A Relationship with my Uterus

 

What is your relationship with you uterus?

I hear this question as I wait for the bus, as I go for a run, as I make lunch on a Sunday afternoon, or any time I tune into La Poudre. The podcast, hosted by French journalist Lauren Bastide, explores the upbringings and experiences of women who hold influential and successful roles in today’s society. Bastide casts a wide net, interviewing female artists, activists, politicians — often combinations of the three — to illustrate the diverse and rich reality behind the portrait of the “successful woman”.

As a simple consumer of the media, I am never obliged to respond to the question. But as a consumer of media, I am going to extrapolate the ideas that I receive into my own experience. Because that’s the point of sharing ideas, no? Not just to inform the public of unique ideas or events, but also to make us reflect on our position in relation to other experiences. The question irks me, and it forces me to wonder: What is the relationship that I have with my uterus? And is that relationship really important?

 

The power and privilege of education

I waited impatiently for my menarche, which I got at 15 years old. Statistically, this was slightly later than average and socially, this was absolutely dreadful. Whether at friends’ houses, swim team practice, or the high school locker room, talking about periods was a frightening topic of conversation for I had nothing to contribute. At the slightest pelvic muscle movement or notion of discharge I would head to the bathroom eager to encounter my awaited entrance into womanhood, only to be disappointed at the absence of blood welled in my underwear.

The day I finally did get it, I was joyed to finally understand and participate in this coveted female experience. To menstruate was to understand a coded language, allowing entry into a new level of adolescent social life, and one day womanhood.

This celebration however, existed solely in my head. If getting my first period was a personal accolade, living with menstruation was the disappointing reality of confronting a long-awaited fantasy.

On my way to my first water polo practice as a “woman”, my mom pulled off at a Walgreens to buy me tampons. I was too embarrassed to go in to the store, petrified at the thought of being seen publicly and sharing such a delicate moment with strangers. To avoid the shame, I completely removed myself from the experience. My mom returned and asked if I knew how to use a tampon. I lied and said yes. She knew I was lying and explained to me anyways. “You shouldn’t be able to feel it.” Alone in the locker room bathroom, already late for practice, I struggled to insert the cardboard tampon. It was painful, and felt like it wasn’t supposed there. For two hours I swam around with a halfway inserted tampon reminding me that this would be my life now: Learning to acclimate my body to the parameters set before me.

I didn’t grow breasts or hips, not the way I had imagined I would at least. Boys didn’t start liking me any more than before. All of my underwear was ruined by the inconsistency of my periods, which came so often and lasted so long that I spent more time bleeding than not. What I had once anticipated as being a revolutionary and empowering experience was now dictating the way I comported myself in day-to-day life. After testing positive for anemia, I was put on birth control pills and iron supplements to control the overactivity of my uterus. When I thought I was joining a sanguine sorority, I was really becoming the subject of medical and social judgments. I despised my body for not behaving the way I thought it should.

My education leading me up to puberty taught me very little on what it meant to have, or how to have a relationship with my uterus, or any aspect of my female body for that matter. American culture is not one that prides itself on the sexual development of females. Periods are dirty and are supposed to be kept secret. My body occupied a strange, ambiguous space, one where my personal gratitude for this bodily function was at total odds with the public opinion.

Many women that I’ve met, especially at university, have had similar educations, the kind where the truth on our reproductive organs is told in discrete and incomplete manners. We knew the basics that we were taught throughout public education. Some were more or less comfortable with their bodies than others, but I don’t remember ever truly talking about my body, what I knew and what I felt, in an honest and open manner. Many lacked the know-how and the vocabulary. Most of us were on birth control of some sort, because it is standard. It is standard and expected for us to regulate the bodies that we know so little about. It seems that most people who have a sufficient knowledge of their bodies are those who have taken an introductory women’s biology course (as I did), those who have expressed sincere interest and done independent research, or those who have, for various medical reasons, been forced to understand their reproductive organs in a new way.

When posed the uterus question by Bastide, writer Sophie Fontanel’s response called to this simple notion of understanding her body:

Fontanel: I took care of this question when I was young. I took a finger. I pushed, pushed, pushed with said finger. I saw that it was blocked…

Bastide: In your uterus?

Fontanel: In, well… you end up at the cervix […] You put your finger in there, how a doctor or a gynecologist does. You feel around, you get just to the cervix. So I got there, to the cervix, I explored, I looked. And after, I saw how it’s made and voilà, I understood. And I thought that everyone did this […] Women don’t understand their bodies. My relation to my uterus is that I at least went to touch the entryway.

Fontanel reflects on her uterus as it essentially exists — a part of her body of which, like any other organ, she understands the limits and functions. Having a relationship to a uterus is rooted in an essential understanding of oneself and all the parts that make up the whole.

Fontanel’s knowledge comes from an independent sense of exploration, one that many do not flirt with out of fear, embarrassment, or disgust. Her certainty and knowledge may seem banal, but it’s a radical example of the liberation and power that comes with such essential knowledge. For when women don’t know their bodies, how are they expected to control them? This abuse of power has been severely exploited throughout history. The politicization of the uterus keeps women in the dark on their own body parts, leaving “undesirable” bodies to be manipulated and maimed by the judgment of others.

 

• • •

 

Before having a conscious relationship with my uterus, I had already constructed an expectation of womanhood completely severed from the physical truth. Being a woman was the embodiment of superficial and conventional qualities of femininity. Undergoing the true experience was a shocking plunge into reality. Since then I have “unplugged” myself from my uterus. I currently have an Intrauterine Device (IUD) which not only prevents me from getting pregnant, but has also suppressed my periods to the point that I no longer have them. A choice initially made out  of convenience, I have since realized has allowed me to essentially deny the existence of my uterus.

When the singer Camille was asked the infamous uterus question, she harkened on being in tune with her body: “It’s a relationship [comparable] to that which I have with my voice. That is to say, it’s me, it’s an other. It has its own life and at the same time it gauges me”.

The comparison of the uterus to any other function of the body lifts the veil of taboo that we place over our nether regions. Like the lungs, or the heart, or our senses of perception, the uterus lives within us, acting as a part of an entire system. To disconnect the uterus from the rest — or to deny it completely — limits the ability to have an understanding and an autonomy with one’s own life. When Camille likens her relationship with her uterus to that with her voice, the arbitrary politicization of the uterus becomes so obvious, that it seems absurd.

So by having an IUD, am I doing a disservice to myself and to the notion of the autonomous woman? I don’t think so, because my choice was one informed by my research and my preferences. Most importantly, it was a choice that I decided to impose on my own body. I have had the privilege to re-educate and re-acclimate myself with the notion of being a woman of reproductive age. By “denying” the existence of my uterus, I’ve allowed myself the time and space to reflect on my experience as a woman, just with less parameters to worry about.

While my relationship with my uterus is specific to my experience, it is indicative of a broad social experience. The clash between education and reality creates a rift wherein the truth of what it means to have a uterus must constantly be confronted and put into question.  

 

My disposition towards femininity fluctuates, but my status as a woman is ever constant.

Today I call myself a woman, but it wasn’t until recently that I truly felt comfortable assuming this identity. Feeling comfortable calling myself a woman didn’t come with my body’s physical and sexual development. It didn’t come with my first, second, third, or fourth sexual encounters with men. In fact, venturing into the lived reality of being a woman scared me away from the idea of becoming one.

Long before considering myself a woman, I have had to grapple with my association to femininity. As a young girl my interests and appearance was simultaneously very feminine and not at all. I enjoyed climbing trees and getting dirty, but I also loved ballet and fashion. Typical social conditioning tells us that girls are either be feminine or tomboys, and the notion of a single person embodying both at the same time seems impossible.

Moving through adolescence, this dichotomic pressure increased as my body became more and more feminine. Between about 17 and 21 years old, I began to distance myself from my feminine traits, which I had begun to associate with being feeble and powerless. Finding myself in an uncharted landscape of emotional and physical experience, I relied on thinking and feeling more masculine in order to orient myself with a sense of normalcy. My body was turning into a woman’s, but I didn’t want to be anything that a woman is supposed to be.

When Bastide interviewed filmmaker Amandine Gay, she asked whether Gay became a woman, or was born one. Gay responded,

“I really became a woman. It wasn’t at all apparent, and it had been a choice at a given moment … It’s something that I realized through certain readings, when I was in Australia, so when I was 21, 22 years old … [In reading one author] I realized that I was often with the kind of men that I wanted to be, rather than doing those things myself. That was the first realization. The second one was while reading Adrienne Rich … who conceptualized this notion of masculine identification. In other words, a sort of internalized misogyny for women that don’t want to fall into the category “woman” and everything that tends to be attached to it … So I was in a period … of questioning gender, gender identity, sexual orientation. And it was from this moment on … that I really reappropriated this “woman” category and told myself, “Voilà,” that there isn’t a problem with having a certain fragility, that if I wanted to wear dresses and people catcalled me in the street, it’s not because I’m not wearing baggy clothes. It’s the street that needs to change and not me.”

Similar to Gay, being able to assume my identity as a women required intellectual and emotional work. I had to reason with myself, question my identity and experiences, and arrive at having a confident sense of self. Being able to consider myself a woman required a reconciliation between my feminine and masculine characteristics, and knowing that identifying with all of them cannot make me any less of a woman, or of a person, than people might consider.

Today, I feel most feminine when my emotional and intellectual state is in tune with physical reality. Understanding the reconciliation between my masculine and feminine traits has allowed me to find confidence in being feminine. Rather than feeling I have to choose to be feminine, I can accept my feminine sentiments as a component of feeling whole and present in my lived experience.

This experience however, is internal and carries no weight in how the outside world perceives me linearly as a woman. The outside world has no real way of telling how feminine I feel in any given moment, and so judgment is drawn along binary and superficial criteria. My presentation of myself may be related to my sensibilities but only in a way that is coded to my flux of thought and emotion. This means that judgments of identity based on appearance are often reductive, if not entirely inaccurate. And the plane that spans between the inner truth and external reality becomes another landscape on which I must venture. But to reiterate Gay’s point, “It’s the street that needs to change and not me.”

The arbitrary tie between the uterus and femininity

This rift between truth and reality is quite digestible and manageable for my conventional circumstances, but it also opens up the question about the perceived relationship between the uterus and femininity. Bastide’s question doesn’t explicitly state that the two are inextricably related, but the fact that the question exists alludes to such. The women she interviews are comfortable in their positions of being women, enough so at least to occupy that identity publicly in their work and use their identity as a tool for navigating society. To call into question their relationship with their uterus points to the notion that having a uterus is a fundamental component of a feminine experience. We’ve been socialized to attach an immense significance to this organ, thus continuing a binary perception of reality: to have or to have not.

When Bastide interviewed Marlène Schiappa, France’s Minister of Gender Equality, this point of contention was acknowledged. Bastide had already received numerous commentary on it and Schiappa addressed it in the book she co-authored and edited, Letters to my Uterus. One letter is penned by a trans-woman who, Schiappa says, “talks to the uterus that she doesn’t have and will never truly have, talking about what it would have brought her, and what it would not have brought her […] She is a woman and her femininity does not just pass by the uterus.”

Having a uterus is clearly not a necessary component of the female experience. As women navigate their experience between internal truth and external reality, the notion of the uterus becomes arbitrary. The uterus is considered significant because it has historically been deemed such by society, government, and culture, and this traditional notion segments people into limited identities that they are told either do or do not belong. When we limit people’s understanding of femininity to a set of characteristics that one either does or does not have, the uterus becomes an arbitrary placeholder for femininity, limiting people’s freedom to express themselves as they feel most just.

• • •

 

So again, I have to wonder what compels Bastide to ask this question. It’s interesting that in the interviews where the question arises, the answers carry a consistent sense of reflection and comprehension. These are successful women who have more or less positive relationships with their uteruses, and they demonstrate a clear association between understanding one’s own body and being able to assert oneself confidently in society. While the question is directed at a specific kind of experience, it opens a floodgate to questions and ideas that extend beyond being a woman and having a uterus.

The question irks me because it reminds me that such the subject, despite its potential to be quotidian, is still burdened with discrimination by hierarchies of power. To ask a woman to discuss her relationship with her uterus implies that talking about our bodies is political and radical. Having women talk about their uterus seems uninventive in the gender equality discussion, and yet we still feel a need to talk about it.

My relationship with my uterus is one of that I am still I’m still trying to work through. It’s not a question of understanding my uterus, but understanding my existence between what I feel to be true, and how that truth fits within a broad social perception of reality. It’s not a question of understanding my evolving self, but a question of unlearning and rebuilding. Unlearning the shame and fear of something that is not as mysterious as it might have seemed, and rebuilding a healthy relationship based on truth and comprehensive, inclusive knowledge.