Vaginal Bleaching

My mother used to quote Shakespeare to me quite a lot when I was five. Not randomly, of course, but certainly when circumstances gave her an opening. 

One of her favorite gems of the Bard was that famous line from Romeo and Juliet, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” It’s true, of course. I’ve always believed that statement to be simple yet profound, but not nearly so profound as Juliet’s pointed question that precedes it: “What’s in a name?”

While opinions certainly differ, the reality is this: quite an enormous lot can be packed into a name. The reason that this is true is pretty straightforward and clear: we understand our reality - in all is complexified glory and pain -  based upon the words we invoke to describe it.

So imagine what I was thinking when I read a recent article extolling the okay-ness of vaginal bleaching. Rather than interrogate a culture in which altering the natural shade of one’s vagina seems necessary in the first place, the article focused on urging its readers not to refer to the process it described as vaginal bleaching. 

The Pulse Massacre

Here’s what I know in my soul about what went down recently in that LGBTQ+ club in Orlando. Given the violent devotion to bigotry that formed the foundation of the US, the carnage in Orlando was inevitable. Just as the appalling body count we in the US rack up every day due to our egotistical infatuation with guns is, apparently, inevitable. Penis envy at its most deadly, I would say. The bigger the better, right? Especially when it comes to assault weapons, capable of the most mind-blowing, rapid repeat ejaculations…

Let me be clear. This is not to say that there aren’t millions of well-meaning peace-loving souls here who would rather lose a limb than hurt an innocent other; our world has legions of such selfless individuals - humanists - who understand and actively embody the moral imperative of treating others as they themselves would want to be treated.

However…

Abortion

Visitors here can know one thing for certain. The singular, most driving motivation I have for maintaining this space is to shed light; to respectfully offer something of value to critical discourse about what we’ve been given to hold sacred about Human Sexuality. It’s precisely that impetus that keeps me here, compels me to re-examine the “givens” of human existence in ways that lift us up, rather than mow us down.

And in the scheme of how we choose our directions in life, this is pretty important, I think. Motivations count. In and of themselves, they’re repositories of power, fully capable of doing pernicious harm or bestowing us with healing.

So recently, when a certain misogynist buffoon currently bidding for the US Presidency argued that some sort of punishment would be in order for women who choose abortion should the laws in the US change, the need to raise our voices yet again resounded with new urgency. Now as ever, there seems little left for actual human beings to do except call this craziness out, in word and in deed, for the insulting, oppressive and invasive denial of basic human rights that it is.

I’m not sure when it is that most of us become aware that having agency - that is, having the right to self-determination - is inextricably bound to the status of being human. For many of us, I think, that spark of illumination comes sometime in the pre-dawn of infancy, when we want with all our hearts to escape the steamy confines of suddenly too-tight wombs. And in the synchrony of primal energies that we surely take for granted, most of us emerge when the time is right, our entrance into the waking world catalyzed largely on our own, by powerful, mystical essentially inscrutable forces within us. For the most part, the maternal bodies that host us take their cues from our own, the onset of labor almost always induced by developmental changes in the fetus itself.

Sexuality, Strength and Power

Ponder this: a human uterus in active labor exerts the equivalent of 397 pounds of pressure per square foot with each contraction. In fact, all things being equal, which of course, they rarely are, your uterus, my uterus, most every human uterus on the planet, has evolved to be the single strongest, most powerful muscle in the human body. And not surprisingly, I haven’t heard many people whining about that fact, since the very existence of our species - at least for the time being - pretty much depends upon our collective uteri being sufficiently awesome, tough, and brawny enough to be able to do their jobs.

On the other hand… when it comes to women being physically powerful, demonstrably muscular and visibly strong in contexts outside of reproduction, apparently, there’s a problem, at least in terms of what our current body-shaming culture is willing to put up with. If you doubt this, just lend your ear to the body-shaming critique unleashed against Serena Williams, by most accounts the most powerful and spectacular woman tennis player of all time. If form really follows function, it’s no wonder that Serena’s success at the pinnacle of her game remains legendary.

While it used to be bedrock “truth” that thinness - a lack of visible body fat - was the arbitrary standard that all women were expected to achieve in order to be considered sexually attractive, these days, there are other ways to instigate the body shamers’ wrath. Judging from their critique of Serena Williams, we of the uterus-having crowd shouldn’t be too toned, powerful, splendidly muscular elsewhere – at least not in ways that the rest of the world can see.