Fertile Crescent

Write about the "Dark Continent" and you're sure to get a reaction. Actually, I had to quell and then ignore all my own reactions before I hit "publish" on yesterday's Bench.

Women who have been tending to their health as prescribed by their gyn doc or nurse practitioner understand the absurdity of what we put ourselves through every year. We have to go sit in the stirrups--and I don't mean at the horse ranch--annually if we don't want to chance being a statistic: Cervical cancer used to be the number one cause of cancer deaths in women. Key phrase: used to be. Deaths and incidence of cervical cancer have declined as the number of women getting annual exams has increased.

Great. Fabulous. So why do I need to write publicly about the details of that very private practice? Well...ultimately, how private is a practice that half of the population submits itself to every single year? How solo is the experience when, as reported again and again, it ranges somewhere between mortification, degredation and personal empowerment, depending on what kind of woman you're feeling like that day?

I bounced the Bench post back and forth in my head before publishing it, alternating between loud laughs and not-so-subtle cringes. One voice in there said: Ah, what the hell. It's "Sex and the City." Every woman experiences it. Another voice said: Oh my God, you're going to describe yourself in that position? We know what doctors do in that room. Another voice said: Men reading this post will faint on the spot. To which another voice answered: Men have as many words for their members as Eskimos have for snow, and their turn-your-head-and-cough moments are hardly hidden from popular talk.

Meanwhile, my experience of that annual excursion to the ranch--let's just let go and call it the ranch, shall we?--my observation of that time-of-the-year is that it's absurd. The whole picture. After all, that physical place each woman and all society holds precious and dear, that bodily Bethlehem that women carry as their source of being, power, identity, passage, rites of their own and of the children they bear, THAT one vortex of humanity gets exposed in the most demeaning and embarrassing and silly of ways, every year--usually under a dusty, unattractive ceiling, and always within these degrading acute triangles of steel that force demureness off today's set list right quick. If we can't look at it and laugh, we get buried in a lot of undue shame. And additional shame is one less thing we could stand to carry around in our body's Bethlehem, can-I-getta-witness.