The Cutprice Guignol

So, last month, this blog reached it’s three-year anniversary. That’s kind of insane, considering that I started this thing just to pass the time when I was stuck in my dorm room with no-one to talk to back in first year (joke’s on them, because now I have a cat to talk to. Oh, and friends, a boyfriend, whatever) and build up some links for my portfolio. In the last year, I finished my brutal love affair with Fifty Shades of Grey, started my genuine love affair with Doctor Who recaps, and wrote a bunch of stuff on sexuality, feminism, mental health, and other topics that I never thought I would ever have had the balls to write about in public. So, firstly, a huge, mega thank-you to everyone who’s supported the blog over the last three years- all your shares and likes and comments and reads have made this worthwhile, and there’s no way I’d be doing this without you. I just hit a thousand followers a couple of weeks ago, which still boggles my mind a little bit. You’re awesome, and I’ll buy all of you a pint next time I see you.

The Cutprice Guignol has provided an awesome jumping-off point for me into the world of freelance writing, and that brings me to my next point. With my official job title being “jobbing freelance writer”, I spend most of my time writing something or other (movie reviews, album critiques, alien erotica, etc) and that takes away time I get to spend writing for the blog. As I’m not getting paid for the work I do here, I can’t really justify spending as much time on it as I’d like and I can’t always take on the cool ideas my readers pass on to me. As a poor student about to be an even poorer graduate, I’ve had to seriously think about whether or not I can financially justify spending so much time on The Cutprice Guignol.

So, to remedy that I’ve created a Patreon. For the uninitiated, a Patreon lets readers and supporters of the blog sponsor me a small amount of money per month so I can keep doin’ what I’m doin’ (and hopefully improve it, too). There are special rewards based on how much you sponsor me (including exclusive blog posts), and if I reach a certain amount of sponsorship per month I’ll be able to take on new recapping projects and generally spend more time turning this into a real website. You can check out my Patreon page here for more information, and how to donate. Notable: if the first one of my sponsorship goals is reached, I’ll be recapping the second Fifty Shades of Grey book. Do with that what you will.

To be clear, no matter how much or how little you fabulous people decide to share with me, I’ll keep writing for the blog, and I’ll keep going with my current recapping projects. Any donations I receive will go towards giving me time to get more blog posts up every month and create a better user interface for my readers. Considering that I’m basically jingling a virtual charity tin under your nose, I appreciate any and all donations more than I can express. More than that, I appreciate all the support people who’ve read this blog have given me over the years. Thank you for reading! Here’s to another three years.

So, in August of this year, the FDA approved the “little pink pill”- basically, female Viagra. And it got me to thinking: with Viagra for dudes being so readily available and such a common, shrug-worthy part of society, the way we treat women’s sexual dysfunction is pretty embarrassing. You know how I know that? Because, for three years, I suffered from a type of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), and no-one seemed to have a god-damn clue what to do with me.

You whisper the words “vaginismus” in front of any woman who’s suffered from it, and you can see that look of haunted horror that passes across their face. Vaginismus is a condition where your vagina essentially boards itself shut, sticks up “closed for business” signs, and leaves you unable to enjoy sex without massive amounts of pain-or, in my case and in the case of many other sufferers, unable to have sex at all. Muscle spasms make it painful or impossible to get anything in there, whether it’s a tampon, an erection, or the cotton swab of a very nice lady who just wants to figure out what the fuck is going on with me. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My vaginismus made itself known when I was first dating my high school sweetheart, and what I was feeling seemed to go above and beyond the usual kind of painful-first-penetrative-sex experiences that I’d been conditioned to expect. But I didn’t think much of it until, two years later, I was still unable to get so much as a finger inside myself without crippling pain. Neither me or my then-boyfriend could figure out what was going on, and we both spent months in silence, assuming that I would just never be able to put out and that we’d just have to deal with that shit as it was. In a culture that values sex so highly, especially at the age I was at, there was no way in hell I was telling anyone else that the crunchy sound of a condom wrapper made me flinch.

I couldn’t tell you what the tipping point was, but I eventually found myself, face burning, eyes on the ground, in my school nurse’s office, explaining to her what was happening and borderline begging her for an answer to the problem. Was I frigid? Was I actually gay? Was I just broken in some profound and unfixable way? She nodded sympathetically, then referred me to another doctor, to whom I said much the same thing before being referred to another doctor to whom…yeah, you get the idea. I remember vividly how uncomfortable the people-medical professionals- I discussed this problem with became, and how keen they seemed to palm me off on someone else. It’s not even as if vaginismus is the most uncommon affliction in the world- it’s hard to pinpoint exact numbers, but somewhere in the realm of one in five hundred women suffer from it and it’s even more common amongst women 16-24, which was an age group I fell into. Yet no-one could even give me a name, and I was getting increasingly frantic, assuming that I would never have sex, never have a family, never get one of those Mooncups I’d been hearing so much about.

Eventually, I got referred to a sexual health clinic, and made an appointment. I sat in the waiting room, surrounded by glum-looking folks who looked as if they were waiting on bad news about that herpes test. I found myself confronted with the aforementioned sympathetic lady, pretty much the first who didn’t seem like she was hoping I’d stop talking about my vagina right about now. That appointment marked the first time a woman touched my nether regions, but it’s not an experience I remember fondly- naked from the waist down, trying not to cry from the pain of the cotton swab she had inside me. I cried all the way home, and prayed that this time I might get an answer.

I was visiting a friend’s house a few days later when I got a phone call from the clinic, and they spelled out the name of what they thought I had over the phone. That was it: they just told me what it was. After more than two years, I finally had something to work from, even if that was the last time I ever heard from the clinic. I was out in the wilderness again, and as I began to look up information about my dysfunction, things felt almost as bad as before. Websites recommended dilators, basically small plastic dildos of varying sizes meant to acclimatise your vagina to the intrusion of other accoutrements. Even looking at the weird, almost always pink, almost always weirdly bullet-shaped collections sold in neat packages of eBay, was enough to make me cringe with pain. I resolved that I’d just have to be really, really good at all the other sex stuff and chuck in any chance to have a fulfilling sexual relationship with a man. I clung to my boyfriend, convinced than no other man would ever want a woman who he could barely touch.

Then we split up, and I was faced with the reality of entering a dating world where the ability to have sex is usually assumed. With the leftovers of my student loan, I finally ordered those dilators from online, and spent a tense Christmas break in my childhood bedroom with lots of wine and heavy breathing as I tried to manoeuvre those bastards into me. And eventually, things started to change. Maybe it was a new partner, maybe it was the dilators, maybe it was just sheer bloody-mindedness, but I did it: I was finally able to have painless sex, hell, even to enjoy it. And that’s awesome, but it doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten what it was like to suffer from vaginismus, and wonder how other women who suffer from FSD are being treated.

It might sound like I’m pretty angry about a lot of this, and that’s precisely right. I had a pretty common medical condition whose resolution usually needs a wide variety of different approaches, sometimes including emotional and physical therapy. I never got that. I was never even offered that. Even though it’s long behind me now, you try shaking two and a half years of being convinced that you were frigid and no person who ever want to form a relationship with you because you couldn’t have sex- that shit will mess with you, and still does to this day. If I’d been a man who couldn’t get it up, there would have been myriad options to help me with what I was going through, and at least I would have known that my experiences were common and not exclusive to me. But no- we’re not teaching people about it, we’re not talking about it, and we’re leaving the scores of women who suffer from vaginismus and other sexual dysfunctions out in the cold. My experiences, luckily, are not universal for women who tried to get help, but they’re not unusual either-and, even if we have got a little pink pill to boost our libidos, we’re failing to address the myriad other sexual dysfunctions that might well cause that lack of desire to get down.

So, I want to address this last paragraph to women who are suffering or have suffered from FSD: firstly, it gets better. Even if you think you’re crazy or broken, even if no-one seems to have a clue what’s wrong with you, it can get better, and you deserve to have it taken seriously. Secondly, when you’re ready, talk about it. Talk about it with your friends, your family, write about it, write it in the sky from the engines of a light aircraft. Because every time a woman is dismissed or shut down on the subject of FSD, it blocks an opportunity to educate and hopefully normalise these strikingly common problems, making them less stigmatizing and therefore easier to seek treatment for. Because we deserve better than this.

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Look, I guess I should set one thing straight here, before I begin- I don’t think Community as a show is inherently sexist. Dam Harmon, the man behind the cult-smash sitcom, has made an express effort to hire female writers and create interesting, well-rounded women characters who get just as much respect and screentime as their male counterparts. With an ensemble cast as big as Community’s in it’s heyday (seasons one through three, and I’ll hear no different), it was and still is legitimately awesome to see the strong central female cast taken as seriously as they were, as likely to be cracking the joke as the butt of it. So let’s get that out of the way.

But I was rewatching the show over the last few weeks (I’m back at university, any sort of college-based comedy is a must to float me through the next few months alive, and apparently all I write about now is sexism in sitcoms), and something jumped out at me a few times across the show’s run. And that’s it’s use of ironic (or hipster, depending on what article you read first) sexism.

Ironic sexism is basically when the writers know they’re being sexist, and the audience knows the writers are being sexist, and the joke stems from the fact that everyone is in on the fact that this would be a horrible way to treat women in real life. Let’s take a couple of examples that jumped out at me- the first was in a Christmas episode, where Annie (played by Allison Brie) sings a parody of the dumb sexy-baby-voice tunes meant to appeal to men with fetishes I’d rather not consider, presumably:

And yeah, this is a funny scene. Don’t get me wrong. I like the way they dismantled the ridiculousness of the woman forced to prance around downplaying her intelligence to further appeal to men. But it’s still Allison Brie prancing around and bending over in a little dress. We’re still being invited to objectify her, even if we are all in on the funny joke. Take a look at these scenes, which are basically the same thing twice:

Woo, we’re so enlightened that we can ogle women doing stereotypically sexy things- in an enlightened and non-sexist way! I understand what tropes they’re going after here, by presenting a stupidly overboard version of those tropes, but it’s hard to see two conventionally attractive young women straddling each other while covered in oil and see it as a breakthrough. And, of course, this kind of stuff isn’t contained to Community. It’s in advertising, where women and men are posed outrageously sexily- in a tongue-in-cheek way! It’s on social media, where people order women they disagree with to make them a sandwhich, bitch- but it’s only because they’re totally enlightened and we live in a post-sexist society anyway, right?

Look, I get that they’re trying to critique the ridiculousness of these kinds of tropes here, but is simply regurgitating a trope actually providing a critique of it? I’m genuinely asking. I think it depends n the circumstance, the intention, and lots and lots of other things, but when it comes down to it, simply producing a replica of sexism and calling it funny assumes that everyone observing it is going to understand that that’s a ridiculous or unacceptable way to treat the person in question. But, you know, that’s kind of a gamble when objectifying women in the media   (and more broadly in society) in a non-ironic way (WHY HELLO THERE GAME OF THRONES) is so completely accepted, so normalised. I know a bunch of people who see the joke in the above Community scenes, but still appreciate the chance to ogle the actresses in question, so while those scenes have successfully made the point they wanted to make, they’d sort of undermined themselves. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think you can critique a problematic trope while you’re adding to it, and doubly so when you’re using it as an excuse to stick two of your leading women in fantasy scenarios and outfits for the audience to gawk act. But what’s your take on it?