Feminist Fatale

I first had sex at 17. It was a summer’s evening and my boyfriend and I were naked in the cool dusk of the room. We’d tried a few times before, but it was too painful for me despite being aroused by my lover. As I’d never been able to use tampons (my body just pushed them out), my vagina was simply unaccustomed to being penetrated by anything other than tentative fingers.

My boyfriend and I were addicted to each other, young and besotted lovers. We had had many first times together—including our first time being completely naked with a lover. After months together, having all sorts of sex except penetrative, we decided together that it was time. On that special day, it was too painful to last for more than a few moments for me, but I felt the immense intimacy and an edge of scalding pleasure of having him inside me.

Without a condom. Yes, despite the years of sexual education we’d both been subjected to in our school days, our first months of having sex were totally unprotected.

My boyfriend never ejaculated inside me, so we were ostensibly practicing the ‘withdrawal method’. We both knew that this was far from a safe option, and that we fast needed to find a better alternative.

Neither of us liked the taut, plastic-bag feel of condoms, so we knew that the next option was the pill. That meant, however, I would have to go to a gynaecologist to get a prescription, and this would entail the dreaded examination and pap smear.

Despite having accompanied my mother to the gynaecologist as a child, I had an ingrained terror of having to go myself. I had visions of lying prostrate on the surgery sheets, my feet in the stirrups and a lecherous male doctor peering at my cervix with a headlamp. I’d resolved that no strange man was going spelunking in my vagina.

However, as the weeks rolled past and yet another pregnancy scare accompanied a late period, I sat down for a heart-to-heart with my mother and told her that I needed an appointment with a woman gynaecologist. She was sympathetic and supportive, but wanted me to see her male gynaecologist, and couldn’t understand why I insisted on seeing a woman. I wanted a woman doctor who would understand the sensation of period pains and yeast infections.

A close friend of mine passed on the number of a female doctor she had been to. As I could only get an appointment six weeks away, I grew more nervous as time went on. On the day of the examination, knowing that I was nervous, my friend passed a note to me in English class. Stapled to the sheet of paper was a rubber glove she’d taken from the biology lab, and a huge khoki drawing of a speculum that resembled an industrial drilling machine.

My boyfriend had reluctantly agreed to come along to the appointment and sit in the waiting room—it was only fair, I reasoned, that he spend some minutes reading magazines if I was to have my cervix swabbed by a stranger so both of us could enjoy safe sex. When the doctor called me into her surgery, he sank into a chair with a copy of Fit Pregnancy, and I stood up to face the ordeal alone.

The experience wasn’t an iota as awful as I’d imagined. The doctor was kind and thorough, if a little harried. I had expected scratchy hospital-issue gowns, and was surprised by the array of floaty satin numbers to choose from.

I slipped one on, and told the doctor I was ready. The doctor talked me through every part of the examination. She felt around my breasts and underarms for any unusual lumps, and then explained that she was going to use a speculum to open my vagina so that she could collect a swab of mucus from my cervix. This would then be sent to the laboratory and screened for any unusual cells or for other common infections, such as Candida (thrush).

Out came the dreaded speculum, which bore no resemblance to the instrument of torture my friend had drawn for me that afternoon. Rather, it looked like a mixture between a homeopathic massage device and a strange shoe-horn, and was made out of plastic, not metal.

The doctor asked me to relax, which was impossible, but as the speculum was lubricated, it slipped easily into my vagina and I felt the strange widening sensation as the speculum pressed against my vagina walls and opened me up. She took out a long implement that looked like a kebab stick with a bit of cotton wool at the top, which she put inside my vagina and took a sample of mucous from around my cervix. To be honest, the swab wasn’t entirely painless. In order to get a good sample, the gynaecologist needed to collect mucous from the neck of the cervix. The action, however, only took a second. Then she withdrew the speculum and said that I could get dressed.

The appointment was over in twenty minutes, and I walked into the waiting room feeling like an enlightened, courageous and responsible woman.

I didn’t stay with that gynaecologist for long. It took two weeks for her to phone me with the results of my pap smear, although she undertook to call me in half that time. In the intervening week, I worked myself into a panic that there had been something wrong with my result, and bombarded her secretary with calls, only to be told again and again that the doctor was extremely busy and would get back to me.

I found another gynaecologist with less demands on her time who gave me her cell number and told me to call her if a problem arose at any time. And call her I have, in emergency situations in different cities, from pregnancy scares to a panic about herpes (thankfully, the inflamed bump turned out to be an ingrown pubic hair).

I used to think it was unfair that women were compelled to undergo regular gynaecological examinations throughout their sexually active lives, whereas men were only subjected to such examinations if they contracted an infection of some kind, or if they needed a prostate check. But I’ve come to understand that this is part of my privileged and powerful capacity to bear and to sustain life. I believe a women’s ability to nurture an infant inside her body and to feed it once she has given birth, is infinitely more amazing than men’s ability to manufacture sperm.

Although it’s ten years since my first boyfriend and I broke up, my partner still accompanies me to the gynaecologist. Why should I fight traffic alone on my bi-annual trips to the hospital for a pap smear when we both enjoy the benefits of my healthy vagina? Those well-thumbed copies of Fit Pregnancy await.

Feminist Fatale is an academic whose current research focuses on HIV and abortion in South Africa.