Deborah Lipp

Endometriosis is a disease in which part of the endometrium—the lining of the uterus that thickens throughout the month and is shed during menstruation—detaches from the uterus and instead attaches to other parts of the body. Usually it stays in the region of the pelvis, but it can attach to the spine, to nerves, and to organs, causing terrible pain.

In the past year or two, I have had increasing symptoms of perimenopause. To the point where I know longer refer to menstruation as my “period.” It is now my “random.” And one thing I’ve noticed is that my lifelong menstrual and pre-menstrual symptoms are also random, and don’t necessarily coincide with my randoms. They’ve detached themselves from my randoms and attached themselves to other parts of the month. And I thought that endometriosis was the perfect metaphor for what I was going through, an endometriosis of my hormonal changes.

Then I remembered my first marriage. When I was a teenager, I dated a raging alcoholic. After he stopped drinking, I married him. I thought the lack of alcohol would make things better, but in a way, it made things worse. His drunken behaviors still occured, but now, instead of being predictably attached to drinking, they floated randomly throughout life and fired off unpredictably. I realized that these symptoms, too, were like endometriosis; a sort of endometrial alcoholism.

And I thought, Why has no one ever used endometriosis as a metaphor before? It’s not rare (5.5 million sufferers!) or hard to understand. There are all sorts of things that cause problems by detaching themselves from their predicted and ordinary locations.

Which is when I realized the answer: Misogyny. Endometriosis is too gross to use as a metaphor. Cancer isn’t too gross. Cancer is used as a metaphor all the time. Cancer is deadly and foul-smelling and painful and nasty, but not too gross to say that every mold, spore, weed, bad idea, and ugly clothing trend “spreads like a cancer.”

Here are other things that aren’t too vulgar or too unpleasant to use as metaphors: Bowel movements, erections, vomit, impotence, peeing in your pants, fever, being kicked in the balls.

But here are things you never hear used as metaphors: Menstruation, menopause, hot flashes, lactation, vaginal discharge.

You see, not only can’t you say “vagina,” but you can’t be made to think about the icky female things that come out of vaginas (or breasts), even metaphorically. You know how everything you ever wanted to know, you learned in kindergarten? It’s true: Girls have cooties.

Amanda has a great post up about this “Willful Ignorance” article in American Prospect. (Shakes also has a great post up from a different, and important, perspective.)

Talking about gender-stereotyped abstinence-only education (I know, as if abstinence-only wasn’t bad enough, it’s gender-stereotyped abstinence-only ferfuxake), Amanda says:

teaching that men want sex and women want love but don’t want sex means that young men figure there’s no such thing as an enthusiastic “yes” to sex. If men think all women are reluctant to have sex at all points in time, then that means that they think sex is basically always rape. If you think all sex is rape because women never reallly want sex—as this abstinence-only curricula subtly teaches—then you think that rape is socially acceptable.

That’s vitally important, and it’s an essential element of date-rape and of disbelieving rape victims. “No” only means “no” if “yes” means “yes.”

See, let’s walk away from what it teaches men for a moment and look at what it teaches women. My first reaction is that if they teach young women that only men really want sex, then women will feel defeminized when they get horny. Holy shit, I want sex, I must be a man. Or mannish. Butch. Undesireable because of these unnatural feelings. All that.

But there’s a subtler outcome, which is that a woman will not admit to sexual desire. She wouldn’t want a man to find out that she isn’t really “feminine,” that she has these “masculine” desires. So she’ll say no even when she means yes, because no is the only “female” response.

Creating the feedback loop whence comes the rapist’s mantra: “She said ‘no’ with her lips but ‘yes yes yes’ with her eyes.” You know, “She really wanted it.” Women simply cannot be empowered to say “no” and mean it and have it honored unless they can also be empowered to say “yes” and mean it and get happily healthily fucked. And these crazy abstinence conservatives fear women who enjoy fucking SO MUCH that they’re willing to rob women of our “no.” Small price, they think, for robbing us of our “yes.” Well, my “no” can save my life and my “yes” is too much joy to give up, thankyouverymuch.