gynecology

...Because I am falling apart! I finally sort of get myself together (well, as together as I could possibly be right now) and off I go and get myself a kidney infection. Lovely. Ok, so there was a little more to it than my kidneys just being out to get me, there was another incident with Nick and getting hit there, which made the infection more painful. But, my real story here (yes, there is a point to this post) is about what happened when I went to the hospital today. As has happened many times before today when I have gone to the hospital about such things, I ended up with a male doctor. This was ok with me today, I was not feeling too concerned because it was not a gyn issue and so I thought maybe I can deal with having him examine me.

I admit I'm a history buff. But my oh-so-nerdy tendency has taken me back to the Women's Liberation movement, so really, you can call it nerdy if I can call it radical.

Reading about the women who worked that movement and gave us all a new lease on femininity brought me to odd moments where vocabulary and anatomy stopped working against us. Do you remember when 'vagina' was an embarassing word? We all went through that phase and struggled to come out of it; I'd bet it was our feminism that saved us. Vagina. That or Eve Ensler.

But we were reexperiencing one of the cardinal achievements, in my opinion, of the women's libbers. Vagina, cervix, uterus, vulva--they opened the words up to the public and took them out of the mouths of medicine to the street. And they did them one better. In a world and a time when female sexuality was nonexistent simply because it was ignored, activist women--our foremothers, to be blunt--reclaimed "down there" with a trend that could stand some popularity today.