I need to focus on some other endeavours for the next few days and I sort of need all my energy and focus elsewhere right now, but don’t worry, I will soon be back better then ever. You could take this time to read some older posts. After all, you couldn’t possibly have read everything and if you have (thank you), you can always take this extra free time to so something you’ve always wanted to do, but never have.
I’m sure even the most extraverted of us have inhibitions. Perhaps they are things we just aren’t comfortable with or that we feel awkward about. I know that I am much more comfortable openly talking about things in a detached way than I am when it gets personal. I think that most of my inhibitions stem from my insecurities, but that can’t always be the case, can it? Some of them surely stem from our expectations or the expectations of others. Sometimes it feels like an internal struggle between the person I really am and the person who hides behind some sort of self-deprecation.
At present, I can tell you that I am not very comfortable with my own body and in some situations I can come off as being a little bit of a prude, when in reality I’m just ashamed of what my body looks like. In my early twenties I didn’t give a shit, hell I would have walked down the street butt naked if I had felt like it and now, I stop myself from taking off my clothes even when I want to. I’m not just talking about sexually either, swimming would be an example or wearing less clothes when it’s hot is another.
Definitely the place where it hurts the most is in a sexual relationship, because it stops me from completely letting go and enjoying the moment. When I was younger it was the complete opposite, my inhibitions stemmed from inexperience. Not wanting to do something, because I didn’t know how and I was afraid to ask for some guidance. Most of the time, I plowed through, not having a clue and certainly not aware of the delicate communication that there can be between two people in bed.
I’m not afraid of that anymore, although it’s definitely a skill that needs to be refined from person to person, but I still crave some sort of reassurance. A reassurance that I want from the other person. I know that’s not what they teach you when talking about self-esteem and confidence, but sometimes I can’t help but what that reflected in the world around me. I like being told I’m beautiful, I like feeling desirable, and maybe that is totally uncouth of me to say, because I know that ultimately I have to think that about myself, but damn does it ever feel good when someone else says it.
The os is the little opening in the middle of your cervix (side note: the cervix is made of cartilage like the tip of your nose). Depending on whether you have had kids or not the os may slightly change in appearance: appearing more like a slit once you’ve had kids.
The os allows menstrual blood to flow out of your uterus and into your vagina. The os will open a little more during menstruation and close a little afterwards, until it opens up again during ovulation. Yup, it also allows sperm to pass through. During pregnancy, the os will close upon itself to help protect the fetus and at the time of birth it is the os that will dilate to ten centimeters to create enough space for a baby to pass through.
It has come to my attention that a lot of people will search the Internet for information on inserting penises or other stick like objects into the cervix. DO NOT under any circumstance try to insert anything into the os. I mean it, don’t do it. I’m not just saying this because it will be painful, it will be, but I know that’s not exactly a deterrent for everyone. I say this, because it is extremely bad for your health. To quote Scarleteen “There’s a lot of reasons women who have had to have backalley abortions have died, gotten very ill or become infertile, and some of the any is because of inserting things into the cervix without medically sanitary conditions.”
Seriously, unless you are having an IUD installed or you midwife/doctor is checking to see just how dilated you are, STAY AWAY FOR THE OS (you can touch it with clean hands, just don’t insert anything into it). Not all holes are meant to be penetrated.
Kate Harding of Shapely Prose wrote an article for the book Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
The article begins:
You should consider yourself lucky that some man finds a hideous toll like yourself rape-able.
THAT’S AN ACTUAL COMMENT left on the blog of a friend of mine, in response to a post she wrote about being raped and nearly killed. Every feminist blogger with more than four readers has dealt with comments along these lines. There are certain people who feel it’s their sacred duty to inform is, again and again, that rape is a compliment. (Or more precisely, “Rape is a compliment, you stupid whore.”)
The first time I read this, I was immediately struck by the truth behind her words as well as the deep seeded reaction that can only be described as: What the fuck is wrong with the world? Truth is there are a lot of things wrong with the world and somehow it never ceased to amaze how fucked up some thing are. You would think I’d be used to it by now.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far, with this blog I mean, I haven’t had to moderate any comments and I haven’t received any negative feedback in my inbox. I’m thankful for that, but I am also very aware that this is not the norm. A fact that is made very clear in Harding’s article is that this type of harassment in the form of hate mail or hate comments is ten times worse for those of the female gender who happen to be fat.
Another example:
You fat whores would be lucky to even get raped by someone. I hope you whiny cunts find your way on top of a pinball machine in the near future.
Whoever raped you could have just waited at the exit of a bar at 3am and gotten it consensually without the beached whale-like “struggle” you probably gave.
If any man would want to rape your gigantic ass, I’d be shocked.
According to Harding the message is clear, “no one but a rapist would ever, ever want you” if you are fat. Sure, there’s a sub-culture of men who like big women, but they are treated as fetishists, and are in no way regarded as part of the norm, because who the hell in their right mind would love a fat woman, right?
Need more proof?
I’m against rape. Unless it’s an obese women. How else are they going to get sweet, sweet cock?
I couldn’t even make that shit up if I tried. The really sad part, is that a fat woman is then made to believe that she is so unattractive that rape is pretty much the only sex she can hope for. The same goes for women who believe themselves to be completely unattractive. How many abusive relationships out there are built around the idea that “nobody else will ever love me and this is the best I could possibly hope for”? One is too many.
This problem goes deep, and taints the lives of so many women. Being a teenager or being in your early twenties is a vulnerable enough age, but when you compound that with “no one wants to fuck a fatty” it tends to twist your expectations and it is so de-valuing that at some point any type of sexual attention seems acceptable.
A friend of mine the other day was talking about a girl he likes and he said: “a girl like that gets to choose”. I know he wasn’t talking about the same thing as I am here, but it’s true nonetheless that if you’re not “a girl like that” society tends to want to take away your choices.
What do you do?
When you’re a fat woman in this culture, everyone - from journalists you’ll never meet to your own mother, sister, and best friend – works together to constantly reinforce the message that you are not good enough to be fucked, let alone loved. You’d be so pretty if you just lost weight. You’d feel so much better about yourself if you just lost weight. You’d have boys beating down your door of you just lost weight.
You’d be lucky to be raped, you fat cunt.
That’s just the way it is, baby. Fat chicks are gross. Accept it.
So what do you do when this is what the world is telling you? Kate Harding leaves you with two choices, either you lose weight or you accept yourself and tell the world to fuck off. Neither road is easy, but only one leads to self-acceptance, “real-ownership of your body, to real strength and confidence.”
I believe in Harding’s description of a world where “fat women don’t automatically disqualify themselves from the dating game. A world in which fat women don’t believe there’s anything intrinsically wrong with their bodies”, because:
Now try imagining some halfwit dickhead telling you a rapist would be doing you a favor, in that world. Imagine a man poking you in the stomach and telling you you need to work out more, moments after he comes inside of you. [...] Imagine a man telling you that you can’t leave him, because no one else will ever want your disgusting fat ass.
None of it makes a lick of sense in that world, does it?
It doesn’t in this one either.
Imagine if more of us believed that.
I stopped over at a friend’s house last night on my way home from my local pub. It was late and although I was stone cold sober the three guys I was with were drunk as hell. I didn’t really know the other two guys, but it never even crossed my mind that I might be entering a precarious situation.
Turns out, one of the guys is a huge fan of my blog, which kind of made me a little uncomfortable in the sense that I was suddenly aware that this person knew a lot of private information about me and that besides the fact that he’s my friend’s roommate’s best friend, I knew absolutely nothing about him.
He was in one of those drunken states where you lose certain basic social skills and start invading other people’s personal spaces much too easily and much too often. Frankly, even if one of my very good friend’s does that, I feel uncomfortable. I like my space dammit and some people just don’t get to enter it, and if you are allowed to you should view that as a privilege.
Let’s just say that despite his slightly inappropriate behavior up until the point where he just reached out and straight on grabbed my right tit, it still came as a little bit of a shock. He wasn’t even looking at me, and then his arm just reached out and palmed my boob. I stepped back and pulled his hand away. My friend stepped in and tried to stand between us, and the plan of action became trying to put him to bed. Something he kept resisting, since he would always come back. It seemed his mission to apologize and tell me that he was in love with a girl whose name I can’t remember, but even his sense of apologizing was to aggressive.
I knew that accepting his apology would probably go a long way in making a bad situation worse, but I really couldn’t bring myself to do that. I wasn’t angry, I was calm, but the last thing I wanted to do was be in a position where I had to accept his apology. I’m sure that he’s a nice guy, and he was very drunk at the time, but I don’t feel like I should have to explain his actions away. My friend told me to hide in the bathroom. The guy who grabbed my tit followed and I was happy I had enough time to lock the door. I wasn’t afraid, but I did suddenly feel trapped when he tried to turn the doorknob.
The other two guys then put him in one of the bedrooms and then ushered me out of the building. It was around 4:30am at this point and although I only had to walk home for about one block, I was much too aware of being alone on a dark street at night. I almost wished to myself that I had asked my friend to walk me home, but then I felt bad about thinking that in the first place… as if it was a silly thought to have had in the first place. It annoyed me that as a girl, I would feel vulnerable enough to want to ask for some form of protection.
On my short walk home, I wondered about these things and questioned my own reaction to the entire situation. Should I have been more upset? Should I have been more vocal about the fact that what he did wasn’t right? Was I overreacting and should I just let it go and smooth things over? I really couldn’t figure out which was which and I felt stuck between two extremes. It was not a pleasant feeling.
When I got home, my friend had sent me an email apologizing for what just happened and I told him not to feel bad, because it certainly wasn’t his fault. Today, I got an email from the person who grabbed my boob in which he apologized and told me he couldn’t remember what had happened and that his friends told him what he did and that he felt really bad about it. Getting that second email felt like another invasion of privacy and even though I’m sure he really did feel bad about it and was sincerely apologizing, I did not feel like responding and assuaging his guilt. Besides, I’ve never felt comfortable around people who use being drunk as an excuse for bad behavior.
I’m not writing this to villainize this person, I derive no pleasure from that. I considered not writing about it since he does read this blog and I do not want to reinforce any bad feelings, but I didn’t like the idea that I would censor myself on this particular topic. That would just go against what all of this is about. I did, however, wonder if this blog played a role in what happened. Perhaps the fact that he had read so many intimate things about me somehow broke down a barrier where he felt like he knew me, while on my part, I considered him to be a complete stranger. The implication of that line of thought leaves me troubled.
