Cecilia Lee

Content warning: This article contains references to sexual harassment.

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I hated health class because they would make us look at pictures of female genitals and tell us it was important to know about these things. The class was only once a year, and they would split us up into boys and girls and then give an hour-long lecture on female bodies and safe sex and reproduction. We flipped through pages in some textbook we had seen but never opened before with illustrations of naked boys and girls with innocent eyes drawn from dots and bright pink pictures of reproductive organs, all labeled with words I’d never heard anyone say out loud in Japan. 

Every time I saw those pictures, I felt a large emptiness alongside an overwhelming urge to take off my own body or hit it against something so hard that it would hurt too much and it wouldn’t feel like mine anymore. It was the same sense of detachment I encountered the first time some man had touched me under my uniform on the train to school, and the same revulsion I felt when my mother mentioned my grandmother’s miscarriage so I read “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” with all its descriptions of the pools of blood and the tearing apart of her body after. All the girls would be giggling in that classroom, and I would sit in my seat quietly flinching. 

I felt guilty for my disgust, because I was a woman and should understand and take pride in my own body, and to do that I needed knowledge of all the myths and mechanisms surrounding it. So in college, I enrolled in a political science class about gender and reproduction. But then I walked in, and they were looking at close-up pictures of genitals again and discussing the political rhetoric behind a female comedian making jokes about her abortion, and I walked out. I walked out because all the pictures and words crawled up my skin, and I felt like throwing up at the way the professor and the students were speaking with an air of pride, like it was a sign of inclusion in some superior intellectual circle if one was openly addressing female bodies and all its problems. As I walked out and rejected my understanding of my female body and its political implications, wishing desperately that I did not have a body that could be looked at or touched or be used to cause brutalizing pain, an ice cold shudder enveloped my entire body, especially around the groin.