girls gone gross

“Oversharing is in,” said Rebecca Traister yesterday in her Salon column, “The Great Girl Gross-out,” thereby summoning the inherent chic of women’s writing graphically about their own bodies’ grossness, a genre of writing whose omnipresence sure makes it seem like all the red, moist, fusty rage.

Drawing a lot from websites, magazines, and books, Traister points to the trend of specifically female “oversharing” about specifically female parts. She quotes from posts on Jezebel that deal with the stink and agony of lost tampons and the stink and agony of garlic as a cure for yeast infections; she looks at Miranda Purves’ Elle article on the psychological horror and the genital gore of childbirth; she dwells on the recently published Little Red Book, an anthology of stories of first periods; and she briefly takes a peek at Charlotte Roche’s novel Wetlands, which begins with the sentence “As far back as I can remember, I’ve had hemorrhoids,” and which was recently released here translated from the German into the English. (Jezebel published a reaction to the piece, which you can read here.)

Traister’s column reveals that her reaction to this trend is a polyvalent stew of admiration, revulsion, empathy, wonder and irritation. Reading it, I got a sense that Traister couldn’t quite get past the shock and awww that signals a complex mixture of disdain and reluctant respect combined with a soupcon of condescension, a reaction that she cops to at the end. Somewhere in the middle, Traister writes, “for a lot of people who are doing the sharing, or experiencing it, it's not so much ‘too much information’ as it is the next, necessary step in personal-is-political, enlightened honesty about the female body.” She has a point.

As hard as it may be to read some of this writing—and maybe I’m showing my age here, but I do find it hard to read narratives that, as Moe Thacik’s did, liken the smell of a tampon to “a fermented tofu renowned for smelling like rotting fish meets sewage meets Black Death” and the look of it to “bloated like a corpse in the harbor.” However, you can’t negate that it is political, and in a very specific, very powerful, and very empowering way.

Women’s bodies have always served as the marker not only for beauty of the human form, but also for its horror. As a culture, we project our needs for physical beauty on women, an idea that is not new. We also use women’s bodies as the yardstick of our fear of our own bodies—our bodies’ smell, our bodies’ decay, our bodies’ nasty and invisible recesses, our bodies’ waste and all the myriad anxieties that these smells, decay, and effluvia cause.

I might be rushing to state this next point, and bear with me if I am because this is just a blog post ripped from the top of my fecund mind and not a fully researched article. I’m going to say it nonetheless: if you want to know what values a culture holds dear, you need to take a look at the way the culture looks at everyone from male to female, young to old, bottom to top, but if you want to see what makes the culture’s skin crawl with the inexorable creep of the horrorsloth, you need to look at the way the culture treats women’s bodies. I’m not suggesting that the way we look at male bodies, specifically aging male bodies, reveal nothing. Pictures, text about, advertisements involving male bodies with back hair, big guts, man-boobs, nasal tufts, bald heads and so on say a lot about how we think about aging and what fears we have about masculinity, but male bodies don’t serve quite the same cultural function that female bodies do. Men get a lot more latitude. Women don’t.

Reading Traister’s piece and the Jezebel pieces, and reflecting on conversations I’ve had, things I’ve written, and other things I’ve read, I realized that Traister was right about the grrrrl-power that shades the gross discourse of Sarah Silverman and the raw honest of book like Little Red. Sadie Stein of Jezebel weighs in, saying, “The female body will not be ignored: it burbles and leaks and creaks and drips and emits and produces and reproduces and generates and puffs and inflates and occasionally reeks. It is fascinating. It is scary. It is alarming. It is hilarious and silly and mysterious.” Stein’s joy in the freedom of language is palpable.

Mostly, reading all this writing about women’s newfound voice brought to mind Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” a poetic narrative of a man, Strephon, sneaking into his lover’s boudoir and discovering an eschatology of ever-increasing grossness. He begins with her dirty smock with its “armpits well be-smeared,” moves onto the fetid disarray of her cosmetics and dressing table, looks into her washbowl and examines her sputum, investigates the toes of her hose, and pauses to look in her mirror to imagine her squeezing her zits. Strephon’s long and lingering—and highly imaginative—foray into Celia’s private space crescendos when he reaches her commode, opens the lid, and looks in. The speaker exclaims,

Thus finishing his grand Survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amorous Fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

Everyone, as the children’s book notes, poops. But it’s women’s poop, women’s blood, women’s hair, women’s stink, women’s mysterious genitals that frequently bear the cultural burden for all of humanity’s pooping, bleeding, shedding, stinking and mystery. The important thing is that this kind of rude, crude, crass and lavishly descriptive discussion of female bodies used to be the sole provenance of men. Women didn’t talk this way, or they didn’t often, or they didn’t openly.

The only text I can summon that had this kind of down-and-dirty discourse was the 1976 book Titters: The First Collection of Women’s Humor. I read it at my friend Jess’s house, and I remember this florid, funny instructional on how to insert a tampon for the first time that ended with the tampon fully inserted in your ass. All the other humor about women’s bodies that I can remember—and I may just have lived a very cloistered life, or I may have lost said humor to the dustbowl of time—has been either women-written and very recent, or it was written by men.

A lot of the writing that Traister references feels strangely tomboyesque, and that makes sense because there is a built-in testicular swagger to a lot of it. Our model for talking out loud about women’s junk is masculine. It feels boyish because the discourse has always been by boys—or it has been highly euphemistic rainbows-and-princesses condescending dreck that treated women as if they needed to be coddled from the hard truths of their own anatomies.

To be a woman and to write boldly, nakedly, honestly and funnily about your own body is unquestionably a political act. It’s a revolutionary act. And someday, it may change the way we view the world of human bodies. Someday we might live in a world where every body holds beauty, every body holds secrets, and every body can poop, stink, bleed, decay and be gross, equally.

Comments

[ugh]

That's rather stunted. It's truly banal and boring when men do it, and it's no more revolutionary when women do it. Likewise, there's nothing revolutionary when homosexuals star in romantic comedies. They're no more enjoyable to watch then any other romantic comedy. They're still romantic comedy. You're being human when you smell bad, and being human isn't statement, nor a declaration. If you think it is, then you're starting from a pretty repressed place, and that's your own issue, not societies. There's a power in femininity and it's not in one upping men. In that case, you're still allowing male expression to define your female expression. Truly lame, and truly tacky.

[chelsea g.]

I'm going to disagree. I think that the fact that women haven't used a full range of expression, or haven't been allowed a full range of expression, and are now writing--and getting paid to write--about their bodies in an open manner, however crass, is important. Lots of roads out of second-rate status have been built upon the rhetoric of the reigning powered establishment.

I hope that some day chicks don't have to be crass. But maybe, just maybe, what we're seeing as crass has more to do with it being a woman's writing than a man's. Men still take the crass cake. I think one can argue whether or not that's a good thing.

Finally, I think "femininity" is a deeply problematic word and an even more problematic concept. I think there's power in being a woman, but forgive me if I don't think that power rests in being feminine.

[LovelornSwain]

I recommend this review of Roche, And She Seems like Such a Nice Girl, by a British doctor who apparently moonlights as a literary journalist.
I've yet to read the book, but the heroine's exploration of her bodily fluids would not be shocking in a male character. I'm trying to think of examples, Bloom in Ulysses is one, but it's entirely permissible for men in literature to delight in their shit, snot and smegma.
The glib thing to say would be that we never leave the infantile phase of sexuality; but it's true

[Di]

CG dear, there is nothing rushed about this post, or at least not in the way you mean it. Every now and and then the muse not only delivers the inspiration but also the work.

Great post.

[Sean]

I think you make several salient points, and one could go even further in observing that the big R (religion) is where a great many of mens' collective anxieties about female bodies and functions--not to mention their own--are immortalized in their perverse, ecclesiastical glory. You can almost draw a wavering line from the bible, to Milton, to most literature up through and including the (overly) celebrated boys in the bedroom, Updike and Roth, to glean the myriad ways men grapple with and, in many cases, project their own inadequacies about themselves and women.

cheers-
Sean

[Shay]

Maybe I really do prefer to poop rainbows; but I still encourage the de-mystification of my genitals, whether that involves gross tampon stories or not. ^_~