Our Bodies, Ourselves (27 page)

At the age of eighteen, I was in my first long-term relationship with my first love. I decided to be up front about MRKH, and this was a very positive experience for me. A couple of months later, we were attending a queer conference and I stumbled across a workshop on intersex. This workshop completely changed my life. I was finally able to feel the emotions I had stuffed away at fifteen. I was able to get angry at the way I had been treated by doctors, about the assumptions that had been made about me and my body, and about the pressure put on me by doctors that I need to be “fixed”—that even if I wasn't ready at fifteen, I would eventually “have” to have a vagina created. (Lord knows we can't have a woman running around without a vagina!) I also decided that never, ever again would I be sexual with someone who didn't know about my MRKH beforehand. I was terrified of rejection but have never experienced this when I have been honest. I made the decision that I would keep my body as it is and have finally learned to love and enjoy my sexuality again.

Cathryn:
Madigan, thank you for telling about how intersexed bodies are just as “normal” as so-called standard bodies. The medical establishment tries to enforce standard bodies on those who may well be comfortable, with some support, in nonstandard intersexed bodies. Bless you.

Miriam:
For as long as I can remember, my mother complained about her body. No matter what her size, she always felt she was fat and was very vocal about this. My older sister was always heavy, and her weight was often criticized or discussed at home (and by strangers in public).

Almost every girl I knew complained about her body—about her stretch marks, the size of her hips, her breasts, her thighs. I always kept quiet. I was chubby and felt like if I complained,
I wouldn't get the reassurance that so many girls were looking for. Or if someone reassured me that I wasn't fat, I would feel like they were lying. And I didn't want to be part of that culture that encourages body snarking, either toward self or toward others.

I don't talk about how I feel about my body. Sometimes I love it, sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I question how someone can be attracted to it, but I know that my insecurities come from myself. I've found that if I fake confidence in my body, I start to feel it. I can be with a lover and not want to be seen naked in the light, but if I pretend I'm comfortable with it I quickly become comfortable. I've decided that I don't want those moments of not liking my body to affect my relationships.

Faith:
I had weight issues when I was in high school. I lost over thirty pounds by the end of it through strict calorie counting and exercise, and have kept it off. However, the feelings of self-loathing from that time period have always stuck with me and my eating is still somewhat disordered because of it.

When I lost my virginity (which was after I'd lost the weight), I remember really not wanting my boyfriend to look at me. I had had so many feelings of shame about my body that it seemed weird to want attention in that kind of way. It didn't dawn on me until later that sex is about
appreciating each other's bodies, not to mention truly feeling comfortable in your own. Sex in relationship actually helped me get over a lot of my body issues. I had never been comfortable being naked, even by myself, until someone else had showed me their appreciation for my naked body.

EJM:
I grew up with severe eczema. Due to the constant peeling and scars on my body, I have very discolored and uneven skin. In previous relationships, my skin was something unsexy and shameful. I rarely liked the lights on during sex, and if my partner commented on my skin, even the most benign comment, it would put me into a negative thought pattern.

My [current] partner takes an active part in taking care of my skin. When I scratch while I sleep, he will wake up to hold my hand to stop me. On my bad days, he will help me put ointment and creams to ease the pain on my skin. Even this very little gesture has made me feel very comfortable with my skin and showing my skin to him. Because he is a part of my regimen of skin care and prevention, it has been less of a burden. With his help, my skin feels better and it also feels wanted.

Jaime:
I see a lot of people in the media like me in some ways. I'm a straight, cis, white women; they are straight, cis, white women. They are mostly thinner and prettier than me, but I'm within a standard deviation of a socially acceptable body. I have these privileges.

My relationships …not so much. I can't think of nonmonogamy in mainstream media off the top of my head. And the pop-psychy gender essentialism—yech. I think the closest thing to the dynamics between my current partner and me are Zoe and Wash from [the TV series]
Firefly
and [the film]
Serenity
. The schlubby husbands and hot but shrewish wives of TV sitcoms we are not. I don't have a TV anymore, and aside from saving money, the dearth of characters and concepts that I can relate to (or even that don't actively piss me off) is a big reason, with my irritation at the lowest common denominator method of portraying women and relationships being prominent.

Danielle:
What books/sites have you found useful or more “true” in portraying relationships for you?

Jaime:
A lot of feminist blogs are written by women who have relationships more like the kind that I like/have. The main contributors at Pandagon (pandagon.net) and Shakesville (shakespearessister.blogspot.com), for example. They talk about their relationships in the blogs, and it's nice to see a functional open marriage, or just an egalitarian partnership.

I find odds and ends in books that often aren't about the relationships but that include them incidentally. Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, with their strong heroine, or just about everything Tamora Pierce has ever written. In nonfiction, there are biographies of people like Jill Ker Conway, Virginia Woolf, and Julia Child, and feminist works on sexuality and women and relationships—
Communion
by bell hooks comes immediately to mind. And queer literature is more likely to portray egalitarian partnerships, so stuff like Alison Bechdel's comics are good for that.

Lydia:
I just have to say, love that someone mentioned
Firefly
. And I absolutely adore Zoe and Wash. I agree with you regarding the tiredness of the
Family Guy
or
Everybody Loves Raymond
sitcoms in which a hot and smart woman is somehow inexplicably married to an overgrown man-child. It's so insulting to men, women, straight couples—pretty much anyone
who has the gumption to be in a positive, lasting relationship.

Chloe:
It's cool that you mention books and the Internet and blogs as media. I think most people were just thinking about TV and pop culture stuff, but it's true, the Internet does offer more options—like you said, if you know where to look, which is a whole other thing. As a trans woman, I've found the Internet crucial to me, especially reading blogs and such. I think that's one of the only places (in media, anyway, not counting people I have met in the “real world”) that I saw relationships that at least came close to mirroring my own desires. I hadn't really thought about it that way before reading your post, though. Also, hell yes,
Firefly
! So good.

Jordan:
My ideal relationship is never on television. I can't think of a single depiction of a relationship involving a nonbinary trans person on television, let alone someone who
also
has disabilities. As a result of the fact that people like me are basically erased, I think that my perceptions of “ideal” relationships are more pure and self-shaped, if that makes sense. I'm not influenced by relationships I see on-screen, in books, etc., because they are so abstract from who I am that I don't see myself or my relationships at all in them. My ideas about relationships are consequently very much shaped by my own beliefs and thoughts; I must construct my own media because the media pretend that I don't exist.

Rebeka:
As a child I did not grow up with a happy family. I never saw what a happy functioning relationship looked like. So as I got older, I watched the Lifetime channel as much as possible. Lifetime is kind of like reading a romance novel. The movies and TV shows they show always have a happy ending:
Touched by an Angel, Walker, Texas Ranger
, and countless fairy-tale movies. Whatever the show, there is always a man and woman who fall in love and are a happy functioning family who live happily ever after.

My mother and brother always make fun of me and say, “She's watching the tampon channel again.” I do hope to grow up and have a fairy-tale relationship where we are madly in love with each other and create a beautiful family. I would say that this is the only way I let TV and the media affect me. I am the total opposite of what the media portray and I am very happy with that. I don't need to try and look like what the media portray, because I am far from it. My biggest challenge is just being comfortable with myself and finding someone who likes me for me. Finding a man who isn't affected by the media, now that is the hard part.

Heidi:
Children's stories and movies like Disney films introduced me to a heteronormative ideal at a very young age. When I was a young teenager, I started having feelings for some of the girls on my favorite TV shows. I was so ashamed of my feelings toward girls, including my best friend at the time, that I really tried to overcompensate by becoming as boy crazy as possible. I felt normal when I was kissing a boy, even when I was feeling abnormal for not enjoying myself like they do in the movies.

This only got worse in my early twenties. I actually went as far as to get married to a man I knew I didn't love (or even enjoy being with sexually) because I wanted the typical middle-class white-picket-fence life for myself and my children. I thought that I was supposed to get married, that it would make other people happy and provide a “normal” life for my children. That is what I saw throughout the media growing up; rarely were there positive portrayals of a single mother, except for the stories in which she later found a husband.

I am having a similar problem right now. I have not had any interest in dating or having a sexual relationship in about two years. I cannot think of a single television character who is asexual and not considered to be extremely odd in some way. With so much emphasis on sexuality and “hookup culture,” asexuality becomes
very taboo. I like the fact that women are more than ever free to explore their sexuality, despite the fact that a double standard does still exist between men and women, as does the dichotomy of “good girl” and “bad girl,” which is strongly tied to sexuality, but I think there also needs to be a space for women without desires, not because they are “good” or “pure” or abstaining for moral or religious purposes, but simply because they are just not interested in sex, or do not currently feel a strong desire to be involved in sexual relationships.

Sophia:
I think the lack of interracial relationships in the media is one of the reasons why my parents were not totally supportive of our relationship when my husband and I started dating. My parents saw very few interracial relationships in their immediate community. They couldn't see how my husband and I could have anything in common. They were afraid that my husband, in the white majority, would take advantage of me, an Asian/Hispanic minority woman. With time, my parents thawed out as they got to know my husband. Now they love him, and they appreciate how thoughtful and sensitive he is to how foreign my parents still feel, even after almost fifty years in the United States, about straying outside their cultural communities.

EJM:
I've had the same situation with my parents. I think they are very accepting of my sister-in-law, who is white, and my partner, but I think it is still hard for them to cope with the fact that we are not in the “normal” relationships that they see in their community. I'm really glad to hear how accepting your family is of your husband. It gives me hope that my parents will be able to do the same with my partner and my sister-in-law and see beyond the cultural differences.