Deborah Lipp

Endometriosis is a disease in which part of the endometrium—the lining of the uterus that thickens throughout the month and is shed during menstruation—detaches from the uterus and instead attaches to other parts of the body. Usually it stays in the region of the pelvis, but it can attach to the spine, to nerves, and to organs, causing terrible pain.

In the past year or two, I have had increasing symptoms of perimenopause. To the point where I know longer refer to menstruation as my “period.” It is now my “random.” And one thing I’ve noticed is that my lifelong menstrual and pre-menstrual symptoms are also random, and don’t necessarily coincide with my randoms. They’ve detached themselves from my randoms and attached themselves to other parts of the month. And I thought that endometriosis was the perfect metaphor for what I was going through, an endometriosis of my hormonal changes.

Then I remembered my first marriage. When I was a teenager, I dated a raging alcoholic. After he stopped drinking, I married him. I thought the lack of alcohol would make things better, but in a way, it made things worse. His drunken behaviors still occured, but now, instead of being predictably attached to drinking, they floated randomly throughout life and fired off unpredictably. I realized that these symptoms, too, were like endometriosis; a sort of endometrial alcoholism.

And I thought, Why has no one ever used endometriosis as a metaphor before? It’s not rare (5.5 million sufferers!) or hard to understand. There are all sorts of things that cause problems by detaching themselves from their predicted and ordinary locations.

Which is when I realized the answer: Misogyny. Endometriosis is too gross to use as a metaphor. Cancer isn’t too gross. Cancer is used as a metaphor all the time. Cancer is deadly and foul-smelling and painful and nasty, but not too gross to say that every mold, spore, weed, bad idea, and ugly clothing trend “spreads like a cancer.”

Here are other things that aren’t too vulgar or too unpleasant to use as metaphors: Bowel movements, erections, vomit, impotence, peeing in your pants, fever, being kicked in the balls.

But here are things you never hear used as metaphors: Menstruation, menopause, hot flashes, lactation, vaginal discharge.

You see, not only can’t you say “vagina,” but you can’t be made to think about the icky female things that come out of vaginas (or breasts), even metaphorically. You know how everything you ever wanted to know, you learned in kindergarten? It’s true: Girls have cooties.

Amanda has a great post up about this “Willful Ignorance” article in American Prospect. (Shakes also has a great post up from a different, and important, perspective.)

Talking about gender-stereotyped abstinence-only education (I know, as if abstinence-only wasn’t bad enough, it’s gender-stereotyped abstinence-only ferfuxake), Amanda says:

teaching that men want sex and women want love but don’t want sex means that young men figure there’s no such thing as an enthusiastic “yes” to sex. If men think all women are reluctant to have sex at all points in time, then that means that they think sex is basically always rape. If you think all sex is rape because women never reallly want sex—as this abstinence-only curricula subtly teaches—then you think that rape is socially acceptable.

That’s vitally important, and it’s an essential element of date-rape and of disbelieving rape victims. “No” only means “no” if “yes” means “yes.”

See, let’s walk away from what it teaches men for a moment and look at what it teaches women. My first reaction is that if they teach young women that only men really want sex, then women will feel defeminized when they get horny. Holy shit, I want sex, I must be a man. Or mannish. Butch. Undesireable because of these unnatural feelings. All that.

But there’s a subtler outcome, which is that a woman will not admit to sexual desire. She wouldn’t want a man to find out that she isn’t really “feminine,” that she has these “masculine” desires. So she’ll say no even when she means yes, because no is the only “female” response.

Creating the feedback loop whence comes the rapist’s mantra: “She said ‘no’ with her lips but ‘yes yes yes’ with her eyes.” You know, “She really wanted it.” Women simply cannot be empowered to say “no” and mean it and have it honored unless they can also be empowered to say “yes” and mean it and get happily healthily fucked. And these crazy abstinence conservatives fear women who enjoy fucking SO MUCH that they’re willing to rob women of our “no.” Small price, they think, for robbing us of our “yes.” Well, my “no” can save my life and my “yes” is too much joy to give up, thankyouverymuch.

Amanda Marcotte has written an absolutely brilliant “Real consent manifesto.” You should, as the saying goes, read the whole thing.

This paragraph in particular kind of blew my mind:

The feminist concept of enthusiastic consent for sex, or total consent or whatever you want to call it, is such a new, radical idea that apparently it confuses the hell out of people. And it’s absolutely fed by queer politics, if for no other reason than acceptance of homosexuality is basically the acceptance of the idea of relationships between people that aren’t in a power differential for gendered reasons. The notion that sexual relationships could be built on desire and enthusiasm from both parties instead of a series of trade-offs between someone with power and someone without is more radical than I realize a lot of the time.

You know, I’ve given a lot of thought to the relationship between feminism and queer politics, but I’ve never been able to put it so succinctly. This is why, at core, everyone working for feminism is also working for gay rights, and vice versa. And that awareness is crucial to understanding how gender rules are running us all day, every day, without our even realizing it. (But we can realize it.)

New Year’s Eve, circa 1992–95. House party at my friend Rosie’s. Kids are invited to come, and they play back and forth between Rosie’s daughter’s room and the rooms where the adults are.

I am dressed for New Year’s Eve. Black miniskirt. Stockings. Boots. Some kind of sexy or fancy or festive top. It’s a good party.

At some point, Arthur, who is a little younger than the other kids, wants to go to sleep and needs to be settled into bed. He’s somewhere between two and five years old.

So I tuck him in and lay down with him and sing him a little lullaby and stroke his sweet little forehead until he falls asleep. Which is, face it, kinda boring, and my mind wanders, and I sort of see myself from the outside and I think “This is never an image anyone sees. This is a banned image. I’d like to paint a picture of this.” Of a mom in a miniskirt and boots cuddling a baby to sleep.

It’s perfectly ordinary, really. We don’t actually throw away our hot clothes or our impulse to wear them when we give birth. And I’m not talking about the porn version of a sexy mom, which I won’t even name because then I’ll get hits I don’t want, I’m talking about a human mom with a human sex drive and a human urge to dress up.

It’s a banned image. You can’t see it. Maybe the porn of mom-being-hot, but not the ordinary beauty of hotty-being-mom. If that image was permitted, everything would be different. Everything.

Happy New Year.

Per Shakes, I learn that brain dead Christopher Hitchens has written an article called “Why Women Aren’t Funny” that Vanity Fair was crass enough to publish.

I’m not going to skewer him, although skewering he deservies, because Shakes already did. And Amanda, and others as well.

No, I just want to tell this story.

When Arthur was five years old, I was tucking him in. I don’t know what I said that made him laugh, one of the ten thousand things I say that make him laugh (and now that he’s older, we make each other laugh, and stuff gets snorted out the nose way much in our house). And he put his tiny five year old hand on my neck and said

“That’s what Moms are for. To be funny.”

Take that, Snitchens.