I identify as a woman.
I grew up with three older brothers and, inso, was raised with a disposition to fight my more feminine qualities. This was caused by classic sibling rivalry and numerous confused gender associations (which we all have been affected by). My brothers hardly ever cried, they played violent video games, and they loved dirt. So, I dabbled too. And, I enjoyed these things as they did… which would be completely good if it wasn’t at the expense and debasing of girlhood.
Until I was into my late teens, I didn’t catch onto the essence of being a woman in this world and begin to dispel of my previous, inaccurate associations. It started with realizing the beauty and power which comes from being a woman, despite how overused this statement might be. My list of reasons for loving my gender has contributed to the fact that it is one of my identities that brings me the most joy in this life.
In order to capture this identity, I wanted to focus on the aspect of womanhood that was the most hard for me to come to terms with: periods. When I first got mine, I hated being a woman. I felt unlucky, at best, and became incredibly anxious every time it came. My fear, which I now look back on with a much less empathetic eye, was of people knowing that I was on it. I was terrified and I knew so little. It seemed that I could go to no woman in my life and be convinced otherwise. My mom kept the word “period” to a hushed whisper and my friends and I never talked about them.
Through time, though, my anxiety lessened and there came a point in high school where I remember actually looking forward to it. That’s just how I felt, with no explanation. After this, I began to open up or rather, to dispel of my unnecessary hush. I became comfortable and, inso, I became happier.
To demonstrate my experience, I wanted to rework a menstruation video I found directed towards young girls. Released in 1973 and funded by Johnson & Johnson, this film has the positive, naive, mysterious tone which I also recall from the woman who explained it to me and my other female classmates in 5th grade.
I reworked the footage and dialogue within this film, Naturally, A Girl (1973) and a Blooming Rose Time Lapse (public domain), with the additional instrumental help of Angel Choir Reveal by Dean Hurley and Slow 30’s Room by David Lynch.
I applied a choir to the opening sequence to demonstrate the chilling positivity which the female narrator in this film as well as the doctor who taught me gave off. And, to add to the magnitude of the occupancy this took up in my brain at the time, I wanted this sequence to be dramatic. Hence, the classic flower=vagina: a slow-motion bloom into womanhood. The adolescent’s voices overlain this represent my own hesitancy at the time.
With the anatomical description of menstruation, I decreased the duration systematically to describe my initial desire for the explanation to be over but also for none of it to be true in the first place. I wanted the words, the facts to disappear. I didn’t want to be a woman if this is what it meant.
In the final part, I wanted to describe how time healed my heightened fears and misunderstandings by keeping the duration of the cycle sped up (not lingering for nearly as long as it first did) and by decreasing the frame size with every cycle as my mind’s attachment to my period became more and more distant and calm. When the screen finally goes black, the score is soft and neutral. No unnecessary positivity or negativity lingers. It is a neutral state. And, I’ve come to terms.
~ Textual Poaching ~
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