Women's Stories

Standing in line for the bathroom at a tapas bar on dueling pianos night I found myself in a conversation about telling children the facts of life. I don't remember how it got started (there may have been some drinks...) but one woman was talking about her daughter, who had an older brother, asking when her penis would grow in.

As I was left with just the woman behind me in line, I confessed that my four-year-old daughter knows more about being a woman than most of the fifth grade students I teach (who are getting "the talk" at school about now). She asked me if I was from the northeast.

I said, "No, but my parents are."

"Northeastern kids are very savvy." She said.

Initially, I was left wondering if the fact that I am so candid with my daughter is a holdover of my New York roots or is, as I have thought, because I am a crazy liberal librarian and believe that more information is the answer to every problem.

It isn't just that, though. Storytelling has been teaching me some interesting things about women. We have got to be honest with each other. And we must share our feminine wisdom between generations.

I have become infamous in the Atlanta storytelling scene for my "naughty" stories. It all started with Carapace's "Taboo" show, in which, with much trepidation, I shared a story about buying a menstrual cup. (Yes, I wrote about this before. This post is a little different.)

I was embraced by the very warm Carapace community and gained the courage to not only share this story with other audiences, but to propose an entire fringe performance based on "naughty" stories.

With a little luck, I was chosen for the National Storytelling Conference fringe, where some of this really started to sink in.

As storytellers go, I am young. I walk in both the traditional storytelling world and the "reality" storytelling world. At Carapace there are many more people my age, but plenty who are older as well. In the traditional storytelling world, I'm an outlier.

My old anxiety about talking openly about menstrual cups and vaginal depth came back as I looked out at my fringe audience. I advertised that it was naughty stories, so they knew what to expect, right? RIGHT?

Not only was my show well received, but many of those who chose to tell me they enjoyed it were older women. I think now that women know, in our hearts, we have to share these stories, at least with each other. Being a woman is hard. Not every woman has a story about ill-fitting menstrual cups, but they have stories about other menstruating misadventures and when we share these stories, no one has to feel alone.

I continue to work to promote "naughty" stories because I have started to realize that they aren't just entertaining. They are important. And if we don't tell our stories, we run the risk of letting someone else tell them for us.

I will take a moment here to say that I do realize calling them "naughty" stories may not be the most productive thing. It is kind of perpetuating the idea that these are not things we are supposed to talk about. But also, those are exactly the stories I mean: the ones we think we are not supposed to talk about.

Back to women, and folklore, and stories. In many cultures, women of multiple generations used to work together for several hours at a stretch with no men around. Adult conversation often turned to true stories and folk tales and jokes, about being a woman. The girls would hear. There were no surprises about growing up or growing old. The female wisdom was available to all ages. No woman thought she was going though some very normal female thing alone.

I'm not saying we need to go back to the "good old days" of women doing only distaff duties. It's just that we have to make more of an effort to talk to each other. If that's on stage at a bar, I'll see you there. I'm listening.

Saying it Makes it True

There are a group of jokes and urban legends that get passed around that center on the concept of "vagina infinita."

Exemplum gratia:

A man gets lost in a vagina and is wandering around for days when he finally runs into another man. He asks, "Hey, do you know the way out of here?"
The other man answers, "Not exactly, but if you help me look for my car keys we should be able to drive out."

The lead cheerleader acrobatically makes her way to the top of the human pyramid and once she is up there the class rings of the entire football team fall out of her skirt.

Now, it's bad enough that men tell these stories, thereby perpetuating the belief that the vagina is a mysterious and frightening place, but even worse, some women are starting to buy into this mindset, as well. They don't tell the stories the same way, but they have the same message:

My friend knows this girl who had sex with a tampon in and then afterwords she couldn't find the tampon.

Women, seeing as how they possess the equipment, should know better. What is it that lends these stories enough credibility that women start to be suspicious of their own bodies? I think it is that they are primarily passed around by word of mouth.

It is true that urban legends and jokes are widely circulated on the internet. However, they are usually outside the context of a conversation. People send e-mails that consist only of jokes or have only "this story that you need to read because it could happen to you!" I don't know about you, but when I get an e-mail like this the first thing I do is check it out on snopes. These e-mails are also easy to disbelieve because they often aren't very personal. A friend has forwarded the story to you and 100 of her other closest friends after receiving it from someone else who also forwarded it to 100 people.

But, when you are having a private conversation with a girlfriend and she says, "listen to what happened to a friend of mine..." Or maybe you're even talking to a guy friend who says, "you won't believe what happened to my buddy who dated a cheerleader..." You don't automatically go into skeptic mode. Talking to another person is more intimate than e-mailing them and it is this intimacy that makes what you say more believable. And regardless of what might be scientifically accurate, if you believe a story, in some ways it becomes true. When you treat your body like it is something beyond understanding, you won't understand it.