I got my first period when I was ten years old, and the first several times I was plagued by severe migraines. When I whimpered and complained to my mother about never wanting a period again, before giving me a Midol she told me that I would have to deal with this for decades. When I had my first gynecological exam, seconds before the speculum was placed inside of me, I looked at my mother sitting to the right of the table and she said, “This is just a part of being a woman,” believing that that solidarity would help. It didn’t. When the speculum opened me up, my face contorted as I tightened every muscle in my body because I believed that the gynecologist had gone too far, that I was too open. I wanted to be closed again. I learned from my mother that pain from first-time sex and birth was normal, even to be expected. My conceptions of pain were inextricable from my conditioning as a cisgender woman, and the pain I experienced from my “second tongue,” along with the meticulous rituals to soothe it, made me feel not only womanly but also superhuman for being able to endure it. I thought that the pain in and of itself was in fact admirable. I was able to present myself to the world as a bubbly, eloquent, and educated black woman while the site of my womanhood afflicted me. I thought: This is how I will become strong, through how well I can obscure pain. I was never taught that the world would nurture me, so I perfected the ways of hiding. I figured that because I was born with a longer labium, I was destined to take care of it. If I relinquished that honor, then I would be unworthy of this life that I have, this grand body that I inhabit. I did research to support my theory. Women of the Bahima clan, in western and southern Uganda, keep their labia minora long enough to cover their vaginal opening in order to make access harder for potential rapists. In Rwanda, girls will pull on their labia for ten to twenty minutes a day in order to lengthen them so that once they marry, their husbands will have an easier time making them orgasm and squirt. Some women, particularly those in Zimbabwe, have even gone as far as getting procedures in order to stretch and elongate their labia. See? I thought. There were other women of the diaspora who had, or aspired to have, long inner lips just like mine. Maybe, I thought, it was some kind of badge of honor, even though the only marks I received were the extra ridges appearing along its surface from years and years of chafing and sticking. The more I focused on it as a gift, the more I was in denial over my own personal body. I trained myself to normalize the pain until I shamed myself whenever I sensed its reemergence, but in the recesses of my mind I wondered if all of this endurance was necessary. When I became a more active feminist during college, my desire to grit and bear the weight of my left labium minora intensified. Publications such as Mic, Broadly, and Cosmopolitan emphasized that labiaplasty stems from insecurity; those who underwent the procedure were victims of the pressure from the patriarchal society in which we all live, where women are expected to be perfect. One of my closest friends in college was a premed major, and she tried to dissuade me from labiaplasty, suggesting documentaries about the misogyny surrounding labiaplasty procedures. I didn’t have the heart to tell, or show, her the size of my left labium minora so that she could better gauge my situation.
If I underwent the surgery, would that make me less of a feminist? And if I became less of a feminist, what standard would my feminism be measured against: white women’s?
My doubts didn’t stop me from scheduling a consultation with a fancy Long Island doctor in late 2014. My mother and I drove to his plush office, where I had to remove everything from the waist down and lie back on an examination table while the doctor used what looked like a Popsicle stick to poke my labia to show my mother and the nurse where incisions could be made to make me symmetrical. I felt like I wasn’t in the room as a whole person. No one made eye contact with me even though one of the most vulnerable parts of my body was being scrutinized. After I dressed, my mother and I were directed into the doctor’s office, where he showed us before and after photos of past patients, before going off topic, chatting at length about his views on terrorism and his son’s active service overseas. I was stunned. I mean, this was my vagina that we were talking about, a vagina that had yet to be penetrated or give birth to a child. A vagina that, for lack of a better word, had not been used. My vagina was wholly private, wholly mine, which made me feel all the more vulnerable about this process. The doctor’s assistant, his blonde and well-groomed wife, assured us that everything would be fine before giving me a student discount for good measure.
It took me over a year, and much discussion with my mother, to decide whether I would go through with the surgery. The same thoughts kept swirling in my head: Was I a bad feminist if I went through with the surgery? What if the only reason I wanted it was because I was worried about what some man would think? What if the pain was all psychological, a direct result of my insecurity dealing with the body that God gave me? Why couldn’t I just deal with the pain? I wasn’t suffering from some chronic illness. I didn’t have cancer. I didn’t have gangrene or hepatitis B. Why couldn’t I suck it up? The pain was not impairing my life at all. My foremothers had gone through far worse, and I had the nerve to care about some extra skin between my legs. That’s not strength, I thought, that’s cowardice. Then I remembered all the times I’d had to skillfully maneuver the lower half of my body while in the midst of conversation so that no one would think that there was something wrong with me. I thought about frequent bathroom trips and the subsequent pain whenever I tried to readjust. I relived the thick of summer when I was both hot and sore, when time would pass me by as I sat with my legs splayed across the floor. I didn’t tell anyone other than the man who I was starting to date about my imminent surgery.