Category: Reading

  • Reading My Broken Vagina by Fran Bushe

    Reading My Broken Vagina by Fran Bushe

    Much like with Lara Parker’s Vagina Problems, I don’t think it’s entirely appropriate for me to ‘review’ Fran Bushe’s My Broken Vagina because the content is so close to home. I’ve also seen Bushe’s one-woman show Ad Libido three times, discussed it several times on this blog and written about it during the same module of my MSc that I discussed in my last blog. I’m a big fan and completely biased, so instead of reviewing My Broken Vagina, here are some thoughts I had while reading it.

    My Broken Vagina is a frank, funny and warm book where Bushe describes her experience of feeling like her vagina is broken and her quest to fix it: spoiler alert, the only thing that’s broken is sex education. As soon as I started reading My Broken Vagina I felt like I was being hugged by Ad Libido. Each of my three viewings of Bushe’s show marked significant chapters in my own relationship with my broken bits but having its wisdom captured in a written form that I can return to and share beyond the limits of the theatre feels very special. Just like her play, Bushe’s book is laugh-out-loud funny, genuinely educational and wonderfully moving. As an added bonus, it’s filled with amazing, poster-worthy illustrations. 

    Among many important points that come up in My Broken Vagina, is one that I am always particularly fascinated by: ‘the conversation’. That is, the great pleasure of telling a potential new intimate partner that they might need to change their expectations of sex because of sexual pain. Perhaps it sounds simple but it’s been something of a minefield for me for many years and I was thrilled to find it in Vagina Problems and now My Broken Vagina too. It’s refreshing to see it being discussed openly because advice about talking to a partner about sexual pain nearly always assumes you’re in an established, monogamous and heterosexual relationship. It’s likely I relate to Bushe and Parker’s musings on the subject so much because we’re all discussing experiences of being single with sexual pain as white, cis women dating men, but there are definitely similar threads running through discussions of ‘the conversation’ that I think are worth talking about. Take a look at these quotes from My Broken Vagina and Vagina Problems:

    ‘Yeah, haha, and by the way, I might never be able to have sex with you. But I’m still pretty funny and I can make decent banana bread.’

    Lara Parker, Vagina Problems – 114

    ‘At what point on a date with someone new, do you say, “Hey, I know we are probably going to go back to mine and bang it out/make sexy magic, but I want you to know … I might find this very painful”.’

    Fran Bushe, My Broken Vagina – p.36 

    Recently, I got over my fear of ‘the conversation,’ by coming to the remarkable discovery that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter for two reasons. First of all, it is a complete distraction from the actual important bits of getting to know someone and figuring out if you even want to get intimate with them:

    ‘I nodded when I was supposed to and laughed on cue, all while thinking about what it might be like to tell him that I might not ever be able to have penetrative sex with him.’

    Lara Parker, Vagina Problems – p.115

    ‘The fear of having this conversation with a stranger not only meant I had never had a one-night stand, it also meant I’d stay in bad relationships longer than I should.’

    Fran Bushe, My Broken Vagina – p.37 

    Secondly, it doesn’t matter because no matter how you present the information, you cannot control the other person’s reaction. Nothing has ever been more out of your control and, if I’m totally honest, a person’s reaction to that revelation can often be a good test of character. The last time I told someone I was dating that sex might not be what they were expecting or used to but that it could still be fun and good if they kept an open mind, the guy in question went quiet for a moment and became very focussed on the beer bottle in his hand. I was about to panic babble when he suddenly became very animated and asked me why his ex-girlfriend had instructed him to stuff a head of garlic up her vagina to prevent UTIs. It cued internal howls of laughter and shook out all the anxiety I had about ‘the conversation.’ Shock therapy? There is no way I could have anticipated that response (nor any way I could have answered his question.) 


    This subject and many others are built upon in much funnier ways in Bushe’s writing. Bushe’s play came to me (steady on) by chance when I was still feeling very much alone in my experience of sexual pain. The Gilmore Girls gif I used to describe how Ad Libido made me feel the first time I saw it is still better than any words I’ve found to describe that feeling. The idea that some scared teenager discovering their body might find My Broken Vagina before sifting through the heaps of unhelpful and incorrect information and advice Bushe and others like myself have had to sift through warms my soul. I wonder how my former Catholic all-girls school would feel about a sudden library donation? I think I’ll find out, because at the heart of My Broken Vagina is a lesson we can all do with reminding of from time to time: that there’s a big difference between feeling broken and being broken.

    You can buy My Broken Vagina from all good bookshops now and until 19 June you can stream Ad Libido online here – I think I’ll be getting my fourth viewing in! P.S. Speaking of vaginas, if you’re in London get to the Vagina Museum for what looks to be an amazing exhibition, ‘Periods: A Brief History,’ featuring the amazing Hazel Mead. Wish I could get there!

  • Reading Vagina Problems by Lara Parker

    Reading Vagina Problems by Lara Parker

    I love non-fiction – so much so that this blog is probably poorly named. Yet the book I’m going to write about in this blog was pretty difficult to read. It had nothing to do with the writing and a lot to do with the fact that it crossed the line from reading non-fiction to broaden my worldview to reading about my own reality. So while this is a blog about reading Lara Parker’s Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, painful sex and other taboo topics, it is not a review – the subject matter is far too close to home for me to be able to give an ounce of objectivity. 

    Vagina Problems was difficult to read because it made me think about things that I spent the best part of the last year trying not to think about. I’m not sure if it’s the Mirena coil or a perk of COVID-19 restrictions, but my symptoms have become increasingly unpredictable leading to multiple weeks of relative relief that I affectionately call ‘hormone holidays’. These weeks are by no means pain free but the pain is manageable, I can hike and concentrate and think about something other than pain. During these weeks, I again start to wonder if I no longer need to seek treatment for endometriosis, maybe it wasn’t ever that bad in the first place, maybe further intervention isn’t necessary. But Vagina Problems reminded me how much I continue to adapt my life around my own vagina problems. And how while it’s hard to remember pain after the fact, the moment it returns, it is totally life-disrupting. Every time I learn about an external factor that worsens my pain, like sex, running and now stress, I’ve been in the habit of removing that thing from my life. Unfortunately, removing stress isn’t an option and I’m sick of stripping away the good triggers. While I have come to terms with the fact that there probably isn’t a long-term solution to be found at present, it is still worth pursuing one, especially while I have the energy during these ‘holidays’. 

    “Hearing that voice inside my head that says, ‘You probably wouldn’t be in pain if you didn’t eat that cookie,’ and telling it to shut the fuck up. Because the truth is, I’d still be in pain. But I’d be in pain without experiencing the pleasure of eating a cookie. And that’s not the kind of life I want to have.”

    Lara Parker, Vagina Problems – p. 40

    Sometimes when I talk about the last year in Brussels, I frame the story as though endometriosis, vaginismus and pelvic floor dysfunction were the last of my worries, with Brexit, chickenpox and a sodding pandemic trumping the chronic problems. But as I anticipate moving house and watch a new housemate as she discovers the city, I realise that my pain is embedded in my experience of Brussels, my work and my house. “This is where I work,” I said as the metro pulled into the platform, “and that’s where I fainted a year ago… and that’s where I vomited once I came round.” Asked why I fainted, I shrugged and said “pain”. Every time I use my work toilets, I’m reminded of how many times I’ve been sick in them, how it’s one of the first places I experienced rectal bleeding, how often I found blood in that small room and was never entirely sure where it was coming from or why. And then there’s the house. That’s where I sat every Friday evening when I came home from work ill, just in time for the weekend. We used to laugh at it, that I was always unwell the moment the weekend started. It took a lockdown for me to piece together that my body starts to send me red flags to rest on Thursdays and that when I ignore them, something breaks the moment I relax. If this has been the good year for my symptoms, then maybe my gauge for goodness is a bit out of kilter. 

    “I start downplaying what’s going on, or backtracking on what I was trying to reveal … I feel the need to make others comfortable with a situation that I’m definitely not comfortable with.”

    Lara Parker, Vagina Problems – p. 131

    Also etched on this house are my failed attempts at dating again for the first time since my first laparoscopy several years ago. You can take Parker’s chapter on dating with endometriosis (titled ‘Hi, my vagina hurts, wanna date?’) and just staple it to my forehead so that people can read my thoughts. Perhaps it’s because we’re both white and date men, but it seems as though I’ve been on a very similar journey to Parker regarding pain, sex and communication. Like me, Parker’s pain during sex is not just limited to penetration or insertion, “just getting aroused can cause a shooting pain from my pelvic area throughout my entire body… it’s not exactly an aphrodisiac,” and like Parker, I’ve spent years fretting over when is a good time to break that news to a potential partner. I recently came to the same sucky conclusion as her: “I don’t think there’s ever going to feel like the right time because it will always feel like boiling-hot water burning your tongue after you spit it out”. And when that communication breaks down, or just doesn’t happen, sometimes it backfires and the other person comes across very, very badly. I’ve tried explaining this to friends and never found the words, but now I have Parker’s:

     “Maybe he was scared! Maybe I wasn’t communicating what the fuck was happening and not providing an opening for a conversation about it. He was confused, I am sure. And for that, I give him 12 percent of my sympathy. Because guess what? As confused as he might have been, so was I. And I was the one dealing with the actual fucking pain.”

    Lara Parker, Vagina Problems – p. 119

    When I think about my future in terms of treatment and any potential coupledom, I’m surprised to find them interlinked, after fighting against doctors’ assumptions of such a link for years. But they’re not linked in the way people always assumed. Let’s say I see this top doctor in Belgium and she is as skilled as the world says she is and she greatly improves my symptoms to the point that I can once again have an active and social personal life and have or even enjoy penetrative sex again? What if I entered a relationship after that point and my partner didn’t know what it took to get there – what if there even came a point where it was taken for granted because they didn’t know what a huge deal it was for me? Then on the other side, what if I see this doctor, and like the others that came before her, she can’t do anything for me? It’s hard to imagine having a functional relationship with someone who didn’t witness that process and know first hand that I didn’t chose the result. Although maybe that attitude is rooted in living in a world where women are rarely believed on testimony alone. 

    I am certain that these aren’t good reasons to start a relationship, and they’re definitely not reasons to have more surgery, yet one intense weekend reading Vagina Problems had me actively using a dating app and on a waiting list for a new gynaecologist after months of dithering on both. I’m still not sure if either of those things are good but somewhere in there, there’s hope. 

    You can follow Lara Parker on Instagram and buy her book here. At the moment she’s raising awareness about U.S. endometriosis experts who have donated to Trump’s campaign. I join her in saying that they cannot advocate for people with endometriosis when they are supporting racist and sexist policymaking. Doing so is to work directly against the patients they claim to care for. I encourage my U.S. readers (that’s 37% of you!) to cast your vote if you haven’t already and to know that a vote for Trump is a vote against pretty much everything good in this world, including access to safe healthcare. Elsewhere, the all party parliamentary group (APPG) report on Endometriosis has just been published – read it here. 

  • Review: So Hormonal

    Review: So Hormonal

    “A collection of personal essays detailing the various roles that hormones play in our daily lives” – SOLD! It was no surprise to those who know me that as soon as I learnt that this book – So Hormonal, edited by Emily Horgan and Zachary Dickson – was coming into existence through a crowd-funding campaign, during the pandemic no less, that I had to have it (or at least pre-order and patiently wait for it). And for those that don’t know me, in addition to my fascination with hormones on this blog, I also wrote my masters thesis on the feminist value of the ongoing cultural backlash against hormonal contraception, where I started to theorise a little something called Hormonal Feminism. So in short: I was keen.

    All this to say, I’ve read a lot of personal writing on hormones, but this is the most comprehensive anthology on hormonal experiences that I have come across. So often ‘the hormonal experience’ is pinned down to either cis women’s (often negative) experiences of menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and menopause or trans* people’s experiences of puberty and hormone therapy. And there are, of course, so many meaningful and important stories under those umbrellas, many of which are featured in this collection, but So Hormonal takes things a step further. It is deeply refreshing to find stories about hormones from cis men, next to essays about hormonal joy, fertility, pain, neurodiversity, osteoporosis, Addison’s disease, PMDD and so much more. The book represents ‘the hormonal experience’ for what it really is: bodies in flux, also known as being human.

    So Hormonal strikes a great balance between the personal and the medical, the technical, which matters, as is expertly explained in Sonja Erikainen, Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm and Lisa Raeder’s essay Telling Hormonal Stories. They write:

    Hormones are ‘made’ and ‘remade’ in both scientific and cultural stories. Indeed, scientific and cultural stories are constantly in conversation with each other.

    Sonja Erikainen, Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm & Lisa Raeder

    I will always be curious about the gendering of hormones, individually and collectively, and the above quote perfectly sums up why it is vital all hormonal stories are told, so that ‘hormonal’ can cease to be a negative adjective associated solely with women, femaleness and adolescence, because nothing could be further from the truth.

    This book is for everyone – it’s only shortcoming in that regard potentially comes in terms of location, though it isn’t always clear. There might be stories where you relate to something directly. For example, in Sonali Misra’s essay ‘Ten Years in the Making: conversations with partners about polycystic ovary syndrome’, she writes:

    I’ve been forced to add an extra step in the dating timeline, a disclaimer of sorts, due to the PCOS.

    Sonali Misra

    Something I know oh too well, thanks to endometriosis and vaginismus. Again with Aifric Kyne’s essay ‘I’m wearing Docs, Michael: on thyroids, tallness, and teenage suffering’ I was blown away by how Kyne seemed to have perfectly described some of my feelings towards height, eating, control and ignoring my body. Yet still, if you find nothing you relate to personally, the book is full of stories that will move you in ways you cannot anticipate. Some of my favourite essays in the collection I can’t even begin to relate to. While I could honestly just list the contents page, some stand out, including: Tyler Christie’s ‘Getting Off the Back Foot with Male Fertility Health’, James Hudson’s ‘Wanna see my Party Trick? *Stops Taking Testosterone*’, ‘Rianna Walcott’s ‘Banana-Poultices: Black British Attitudes to Healthcare and Medication’.

    And then there is the political, burning its way through the book like a hot flush. Many of the essays were written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it shows. Healthcare systems that have time and again failed in regards to hormonal care, have struggled to deliver the very basic care needed even more during 2020. Jo Ross-Barrett’s essay ‘A period piece: on PCOS, PMDD, and the NHS in 2020’ closes with a powerful call for the UK’s healthcare system to do better: “I wanted to share my story so that people could see the human impact of intersectional feminist failings within the NHS. The NHS needs to offer timely and appropriate person-centred care that focusses on the individual in a holistic manner”. And then in the piece ‘Roaccutane Tubes: On navigating puberty hormones and bodily changes in the wake of sexual abuse’, Madeleine Dunne boldly writes:

    Until a point in time where healthcare providers and medical science are prepared to actually see female bodies, trans bodies, and Black bodies as being valid, to listen to the voices coming from those bodies, and to hear, act on, and validate those experiences, I worry that we are trapped in a cycle of gatekeeping, dismissal, misdiagnoses, inappropriate treatments, and loss of lives.

    Madeleine Dunne

    The quote speaks for itself, as does the entire book, and I recommend you read it.

    So Hormonal is published by the independent publisher Monstrous Regiment, based in Edinburgh, you can buy the book directly from them here.

    While I have you, I’ll take the chance to implore you to support the #ButNotMaternity campaign, which is lobbying for change in regards to the hypocritical and sexist measures than remain in place for people giving birth in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic, measures that are leading to traumatic birth experiences. You can learn more about the campaign here and sign a related petition here. I’d also like to draw your attention to this article about a U.S. study where black babies were found to be more likely to survive when cared for by black doctors, demonstrating just how much work is still to be done in rallying against conscious and unconscious biases in medicine.