38 Weeks, Bitches

Eve of a New Day

Vaginal Corona

When I was 18 I went out with a guy named Ben. It was our first year out of high school, we were overseas together and we were in love. One warm night we were so in love we decided to bequeath our virginities to one another.

Afterwards Ben said he was surprised that I hadn't bled. I mumbled something about horse riding, tampons and masturbation, then I fell asleep.

Fast forward 18 years to a few days ago when I web surfed my way to a pdf booklet put out by RFSU (the Swedish organisation for sexual enlightenment), which starts like this:

Known by the established term "hymen," the vaginal corona is the subject of many myths and misunderstandings. The most important of these is the notion that a woman’s vaginal opening is covered by a membrane that ruptures on penetration. This is incorrect. There is no such membrane. RFSU wishes to dispel the myths and promote knowledge of the true facts. In this booklet, we aim to give you a more accurate idea of what you will find just inside the vaginal opening of every woman.

Holy popped cherries, batgirl! My entire life I thought I had a hymen, and that somewhere along the line between being born and meeting Ben, this precious proof of purity was disturbed.

Between clitoris and labia in my Cambridge Illustrated Thesaurus of Biology is the listing for hymen:

Thin membrane partially closing the vagina in a virgin woman. It is ruptured when coitus first occurs.

Ha! One more myth of the patriarchy debunked. I wonder if there's a word for the membrane that seals a closed mind.

Born Free

I didn't know much about Julia Gillard before she became Prime Minister two days ago. I knew about some of her decisions as the Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, and as Deputy Prime Minister, but not a lot. Just another politician, I thought.

But after seeing Gillard interviewed on the 7.30 Report, I have changed my mind. She was gutsy, honest, intelligent, decent and likable. I agree with Joan Kirner, the first female to be Premier of Victoria, who said that Gillard is going to make politics fun again.

We also watched the 2006 Australian Story about Gillard. My favourite part was the story her mum, Moira, told about when her daughter was in high school:

Julia could never understand why the girls should stay in class to tidy up the classroom while the boys were just running around having a good time. So she said to the teacher that was not fair. Why couldn’t the boys do it one week and they do it the next week. He said to her 'Are you into women’s liberation, Julia?' And she said, she looked at him with utter scorn and said 'I don’t need women’s liberation, I was born free'.

The Hopenfogels

My lil ol' blog is two years old today, and to celebrate, I have decided to create an award.

Every year on the 29th of May, we here at the Land of Meg will announce the winner of The Hopenfogel award. Hopenfogel means Hoopoe bird in German.

Hoopoes were considered sacred in Ancient Egypt, and symbols of virtue in Persia, but I have chosen them as the namesake for my annual award because Hopenfogel was my great grandmother Edith's maiden name, and it brings to mind all the impressive women in her lineage.

There are no criteria for the award. Some years there may be more than one winner, some years there may nominations in several categories, some years I may forget all together, but for this year's award, there is a single winner.

And it is Norrie.

From The Age, March 10, 2010:

This Mardi Gras, Norrie received a gift that no other androgynous person in NSW has had before.

The night before the parade, the postman brought a certificate from the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages that contained neither the dreaded ''M'' nor its equally despised cousin, ''F''.

Instead, it said ''sex not specified'', making the 48-year-old Sydneysider, who identifies as neuter and uses only a first name, the first in the state to be neither man nor woman in the eyes of the NSW government.

(Norrie has since had zie non-specified gender status withdrawn by the government who said that it is not permitted in law to state anything other than male or female on legal documents.)

But to us you are a winner. Congratulations Norrie! This inaugural Hopenfogel belongs to you.

Breastly Dramas

I go to the theater with a newborn baby. The theater is at the university. It's opening night. The vice chancellor is there, along with other important guests. I sit in a seat near the aisle so I can escape quickly if my baby starts crying when she wakes. She wakes, and I offer her my breast. She happily suckles for the rest of the play. I sit in the half-light with my huge breast out, my daughter latched on. It feels curiously subversive. For what other reason could I sit in a theater with one breast "exposed," unless performing maternity? It means mother and baby don't disrupt the "real" performance, and yet some other meaning is being disrupted, something to do with the way I've been trained to behave in public.

- Alison Bartlett, adapted from Thinking Through Breasts: Writing Maternity.

I am Dr. Tiller

I am Dr. Tiller is a website that was created as both a memorial to the lifework of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician who was shot dead by an anti-abortion sociopath, and as a living testimony to the courageous lives of abortion providers.

Here you will find stories of individuals who have dedicated their lives to making abortion safe, legal, healthy, and accessible to women and girls. These people may be nurses, counselors, escorts, volunteers at abortion funds, or abortion doctors themselves. We share our stories in hopes of ending clinic violence, to alleviate the shame associated with the abortion experience, and as an homage to Dr. Tiller's outstanding and courageous life work.

(Thanks for the link, Dr P.)

Growing Up With a Sister

From The Times:

Growing up with a sister makes people more balanced

Growing up with a sister makes people more optimistic, more ambitious and better balanced, psychologists have found.

A study of 571 families comprised of brothers, sisters, a mixture of both and only children found that having a sister in the home led to siblings of either sex scoring more highly on a range of standard tests for good mental health.

They were found to be better at coping with setbacks, more highly motivated, had more friends and a better social life than those who grew up with just brothers.

The rest here. 

(Thanks for the link, Becky!)

Pickled Tink

I recently read a personal essay by a woman who wrote that she felt the most feminine she ever felt when she was breast feeding her baby. This got me thinking about my own sense of femaleness and when I feel the most feminine I can feel.

My first thought was when I am with PJ and although I like this answer (and proximity), I am striking it from the record because I am looking for an answer that is just to do with myself and not in relation to another.

But maybe that's impossible, because a large part of my feelings about my femaleness feel constructed and composed; learnt and not innate.

I am Meg, and although I am obviously female, I don't live my every day cognisant of my gender. Or maybe I do but it's so ingrained in my self that I'm not conscious of it.

And so, I have started keeping a list of times when I feel conscious of my femaleness. On that list is when I was pickling our homegrown cucumbers two weeks ago. (And yes, I can see the irony of the phallic cucumbers.)

Readers of this blog will know I don't own a single cook book and that I like to roam google's hallways in search of a recipe to follow. But for my cucumbers it was different. My friend Jo lent me some cook books including Stephanie Alexander's book of her mum's recipes, which is where I found the one I based my pickling concoction on. 

I know men who pickle and preserve, but when I did it, I felt connected to a whole history of women, including my dad's mum, Nanna Jo-Jo, who was a fabulous pickler.

Also, because pickling was once, and still is in many parts of the world, an act of preserving produce for out-of-season months and long journeys, there is an element of vitality added to the recipe; the survival and preservation of a people, and along with them, their time-honoured ways.

Dragging

I don't know how any of the events went, but from the mood in town, ChillOut was a huge success.

A few years ago during the festival I participated in a drag king workshop. Here's a photo I dug up from the day.

Pretty tough, huh? Want an arm wrestle?

Women!

Happy International Women's Day!

From one of my favourite female writers, Catherine Deveny:

It's International Women's Day this week and I'm wearing camouflage after my seven-year-old son handed me a tampon and said, "Here's one of your vagina bullets".

It's still a battle of the sexes. Quilting conventions, goddess weekends, hens' nights, book groups, chick flicks, women's studies and scrag fights aside, the gender war is still raging. The rumoured truce is a myth. Who said we're waving a white flag? Listen closely and you'll hear many still screaming blue murder. It's a bit hard to hear them, though, because most are gagged, bound and kept in cellars.

The gloves are off but we're still wearing the matching belt. Although I'm not one of the missing in action, I have war wounds and battles to fight despite my thin veneer of shock and awe and my reputation as a shoecide bomber.

The rest here.

BEK

The end of yesterday's post, about my watching all those college teen flicks and my confusion at being addressed and courted as a male viewer, reminded me of this cartoon by my favourite New Yorker cartoonist, Bruce Eric Kaplan.
Here are some of my other favourite BEK cartoons: