Cunt (6 page)

Trusting my friend as I do, I bought a couple of sea sponges at the local health food
co-op and gave them a whirl. The only problem I’ve had is that when a sea sponge is
full, it is
full
. If you laugh or yell when the sponge has absorbed its maximum capacity, your nice
white panties will get a big red how-do-you-do on them.

Other than that, sea sponges are the coolest. I’ve developed an endearing friendship
with my sponges. They are miraculous little plant bodies that once lived in the ocean,
which is also ruled by the moon. And they don’t carry that impersonal, flushable,
bleached personality tampons possess.

Sea sponges can be found at almost all Anystore U.S.A.-type stores, usually in the
make-up or bathtime section. If you’re lucky enough to have a health food co-op in
your town, they’re sure to have them. At under two dollars apiece, they pay for themselves
after one month.

Keep them clean
. Boil a new sponge before you use it for the first time. Store them in a little cotton
bag. Wash them and let them dry completely before putting them away for the month,
but
always
wash them again before using. I’ve heard that you can use more than one at a time
if you bleed a lot, but I’ve never tried this. I wouldn’t recommend using the same
sea sponge for more than a few months because the natural fibers wear down after a
while and it gets kinda disintegratey.

A friend of mine who uses sea sponges once told me about an experience in a public
restroom. She was at a busy nightclub, waiting in line with eight or so other women
to use the toilet. There were four stalls and at least that many women at the sinks,
primping and washing their hands. Suddenly, all normal bathroom conversation came
to a crashing halt as a voice from behind one of the stall doors pealed out, “I’m
coming out with my sea sponge, so if you’re gonna gross out, shut your eyes.” A woman
then emerged from her stall, sea sponge in hand. With all eyes upon her, she washed
it carefully at the sink, went back into the stall and finished up her business. One
woman actually did close her eyes, but everyone else stood transfixed, witnessing
the woman’s ritual with her sea sponge. When the woman came out again, she fielded
quite a number of questions about where to get sea sponges and how to use them. The
whole room of women came together for a few moments, laughing and talking about our
blood.

I enjoy imagining how the culture of restrooms would be different if our periods weren’t
all hush, flush ’n rush.

The Keeper is another fabulous gizmo for catching blood flow. It is a natural rubber
cup with a stem that has a small hole in the end. The cup fits over your cervix, and
when it’s full, little drips of blood flow through the stem, letting you know it’s
time to tend to your Keeper.

I have never tried The Keeper because I don’t like things covering my cervix, but
I still average around two emails a month from ladies extolling the The Keeper’s virtue.
It is, I’ve been informed by sources all over the globe, reusable, incredibly comfortable
and convenient.

Using sea sponges and the Keeper are very good ways for women to cut down on contributions
to large corporations that don’t readily promote the idea that cunts are sacredholy,
and responsible for the entrance of every human being walking this earth.

But some ladies just don’t like internal blood-soaking devices at all. Some ladies
like to bleed
onto
something.

Even though me and my period have come to terms quite nicely over the years, I still
can’t put anything up my cunt on the first day of my period. My uterus rebels if a
stray pubic hair finds its way up my canal on that ultrasensitive first day.

So I asked my grandmother, “What did ladies bleed on before Kotex dreamed up those
thick-as-white-wall-tire pads and elastic security belts?” She blinked her desert
tortoise eyeballs before replying, “Child, where do you think the phrase ‘on the rag’
comes from?”

So smitten was I with not spending my money on tampons, I started safety-pinning rags
to a pair of boys’ underwear. (Why are BVDs so comfy, while Maidenform makes all these
panties that cost too much and skooch up one’s ass?)

I cut up a towel for my rags: A few are around four inches long and six inches wide,
and the rest are five inches long and two inches wide. I wrap the wider width rags
around my underwear, placing as many of the thinner ones between the wide rag and
the underwear panel as I’ll be needing.

It takes some practice to figure out how to get the rags situated just so. I can’t
really offer any suggestions, as it depends on how much you bleed, how you walk, sit
and stand, what kind of fabric you choose, how you decide to affix the rags to the
undies, etcetra and etcetra.

Many health food stores sell ready-made flannel rags with velcro fasteners.

If you sew, design your own rags.

If you don’t sew, contact Bloodsisters, Lunapads and Glad Rags. Their information
is in the Cuntlovin’ Guide at the back of this book. Heck, these organizations are
so dang cool
, get in contact with them, regardless. They feature cuntlovin’ bleeding products,
reading materials, panties and many other revolutionary products.

And then, of course, there’s the trusty Blood Towel.

I’ve had the same Blood Towel for seven years. It is blue. Terra cotta shadows stain
it everywhere.

Linus from
Peanuts?

Me and my Blood Towel.

When I’m on my period I sleep with my Blood Towel between my legs. We all know you’re
not supposed to wear tampons or sea sponges to bed, and rags and pads always seem
to mosh up the ol’ ass. Maybe a Blood Tbwel isn’t the most alluring thing to wear
to bed, but it sure is comfortable and keeps the sheets clean.

In the morning I walk around the house with my Blood Towel wrapped around my waist.
It catches the flow when I sit down. I use it to wipe the insides of my legs. Otherwise,
the blood splatters on my feet, the floor. I step in it and get it everywhere.

Sometimes I don’t clean it up right away.

Messy, messy. Fingerpaints in kindergarten messy.

I like to do this for a very good reason:

Because I can!

Isn’t it amazing.

By the simple act of not wearing panties, I can stand in the middle of my kitchen
and
change the way it looks.
Without moving a muscle, a pool of blood appears between my feet.

Like magic.

Bleeding on sea sponges, the Keeper, rags and Blood Towels may
seem
undesirable when affiliated with commonly accepted standards for absorbing blood
flow. But these “inconveniences” are founded solely upon our indoctrination in this
society. Spending time with your blood is a constructive action. Bleeding every month
is a part of life that we are taught to ignore. When we choose, literally, to see
it, we open up to our actual reality as cuntlovin’ women.

Rinsing a sea sponge or the Keeper out in the bathroom of a fancy restaurant or washing
bloody rags by hand may not be as “convenient” as flushing all one’s cunt ambrosia
away into the city sewer system, but it reconnects a cuntlovin’ woman with her body
and, indirectly, with the bodies of every cuntlovin’ woman, living and dead, who has
ever known the sensation of blood flowing out of her cunt.

You have a ritual for bleeding on throwaway cotton.
You and only you
know your bleeding technique. Sure, it takes time to learn another one but the nice
thing is:

Human beings are the most highly adaptable mammals on the planet. You’ll figure out
a system.

If, for example, you were to decide that using rags and sponges was impossible except
when you are home at night, that’d still cut your dependency on large corporations’
products anywhere from 20 to 50 percent.

In some situations, I use tampons (preferably, the unbleached kind found in food co-ops
and healthy rainbow sister stores). But instead of being
solely reliant
on tampons, instead of coughing up the money every single period, it takes me three
to five months to empty a box.

When I
unconsciously
relegated the right to be in charge of how I bleed to various commercial and corporate
entities who have no interest in me as a living being, much less as a woman, the distribution
of my power did not serve me. Feminine hygiene corporations fund the lives of a small
percentage of men who
remain
in power because they are so good at convincing us ladies that the most
natural and convenient
thing for us to do is to give them ours.

Speaking of men.

As individual husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and lovers, rather than as the most
affluent team of business associates on the planet—are involved with this bleeding
situation in a deeply subconscious way.

Men do
themselves
a
great service
learning about women and the moon. Unless they’re incarcerated, it is just about
impossible to avoid interacting with us.

Bleeding ladies are taught to be, at best, intolerant of a month-to-month physiological
occurrence which clocks the time of our bodies. We therefore act mighty peculiar.
Disliking something unavoidable takes its toll after a while. Some people call this
PMS.

If, at every stage of life, society commanded men to despise their hard-ons, how pleasant
would they be when this bodily function that they are incapable of desisting occurred?

Society fails to acknowledge that our bleeding cycle affects men’s lives tremendously.
This is further compounded by the fact that women who live or work in close proximity
to one another tend to merge bleeding cycles. Chances are, every woman in a given
household or workplace is bleeding at the same time. Sometimes men are surrounded
on all sides by cranky, bleeding cunts.

To the incognizant, we seem entirely unpredictable. We may bite a man’s head right
off for the smallest vagrancy.

They know this.

There is no way for them not to know this.

But chances are, they don’t understand, and act like jerks ’cause their courage is
tested. When most men who don’t understand women see how really scary we are, courage
usually segues to fear. This results in anger, frustration, violence and the perpetuation
of general disrespect towards women. Bottom line: Men are afraid of our blood.

How’s this for some serious chicken shittedness:

Can’t say that I blame men for fearing our bloody cunts. We be powerful people when
we bleed.

When women bleed, all of the frustration and anger we’ve stored in our bodies for
the month is physically manifested in a sudden and swift change in hormone levels,
resulting in an openness and vulnerability that cannot be described. Menstruation
is a monthly purging and cleansing. We hear, taste and smell things that are usually
indiscernible. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we feel threatened when
our heightened senses are assaulted.

I assert that menstruating women intuitively want to be
left alone
or with other bleeding women, as many of our great-great grandmothers firmly believed.

A number of societies certainly have the right idea prohibiting highly sensitive menstruating
women from entering churches where a son-sacrificing, war-mongering, sadistic god
is worshipped. Unfortunately, this prohibition is enforced because of the belief that
menstruating women are “unclean” and not because we’d rather spend the sabbath quietly
paying homage to ourselves and the moon.

A few friends and I spoil each other silly if we’re hanging out on the first day of
someone’s period. We fry up sweet ’n sour tofu, give massages, play Toni Childs and
Sade or bring each other chocolate-covered strawberries. Mostly, we sit quietly and
stare out the window and demand absolutely nothing of each other.

The social requirement that we fulfill the responsibilities of our non-menstruating
selves at all times throughout our cycle is the source of our alleged PMS.

We’re taught to distrust everything about our very compelling blood mystery. Yet the
clickety-clack, passive-aggressive business world of men and machines is the absolute
antithesis of everything our senses crave on the first few days of our blood. In our
souls, we still know this. In our DNA, we want to be quiet with ourselves. In this
society, where a day to ourselves might very well mean no one to care for the children
and no food on the table, bleeding women are naturally irritable.