I boil my menstrual cup in my suite’s communal pot. It takes 45 seconds, and the red tick off my to-do list is satisfying enough for me to lie down without the usual pang of guilt accompanying rest. I am faint, but I do not faint. I wish I would faint.
I stole multivitamins from Walgreens. I had never been in a Walgreens before, and I rode the escalator up and down once before settling in the health section in a tight squat. I slipped the Woman’s Daily container into my tote bag. I am a daily woman, and I deserve these vitamins. I deserve these vitamins because I am a woman. My comfort comes at the expense of a multimillion-dollar pharmacy company. It is an easy justification.
I get manic when I bleed.
When my menstrual cup arrived in the mail, I was one week away from my period. I bought the size for women who have never been pregnant. I have never been pregnant, and I have never been so excited for my period. The initial ecstasy faded when I realized that my anatomy was foreign to me. I did not know where my cervix was. I did not know what my cervix was.
The function of the cervix is to allow the flow of menstrual blood from the uterus into the vagina and direct the sperm into the uterus during intercourse. The opening of the cervical canal is normally very narrow.
I have sex for the first time. I do not bleed. I bleed through my sheets the next night when my period begins.
(Blood is considerably less exciting after six years of bleeding).
When I passed out condoms to my high school peers in the San Francisco suburbs on club day in my junior year, accusations manifested themselves in the form of passive looks—and the administration’s monitoring my Planned Parenthood club booth for the remainder of the year. I founded the club as a way to connect with my peers on the need for comprehensive sex-ed. Boys thought I was a joke, girls thought I was a slut. Everyone thought I was manic. We did not connect.
I was a virgin when I started the Planned Parenthood club.
***
Apparently I can’t be a virgin because I have my belly-button pierced. Or because I live in New Jersey. Or because I kissed Chris Soules ‘like that’ during my appearance on The Bachelor. During my time on the show, social media was flooded with absurd judgments and arguments as to why I couldn’t possibly be a virgin. It’s been odd and frustrating to see people debate the status of my hymen (!) on Twitter — seriously, people, that’s what you’re using your time tweeting about?
— Ashley Iaconetti (@ashleyiaco)
I pierced my belly button the month before I had sex for the first time. In his two-story house in his room with a balcony in his dark sheets, he plays with the silver faux diamond stud on my navel. He tells me he likes it; I hear my anxiety fill the bed. I hear dress code violations and disapproving slurs and anti-women agendas curl up between us and nestle under his duvet. The only thing stopping me from feeling like a slut was having sex. Irony lubed me up and prepped me for the worst. I am hyper-aware of his hands on my piercing as the churning in my stomach reminds me to take my Propranolol.
Waves of cautious faculty warnings spoke me into something I was not. I was a girl who did not know her anatomy, but I felt responsible for carrying the weight of a public education system that failed to educate its youth on the importance of pleasure and self-love in sex. It is easy to tell others how to live their sex life, but much harder to live this message in your own life. I was the so-called empowered woman of Acalanes High School, but I did not feel that way. I felt like a liar. I felt like a fraud.
I slept each night curled up in a ball of my disconnected defenses. My high school friends thought they understood sex-positivity. They thought they knew what I’d dealt with as the face of a sex-positive club in sex-negative suburbia. They thought we were aligned, but their values were centrist, and mine were progressive past a label that they were able to support. I was progressive past a label that people were able to support. California votes blue, but California is not one person. California is not an affluent public school. I quickly realized the demands required of me if I wanted to teach in a school where I was alone in my values. How do you help teenagers understand anal 101 and strap-on techniques and healthy nonmonogamous relationships without ostracizing yourself from a community you have to live in for two more years? I wanted to do it. I was angry I could not. Accusations of hysteria rapidly became reality.
I need more Propranolol.
I get manic when people turn sex education into something it is not.
***
A List For A Life Most Lived
Take to the birth canal to climb out
Don’t hurt mother or her humble womb
Leave the cervix intact, alone
Climb into the light through tears
See it for what it is and move on— Earl Schumacker
When I passed out uterus stickers to my high school peers I had passed the primary phase of teenage shock at theories that do not occupy a familiar living space. I passed out the stickers for a human rights week event that I had been recruited to help with by the QSA club. This was hope, right? I saw the stickers on binders, water bottles, and notebooks for the remainder of the year. I wanted to be hopeful. I feigned hopeful; I was not. The gesture felt external; the stickers were pink and had animated faces that made them look less like a human organ and more like a character for people to scream: LOOK AT ME I AM INCLUSIVE AND I LOVE WOMEN. I AM WEARING PINK BECAUSE HOT WOMEN WEAR PINK. THIS IS ON TREND AND MAKES ME SEXY.
If the stickers had looked like this:
Rather than this:
I am not sure high school hallways would allow their students to smother their overpriced goods in such desperately graphic content. I never once saw a sticker used by a cis man.
***
I only take one gummy iron vitamin. The package has 60 vitamins. If I take two a day, they will last for one month. If I take one a day, they will last for two months. The package costs $14.99. I do not want to pay for more. I cry in the upper-level Walgreens pharmacy because no one understands this part of menstruation. Sex-ed did not say that blood loss means iron loss, means those with iron deficiencies will experience dizziness. If my physical education teacher disguised as a sex educator had told me this in seventh grade when a 12-year-old me first started her period, then I would have identified the cause for my dizziness and been able to budget in iron supplements six years ago. Instead, I scream into my blood-stained cotton sheets because the Google Docs chart I keep for my monthly budget does not have a slot for iron supplements.
The first National Period Day was held on October 19, 2019. There were rallies in all 50 states. The New York rally took place on the steps of city hall. It looked like a large patch of blood on a creamy white vulva with pubic-hair people. City hall did not stop their tours while the speakers were speaking. Foreigners were confused and afraid and concerned by the large patch of free bleeders. They did not stop to listen.
***
In detention centers and in prisons, in big cities and small towns, women across America don’t have access to the period products they need. On #NationalPeriodDay, men need to join women in demanding real change—which is why I’m supporting the Menstrual Equity Act.
—Beto O’Rourke (@BetoORourke)
I had never met someone with a menstrual cup before I left high school.
Everything I did for Planned Parenthood fell under scrutiny to an omnipresent suburban watch force that decided my club represented their underage children giving blow jobs in red Jeeps and drunk party hopping at 3 am because the suburbs turned them into vodka fiending alcoholics. All I wanted to do was to teach, and all that my community heard was Slut.
The system is failing women and calling us manics when we try to change it. In my blue tile New York bathroom I fold the pink cup into a C and reach up inside myself in search of my cervix. I let the cup expand and unsuction in the opening of a canal I have never touched. I twist the pink stem. I adjust the device for comfort. I pull out my right hand’s fingers coated in vaginal fluid and reddish-brown period blood. I wash away my blood and leave the bathroom clean, calm, and yet: still a woman. Still manic.