Woman's Body: An Owner's Manual

Sexual problems: B28 – Frigidity

Frigidity, or general sexual dysfunction, is a complex female complaint in which a woman derives little or no erotic pleasure from sexual stimulation. Treatment often takes the form of sensate focus therapy – a technique developed by Masters and Johnson. In sensate focus therapy the couple refrain from intercourse and orgasm for a period. During this time they learn to caress each other’s bodies until the woman is sufficiently aroused to initiate intercourse.

I don’t want to be touched, and I think dicks are revolting.

‘Perhaps you’re a lesbian?’ suggests mum, but I’m not that into vaginas either. I start checking myself against the book with every new, creepy little thing that my body does. I spend a long time in my bedroom calming myself with the thought that I can live quite happily inside my head. There will be no need then to meet new people, or to look attractive, or to make conversation. I’ll never have to go to work where I’ll have to talk to other people, or listen to instructions, and I’ll never have to ever give a blow job. It’s the ideal way out, to become appallingly fat in my bed and avoid the outside world forever. Woman's Body has a section called K20 Who Becomes a Compulsive Eater? It shows an obese woman, who looks troublingly like me, sitting on a chair and stuffing her face with cream buns. She is circled by the words I feel miserable, I’ll eat to comfort myself, I look fat, I feel guilty/I look ugly.

A girl friend tells me confidently, ‘Once you’ve been fingered, the rest of it just follows like dominoes.’

My friend gets her period and tells her parents, and her proud father takes her out for breakfast to celebrate. My mother is so excited when she spies a hair under my armpit that she rings my father at work. So when I get my period I keep it a closely guarded secret. When I come home from school there’s a gift-wrapped packet of Tampax on my pillow.

With my first period I smoke my first packet of cigarettes. On display on my parent’s mantle piece, amongst unframed photographs and odd little statues, dripped candles and bowls full of change and spilled clove oil for my father’s sore teeth, is an old packet from the 1950s. The picture on the front is of a sexy woman made of blue smoke. The cigarettes themselves are brown from age with no filters and I smoke my way through them late at night when the rest of the house is asleep. I practice in the mirror, wearing lipstick and copying makeup from magazine samples. Sometimes I steal a half drunk bottle of wine from the kitchen, sometimes a can of beer or tumbler of whiskey.

I practice smoking and drinking and looking exotic with a friend. My friend has the woman’s body of a tiny ballerina. She has tits that fascinate everyone, male and female alike – they are rock hard and they go straight up. She is good at being a woman, she takes her boobs along with her, and people show her a strange sort of respect. Drinking makes me feel more in control of my woman’s body and it makes me understand a bit better what I’m supposed to do with it, how to place it so that it’s looked at in the right way by other people.

We start going to New Cross where we find we can get into a pub and be served Snake Bite Black until we’re sick on the dance floor and people around us cheer and clap. The pub is full of old punks and students with dyed hair and ripped clothes. We make friends with two seventeen year old boys, one of them is skinny and he wears orange leggings under his ripped black jeans; he overuses the word ‘decadent’. I like this one, and try to impress him by cutting the word Anarchy into my forearm with a penknife. I spell it wrong and it reads Anarcy instead. I do not impress him.