Woman's Body: An Owner's Manual

Masturbation: B21 – Fantasies

% of women experiencing different types of fantasy during masturbation:

A new book arrives on my parents’ shelf. It has no picture on the cover, just the title, in gold, Les Onze Mille Verges by Guillaume Apollinaire. I know it’s rude, I can tell by the way it’s hidden in plain view, just like the art books, and there is something about the word Verges that makes my ears prick. When I flick through to see if my suspicions are founded, it falls to a page that describes a soldier warming his hands in a horse’s vagina. He is so overcome with passion for the horse he has to fuck it, then and there in front of his whole regiment. It is the first time I’ve encountered the word fuck as anything other than a swear word. I spend the rest of the week locked in the toilet, reading. I read about sex with animals, torture, farts, sex with children, sex with dead people and so much shit and flogging that it all starts to sound normal. When you fuck there is blood and stink and pain, and everybody loves it.

The line that stays with me, the line which will pop into my head from this point on at the most inappropriate of moments, occurs just as the lead character has finished doing it with his best friend. He yells, ‘There, if that doesn’t make you pregnant, you’re not a man!’

A12 – Puberty: Problems

In some rare cases, puberty can fail to occur at all because of a hormone imbalance. For most girls however the problems of puberty are usually psychological. Even such physical conditions as spots and blackheads, excessive weight gain, and heavy perspiration, are more embarrassments than anything else. As a result of psychological changes, the adolescent girl may appear aggressive and rebellious, and may challenge the authority of parents and teachers (and perhaps even the police).

My mother does not approve of things like bras, the shaving of armpits or wearing deodorant. A girl at school gets taken aside by another pupil and told that people are talking about the way she smells, and that she had better go and buy herself some deodorant. At lunch break, there is a mass exodus to Boots to buy roll on, in case the same horrific episode happens to anyone else. I don’t have the money, and so I explain this all carefully to my mother. She seems to take it well and says we’ll stop at the local chemist on the way back from school. As she opens the door to the chemist who has a long line of customers waiting to be served, my mother announces ‘My daughter thinks she smells.’ And I leave the shop and walk home alone and stinking. I steal the witch hazel that my father uses as aftershave, and rub it into my armpits. I smell like a hospital.

Changing for sports at school, suddenly everyone else has a bra. They cover up their bras with T-shirts and towels when they change, just in case. It is true that I do not have tits like the rest of my class, but it’s getting harder and harder to ignore my classmates’ looks of alarm whenever I take my shirt off, their horror at me exposing myself.

‘My daughter thinks she has tits,’ says my mother in Peter Jones.

I go into a changing room where a woman measures the bones of my naked chest, and I’m aware from the way that she sucks in her cheeks that she’s humouring me. She decks me out in a padded black bra, with extra bits that you can stuff in to ‘boost the plunge of your cleavage’. The cups are hollow because I have no boob to fill them, and she keeps telling me to lean forward and shuffle my breasts into the cups. ‘There we go,’ she says eventually, ‘that’s better.’

The skin of my chest has made a small crease in between the empty cups of the bra, like when you fold the skin of your knee to make it look like a bum.

As we’re waiting in line at the till, my mother tells me happily about the time that she and my father were having some work done on the house, and they overheard the builders talking about her.

‘What’s this Mrs Wyld like then?’ asked one of the builders,

‘Oh, you know,’ said the other, ‘the bra-less type.’