The Doctor's Tongue - Tasteful Rude

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It began when I was five or six, at a daycare center.
I sat with a group of my peers on a calico carpet that smelled of corn chips and baby urine. A lady we’d never met before was visiting. She held a bag of treats but before she could give them to us, we had to listen to her. She had important things to say.
They lady told us that there are bad people who like to hurt children.
They’re called strangers.
The stranger told us to avoid strangers. Stranger rhymes with danger for a reason. Strangers want to snatch children. They want to touch children in places where children shouldn’t be touched. Private places. Strangers use licorice and puppies and smiles and lies to lure kids into their cars, which are usually vans. If a stranger offers us any form of kindness, our job is to run and tell the person whose job it is to be good to children.
This person is the police officer.
Police officers are the best.
They are here to protect you.
They are here to protect me.
They are here to protect everyone.
The stranger asked us to raise our hands if we loved McGruff, the crime dog who helps the police to catch criminals.
Though a terrier had recently bitten my face, I raised my hand.
“Say, ‘We love McGruff!'”
We chanted, “We love McGruff!”
“Who do we tell if a stranger talks to us?”
“The police!”
“Very good!”
The stranger gave us candy.
None of us snitched her out to the cops.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
A lot of it happened in public schools.
By the time I was in fourth grade, I could label a flower’s reproductive organs. The stamen and its constitutive parts. The pistil and its constitutive parts.
I could not label my own reproductive organs.
I could not label those of any human.
Well, I guess I could label a “ding dong” but that was easy.
Ding dongs are outies.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It happened on the floor of my friend’s house.
We had eaten snacks before retreating to her bedroom.
She banged on a Casio keyboard, played You Are My Sunshine.
We sang.
My friend looked up from her sheet music and said, “Let’s go to the bathroom. I have something to show you.”
I followed her down the hall.
“Close the door.”
She knelt, reached into the cabinet under the sink, and hauled out a formidable stack of magazines. She split it, shoving a pile in my direction, and plucked one for herself. Leaning against the toilet, the eight-year-old perused Playboy.
I wasn’t sure what playboy meant, but the word sounded fun.
I played along.
I mimicked my friend.
I paged through an issue of Hustler. I saw things I’d never seen before.
And things I haven’t seen since.
The pornography made me feel as if I’d chugged a glass of warm milk. From somewhere deep in my abdomen, a fire radiated. The heat reached my toes. My earlobes burned.
I couldn’t language what I was looking at.
I had not been given the words to describe the anatomy that thrilled me. I only had euphemisms.
Private parts.
Down there.
A precise vocabulary was years away.
I could see. But I could not name.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It often happened at school.
Our teachers had herded the fifth-grade girls into a classroom. The boys went outside. They played kickball basketball.
We watched a short movie about a redhead who begins menstruating. Her mother teaches her how to use a sanitary pad. I think the movie might have been sponsored by Kotex, a maker of sanitary pads.
I realized that the bundles my mother kept in her purse weren’t special adult candy. They were sanitary pads. I was thankful I’d never tried to eat one.
Our teachers gave us a gift, a free sanitary pad.
Girls were embarrassed by the gift. Where were we supposed to put it?
I slid mine into the pocket of my overalls.
I gazed out the window, at the boys having fun.
I wondered why they weren’t with us.
I figured they should’ve been.
They should know that blood shoots out of girls.
That shit shouldn’t be a secret.
Horny toads shoot blood out of their eyes.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It often happened at school.
I was twelve years old and gluing paper to paper. Collaging.
A classmate said that she’d met her boyfriend at the mall.
They had sex in the stairwell. Several times
The boyfriend was very mature. Seventeen.
My classmate said that she was scared of getting pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t like the feel of condoms.
I hate when people use words I don’t know, and I didn’t know what condom meant.
My classmate sensed my confusion.
She narrowed her eyes at me and asked, “Do you know what a condom is?”
Ashamed of my ignorance, I snapped, “Of course I do!”
“What is it then?”
“It’s like an apartment. Only bigger.”

She got pregnant.
And I learned the difference between condom and condominium.

I don’t remember much about junior high school.
I remember that there were several boys who would stand or sit close to me to touch me down there. Sometimes, they would sneak up behind me and hit me or lift my skirt. I didn’t want them to, but I was afraid to tell on them.
We, as in the whole town, found out that those boys were getting their private parts touched by their little league coach.
He was not a stranger. He was my neighbor.

During a walk home from the bus stop, a classmate asked me, “Have you seen Dirty Dancing?”
“No.”
“It’s evil.”
I thought of The Exorcist.
“How?”
“It’s got abortion in it.”
Another word I didn’t know.
“What’s that?”
“It’s when a woman doesn’t want to have a baby and so she KILLS IT! SHE MURDERS IT!”
“Well, babies are a lot of work. I wouldn’t want one. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
I thought of la Llorona, the legendary weeping woman of Mexico. She drowned her children and now haunts rivers. At night, she moans. Kidnaps children.
I gave my neighbor a Llorona smile.
She looked at me in horror.

I remember more of high school.
I wasn’t being constantly molested there.
Ours was a Catholic campus. The motto was to image Christ in mind, heart, body, and soul. Next to the flag, a crucifix hung in each classroom. We began each morning with the Lord’s Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance.
I was a conscientious objector.
I silently stood with my classmates. I refused to chant propaganda.
Sophomore year, in religion class, we endured something called Sex Respect Week. All week long, we learned about how to fuck the Catholic way. On Monday, a British priest came to speak to us. I wondered what he was doing all the way over here. Weren’t there people to minister on the other side of the Atlantic?
He gave us a talk. It was titled Why Sex Is Like Baseball.
By third base, I was nauseous.
I have never heard someone say “petting” so many times.
I wondered if when he gave this talk to English children, he used cricket analogies.
On another day of Sex Respect Week, a woman who staffed a pregnancy crisis center came to address us. She stood beside a projector, clicking through slides supposedly depicting abortion. The images on screen looked like Italian food. Lasagna. Meatballs. Spaghetti. There was so much blood.
She told us that when abortions happen, a blender basically gets shoved inside a girl and the baby is pureed. Then, the puree is sucked out by a vacuum.
She handed out her business card and told us that she rescues babies. If we know of a baby that needs rescuing, we should reach out to her.
She’s someone we can trust.
She ended her talk by strolling the classroom with a plastic doll displayed in the palm of her hand.
“This is a fetus,” she told us. When she’d finished canvassing the room, she stood in front of us and dismembered the doll.
“That’s what happens to babies during abortions.”
The day after the fetus rescuer spoke to us, our principal, another priest, came to lecture us. The subject of his talk was how to have fun on dates without becoming sluts. He didn’t put it in those words but that was the message. He wore a t-shirt with iron on letters. It announced DON’T BE A LOUSE. WAIT FOR YOUR SPOUSE.
One of his suggestions for not becoming a whore while dating was to ask a boy to take us to a diner for a milkshake.
If we really wanted to be daring, we could use two straws.
The last person to speak to us about sex respect was Mr. M, an English teacher. Mr. M was a married member of our faculty and he told us that he wanted us to be well-versed in the only birth control method permitted by the Vatican, the rhythm method. He explained to us that women are more fertile at specific times of the month and that it’s our responsibility to track our menstrual cycles. He explained that his wife keeps such a calendar, and they fuck according to schedule. (He didn’t say fuck; he said something like make love or fornicate.) He said that sometimes periods are irregular, and, in that case, we’ve got to go the extra mile to keep track of our cycles. Mr. M said that sometimes, his wife’s period gets unruly and so she has to rely on the consistency of her menstrual secretions to gauge ovulation. As my teacher described his wife’s mucus-y discharge, my spirit left my body and floated down to the truck-stop diner, where it ordered a vanilla milkshake and cried.

At age nineteen, during an afternoon walk, a stranger jumped me and raped me.
The detective assigned to my case told me I was lucky that my attacker didn’t beat me to death with a pipe like he did the other woman. I was fortunate to only have had oral sex forced upon various private parts.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It often happened in healthcare settings.
I confided to a therapist that I experience flashbacks, that I sometimes feel the face of my rapist burrowing between my legs.
The therapist said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a serum you could be injected with to erase those memories? I hear scientists are working on something like that.”

Can you abort a memory?

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
I got a girlfriend. She made me feel like I had drunk a glass of warm milk.
She wanted me to speak Spanish to her when we’d do it.
I would but I didn’t say anything sexy. I’d recite the grocery list. Platanos. Manzanas. Elotes. Carne molida…
I told my gynecologist that I had a girlfriend, that we lived together.
I was terrified of getting a pelvic exam, but my primary care physician had urged me to. She told me that if I explained my concerns to the doctor, they would be extra gentle with me.
I believed her and sat across from the gynecologist, explaining that I don’t have penetrative sex and that I’m a sexual assault survivor. It scares me when people go between my legs.
The gynecologist smiled. Her eyes swept up. Her eyes swept down. With pity, she said, “What a pretty girl you are.”
“Thank you.”
The gynecologist left the room. I took off my clothes and replaced them with a paper robe. I climbed onto the examination table and pressed my knees together. I would separate them when I had to.
Without warning, the gynecologist re-entered the room.
She perched on the stool positioned between where my legs would go.
“Put your feet in the stirrups.”
I did. I looked at her. She was grinning.
“Relax!” she ordered.
“I’m very nervous.”
“RELAX!”
Every muscle in my body tensed.
I felt her hands on my thighs. She pushed them apart. Hard.
I didn’t want to cry but a tear crept down my cheek.
“You need to RELAX!” After displaying an enormous metal speculum,
she plunged it into me. With a smile, she said, “I don’t understand what your problem is. This is no bigger than your boyfriend’s penis.”
I silently wept during this homophobic impalement.

More than a decade passes before I have another pelvic exam.
The new gynecologist comes highly recommended by a white feminist.
I went to see her because had my period in a few months.
I’d been extremely stressed.
I’d been laid off and I had a mortgage to pay.
Seated across from the highly recommended doctor, I expressed the same concerns as I had last time. This doctor, a lesbian, assured me that she would be gentle with my genitals. She will use a small plastic speculum and make sure that I’m comfortable every step of the way.
She kept her promise. I was so relieved I wanted to cry.
She left, I got dressed, and when the doctor returned, I thought we were going to discuss the matter of my missed periods. Instead, the gynecologist asked, “Do you grow hair where women don’t or where ethnic women do?”
I figured she was referring to my light treasure trail, a smattering of hairs that spring between belly button and bush.
I flushed with embarrassment and pointed at my stomach.
“Are you talking about this?”
She nodded.
“I’m diagnosing you with hirsutism. I’m also diagnosing you as menopausal. Your period is never coming back. I’m going to treat you with hormone replacement therapy. You’ll be taking estradiol and progesterone every day. You’re going to feel much better.”
I sat in a cliché. Stunned silence.
“If the hair bothers you. I can refer to you to someone who performs electrolysis. Here’s their card. They’re right down the hall.”
She reached into her coat pocket, handed me a card.
I stared at it, wondering if she earned commission from referrals.

My period returned.

I said, “My period came back.”
“That can’t be,” said the gynecologist.
“Why not?”
“I diagnosed you with menopause. Are you taking your pills?”
“Yes.”
“How do you take them?”
“Orally?”
“Show me how you take them.”
Instead of miming, which seemed stupid, I said, “I put them on my tongue and swallow them with water.”
She gave me a stern look and snapped, “That’s the wrong way! You’re supposed to place the estrogen beneath your tongue. Then you let it dissolve.”
“Okay. So I can’t just swallow them the way I take Advil?”
“No, you must put them under your tongue. T-T-TONGUE,” she clicked, as if speaking to a fool. She opened her mouth and stuck her erect tongue out at me. She lifted it, wagged it, and pointed to the pink space beneath it.
She moaned.

It would be years before I would get another pelvic exam.

I ask a brown lesbian friend to recommend a gynecologist. She tells me about a woman who works in Los Alamitos.

I go to see the doctor in Los Alamitos.
I give her the same preamble I gave to the doctor who impaled me on the world’s largest speculum and the one who flashed her tongue at me. I tell her that I do not like gynecologists and that my fear is well-founded.
She says that she understands. She also tells me that she is shocked by my medical records.
“Why are you on this dose of HRT? It’s the highest I’ve ever seen. This is very weird.”
My body relaxes. Finally, someone confirms that the way that I’ve been treated is weird. Maybe even wrong.
I tell the new doctor about the body hair question and the referral to an electrolysis office. I tell her about being diagnosed with menopause. I tell her that the last doctor stuck her tongue out at me and wagged it when reprimanding me for taking estrogen incorrectly.
I say, “Honestly, I felt like that question about the hair was racist. As if white women are Pillsbury Doughboy smooth.” I second guess myself. In a small voice, I ask “Was my last doctor racist?”
The doctor vigorously nods.
I exhale. Relief settles into my everything.
I know that I’m safe to voice my thoughts.
“I think she put me on that super high dose to feminize me.”
“A dose like that can cause cancer.”
She prepares an order for a transvaginal ultrasound.
We need to make sure my uterine wall isn’t trying to kill me.

The results from the ultrasound show that everything down there is normal.
I’m so relieved.

As I pull out my tampon, I recall that doctor’s tongue.
I cringe.

My sexual miseducation took place in California.
It happened everywhere.
And last week, I got a letter from my gynecologist.
She’s retiring.
I must find someone new to look between my legs.

Myriam Gurba is the editor-in-chief of Tasteful Rude. She is also the author of the memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice. O, the Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time and Publishers’ Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Paris Review, TIME.com, and the Believer. Gurba has been known to call shitty writers pendejas and has no qualms about it. Along with Roberto Lovato and David Bowles, she co-founded Dignidad Literaria, a grassroots literary organization that seeks to revolutionize publishing.

The Doctor’s Tongue