Men always want me to share more. From my first boyfriend on. Craig slurred at me in a dorm room hallway that I’d never really let him in, never talked about my feelings or had a single serious talk with him throughout our senior year of high school.

I shook his grip from my arm.

“But you didn’t either?” It was a question how I said it, and stepped back against the damp wall. We’d been broken up for months, the way I’d expected us to when high school – and what I saw as our role for each other—was over. I was less drunk than him (always) and couldn’t quite follow his logic.

But, then, it wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully. My thoughts along with my legs. And because I hadn’t, he explained to me, I was “super fucked up,” around relationships. He teetered and slumped to the floor.

“You never even gave me a chance to know you,” he looked up, his lush eyelashes in full effect. I was fucked up because I didn’t open: instantly, easily, for him. We’d known each other since we were 12, but he felt he’d never gotten enough of me. He wrenched up his face and twisted toward the floor, and so, across the narrow hallway from him, I sunk down too.

“I’m sorry?” I said, hoping that would end it, but regretted it as soon as I spoke.

In The Body in Pain, her classic text describing the philosophical and spiritual features of pain, Elaine Scarry addresses biblical depictions of the inside and outside of the body, and the dynamics of the divine that operate between. Scarry observes that when a person in the Bible resists God, or belief in God, “…the withholding of the body…necessitates God’s forceful shattering of the reluctant human surface and repossession of the interior.”

I can’t help but see here a masculine God, one that refuses any scenario in which a person refuses to fully give themselves over. As Craig did, pulling at me in that dorm hallway for something he felt he wasn’t getting.

It wasn’t actually a logic I could cross into: at its heart was the belief that I should open myself to him, and fully.
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It’s not fair, though, to make this only about men.

“He just wouldn’t open up to me,” Cara sighs. “We spent a whole weekend together and I barely feel like I know him.” I’ll readily admit it’s not always the case that the one prying open is gendered masculine: the penetrating gaze of women and queer people all around me bores towards the deepest darkest secrets of the people we want to know.

“I want him to let me in.”

“She’s hiding herself from me.”

“I want more of you. All of you.”

As if there was only one way in to where we’re trying to go, and the tunnel is to blame for not being open.

One weekend camping with friends in the Sierras, we laugh the whole time and I feel closer to them than I have to anyone in a while. My eyes tear and my throat is sore from laughing about our sad and weird experiences learning sex at summer camp from older kids, the stupid things we’ve said while trying to be cool. We are academics, therapists, entrepreneurs and artists—adult people whose intelligence (emotional and otherwise) I respect. But in this weekend I get a break, mostly, from speaking this intelligence. And in these conversations that I’ve sometimes termed more surface, I feel something more like closeness. More like trust.

“Yes, because we’re trusting each other to know we’re not stupid,” Ellie says from her perch on the granite boulder. “We don’t have to spend the whole time proving we’re smart or emotionally articulate, or have good politics, or have worked through our childhood shit…” She trails off and scratches the back of her leg, reaching awkwardly around to where a patch of calf got ravaged by mosquitos. I look away instinctively, not wanting to witness her weird body position. But then I look back.

“…the pose of awkwardness is very dangerous, because at this post-feminist moment one should be a top, one should win, etc,” writes Eileen Myles in “Long and Social.” Myles is speaking here about the ways in which their own work is “a bad recording” of lived experience, as opposed to the careful curation of a memoir. They term this position of “bad recording” dangerous for women expected to be getting things “right,” topping the narrative, so to speak. Myles points here also to the precarity of power by noting their refusal to top. This choice to maintain an awkward pose (a crouch, perhaps) leaves their narrative-body vulnerable to risk. The awkward narrative allows for others to also enter and also make claims upon the truth. The awkward body leaves the story open, incomplete.  

I want to see this awkward body – in part because I have it. I’ve been managing chronic illness and pain these last few years, and lately doctors have focused on a problem with my hormones. The OB-GYN says too much estrogen in my body is forming the cysts on my ovaries, and the herbalist says my diet has too many estrogen-heavy foods, that I need to eat less of everything on the list she hands me.

“It’s important not to feel defeated if the diet changes don’t fix everything right away,” she tells me. “You are managing a chronic condition.”

I’m still trying to understand what exactly this means: how to explain that I’m incapacitated by endometriosis pain one month, but the next am out late and energized every night. I’ve been turning to sick, crip and disability theory to try to better understand – even though of course I know these are not all the same. What I’m trying to understand between them is how to manage a condition that is largely invisible much of the time, how to manage something intentionally or inadvertently pushed out of view.

But: “…disabilities are not exactly ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’ but intermittently apparent,” writes theorist Margaret Price in “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain,” “…a better metaphor than vision for some kinds of disability might be apparition.” I latch immediately onto this, the way “apparition” flickers and returns at unpredictable times – often frightening those present when it appears.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down. Sometimes I feel better but I don’t know why. I get up from bed, then later fall over, over and over, never over. I stumble on my words when anyone asks how I am and I try to explain.

“Clumsiness might provide us with a queer ethics,” writes Sara Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life. “Such an ethics attends to the bumpiness of living with difference, so often experienced as difference in time; being too slow or too fast, out of time.”

The apparition of chronic illness is also “clumsy.” Because my body moves clumsily in pain, but also because it is out of time, unpredictable, inconsistent. It does not respond well when asked to be consistent or reliable. (“Sick time is always escaping the institutional technologies invented to contain it,” writes Anne Boyer.) It does not respond well when asked to be fully seen and understood. And it does not respond well to normative relations, queering the sense of my relationship to others in care, in attraction, and attractiveness: always incomplete and refusing the happy ending.

The idea of chronic illness as apparition also feels soothing after years of trying to bore down into the core of how to fix this, how to find one thing I can do that will eliminate my symptoms – and failing, failing to nail it down
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This is why I began with my teenage boyfriend. Because what’s awkward and clumsy if not one’s first relationship, one’s first times attempting sex? Especially in a relationship where I was primarily attracted to the idea of sex, the performance of relationship and its accompanying teenage drama: not to any kinds of hot sex we were actually having. I didn’t have the knowledge or communication skills at the time to re-direct or explain this, and so remained stilted in what I told him, how our bodies moved together, and the way, ultimately, we broke up. I guess we should stop dating now, I bumbled on his porch steps the week before we left for college, and bolted away across his lawn into the night.

He remained angry at me for years for this breakup, and for refusing to “let him in” on what I had been thinking, wanting, needing. Things I didn’t exactly know myself at the time. And I’ve come to understand the ableism beyond the misogyny in his anger, the insistence that a body and mind should even be available to seamlessly open.

But also I am grateful now for the clumsiness that surrounded us then, my hormonal body ineptly attempting to work alongside another. I remember us in basements pretending to listen to Dark Side of the Moon on a couch we couldn’t figure out how to arrange ourselves upon. Our limbs not knowing where to go against one another, yes, but also the emotional inelegance, how I rarely knew where to look or what to say.

“I considered how one cannot continuously manage one’s emotive surface and, mostly, that this lack of control is something to be grateful for,” writes Caryl Pagel. So I am grateful to my teenage self, the self that stuck her ass in boys’ laps while dancing and didn’t know what it meant, genuinely shocked later by their desire. I am grateful to the awkward teenage self who avoided intimacy wherever possible, terrified of risk and then on occasion spilling it all, with Smirnoff Ice.

And not just me but him, her, them, us: crouching underneath bathroom stalls because we’d locked ourselves in and didn’t know where else to go but the sticky floor. The sense that we did not need to blast one another open in any masculine-, female-, God-like or therapist-way, because, really, we already were shattered (a la Scarry) open, slithering on the floor and around in our hormones. Our unpredictable bodies our first hint that we might be that way—forever.

This is how I’ve found myself embracing the clumsy, as a body half performed and half messy, half closed and half open. A person allowed to open only sometimes, a body willfully aware of change and potentially shifting states. To be clumsy is not to be fragile: it is to know that one is breakable, and to live (speak, interact) knowing this.

Clumsy might come in any gender, but because they’re the ones I use, I’ll use she pronouns here. She’s been a beacon to me when I’m in pain, and a beacon to me when I try to explain my illness. She lets me shrug: “it’s hard to know how I’ll feel next week.” She lets me refuse to talk about it when I don’t want to. She performs gender as she is available: she lets me spend half an hour on my eyeliner and then say fuck it, and smear it off.

She wants to be seen, but at the same time refuses to be seen completely: a position I’d want, for any person—the understanding that a public presentation doesn’t necessarily mean she wants to be taken, opened or entered entirely. Or that she’ll be available in this same way tomorrow. Her hormones, her blood, her gender, her feelings, her laughter: none of it demands to be shattered or unwrapped for consumption.

I summon the spirit of clumsy from my teenage self, picking nervously at the pimples alongside her mouth as she tries to end the conversation with Craig on the porch. She doesn’t know how to break up with someone gracefully. Her legs are half-shaven and bumpy, and her shorts are the wrong thing to wear in this late summer chill. She blurts and runs. She’ll learn more later about what people want to hear. But for now she doesn’t know what to say, and I love her for it.

It’s October, the spookiest time of the year, and also the prime time for a resurgence in harmful stereotypes about disabled people in the media. I love Halloween, and like many people, I’ve been dutifully scaring myself silly this month with new shows like The Haunting of Hill House, and a re-exploration of Stephen King’s back-catalogue. But in nearly all of the terrifying films, books, and TV shows currently dominating our leisure time, it’s impossible to ignore one pervasive trend: the looming spectre of the “Evil Cripple.”

Quite frankly, we disabled people are everywhere right now, but not in the way many of us would like. If we’re not wielding chainsaws and going on murderous rampages, then we’re plotting world domination from our wheelchairs and reveling in a variety of gruesome deaths. The recurring tropes of disability = evil and disfigurement = morally bankrupt are stereotypes as old as culture itself, but what exactly is so scary about us? Well, come with me on a spine-tingling trip through history, that begins thousands of years ago, within the creeping mists of time…

Horror films and books play heavily on the idea that religious texts and arcane tomes are gateways to magic and evil, but the idea of disability as punishment is one found in almost all religious stories. In these parables, sinners are struck down with blindness, leprosy, or paralysis as a punishment for perceived sins, and healing is only offered when they repent and beg for forgiveness. In fact, early Puritan writings suggested that disabled people were innately driven towards evil, and that a child born with a disability was being punished for intrinsic impulses towards immorality.

In folktales and fairytales, too, limping crones lure children to their deaths, and disfigured characters like Rumplestiltskin use their cruelty and cunning to entrap the more moral characters of the story. Often, in these tales, disabled and disfigured people are fueled by jealousy and bitterness, and so turn their hatred onto the pure and blameless members of society. The over-arching message? Disabled people are inherently evil, and as such, we are scary.

Early Puritan writings suggested that disabled people were innately driven towards evil
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Unfortunately, this lazy trope, which positions disability as being caused by, or being the cause of, malicious wrong-doing, is one that repeats itself in popular culture, and feeds into the false idea that disability is inherently a bad thing. In Stephen King’s The Green Mile, callous jailer Percy is punished for his cruelty to the inmates by being rendered catatonic, while the sweet-hearted wife of the prison’s chief warden is saved from her brain tumor because, we’re meant to infer, she deserves to be.

In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is a disfigured character who tortures people to death and tries to wear their faces, because of course, if you have a facial disfigurement you must be filled with self-loathing, as well as a burning hatred for those who don’t. We know that Freddy Krueger is evil because he’s disfigured; the Phantom of the Opera becomes a villain because he can’t possibly reveal his scars; and Jason Voorhees, with his disfigurement hidden behind a mask, demands your attention with murder.

But it isn’t just physical disabilities that history and, by extension, the entertainment industry, consider frightening.

One of the most famous horror tropes is the mentally ill and therefore murderous antagonist. Often a serial killer, like Hannibal Lecter, or occasionally possessed by demons, like Emily Rose, if there’s one things the horror genre has taught us, it’s that mentally ill people are to be feared. But there’s a particularly sad irony in this stereotype, since throughout history, mentally ill men and women have been the ones most frequently harmed by society.

Take Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam Asylum, for instance. Most of us know that Bedlam was a terrible place, where people were locked away in squalor, without treatment, and routinely abused by their gaolers. What many people don’t realize, however, is that before Bedlam, locking away patients with mental illness was considered to be a humane way of isolating them from their abled peers, for the very simple reason that mental illness was thought to be contagious.

As a result, many people suffering from mental health problems were subject to torture or murder, as it was feared they might infect others. Isolation was considered to be a more compassionate alternative to a variety of so-called therapies, from blood-letting, to starvation diets, to trepanning, an ancient practice in which a portion of the skull is removed. Yet despite this, the horror genre is rife with depictions of psychopaths committing mass murder, or people with multiple personalities slaughtering their families.

Perhaps, you might think, that these stereotypes are no big deal. But the fact is that the horror genre is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all. In 2015, a report by the Media, Diversity, and Social Change Initiative found that of the top 100 movies that year, only 2.4% of disabled characters spoke or had names, despite the fact that 1 in 5 people around the world are disabled.

The entertainment industry, in particular, regularly comes under fire for allowing abled actors to “crip up” and play disabled roles, thereby denying disabled actors the opportunity. The problem has become so bad, that the Ruderman Foundation recently reported that an incredible 95% of disabled characters on television are played by able-bodied actors.

The fact is that the horror genre is the only genre in which disabled people are regularly represented at all.
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Similarly, while most horror films depict mentally ill people as violent, cold-blooded killers, the reality is that they are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violent crime. The stigma around mental health issues also makes recovery harder, and according to the Mental Health Foundation, nine out of ten people with mental health problems believe the stigma around them has a negative impact on their lives.

While Halloween is a great excuse to terrify ourselves and indulge in dark stories, it’s worth remembering that while horror entertainment frequently depicts disabled people negatively, there’s essentially no other popular media to counter-act these depictions. While there are countless disabled and disfigured people portrayed as killers and villains, we rarely ever get to be the heroes, and frequent negative representation breeds ongoing stigma and prejudice.

Stories of disability as a moral punishment, in particular, feed into the idea that disabled people deserve suffering, or even that the lives of disabled people are nothing but suffering, and so we are either to be pitied or punished. Neither of these things is true, and isn’t it about time we stopped using disabled bodies as a short-cut to cheap scares? The chances are we’re probably not going to murder you or wear your face as a mask, but we are pretty tired of always being the bad guy. Really, the only thing frightening about disability is the archaic attitude the entertainment industry still has towards it – in both its depiction of us, and its refusal to offer us a chance at employment.

CW: Mentions of self harm

I carefully walk up the wooden stairs, gripping the handrail. The scent of jasmine is sweet as I cross over to open the Dutch door. The sound and smell of the studio are overwhelming: the tang of green soap and vaseline, the clattering buzz of the machines. There is art everywhere: watercolors in bold primary colors, books on the counter filled with potential options. As I settle in, the razor flicks over my skin. I watch the fine blonde baby hairs of my arm shaved off, golden motes dancing in the sunlight. “You ready?” the artist asks. I involuntarily clench, but smile. “Born ready, baby.” Then the needle touches my skin and I relax into the pleasurable pain of being tattooed.

I got my first tattoo at 18, much to my parents’ chagrin. I don’t remember when exactly it was that I fell in love with the idea. Growing up in the punk scene, I couldn’t think of a specific person whose inked skin made me suddenly decide my skin needed to look similarly, mostly because everybody’s skin was tattooed. It was exactly what I planned to do the minute I was old enough, because I wanted to. Because I could.

So I drove in my green mini-van to the tattoo studio all my friends went to and spent the morning of my 18th birthday getting tattooed (with a tattoo of such poor quality and miniscule size that I would eventually cover it up entirely). Back then, more than 15 years ago, my tattoos were a declaration of selfhood, a way to decorate my body with things I loved. Back then, the niggling pain in my back was just a minor irritation, probably nothing big, just a discomfort from standing on my feet as I worked as a restaurant hostess. There was no connection between that pain and getting work done at a tattoo studio.

Except the back pain didn’t go away. It got worse. Some days, the pain was so bad that I would have to call in to the restaurant where I worked, gasping as I explained I wouldn’t be coming in that day. I graduated high school and moved away from my hometown to attend the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Days when I couldn’t work were inevitably also days when I couldn’t attend class.

I’d spend hours in bed, splayed out, trying desperately and carefully to not move at all. If I stayed still, I couldn’t feel the lightning bolts of pain shooting from my back into my ribcage, down my legs and into the soles of my feet.

Back then, the niggling pain in my back was just a minor irritation, probably nothing big, just a discomfort from standing on my feet as I worked as a restaurant hostess.
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At some point, the pain in my back relocated. It moved into my ribs, and my hips, and my ankles, and my legs. In desperation, I tried everything: visits to urgent care were followed by the chiropractor, then the acupuncturist. When they had no solutions for me, I added regular doses of ibuprofen to my repertoire. As the pain increased, so did the number of days I spend in bed. The pain was debilitating.

I moved from one specialist to the next. I felt increasingly disconnected from my body. I had never felt isolated from myself before. My body had always been me. After all, isn’t that the way most humans exist? Our bodies are ourselves. There is no separation from body and mind.

Except a natural separation begins to exist when your body stops behaving predictably. The body that I had relied upon for so many years, through karate lessons and long-distance running and college all-nighters, suddenly stopped behaving in a way I could anticipate. I could no longer trust that I would wake up and be able to complete all the tasks I needed to through the course of the day.

Hell, I could no longer trust that I would even be able to crawl out of bed. A creeping dysphoria set in: this is my body, but it is not myself. My body was separate from my existing, and both had to be managed in order to get through the day. As my dysphoria became more apparent, the act of being tattooed started to be less a declaration of selfhood and more about feeling a sense of control over a meatcage spun wildly out of control.

The idea of disability and dysphoria are no strangers to many other disabled humans. Jill Jones, a 34-year-old disabled woman from the San Francisco Bay Area, understands the idea of needing ownership over a body you no longer feel like you control — even though she lives with a disease that prevents her from being tattooed anymore. Her disease, hereditary angioedema type 3, is an incredibly rare, life threatening condition that causes episodes of edema (massive swelling) in various body parts, including the hands, feet, face, intestines, and airway. Without treatment, death occurs in approximately 25% of HAE patients.

“I feel like once I disclose my current diagnosis, artists don’t want to tattoo me,” she explains. “Minor physical trauma can trigger life threatening airway attacks at worst, and at the least localized swelling, bodywide pain and the need for a rescue shot that costs over $11,000.” Despite this, when she can be tattooed, it is a source of relaxation and euphoria for her; she’s even slept through long sessions before.

“Ownership is huge when you have no control over your bodily functions and you don’t know when your body will turn on you, killing you. You develop a fear, and a resentment of your body. It represents your illness and all the pain and loss that follows suit. So when I look at my tattoos it helps me to see me there, separate from the genetics that want me dead.”

After I was finally diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), a genetic, degenerative collagen disorder that causes my joints to easily dislocate, I began to reconcile the reality that my symptoms weren’t going to disappear. There is no cure for hEDS. As my understanding of my body evolved, the nature of my tattoos did, too. They started getting bigger, stretching across my entire shoulder and down my arm, or over my hip and across my thigh.

The pain of the actual session started to recede, too. I wasn’t so focused on the painful bite of the needle anymore, or wondering when the session would end. I started to look forward to the distraction of the hurt. It was a hurt I could opt-into, one I could select.

Jaz Joyner, a 27-year-old Black self-defined “womanperson who is a bit genderqueer,” mentioned that same concept of control when discussing her tattoos. After an emergency salpingo-oophorectomy to remove her fallopian tube and ovary, she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), hypertension, and hyperthyroidism at age 13. An osteoarthritis diagnosis followed at age 18 (with three herniated discs in her back), and a diagnosis of fibromyalgia and tactile allodynia (painful sensation caused by innocuous light touch.) Joyner says that it was the pain from the tactile allodynia that got her into tattoos and body modification.

“I am often in pain or can’t control what my body feels from one day to the next, and that usually makes me feel powerless,” Joyner said. “Tattoos and piercings give me back that control. I pick where and when the pain will happen, and this pain comes with a reward: beautiful art I can keep forever.” In fact, Joyner’s first tattoo was representative of her experience with the medical side of her illness.

As my dysphoria became more apparent, the act of being tattooed started to be less a declaration of selfhood and more about feeling a sense of control over a meatcage spun wildly out of control.
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At some point, I stopped mulling over an idea for months or years before finally committing to it. I started looking at the sessions themselves as a respite from the normal pain of existing within my own body. Being tattooed was still painful, but as Joyner said: at least it was pain I could choose.

Selecting the pain meant it was not only bearable, but almost pleasurable. And, unlike the chronic pain from my rebellious meatcage, this hurt left me with a visible trophy to celebrate. Something about being able to run my fingers over the colorful artwork now permanently emblazoned across my skin felt like I’d come away a winner.

I knew that my reaction was, in part, a response to the associations I’d made with the act of being tattooed and the studios themselves. The positive connection in my brain left me dripping with positive endorphins and adrenaline. In fact, the idea of place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and a main concept in environmental psychology. The tattoo studio became an environment of safety for me, a place where I had the power to not only control my pain but shape it into something that felt valuable.

Andrea Lausell, a 25-year-old Latinx woman from Los Angeles, understood the interactions of brain chemistry intimately. “After a tattoo, I feel euphoric,” she said. “I feel in control of my body, and as a result of the pain, [I have] something I love on my body…” Lausell was born with Spina Bifida Lipomyelomeningocele, a birth defect where the spine fails to properly form.

She was diagnosed with Chiari Malformation, a condition where brain tissue extends into the spinal canal, in 2011. Over the course of her lifetime, she’s undergone 12 back operations and a skull decompression to remove a portion of her skull. “After a [medical] procedure, I generally feel drained and traumatized,” she clarified, in opposition to the elation of being tattooed.

In fact, this emotional connection to the experience is likely connected to the neurotransmitters the body releases during the tattoo process. Adrenaline, a hormone and neurotransmitter that plays an integral part to the flight-or-fight response, is one of those transmitters. Interestingly, adrenaline may also serve as a memory enhancer during these experiences, deepening our positive connection and place attachment to the experience.

Other neurotransmitters are also released during the tattooing process, including endorphins, which interact with our brain’s opiate receptors. Endorphins act similarly to morphine to reduce pain, and are released when we are injured. Since the act of being tattooed is hours upon hours of physical injury, needles digging into our skin and leaving ink behind, it’s unsurprising that the body dumps adrenaline and endorphins, affecting the experience.

Gabriel Vidrine, a 38-year-old transmasculine genderqueer human from Chicago, got their first tattoo when they were 18 — long before any of their chronic illness diagnoses. Vidrine lives with asthma, depression and anxiety, chronic migraines, and a subarachnoid cyst (a fluid-filled sac in the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord.) They came out as transgender at 35, and have connected their body dysphoria as the main trigger for their anxiety and depression.

“It’s a type of high. The pain itself is a distraction from everything else,” they said.“As a self-harmer, whenever I’d hurt myself, there would be this rush of endorphins, and I’d feel free and light for a day or two (perhaps what most people might consider ‘[feeling] normal). It’s the same with a piercing or a tattoo.”

While everyone who gets tattooed experiences the rush of endorphins and adrenaline, people with chronic illnesses may experience those factors differently. Pain perception can also be influenced in the brain itself: the brain can amplify, decrease, or outright ignore the pain. Additionally, cognitive and emotional factors also determine what happens to the pain signal. If we’re looking for something specific to focus on that isn’t our chronic pain, tattoos serve as an excellent distraction.

While our understanding of pain perception and how various factors influence remains poorly understood even today, the gate control theory of 1956 revolutionized pain research and remains the basis for much of our current understanding. In short, the theory posits that pain messages travel from the site of injury through nerve “gates” in the spinal cord before finally ending up at the brain.

The theory proposes that the activation of nerves which do not transmit pain signals can interfere with signals from pain fibers, thereby inhibiting pain. An easy example? You smack your funny bone on a desk. Then you rub your elbow, trying to stop the pain. The nerve signal produced by rubbing overrides the sharp pain and results in a decreased experience of the sharp funny bone pain.

If we’re looking for something specific to focus on that isn’t our chronic pain, tattoos serve as an excellent distraction.
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Though there isn’t any clinical research out there following up on the idea, it stands to reason that the vibration from the tattoo machine works in the same way that rubbing the smacked elbow does. For a period of time — especially in conjunction with adrenaline, endorphins, and positive place attachment — the body might tune in to the non-pain signals from being tattooed by a heavy machine that’s vibrating, drowning out the constant drone of chronic pain.

Science or not, the reality remains that a whole host of chronically ill humans view body modification as a way to control bodies gone terribly awry. To us, tattoos feel like freedom, like armor, like hope, and release. They’re a way to change a body out of our control, and a way to be gentle with ourselves during times when we’d rather be doing the exact opposite.

Jamie Rose, a 22-year-old nonbinary transgender human from Cardiff, Wales, described it succinctly. “While the tattoo is healing, I definitely have a lot more compassion for my body than I usually do; I think healing an acute wound is a lot easier than living with the day-to-day grind of a chronic illness.” Long after we’ve walked out of the shop, after the endorphins have faded, we’re left with artwork that we need to care for in order to ensure that it remains as beautiful after the fact as it did in the moment.  

“I see my body… as a canvas for something an artist has put hours of work into, that I need to respect and care for,” Rose clarified. “It also makes me feel more cool and confident and in charge of my own physicality, which is something that being disabled can often strip from me.”

Every time we finish a session, I practically skip down the stairs from the studio, carefully cradling my arm, barely feeling the normal hurts from descending a set of steps. I can hardly wait to get home and admire my newest work of art.

What do you call your private parts, to yourself, to your doctor, in polite company? There are plenty of slang words for the female genitalia—some cute, some raunchy, some silly, some banal—but none of them, not even the scientific-sounding vagina, is quite right.

The term vagina refers to the canal that connects the inner, non-visible organs—cervix, uterus, ovaries—to the visible, outer part, which is the vulva. Often, when we refer to our pussy, hoo-haw, cooter, or vagina, we’re actually talking about is our vulva. Given that “vagina” isn’t —arguably— the prettiest or most exciting word out there, why is that our collective, patriarchal culture insists on using it?

Swedish artist Liv Strömquist wants women to reclaim the word vulva. Or, more specifically, she wants us to—finally—claim it. The illustrator, whose book of graphic nonfiction, Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs the Patriarchy, was released in English last month, aims to destigmatize the female body, especially the vulva, the orgasm, and menstruation.

The 40-year-old feminist activist felt a lot of shame about her body growing up, especially when it came to menstruation. As an adult, she decided to start looking into the taboos associated with the female body. She started asking pointed questions, like, “Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history? How does the taboo around the vulva affect us women psychologically?” she told me via email in early October. “All these things were very interesting for me. I wanted to investigate why there is so much shame surrounding women’s bodies—and in particular the genital parts—in order to change it.”

And then, in 2012, she started turning what she had discovered into Fruit of Knowledge (originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Kunskapens frukt), a cultural history that explores—in edgy, satirical tones and comic-book form—the pathologies, politics, and oft horrifying punishments that female and trans bodies have suffered at the hands of religion, science, and men.    

The meticulously researched Fruit of Knowledge chronicles—toggling between dead serious and drop-dead funny tones—the female body’s mistreatment and mishandling, starting with Eve and winding through history, medicine, pop culture, sex ed, contemporary advertisements, and more.

As graphic nonfiction gains more of a foothold in the literary world, we see more and more serious subjects conveyed in comics form. Here it brings awesome power to a misunderstood and hushed-up topic.

Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history?
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“So much is communicated with a well-drawn side-eye, angry eyebrows, etc.,” translator Melissa Bowers told me via email. “The first time I read [Fruit of Knowledge] I was either giggling, cringing, or both. I was so charmed by Liv’s simple, expressive drawing style.” Charmed is a surprisingly accurate response to the way Strömquist conveys information. When asked why she chose the comics form to write about such thorny material, she said, “I’ve always really liked comics, since I was a child. If you see a comic in a magazine you immediately want to read it—and this is why I really like this art form. It’s very appealing, not difficult or pretentious. It’s folksy. Articles about feminism and left-wing politics often tend to be very heavy, academic and serious, so I like to make my work fun to read.”

Fruit of Knowledge certainly achieves that artistic intention, turning a gallery of “Men Who Have Been Too Interested in the Female Genitalia” into an informative yet humorous hall of shame, and, in “Blood Mountain,” poking fun at the superstitions around menstruation, while also digging into ancient times, when it “appears that menstruation was MORE holy and LESS icky.”

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape—vulvas made their appearance in Greek myth, Egyptian lore, European fables, and notably, monasteries, churches, and village gates in Celtic culture. It was once believed that the female orgasm was necessary (and thus highly valued) for procreation. Sounds a bit different than the way we treat the female body today, doesn’t it?

Strömquist explains the disparity this way: “The very overt hatred and fixation that the monotheistic religions have with the female body and sexuality [arose because religions]—in their early stage—were in competition with fertility cults.”

During the Enlightenment, and with the rise of medical science (and male doctors), those in power had to come up with new theories for female inferiority.

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape.
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Strömquist continued explaining that:

“Science had to try to find explanations as to why women were different from men and couldn’t have the same access to power and money in society. Before they could say, ‘Women have no power in society because that’s what god wants’—but later they had to come up with scientific reasons. That’s when medical science started to obsess on things like the uterus, menstruation and so on.

“In the debate over if women could enter university in the end of the 1800s, there was a doctor who wrote a book that argued that women couldn’t enter university because of their menstruation. If they studied, their brain would use the blood they needed for menstruation, and become infertile. So if women started to study in the university, it would be the end of the human race.”

This might sound extreme to us now, but considering the contemporary struggle to simply close the gender pay gap or support working mothers—how far have we really come? Society continues to use the female body—and its natural functions—against women.

While much of what Strömquist covers in her work relates to the biologically female body, she also fixes her searing gaze on the binary two-gender system, criticizing the surgeries that intersex babies undergo, often in the first weeks of their life, which only serve to “categorize genitals” and “remove sensitive tissues that the person might miss later in life.”

In “Blood Mountain,” the chapter which covers menstruation, Strömquist explores the fallacy of PMS being linked to a particular gender, illustrating her point with a male figure skater lifting a leg to expose bloody panties, accompanied by the captioned thought that if we didn’t live in a binary two-gender society, “I could have drawn the first page of this chapter like this → Or in some completely different way!! Which I am too socially conditioned to even think of!!!”

Social conditioning plays a strong role throughout Strömquist’s work, and she’s keen to exploit that awareness, not allowing how we culturally perceive biology and gender to dominate her art.  

In all areas of her work, Strömquist explores “provocative” subject matter. Last year, her art came under fire last year when Stockholm’s metro commuters found her subway illustrations of women menstruating “disgusting,” while others insisted it was awkward explaining the red stains to their children.

“There was a big debate over my pictures when they were displayed in the Stockholm Metro-station,” Strömquist says.

“They were vandalized twice so they had to be replaced with new prints. There was a political debate, where the populist right-wing party in Sweden wrote an article criticizing the use of tax money to support this kind of art and promised that if they got in power they would replace this kind of art with pre-modern oil painting. People still have quite strong feelings about [menstruation], which I find interesting.”

Despite the controversy over her artwork, she also “received a lot of support and positive reactions” for depicting menstruation—something that happens to millions of bodies every day—in a celebratory public forum.

Strömquist currently lives in Malmö, where she works for a youth radio station and hosts a political podcast. She has two new books in the works. One, a comic titled “Rise and Fall,” covers “climate change and problems of world capitalism.” The other is “a book about the social construction of romantic love,” which she hopes to see published in English as well.

In her chapter, “Upside Down Rooster Comb,” where she quotes Sartre and The Latin Kings, Strömquist also cites psychologist Harriet Lerner, who has been writing about the consequences of mislabeling the vulva as the vagina for decades. Lerner “likens this misuse of language to ‘psychic genital mutilation.’”

Whereas the vagina is often described in terms of absence, “a ‘hole’ waiting to be filled with a cock,” the vulva is very rarely mentioned—in conversation, and even in biology textbooks.

We are literally discouraged from properly naming the vulva. “If we don’t have the words,” Stromquist says, “we cannot understand what the organ is or how it looks and works. Words are really important. In many languages there isn’t even a proper word for the [female] sexual organ—one that isn’t an insult.”

Imagine being encouraged to call your arm your hand, or being told your entire life that your toes are your leg. This kind of senseless mislabeling encourages confusion, avoidance, and embarrassment, all of which prevent many people from treating the vulva with the respect and veneration it deserves.

If we don’t have the words we cannot understand what the vulva is or how it looks and works.
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Given the current political climate in the United States, Strömquist’s vibrant, excoriating work is more necessary than ever. Fruit of Knowledge is the kind of self-care Western culture needs—accessible, intelligent, and engaging renderings of culture and history—that provide the encouragement to help us finally name and reclaim the female body.

As a chubby, gender nonconforming queer I’d always been the odd duck in yoga class.

For 10 years, I’d used yoga to relieve back pain or pause anxiety, but self-consciousness kept me from connecting with it on a deeper level. I didn’t go to yoga studios often because I couldn’t afford to, first and foremost. But when I did attend classes, I felt invisible.

I was chubby and inflexible, barely able to touch the ground in a forward fold, nevermind execute an arm balance like crow pose. I practiced in loose pants and old t-shirts that flew up to expose my round stomach, because leggings and clingy yoga tanks felt invalidating. Every time a yoga teacher used gendered cues, mentioned upcoming yoga retreats, or offered the class an opportunity to practice handstands—something that seemed to come easy to the bendy, leggings-clad yogis that packed most classes—I was reminded anew that I was an interloper in yoga land.

I stuck to the back of the room, hyper-aware of everything from my smelly feet to my attempts at chaturanga, and scurried out of the studio at the end of class. Boston may have been a cosmopolitan city, although a highly segregated one, but this ancient practice of Hindu philosophy felt like it was reserved for skinny, wealthy, white women who had their shit together and could afford to invest in personal, physical, and spiritual development.

When my local yoga studio began offering LGBTQ community classes, the $5 price tag got me in the door. The class was a collaboration between a yoga studio I’d visited occasionally and my local LGBT center that offered AA-type support groups and youth programming. While these programs are needed by many LGBTQs, the center didn’t exactly offer social opportunities for adults. I didn’t expect much from the class, but I never turned down cheap yoga—and I wanted to support the attempt at adult programming.

Every time a yoga teacher used gendered cues, I was reminded anew that I was an interloper in yoga land.
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The LGBTQ community class was a beginner-level class. I recognized many of the people in the room from previous events at the center (I’d moved on from Boston a couple years earlier) . The yoga teacher talked my fellow yogis through poses I knew well. While she explained the body mechanics of low lunges and forward folds, she emphasized breathwork and tuning in to the body. Through mentions of the chakra system and, in later classes, of Ayurvedic doshas, she maintained a cultural connection that, as yoga has become more popular in the West, is too often lost or appropriated, like those “Namastay in Bed” tees.

These concepts weren’t new to me, but here, surrounded by queer and trans folks, I made a new connection to them. I appreciated this teacher’s brief explanation of her own yoga journey. She began practicing yoga as rehabilitation of an old injury. She felt relatable. She couldn’t do yoga perfectly, either.  

There was no default to gendered language, something mainstream yoga teachers used without a second thought. I’d become accustomed to these cues and developed my own workaround: Rather than take the recommended hand position for men or women, I would switch my grip midway through the pose. It was my way of coping with a system that used hand positions, pose recommendations, and different terms for male and female yogis to center, without space for fluidity, the gender binary.

But here, as we flowed through sun salutation, something shifted. Surrounded by other LGBTQs, I felt seen and uplifted in a way I’d never been in yoga class.

It hit during savasana — THIS was what yoga was all about. It was about feeling connected to my body and to my community. And if all this happened during one class, what else could an LGBTQ-affirming yoga practice heal?

For too many within LGBTQ communities, the body is a site of shame, not pleasure. External pressure to adhere to unrealistic beauty standards — namely preferences for thin, gender-conforming bodies — lowers self-esteem. Calls for “no fats, no femmes” on personal ads, or the continued use of the transfeminine body as a punchline in entertainment, make many of us feel invalidated.

When children grow up hearing transphobic and homophobic slurs, their body image suffers and they internalize shame. Long after coming out, LGBTQs bear the scars of stigma.

In a Chapman University study, 77 percent of gay men felt they were judged on appearance, and 51 percent of gay men expressed interest in cosmetic surgery. Pressure from romantic partners, friends, and media to conform to unrealistic beauty standards leads gay men to experience higher rates of eating disorders and body dysmorphia than their straight peers.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that lesbian, bi, and queer-identified women are exempt from pressure to be thin, as the assumption is women only attempt to be thin to adhere to the tastes of straight men; however, some studies suggest that with greater acceptance of LGBTQs comes increased pressure to conform to heteronormative beauty standards.

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This seems true for LGBTQ youth. Sure, they’ve come of age in the era of gay marriage, but they still face discrimination — and employ unhealthy coping mechanisms. A joint survey of 1,000 LGBTQ youth from The Trevor Project, National Eating Disorder Association, and Reasons Eating Disorder Center found that 71 percent of transgender youth and 54 percent of all LGBTQ youth had been diagnosed with an eating disorder. After trans youth, cis female LGBTQ youth had the highest rates of eating disorders.

Trevor Project CEO Amit Paley writes in the study’s introduction that, “The unique stressors that LGBTQ-identified people experience, such as coming out and harassment in schools or the workplace, can impact levels of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and unhealthy coping mechanisms,” from eating disorders to substance abuse.

These stressors carry lifelong consequences. Almost half of transgender adults report depression or anxiety, compared with 6.7 percent and 18 percent of the general U.S. population, respectively.

“While the main reason [for] mental illness and depression amongst trans and gender variant people is due to the lack of acceptance and social ridicule…it cannot be denied that the actual physical [gender] dysphoria most certainly plays a large part,” notes Rebecca Connolly, an Advanced Clinical Practitioner and member of WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Connolly adds, “The vast majority of trans people have huge degrees of body dysphoria purely, because [their body] does not match the internal representation of who they are and how they express themselves.” While gender-affirming surgeries are available, they’re not accessible for all who want them, nor do (or should) all trans folks want surgeries.

There also continue to be few professionals nationwide who have the knowledge to address LGBTQ mental and emotional wellbeing. In a 2015 survey of 452 transgender adults living in Massachusetts, nearly one in four respondents had experienced discrimination in a health care settling — and were more likely to postpone or avoid seeking care as a result.

“A huge struggle that my trans clients face is being able to feel safe in their own skin without the world judging them,” says Bernard Charles, an LGBTQ lifestyle coach who uses meditation to heal LGBTQ body image issues.

In the face of a lack of bias-free, gender-affirming care, many LGBTQ folks have turned to self-care tools like yoga to fill the gap. While yoga has long been known as a stress reliever, it has potential to heal body image issues, too. Studies have chronicled how yoga lowers stress through improvements in heart rate, respiratory rate, and systolic blood pressure. Yoga activates both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous systems. Flowing sequences like the sun salutation stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, while seated meditation boosts the parasympathetic nervous system.

LGBTQ-affirming classes, such as the one I’ve been fortunate to find, are more welcoming of diverse bodies, genders, ages, and abilities. Sally Morgan, a lesbian yoga teacher, says, “[speaking] as a lesbian… the yoga community is not particularly inclusive and I know some of my lesbian friends with bigger bodies are very self-conscious in yoga classes because they don’t fit the stereotypes of yoginis.”

In the face of a lack of bias-free, gender-affirming care, many LGBTQ folks have turned to self-care tools like yoga to fill the gap.
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Morgan, who trained in Phoenix Rising yoga, notes that specific styles of yoga may work better for healing trauma. In her work with trauma survivors, Morgan avoids hands-on corrections (which may be unwanted) in favor of clear directions that avoid “yoga jargon.” Rather than gendered cues — common in traditional yoga classes — LGBTQ-affirming cues are open-ended, so participants can decide how to adjust their bodies.

Jacoby Ballard, a New York City-based yoga teacher who offers Queer and Trans Yoga classes, acknowledges that mainstream yoga classes often center a particular experience—the young, affluent able-bodied white women with whom I’ve shared many an om—and this makes the practice inaccessible for folks who can’t afford it, don’t feel welcome, or are disrespected when they show up on the mat. Ballard speaks to the LGBTQ lived experience in yoga practice by addressing homophobia and transphobia in meditation and highlighting savasana as a time to release inner shame or guilt.

Yoga’s power to heal a negative body image lies in its focus on movement that draws participants out of their minds and into their bodies. While remaining in a pose, students may be encouraged to ground, balance, or soften. Strength, stability, and emotional release come through focused movement. Playful poses lighten the mood, helping participants find fun in their bodies. Yogic breathwork grounds participants in the present moment, which can pause anxious thoughts.

With regular practice, yoga changes fascia, tones muscle, and increases balance. As it becomes easier to move, people feel better in their bodies.

Morgan structures yoga classes to lower anxiety, increase relaxation, and remain sensitive to trauma in her students’ pasts. Says Morgan, “We…spend nearly all of the class on the floor as a way to help people feel more supported literally and emotionally….I use cues such as ‘Where is there dark in your life?, Where is there light in your life?, What is the message from the dark?, What is the message from the light?’….Sometimes this look inward prompts journal entries, which can further foster healing.”

As connections are made explicit in yoga classes, participants can return to them at home. As Morgan says, yoga “causes one to look inward and to find a quiet place of peace in the mind and body. Once a person learns this skill, it can be applied in any situation in life that is challenging.”

What keeps LGBTQ people from feeling comfortable on the yoga mat isn’t yoga itself, but the mainstream culture that’s been built around yoga in Western societies, which focuses on hetero- and cis-normative body images as the assumed goal. But when those structures are stripped away, yoga can become a place to heal.

I’m in panic

He wants to see my bare face

I really like him

Would it be okay to show it to him?

Oh, never (That’s right, that’s right)

Let’s keep what needs to be kept (Right, right)

Until you get all of his heart

Don’t ever forget this

–I Got a Boy, SNSD

Beauty in South Korea does not come in all shapes and sizes. It comes with a V-shaped face, a slender body, double eyelids, and pale porcelain skin.

Cis Korean women are expected to go to any length to achieve this perfect look—and they certainly do. South Korea has the highest per capita plastic surgery procedures in the world, and its beauty industry is globally ranked as one of the largest. Every major street and subway station is littered with stores selling sheet masks, Jeju volcanic creams, and the promise of perfection.

But some South Korean women, mostly those in their late teens and twenties, are declaring it’s time to “take off their corsets.” These women do not literally wear corsets; the movement references the restrictive, harmful, and gender-essentialist nature of corsets. 탈코르셋, or Tal Corset (tal meaning to take off), inspires women to cut their hair drastically short, destroy their makeup, and get rid of uncomfortable clothes. Anything that restricts how women express themselves, or asks women to conform to certain beauty standards at the expense of their own desires, is a “corset.” And these women are claiming that it’s time to throw them out.

Anything that restricts how women express themselves, or asks women to conform to certain beauty standards at the expense of their own desires, is a 'corset.'
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Getting a short haircut and forsaking makeup and bras is radical in a nation like South Korea. Like other East Asian countries, South Korea is still heavily influenced by Confucian ideals, which explicitly qualify men as superior, and command women to be obedient to their fathers and brothers when young, then to their husbands, and later to their male children. Though women no longer exist for the sole purpose of bearing a male heir, they are still expected to be passive, soft-spoken, and utterly feminine.

As a result, women’s behavior and appearance is fastidiously scrutinized. In fact, it is often considered rude for Korean women to show their “bare” face in public. South Korea also has the lowest score of any OECD country in terms of the gender pay gap. According to the 2017 OECD report, “women hold only 17% of seats in the National Assembly […] and only 10.5% of management positions [in the private sector].” The patriarchal Hoju System, which by law placed men as the head of households, was not abolished until 2008.

To make matters worse, feminism is still very taboo in South Korea. Anything even slightly related to women’s empowerment is often met with extreme, and sometimes violent, backlash. Female K-Pop idols have faced public uproar and boycotts from male fans for shockingly radical actions like reading a feminist book or having a “girls can do anything” phone case.  Female game developers claim male players surveil their accounts for any feminist activity. If any semblance of feminism is found, they often complain and protest until the developers formally apologize or leave the company.

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Steady changes towards women’s rights have been happening for decades, but the efforts somewhat lacked movement. Then, in 2016, the horrifying Gangnam Murder shook the nation and awoke a feminist upheaval. On May 17, a man murdered a random woman in a public bathroom close to Gangnam Station. He reportedly did it because he had been scorned by women too many times. Enraged, thousands of women took to the streets, fed up with the violence of misogyny.

Feminism experienced another resurgence with the explosion of #MeToo, which has toppled down high-profile assaulters, including the aspiring (paywall) presidential candidate Ahn Hee Jung. There have also been widespread protests against spycam pornography, an issue South Korea has struggled with for years.

In the midst of all this, it is only natural for women to start pushing against other forms of oppression—namely, society’s patriarchal obsession with controlling how they act and look.

탈코르셋 캘리그라피 영상입니다! pic.twitter.com/0taZxpA24z

— 김명지 (@kim_noonsong) June 9, 2018

“I didn’t really get the whole concept of Tal Corset at first because I thought ‘corsets’ like makeup, long hair, and high heels were things you do for yourself […] but I got to understand the concept when I saw it as a society, not just from my point of view,” says Myungji Kim, a college student who writes feminist calligraphy.  

Her sentiments are shared by Fennie J*, a high school student. “When I first got to know about Tal Corset, there were so many things that I started to evaluate,” she says. “I wondered ‘is that also a corset?’ […] I finally realized that I had been pushing myself too much to meet female social standards by calling it ‘self-satisfaction.’”

According to these women, joining the movement has changed their lives for the better.

“I tried to lose weight until I almost fainted crossing the street […] as a result of an extreme diet I was on,” says 18-year old Sion Ji. “I have put myself into the tightest corset to meet society’s standards. I don’t do that anymore.”

Besides a healthier and more positive relationship with their bodies, women are also gaining a valuable resource: time.

Myungji Kim boasts that she went from spending an hour getting ready every day to just 15 minutes. And Sion Ji says, “I can now get enough sleep since I don’t need to wake up early to [get ready]. I can instead use that time to study more.”

Besides a healthier and more positive relationship with their bodies, women are also gaining a valuable resource: time.
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Despite the positive changes advocates of the movement exalt, not everyone agrees with its ideology. Most of the criticism comes from people claiming that telling women to not wear makeup or skirts is just trading one set of beauty standards for another. “[…]Are we taking off the corset or putting on another one? Calling yourself a radical feminist doesn’t justify criticizing people with a different opinion.” says @KIMBUNGEO on Twitter.

Yet others say that the movement is more about options. “By breaking off the concept of ‘feminine’ and wearing a [different] look […], I wanted to show [that] there are clearly more options for women,” says Myungji Kim.

Most of the women I spoke to said they felt supported by their family and friends. The public sphere, however, is a whole different beast.

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“I realized that male workers in the service industry treat me differently,” says Sion Ji. “Before, when talking to male workers as a customer, they used to talk to me with a smile on their face, but since I got my hair cut short, they are not like that anymore.” Others said they had had instances of people on the metro commenting loudly and disapprovingly on their masculine look.

For Myungji Kim, things have been more extreme. “I openly engage in feminist activities with my face and name out there. Sometimes my pictures end up on random websites and I get sexually harassed and cyberbullied,” she says. “Some people have left me. Living as a feminist in Korea is really not easy, [it] means you can get fired, your personal information might be posted up on the internet without your consent, and it’s likely to affect your chances of being hired.”

This is one of the reasons many of the women posting about the movement hide their faces online behind carefully chosen angles or cute stickers. Interestingly enough, this pattern seems mostly prevalent on Twitter rather than Instagram.

#탈코르셋_인증#탈코르셋_후기
사실 머리자르고 조금 후회했다
더 일찍 자를걸 더 짧게 자를걸
예전에 어떻게 저리 업업하고 다녔는지 상상도 안됨
머리 감고 말리기까지 3분컷이다 pic.twitter.com/4ZfM13Hgto

— 재기민기밐기 (@formygr8life) May 13, 2018

Sion Ji affirms that she hid her face because of fear. She cites an incident in which a female YouTuber received threats for mirroring, or copying the language men use to attack women to in turn attack men. One of the people who threatened to kill her did so as he filmed himself going to what he thought was her house (from an address provided by netizens).

Fennie J has different reasons for concealing her identity. “If I didn’t cover my face, people would try to find out ‘who from where’ instead of [listening] to the message I want to send,” she said. “People would score my look and see [me] as an object, not a subject.”

The haters may be hating, but it seems like feminism, and Tal Corset, are here to stay. The word is spreading, the world is watching, and women’s lives are changing. As Fennie J  puts it, “This movement is a chance for all women, including me, to have more dignity.”

*Name has been changed as per the source’s request.

**Interviews and texts were translated by Jung In Lee. Interviews have been edited for clarity.

In Naturalis Historia, the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote that period blood has the power to stop whirlwinds, kill bees, and drive dogs mad…

If you feel compelled to chuckle, keep in mind that nearly 2,000 years later, menstruation is still shrouded in myth, taboo, and beliefs that are nearly as bizarre as what ‘ol Pliny was peddling.

In fact, the actual science of why people have periods is almost stranger than the myths. And while periods are part of the everyday lives of over half the population, the answer to the simple question “why do they exist?” is far from being common knowledge.

Humans — along with old world primates and certain types of bats — are one of the few species on Earth that menstruate. In these species, a drop in the levels of the hormone progesterone triggers the breakdown of the inner lining of the uterus. What follows is an extraordinary process of scar-free wound healing. The uterus can break down and regenerate every month, hundreds of times in a lifetime — all without ever leaving a scar.

This incredible process is practically unheard of in adult tissues, but, as many of us know, periods can also be debilitating. So biologists have been puzzled as to why this phenomenon should have evolved. And, more specifically, why did it only evolve in humans, old world primates, and certain bats?

Recent research suggests that the answer lies in an ancient conflict. It’s in the best interests of the father (or parent providing the sperm) for the mother (or parent providing the egg) to pour as much energy and resources into pregnancy as possible. But it’s in the best interests of the mother to balance the needs of pregnancy with maintaining their own health. In humans, this conflict has left its mark on our very DNA.

We each have two complete copies of the human genome: one paternal and one maternal. Usually, the two copies are equally active. But sometimes, the father or mother modifies their copy so that certain genes are “off” — most of the genes that are modified in this way are involved in fetal growth.

Herein lies the rub.

If both copies of those parental genes were active, the fetus would grow abnormally large. So, in the copy of the genome she provides, the mother’s body gets the hell in there and shuts those genes off.

Likewise, there are certain genes that repress growth, and if both copies of those genes were on, the fetus would be abnormally small. The father goes in and shuts those genes off. The size to which the fetus will grow is ultimately determined by this genetic tug-of-war.

This conflict has also driven the evolution of a particularly gruesome kind of placenta: the hemochorial placenta.

Some types of placentas don’t invade maternal tissues at all. But the hemochorial placenta — which all menstruating species have — burrows through the walls of the uterus and hooks into the mother’s bloodstream. Once the invasion is complete, the placenta can control the mother’s entire body by releasing hormones into her blood. So it was necessary for people with wombs to develop a defense system to mediate placental invasion.

This was particularly crucial because of another strange quirk of human biology: Human embryos are 10 times more likely than other mammals to carry an abnormal number of chromosomes. Some variation in chromosome number can be tolerated: For instance, three copies of chromosome 21 in Down Syndrome or only one copy of the X chromosome in Turner Syndrome. But in general, embryos with large parts of their genomes missing or duplicated will not be able to develop.

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Because so many human embryos are actually inviable, our species has an incredibly high rate of miscarriage. Fifteen percent of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, but counting pregnancies that aren’t clinically recognized, that number is actually closer to 50%. Unfortunately, society tends to tell pregnant people that something is wrong with them if they experience miscarriage, when really, a high chance of miscarriage is just part of being human.

Periods result from an adaptation to those two things: the invasive, hemochorial placenta and the prevalence of chromosomal abnormalities. One thing that humans, old world primates, and menstruating bats all have in common is a phenomenon called “spontaneous decidualization.”

Decidualization is the remodeling of the uterine lining that occurs in preparation for pregnancy. In other animals, decidualization is triggered by the presence of an embryo, but menstruating species have taken control of that process. In these species, decidualization occurs cyclically, whether there is an embryo or not.

A high chance of miscarriage is just part of being human.
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So why is this a good thing? Here’s why. Many people believe that the uterine lining thickens and changes in order to provide a hospitable environment for an embryo, but that’s not the whole story. Once the cells of the uterine lining turn into decidual cells, they gain the ability to sense whether or not an embryo is developing normally, even before it implants. If it is, the cells permit the invasion of the placenta. But if it’s not, the cells quickly self-destruct. By making the transformation into decidual cells occur cyclically, our species has made sure it’s prepared to defend against potentially harmful pregnancies before the embryo implants.

Some biologists argue that periods are just the coincidental result of combining spontaneous decidualization with cycling hormone levels. Once cells are decidualized, a drop in progesterone will trigger them to self-destruct. And, so long as pregnancy doesn’t occur, progesterone levels rise and fall each month.

It makes sense that periods might not have intrinsic benefit, because in the natural state, periods are pretty rare. Our ancestors, who were more frequently pregnant, only had about 40 periods in a lifetime. But some biologists think that menstruation does have intrinsic benefit. Because the uterus is able to repeatedly break down and rebuild itself, it may be able to learn from previous reproductive events and adapt. If this is true, it might explain why most pregnant people who experience miscarriage eventually go on to successfully conceive.

Menstruation is, in many ways, a potent symbol of the socio-cultural stronghold the patriarchy still wields. In a society that has become increasingly inured to the ubiquity of sex and violence, periods remain largely unmentionable, further complicating our long history with the uterine lining. But I tend to believe that — although he may have been oh-so-wrong in the specifics — Pliny the Elder was damn right when he wrote “over and above all this there is no limit to woman’s power.”