a ten-minute slide show of sexually transmitted diseases, followed by threats of teenage pregnancy, fiery pits of hell, and photographs of our parents and Jesus making a series of disappointed faces. None of this had been in the book.
After school that day, I went home, lay on my back against the plush pink carpet of my bedroom floor, looking up at the ceiling fan covered in dust and dog hair, and taped my vagina shut with Scotch tape.
Now, I want to say taping my vagina shut was part of a bold religious statement of empowerment, in the vein of Joan of Arc being burnt at the stake or St. Lucy of Syracuse having her eyes gouged out before execution, but the truth is that I sealed it shut out of sheer terror. The warm, electric feeling and curiosity that existed between my legs in my sleeping bag that night were replaced by shame and anxiety, and if I taped it shut, I wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally touching it, or even worse yet, liking the feeling.
There were two problems with my plan, the first being that when I sat down to go to the bathroom, pee shot out of me like a clogged showerhead. The second was the ensuing rash from layers and layers of slightly urine-damp plastic tape on my labia. Three days in and I was basically dragging my crotch across the carpet like a dog until my mom grew suspicious and took me to an emergency appointment at her lady doctor. I will never forget their horrified faces as I climbed up onto the table and put my feet into the stirrups, giving them a front-row view of my swollen vagina mummified in clear sticky plastic.
Tears streamed down my cheeks as I explained to Dr. Sim and my mother what I’d learned in health class, as Dr. Sim quietly removed strip after strip of tape with long metal tweezers. I think this was the first time my mother was seeing the real-time effects of religious education, and it freaked her the fuck out. Here she thought she was getting polite, well-educated children who read at or above grade level, but the reality was that it came with a price, and that price was a daughter who put tape on her privates. Not that this should be surprising, because in general, the Catholic Church is a weird institution. Half-naked people on crosses, teen moms, Copperfield-level magic all over the place. Normal people don’t emerge from that environment.
I left that office with my very first scheduled therapy appointment, instructions to apply the steroid cream until the redness andswelling subsided, and an inflatable hemorrhoid pillow to use until the skin grew back.
In case you ever catch yourself wondering just how judgmental small children can be, ask the girl in fourth grade who had to sit on a hemorrhoid pillow because her labia was full of scabs.
“My mom said that putting stuff on your private parts gets you on sex offender lists.”
“You’re not a sex offender if you put tape on your own privates, Tara,” I shot back.
Just when I thought they’d never let me live that shit down, two weeks later a boy in my class went up to the chalkboard to answer a math problem with an erection. Nobody really remembered I taped my vagina shut after that. Thank God for erections, am I right?
SHE GIVES IT ALL AWAY
An issue many overweight women face is that it’s very easy to have a great deal of your womanhood and femininity robbed from you. You aren’t a possible mate because you aren’t pretty; instead you’re just “like a sister” or “one of the guys” or Madonna’s wingman in A League of Their Own . Once I had enough distance between myself and Catholic school, and the scars on my vagina had healed, I began to search out a point of connection between the girlishness and attractiveness I wasn’t feeling, and that connection became messing around with boys. Or in bitter high school girl terms, I became a huge whore, which was actually somewhat of a challenge because I looked like a fat Dutch Boy with boobs.
As it should come to the surprise of no one, I
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