When my gynecologist told me that he had broken my hymen, I was focused very intently on ice. This was because I was chewing ice. I was in the recovery room of the Women’s Medical Center and trying not to think about my body, which would mean thinking about the pain inside of my body, so I kept chewing ice and thinking about ice. It was the perfect kind of ice, frozen not into cubes but into ovals the size and shape of pinky fingernails. When I bit down, I felt a strangely electric but nonetheless perfect jolt. The ice was packed densely into a paper cup and covered with Diet Coke, which the nurses said would help with my nausea. It did not help with my nausea. I held the cup with its Diet Coke and perfect pinky-nail ice up at the level of my chin and I kept falling asleep, just like that, with the cup raised up just like that, an ice cube between my teeth. And because I had all of that ice to think about, it was difficult to understand what my gynecologist was saying about what he had just done inside of my body.
I did understand the general idea of what had just happened inside of my body. I knew that my gynecologist had used several sharp instruments, guided by a camera, to cut into, inflate, and explore my lower abdomen. I knew this because he had explained the process after a pelvic examination and Pap smear, during which he wore latex gloves and told me that I would feel a little pressure. I felt a lot of pressure. He looked up at the ceiling and the fluorescent lights that decorated it. His eyebrows pushed against each other and I felt very cold and afraid and so I looked up at the ceiling and its lights, too. After the exam was over, he told me in his whisper-voice to get dressed and meet him in his office along with my mother, who had to be present during my appointments because I was a minor. His nurse smiled and blinked her eyes a few times, then reminded me in her own whisper-voice that his office was the first room on the left. And then I was standing in the middle of the exam room, alone, in a paper gown and with no panties on. I was just standing, in a moment of impossible quiet, until panic keened in my ears.
*
The Mayo Clinic’s website recommends that women receive a pelvic examination and Pap smear when they meet one or both of the following criteria: a) when they are twenty-one years old, and/or b) when they have been sexually active for three years. Because I experienced extreme pain and bleeding during my menstrual cycle, I received my first pelvic examination and Pap smear when I was twelve years old. I had not been sexually active. At the time of the pelvic examination and Pap smear that left me just standing, in a moment of impossible quiet, I was seventeen years old. I had not been sexually active, though I had received many pelvic examinations, which, according to the Mayo Clinic’s experts, did not make me any less of a virgin.
*
In the center of my gynecologist’s office sat a huge oak desk, like a giant freighter anchored on the navy blue carpet. Both he and my mother looked at me with expectant and worried faces. There were stands set up on his desktop for drawings of women who stood to the front and then to the side, their skin peeled off to show the amorphous pink shapes inside them. I was grateful for my clothes.
“Well,” my gynecologist said, “there’s an area behind your uterus called the cul-de-sac.”
“The cul-de-sac?” I asked. “Like the circle down the street that everyone turns their cars around in?” My mother dipped her head to the side a little and said “Emily” in her own whisper-voice, the one with the italics, which meant that this was not a time for joking. And so I stopped joking. My gynecologist pointed his pen towards one of the side-facing women. Inside of her body were three elongated pink ovals stacked on top of each other.
“This is the uterus,” he said and pointed, “and this is the rectum. And here”—he moved his pen back and forth—“is the cul-de-sac, right in between them. See?” I leaned forward and nodded to let him know I had seen. I was afraid to speak out loud. I was afraid to say yes. “I felt several spots of endometriosis there,” he said, “which explains a lot of the problems you are having.” My foot tapped itself against the floor, so my mother put her hand on my knee. Her hand was warm and I realized that I still felt very cold.
Endometriosis, my gynecologist explained, was a condition in which uterine tissue grew outside of the uterus, like very aggressive and insistent weeds. He couldn’t explain why this happened, or what caused it to happen, or what would make it stop happening. No one could. No one knew. He couldn’t explain why no one knew. He could explain that this could possibly explain why my last period had lasted almost an entire year, and the pass-out pain, and the blood and the blood and the blood. It meant I would probably have a difficult time getting pregnant. It meant that sex would probably be very painful. “Do you understand what I mean?” he asked. I nodded. I had not even had my first kiss. I was afraid to say yes.
*
In the recovery room, I kept chewing ice as my gynecologist listed all of the places he had found endometriosis—in the cul-de-sac, as he’d predicted, and under my right ovary, and on my right ovary, and inside my right ovary—during which I heard mostly crunch crunch crunch. I was getting into a rhythm with it, a strange little song of sorts, when he told me that he had broken my hymen. I kept chewing. He told me not to worry, that he had sewn my hymen up again. I stopped chewing. The hand holding up my cup of ice fell and my mother grabbed the cup before it fell, too. “Whoopsie,” she said.
“What?” I said, my voice thick with drugs and cold.
“I repaired it,” my gynecologist said. He was smiling broadly. “I sewed it up, so don’t worry.”
“What do you mean, you sewed it up?”
“Just that,” he said. “I repaired it.”
“I didn’t even think that was possible?” My voice made an up-turn at the end, so it became a question. My gynecologist nodded in assent. He smiled even more broadly. He looked so proud of himself. I didn’t want to disappoint him. He moved on to talk about how and when and where I could shower. I was still holding my hand in a C-shape right below my chin, so my mother put the cup of ice back in my hand. I nodded my thanks and started chewing ice again, so I could at least hear something that made some sense.
*
In ancient Greece, Hymen was a male, though not a male human being. He was a male god, whose duties included attending every wedding ceremony, so he was very busy. In sculptures and paintings and other artistic representations, he’s shown wearing a garland of flowers and carrying a torch.
The Wikipedia page for Hymen (god) offers a link to Hymen (disambiguation) and a photograph of George Rennie’s sculpture entitled “Cupid Rekindling the Torch of Hymen.” In Rennie’s sculpture, Hymen indeed wears a garland of flowers, along with a penis, which indicates that he is a) a male and b) a male who is comfortable with his sexuality. He also indeed carries a torch, though it doesn’t look like a torch. It looks like a vibrator. It looks so much like a vibrator that upon seeing the photograph of the sculpture, I said out loud to myself and my cats, “Is that a vibrator?”
Neither myself nor my cats answered.
*
Approximately four months after my first operation, I sat in my gynecologist’s office, again, looking at his giant freighter of an oak desk while my foot tapped itself against the navy blue carpet. My mother sat beside me. She did not put her hand on my knee to make my foot stop tapping itself. Instead, she was asking my gynecologist why all of this pain I had never seemed to stop. She was no longer using her whisper-voice. My gynecologist explained that my endometriosis had grown back. He used the word “aggressive.” Neither he nor any other doctor could explain exactly why my endometriosis had grown back, and aggressively. Neither he nor any other doctor knew why anyone’s endometriosis grew back, and aggressively. This is because neither he nor any other doctor knew why anyone’s endometriosis grew in the first place.
My gynecologist said it was time for more aggressive measures. It was time for more aggressive surgery. It was time for more aggressive hormone treatments after surgery. Endometriosis, he and other doctors theorized, grew and aggressively because of estrogen. Likewise, they theorized, it would stop growing and aggressively if estrogen levels were lower. After my next surgery, I was to start receiving shots that prevented my body from producing estrogen. I would at that point enter a medically-induced menopausal state. “Do you understand?” my gynecologist asked. I nodded. He handed me a pamphlet about the drug’s side effects. He handed me another pamphlet about menopausal symptoms. I had just turned eighteen. In a few weeks, I would be a freshman in college. I would pack my Birkenstocks, my love bead necklaces, my cat’s eye ring, my favorite sweaters, my Tori Amos poster, my hormone injections, my hormone pills, my pain pills, and an ice pack for when the hot flashes got too bad.
*
After my first three months of college, I came home for Thanksgiving and another doctor’s appointment. My endometriosis had grown back, again, and aggressively. I was no longer a minor and because we both already knew what we would all say, my mother stayed in the waiting room while I sat in my gynecologist’s office, my head bobbing on the waves of the pain medication I had to take to walk.
My college friends all seemed to spend a great deal of their time doing three things: 1) talking about how badly they needed to get laid, 2) getting laid, and 3.) talking about how badly they needed to get laid again. I didn’t spend any of my time doing any of those three things, and because all of the pamphlets about my hormones’ side effects and menopause said I should discuss a decreased sex drive with my doctor, I decided to discuss my absent sex drive with my doctor. I said, “I’m just a little worried because I don’t want to have sex.” My gynecologist said, “Do you mean that you’re not sexually attracted to men?” I said, “No, I mean that I’m not sexually attracted to anyone.” My gynecologist said, “Hm.” It was the kind of “hm” that indicated that he did not believe that I didn’t mean that I wasn’t sexually attracted to men, which therefore indicated that he believed I was sexually attracted to women and was ashamed of it.
*
According to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, 28% of females reported that they experienced sexual attraction to other females. Nineteen percent had engaged in some kind of sexual contact with other females. Most of these women had engaged in some kind of sexual contact with other females ten or less times. I engaged in sexual contact with another female zero times, unless you count very awkward kissing during two very awkward games of spin-the-bottle in my Resident Advisor’s dorm room.
Alfred Kinsey’s report makes no mention of games of spin-the-bottle, awkward or otherwise.
*
My college friends often used baseball metaphors to describe their sexual activities. These metaphors ranged from a strikeout, which involved no sexual activity, to a home run, which involved actual sexual intercourse. Because I was not familiar with either baseball or sexual activity, I often felt very confused when my friends discussed their sexual activities by referring to the bases, to strikeouts, and to home runs.
*
After a while my gynecologist was either a) convinced that I did not, in fact, mean that I was attracted to women instead of men or b) convinced that if I was attracted to women instead of men, I was not going to tell him about it, even if my mother was not present. And so he said, “Think about it this way,” and I said, “Okay.” I prepared to think about it this way. I wanted to be a good patient. “Imagine you are drowning,” my doctor said, and so I began to imagine that I was drowning. This wasn’t very difficult for me to imagine because I actually had, at age four, almost drowned. I was actually just remembering drowning instead of imagining drowning. My doctor kept talking: “as you drown, your systems go, one by one, according to what the body needs most. Your digestion stops, your breathing stops, and then your heart stops, and your brain stops last, because that’s what your body needs most.” I imagined my digestion and my breathing stopping, one by one, until I was just a heart and a brain, and then just a brain. “Right now,” my doctor said, “you are drowning.” I didn’t argue. “What does your body need least? Sex. So your sex drive has shut down.” So I had never actually stopped drowning. I’d been walking around all of this time, drowning, and no one who is drowning is also thinking, Perhaps this is the right time for me to engage in sexual intercourse. It made a lot of sense, so I said, “That makes a lot of sense.”
What I did not say to my doctor was that actual drowning was a lot better than the metaphorical drowning I had experienced, all of this time, walking around. Actual drowning was actually kind of pleasant. Everything was soft and blue, even the light, and I felt very peaceful.
*
Wikipedia notes that even if a drowning person tries to hold her breath, her body will try to breathe, despite herself, as a reflex. When I was a drowning person, I did not hold my breath. I also did not note that my body tried to breathe, despite myself. In fact, I noted that I didn’t feel like I needed to breathe, which was a relief. While metaphorically drowning—which is what I had been doing, apparently, and all of this time—I always needed to breathe, which was very unpleasant, because even breathing hurt. So I walked around in my Birkenstocks and ordered egg sandwiches and talked about The History of the Peloponnesian War and drowned metaphorically. Sometimes I stopped and reminded myself to breathe. Then I would breathe in shallow, rhythmic melodies. Sometimes I wished that my breathing would do its own thing and just stop, by its own volition. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to have my own breathing just stop. When I actually drowned, things were much nicer. I just hung there, in the water, which was very warm, feeling very warm and relaxed and like I didn’t even have to breathe. It was that easy, drowning. It was that easy.
*
In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides never explicitly mentions the gods or any god’s—including Hymen’s—involvement in human affairs. By his explicit not-mentioning, he is making an explicit point. Instead of using human beings to meet their needs, in Thucydides, the gods exist because human beings use them to meet their needs.
There is no evidence to suggest that Hymen did or did not attend any wedding attended by Thucydides.
*
When I almost drowned, it was in my aunt’s above-ground pool. For a while, I floated around on the surface with the help of an inflatable inner tube. Then the inflatable inner tube stopped helping me, and then I wasn’t floating around on the surface anymore. I was inside of the water instead. I didn’t know how to swim, so I didn’t. I just hung there, with myself and the light and time and everything, everything suspended.
*
Wikipedia notes that there are two kinds of drowning: active drowning and passive drowning. Passive drowning involves “people who suddenly sink or have sunk due to a change in their circumstances.” An example would be the circumstances occurring when an inflatable inner tube no longer helps a person float. Active drowning involves “people such as non-swimmers and the exhausted or hypothermic at the surface, who are unable to hold their mouth above water and are suffocating due to lack of air,” such as a person who has not yet learned how to swim when her/his inflatable inner tube refuses to help her/him float and leaves her/him, instead, hanging in the water with everything, everything suspended.
I could not then, nor can I now, identify which type of drowning I metaphorically walked around in, all that time.
*
In Chapter IX of Book Three of The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides focuses on the sentinels who missed the initial approach of the Plataeans. The sentinels “did not see them in the darkness, or hear them, as the wind drowned with its roar the noise of their approach.” This sentence could also, and accurately, describe why, while I was walking around in my metaphorical drowning, I was not sexually attracted to any of the male or female human beings around me.
*
According to Wikipedia, the tendency to discuss human sexual activity with baseball metaphors first emerged after the Second World War, which ended in 1945. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which discussed the human male’s sexual activities from strikeouts to home runs. There is no discussion of baseball, as a sport or as a metaphor for human sexual activities, in The History of the Peloponnesian War.
*
I wasn’t positive that Alfred Kinsey never mentioned games of spin-the-bottle, awkward or otherwise, so I Googled “Alfred Kinsey spin-the-bottle,” only without the quotation marks. Five out of the first six results regarded Wicked Blaze: WWW.Girl-Gear, a novel by Alison Kent published by Harlequin Blaze, which is an imprint specializing in books geared to female human beings who like to read about other females engaging in sexual intercourse with male human beings.
*
In the year that I turned eighteen, I had a total of three laparoscopic surgeries for the express purpose of seeking out and removing growths of endometrial tissue in my abdomen. Prior to the first and second laparoscopic surgeries, I had not yet had my first kiss. Prior to the first, second, and third laparoscopic surgeries, I had not engaged in sexual intercourse of any kind, so even though I had had many Pap smears and very many pelvic exams, according to the Mayo Clinic, I was still a virgin. During the first and second laparoscopic surgery, my surgeon tore my hymen membrane, which he then repaired with small sutures in a procedure known as a hymenorrhaphy. Prior to neither procedure did I give my express consent or express a wish that, should my hymen be torn, it should be sewn back up.
The Mayo Clinic’s experts, unlike my college friends, do not classify virginity as a disease, condition, illness, or syndrome.
*
Many male and female human beings assume that if a female human being’s hymen is not intact, that female human being is no longer a virgin. According to Wikipedia, many heterosexual human beings consider themselves virgins until they have engaged in sexual intercourse that involves penile-vaginal penetration; in other words, many heterosexual human beings consider themselves virgins until they have made it through all of the bases and achieved a home run. The act of sliding into home presumably pierces the hymen membrane, which causes minimal pain and bleeding. However, Wikipedia notes that only 43% of women experience this minimal bleeding the first time that they engage in sexual intercourse, which indicates that their hymen membranes were not intact before they engaged in sexual intercourse. The hymen membrane may not have been present in the female human being’s body from birth; it may have been broken in the act of physical exercise, such as a softball or baseball game. Wikipedia offers no information on baseball metaphors that describe a home run that doesn’t result in bleeding, though “a stolen base” would work nicely.
When my twice-repaired hymen did break, it was not in the process of penile-vaginal penetration, or a home run, but instead on second base. I was twenty-four years old. The pain and bleeding was not minimal, either, but extreme and also humiliating, and therefore play stopped before any other bases were reached. In baseball terms, this experience was roughly equivalent to a force out.
*
Of the hymen, Alfred Kinsey wrote: “I think any creator who claims that he had a purpose in creating the hymen certainly shows himself incapable of having done a good job.” Not only did my hymen not break in the process of penile-vaginal penetration, but the associated pain and bleeding were so extreme and also humiliating that I did not get any closer to penile-vaginal penetration for quite some time. It is unclear if this proves or disproves Kinsey’s remark about any creator’s purpose in creating the hymen, or my gynecologist’s purpose in twice-repairing my hymen.
*
Despite Wikipedia’s insistence, there is no way to disambiguate the hymen.
*
I never told my gynecologist that I was angry with him for performing two hymenorrhaphies without my express consent. I also never told him that I blamed the two hymenorrhaphies, and therefore him, for the extreme and embarrassing pain and bleeding I experienced when my hymen broke. I wanted to be a good patient. I was angry, though. I was angry as I washed the blood off my legs, my arms, my hands. I was angry as I pulled the bloody sheets off of my bed and when I saw the blood seeped into the mattress. I was angry as I folded them before I put them in a trash bag. I was angry as I pulled the pillow out of the bloody-hand-printed pillowcase. I was angry as I saw bloody handprints on the pillow, too, and I was angry as I put both the pillow and the pillowcase into the trash bag. I was angry as I walked to the dumpster, as I clenched my teeth and said don’t cry don’t cry to myself in my head, as I held my nose and slid the metal door open and put the trash bag in the dumpster, as I walked back, as clenching my teeth stopped working, as I started crying, still saying to myself in my head don’t cry don’t cry. I was angry as I drove to Target and as I stood in the check-out line with a cart full of new sheets, a new pillow, Clorox bleach, overnight Kotex, and a bottle of red wine. I was angry. I was angry.
***
Image credits: featured image, third image.
