also readily admit that it’s very hard to ground this assumption. That’s why I think in the end it should be regarded as a hypothesis – one that has to be proven and re-proven empirically to fit with the available evidence, in an iterative process. (My seminar paper went into this iterative idea in more depth. Jessica’s paper actually did this, quite beautifully, and I tried to do it as well in my dissertation.) Sometimes, though, the evidence may show that in a given set of circumstances, the presumption doesn’t hold much water or obscures more than it explains.

A second area where I see my embodied experience affecting the history I write – often in ways that may remain preconscious or only dimly perceived – is through the interaction of the writing process with my own embodiment. Here, too, I don’t think I’m alone, but I’ll speak for myself and you can let me know if it makes sense. Most often, this takes form as a process of effacement of the body while writing. A relatively trivial example, one I’m sure most of you have shared, is when we try to ignore a headache or backache while in order to focus on the work. Many people deal with chronic pain and their work would come to a halt if they didn’t tune out their discomfort.

But when I do this - when I tune out my body while writing - I re-enact Cartesian dualism. Ironically, my seminar paper was in part an argument against splitting our selves into body and mind. So a second set of questions would be: How does this act of bracketing out my own body affect the kind of body history I write? Does this habit of effacement create blind spots, and if so, how do I rout them out?

But simple effacement is not the only possibility here. An example of embodied experience more specific to my own work was my changing relation to childbirth between starting and completing my dissertation. When I embarked on my project, a number of women scholars – mothers, one and all – told me I really couldn’t write about pregnancy and childbirth without having experienced them myself. Mindful of Barbara Duden’s warning against using our bodies as a bridge to the past (and just plain ornery), I was determined to prove them wrong.

As it turned out, I had my first baby while in the midst of writing chapters on hospital birth and the emotional import of pregnancy. In my panic at the thought that I might never focus properly again, I became the queen of effacing my body. Someone might be kicking up a storm in my belly, but I tried my darnedest to ignore everything below my neck. Or so I thought.

My perspective on this changed radically when I began revising the manuscript and I realized how my own childbearing experience hadn’t necessarily created a bridge to the past but it had thrown into question some of the present-day dogma that I’d absorbed about childbearing. For instance, the now-current notion that pregnancy is basically healthy and not pathological had blunted my empathy and understanding of the physical challenges women have faced in performing their jobs and housework while pregnant. I had to experience morning sickness and deep exhaustion for myself before I recognized my own blind spot.

My third and final question would thus be: How can we use our own embodiment to write better, more perceptive, more empathetic histories without falling prey to the assumption that our body can serve as a simple bridge? Quite possibly, this question can only be answered in specific contexts, looking at our own experiences and how they may overlap – or not – with the kinds of experiences we’re studying.

I’ve used my own experiences as a starting point here, because I didn’t want to be presumptuous. I can’t speak directly for other writers’ and scholars’ experiences. And yet, judging from audience reaction at the seminar, I don’t think either my experiences or their implications are limited to me.

Similarly, I’ve laid out these thoughts from a historian’s perspective, but I think they may apply to at least some aspects of blogging. Most of us who don’t write strictly political blogs deal with personal experiences in one form or another. Sometimes those experiences are our own; sometimes they belong to other people; sometimes they’re shared property, so to speak. What sorts of assumptions about experience are lurking in the background as we blog about experiential stuff?

If you’ve stuck with me through all of this, I’d love to hear if any of these thoughts resonated with you.

Self-Luminous

This week in the religion, gender, and sexuality class I'm helping teach, we read an account of the Buddhist creation myth. One of the fun things about teaching is having a chance to learn about stuff that is completely new to me. At least in the humanities and social sciences, I think this is virtually always true, even if you're teaching in your own research field. But it's even truer when half the course is really outside your area of expertise. So this Buddhist origin story, the Agganna Sutta, was all new to me.

And since I'm so not an expert on it, I mostly just want to offer a modest appreciation of its beauty.

There comes a time . . . when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance, usually come to life as humans. And they become made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory, and remain thus for a long, long period of time.
(This is from the version I read for class. Here's the whole Agganna Sutta but in a slightly less beautiful translation.)

Such gorgeous language. Feeding on rapture! Self-luminous! Imagine such an existence.


The catch is that if you've got self-luminance, you don't get to have a body. Later on, as the earth solidifies from liquid to a sweet milky substance to plants (a nifty evolution story), the formerly radiant beings grow more solid. As they solidify, they come to know cravings. And so, although there's no Eve to take the fall for the Fall in this story, sex becomes a polluting force. (Buddhism has its own issues with women and the flesh, as it turns out.)

But even so. I would like to be self-luminous and traverse the air for just an hour, as long as I didn't have to stay in the World of Radiance. The funny thing is, I feel like I have my share of radiance in my own little earth-bound life with all its cravings, desires, and beauty.


The petite red tulips come from the Bear's elementary school; the others, from my garden. All photos by me.