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story 70
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The first
thing I remember being told about the vagina was...
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i don't have
any idea. there were middle school "health" classes,
but that clinical stuff was relatively late in my ideation of the vagina.
i also remember a children's book with paper-cutout illustrations of general
birds and bees that definitely had mention of menis and vagina, but of
course i was more interested in the illustrated naked woman. think probably
a library book for my older sister's early birds and bees talks. i remember
some incredulity that my penis would "be inserted into"
the vagina of my mate, but that was well before the physiological state
of arousal was associated with copulation or eroticism much at all. .
.
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When my friends
and I first talked about vaginas...
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as a precocious
youngster i thought the organs were just slits, like in coin-op machines.
probably bathed in same tub with sis as toddler; no coherent memories.
and then later, having socialized as an adolescent and learned ("our
type" of) eroticism, under more casual signifiers than "vagina"
friends and i would report what older brothers and other guys reported,
mostly in the form of crude jokes. there was one with a line about an
aroused vagina feeling like a horse eating a handful of oats out of your
hand, that has stuck with me. more recently, a tom stoppard line: (something
like) in such a state of arousal as would have orchids blooming in her
trousers in january.
once erotically socialized, and having learned, first hand as it were,
about arousal and techniques of mutual stimulation, i then became fascinated
with the vagina.
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The first time
I heard of menstruation, I thought...
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didn't understand.
older sis again. there was some "to do" that was quite hush
hush. at some point - i was an intuitive boy and the emotional uproar
had to be explained somehow, moreover we had a pretty good familial policy
of truth-telling and education fostering - it was explained to me that
some phenomenon unique to being a woman had begun, signifying a rite of
passage, the details of whcih i would be told about sometime later.
then the crude jokes, crude songs, filtering down from some fraternity
wag's brain into the backroom whisperings and cadences of erotically supercharged
(and wrongheaded) elementary school boys. big brothers' stories and big
sisters' explanations; ever the doorway.
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The first time
I saw/touched a vagina...
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probably
in the tub as a toddler. see "coin slot" ideation above.
took me a long time to get a god look at a vagina attached to a real live
specimin; many magazines, but despite the exceptionally gory and tantalizing
closeups, never really got a good sense of how all the topography fit
together there; though the stories helped. first time touched: in the
woods, after horseback riding, middle school, super exciting, didn't get
much sense of geography tho.
especially didn't get much of the relation of the things my hands experienced
and the diagrams in the health books . . .
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Since then
my perception/experience of vaginas (changed/hasn't changed)...
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it sure has
changed.
then, sometime, but before earnest puberty (and before the touching described
above, of course), i had a dream in which several women were nude, and
instead of that denuded and featureless slit i had until then imagined,
all were displaying baffling complex and enlarged organs that were much
like a penis if the scrotum were not so loose, but tacked bulging up against
the front of the pelvis so that only the glans protruded above. i found
these women with these strange organs menacing and awoke scared. now though
i see the "vestigial penis" theory (i realize that "vestigial"
may be offensive for its denotation of uselessness, as the appendix is
vestigial because we have somehow "evolved beyond" needing it,
and that's NOT AT ALL what i mean, so much as "same elements differently
developed" or perhaps "cognate" penis. of course the other
offense is using "penis" as the reference point. so anyway,
no offense; i use the words as i can) somewhat more clearly now, and see
similar elements in the vagina and vulva to those in the penile apparatus.
absolutely. anyway, while i can see seeds of these horrifying dream organs
in real vibrant vaginas that i've had the privilege of encountering, the
real thing isn't as menacing or obtrusive as the dream organs - sticking
out like a litte pregnancy (and presumably full of testicularly fragile
bits).
seems pretty young for such a transcendently true dream. maybe a blocked
memory of every other man's fantasy: being horribly molested as a boy
by an orgiastic band of Maenads.
then i had some girlfriends and some sex and otherwise became more or
less adult.
nowadays, i understand to dome degree, my own impulse to seek out and
climb back into the womb beyond the vagina: oedipus crawling in for a
long winter's hibernation. marsupial envy.
at the moment, though, it's just more ideation of vaginas, and not so
much direct experience.
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What I would
want my daughter to know about her vagina...
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a lot more
than i do.
i think i would like her to treat the whole apparatus of which the vagina
is a small part with more respect than i perhaps have, when i have been
interested in particular people's vaginas. i would like her - even though
chosing to behave differently - to understand, as the pope says, the "unitive
and generative" purpose built into the organ and thus into the possibility
of all the things that we eroticize. it took me too long to see these
qualities through the gloss of sexiness and the mythos of hollywood love
fade to black, so i hope my daughter would know this, ideally in some
way that isn't tainted by the divisive polar histrionics of the so called
"abortion" debate, some way more primordial than through movies
and what her friends say about sex and the pill.
but i don't have a daughter.
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Usually, I call a vagina
a...
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depends on the context.
i tend to err on the side of clinical diction in mixed company, and relax
a bit more otherwise. still, when speaking to a lover probably take the
lead from her vocabulary. don't tend to talk much in "locker room
banter"; kind of situations that usually call for crude discussion
of the organs, but do know a joke or two: how is a circus different from
a brothel? a circus is a cunning array of stunts . . .
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This conversation
makes me think...
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about confidentiality.
also that i should be doing more about vaginas than sitting here writing
about things that i think about vaginas; the jewel of the lotus resides
within.
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