See You Next Tuesday

I have to be upfront about this. This post is going to have a lot of bad words. Not so much an assortment of bad words, but one word in particular will be mentioned. A lot. You may think you don't care, you may think bad words don't shock you at all anymore, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the few English curse words whose sharpness has not been dulled with overuse.
This post also gets extremely personal and disturbing at times.
So, a warning: If you are easily offended, stop reading now.

I'll wait......

Ok, are all the wimps gone now? Good, this post should be read amongst friends.

Man, I've really built up the suspense, haven't I? You're dying to know what word I would actually warn about. I'm just going to say it once, get it out of the way, and then we can move on to my reason for bringing it to your attention.

CUNT.

Yep, you read that right. This post is all about the cunt. Or, more specifically, my response to the book Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio.
This book is many things; it has many messages. It starts off with a backround of the word cunt, how it was originally a word used for female priestesses, women who were holy and connected with the spirit world. It was a word of reverence. A word of power. And I guess it still is, but in a very different way. Inga is adamant about reclaiming the word, much like African Americans have reclaimed 'nigger'. (Yes, I thought about using the phrase 'n-word' instead, but I figured, I've already used cunt, being P.C. is pretty much out the window at this point.)
She talks about sexual abuse, she talks about women's relationships with their cunts, she talks about alternative natural "accessories" for the cunt, she talks about sex workers, and basically everything else you could imagine about that lovely area. If you're wondering whether or not you should read it, I will say that on the flight from CA to NY I pretty much did not put it down except to sip water and munch on sunflower seeds. If nothing else, whether you agree with what she says or not, it will make you think about the cunt in a very different way than perhaps you once did.

Now, I did not agree with everything she said. I'm not trading in my tampons for a sea sponge (not making that up) and I will continue to see movies and read books by men. However, I found myself affected and at times even moved to tears by the stories and epithets she wrote.

Truth be told, women's issues have always been very important to me. In acting school, we were assigned a project, or Poetry Project as it was called, where everyone had to create a 5 minute one person piece using at least 3 different published works. It could be from a script, yes, but it could also be from a book, newspaper, even a cereal box, as long as the actor performing it did not write it. Those were the only parameters. I could have made it about any subject I wanted. And I chose to make mine about... menstruation.
Why? I'm not really sure. I don't know why I wanted to talk about my cunt for 5 minutes. Perhaps it's been at the forefront of my mind since middle school, where I was the only girl I knew who had not yet gotten her first period. Who knows?
Thankfully, it ended up being pretty funny, even with the ending of me dropping my red skirt to show nude colored panties stained with stage blood and talking about 'the great river'.

And yes, the whole realizing your "womanifesto" thing appealed to me. I do believe that women have tremendous power within us, simply because our bodies produce life, which is a pretty miraculous thing. I'm not saying it isn't a pain in the ass having a cunt sometimes, but on the whole, I very much enjoy being a woman and revel in my femininity.

But what really got to me in the book were the stories of sexual abuse. Stories of men exerting their power over women in this way make me furious. The fact that, at age 24, not having been sexually assaulted makes me very very lucky. In America, 1 in 4 women will be sexually abused at some point in their lives and 1 in 3 will at least have to fend off an attack. And these numbers are probably conservative, as they are based off of mostly reported cases. I shudder to think about the statistics in other countries.

I read a book last summer called Desert Flower by Waris Dirie. It's an autobiographical tale about a woman born into a Somali tribe of goatherders who runs away, manages to get to England, is discovered and becomes a supermodel. But that wasn't what affected me. She became a fighter for women's rights because of what happened to her as a child, and what happens still to many women around the world: Female circumsicion, or as it is politically and correctly called, female genital mutilation.
As an 8 year old girl, she was woken up in the middle of the night, dragged to a spot in the desert, had her clitoris and labia sliced off with a rusty razor blade, and was sewn up so only a hole as small around as a matchstick remained.

When I read this, and read that this is a common occurrence in many African countries and their ensuing communities in Europe, an emotion that I must label as rage swelled inside of me. There is no religious base for this. It is nothing other than men controlling every single aspect of women's lives, at the most personal level. Of men treating women as property.
Few issues affect me more.

Though, thankfully, barbarity such as that is not legally tolerated in this country, we are still, in my opinion, far away from true equality between the sexes. I'm not saying I hate men, and that all men treat and think of women in the same way. This is not at all true. But even in a city as liberal as NYC, misogyny is everywhere. Language has incredible power, and what may masquerade as innocent guy banter actually perpetuates the objectifying of women, which can have devastating results. The change has to come from the people it affects: women.

This book, if nothing else, made me more determined to love myself and my cunt, and to treat both with reverence and respect. If you are reading this, and you are a woman, think about the last time you paid a visit to your cunt. Do you know what it looks like? Feels like? Let's face it ladies, if we aren't willing to get to know ourselves, how can we expect someone else to?
It can be a place of joy and power, if only you let it.

In the words of Inga, "You gots a goldmine between yo' legs." So get digging.