Unedited Extract Women Like Us

MANDY NOLAN
& ELLEN BRIGGS
FOR ANYONE WHO HAS
REALISED THAT BEING
PERFECT IS JUST TOO DAMN
HARD!
‘Funny, fabulous and a little bit scary.
I love these ladies.’ GRETEL KILLEEN

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Girls With Balls
Doesn’t matter how perfect you are, I reckon you still get body shame. Every single
one of us experiences moments of intense self loathing and personal repulsion – some
daily, some weekly, some every ten minutes. So when did I start hating myself? I
once tried to trace this back to the moment when it occurred to me that I wasn’t OK.
As a little girl I never thought about my body. It never occurred to me if I was pretty
or not. Like Ellen, I never thought about it. Once my body started changing, so did
my attitude towards myself. As I became a woman, I felt conspicuous. I felt like any
moment the whole stupid thing was going to come undone. That I would be exposed
as a fraud. People would realise that I wasn’t a real girl.
And it happened. Once, in a spectacular and public display that I often trace back to
why I am a stand up comedian. Perhaps it was my way of dealing with trauma. This is
the single most embarrassing experience of my life. It wouldn’t be if it happened now,
but at the time of the ‘terrible toilet paper incident’ I was 13. And anything that
happens at 13 has the capacity to scar for life. I still feel sick when I tell this story.
I got my first period on my 13 th birthday. It was like a cosmic joke. A birthday present
from my biology. The Universe decided to mark me becoming a teenager by gifting
me with the joy of ovulation. The only cycle I wanted was a Malvern Star. Back then
sanitary products were new techonology. Our mothers told us that they’d never had it
so good. They had used rags pinned to a pad belt… what we had, well if you
compared it to now, it was like the iphone for the vagina.
Sanitary Products in the early 80’s were nothing like the products today. Keeping the
phone analogy going, it was like wearing a NOKIA brick down there. They hadn’t
perfected the super slim absorbent technology todays teenagers enjoy. In cute pretty
patterned tins. Or flowery packages sealed up like tiny precious gifts for your twat.
Mums and Nuns didn't want you using tampons. Only sluts wore tampons. It would
be a few years before I became a ‘slut’ and enjoyed the comparative freedom of
ramming a cotton wall ball under my cervix to stop the flow. Tampons then came
with these long cardboard shooting tubes so you didn’t have to do something gross
like use your finger. I mean, you don’t want girls bleeding everywhere, but you don’t
want to encourage them to start fingering themselves! Who knows where that could
lead! To being sluts of course!
Good girls wore pads. I was a good girl, but even if I wasn't, it wouldn’t have
mattered. It wasn’t really a choice for me anyway. I tried using tampons lots of times,
but I couldn’t get it in. I think my hymen had been hand stitched by nuns. I imagine
Sister Zita sitting up late at night ‘Just one more row of cross stitching on this hymen
and I’ll be done. Hymen sweet Hymen! ’ Oh yes, those women liked you to keep
God’s door locked. I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that there’s only an ‘e’ dropped
from hymen and you have a hymn. Mine was so rock solid I think the old bitch
welded me shut with an oxytorch.
I remember once trying to hammer a tampon in with a rock. I was desperate. Next
option was to use a brick. I would only ever manage to get half the stupid thing in, but
I tried to wear it anyway. Every time I sat down I experienced a kind of spontaneous
penetration. My eyes would go wide and I’d look a little startled, and it was hard not
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to yelp. In pain mind you, certainly not in pleasure. This was not how I imagined
losing my virginity. 10.15am in maths class trying to find the value of x. It was
unnerving for my teachers who kept sending me to the office for being disruptive.
Which was so unfair. I was being sexually assaulted by a tampon. So I gave up. I
wore pads.
Or perhaps they wore me. You didn't just put a pad on. You mounted it. It was like
getting on a horse. 1, 2, 3, left foot firm on the ground and then push up and swing the
right leg over. They weren’t nicely shaped to suit your twat. Not like the ones now
with wings and modifications that acknowledge the difference between the front of
the vagina and the back. We’re not all boxy down there. I guess no one bothered to
check. Back then pads were made in the same factory they made those ceiling
insulants. Clearly they were designed by men who’d failed in the heady world of
industrial design and ended up with a career instead of designing sanitary pads. This
was during the ‘turn the light’s off don’t look at it, it will steal your soul’ era of
vagina knowledge. Whoever was designing pads hadn’t looked at a woman’s vagina
with the lights’ on.
But while pad’s were massive, they weren’t that absorbent. There was no micro
technology. So you’d have to change them at least twice a day. Sometimes three or
four. This created a huge source of anxiety for my hours at school. How do you
discreetly remove a 5 kilogram block of cotton padding from your bag in a shared
area without at least one pair of prying eyes spying your shame? ‘Mandy’s taking an
insulation bat to the toilet again’.
It caused me such terror, just thinking about it made my heart race. So I came up with
a strategy…I would use two pads. Yep, two NOKIA’s one on top of the other. That
way I had a clean pad already loaded. I thought it was genius. Lucky I was still really
skinny then so I had a significant thigh gap, otherwise I would have had to use a
wheelchair. It was like walking while straddling a fence.
This isn’t the embarrassing moment. This is background is to give an idea of the
mindset I was operating with. Paranoia, terror and body shame. Strangely it wasn’t as
if I had been conditioned to feel such repulsion. It came naturally. My mother had
been nothing but affirming about me becoming ‘a woman’, which kind of made it
worse. I found talking to my mum about vaginas, bleeding, ovaries and all that kind
of stuff really creepy. It may have gone back to the ‘sprinkler’ incident. That was
when I got in trouble for sitting on the sprinkler on the front lawn. Apparently having
your 5 year old daughter writhing in ecstasy in the front yard doesn’t make for good
neighbourly relations. I got in a lot of trouble for that. To this day I can’t sit on the
sprinkler without feeling bad. Even now in a society with more liberal sexual mores,
it still gets tongues wagging. For those of us with such a domestic deviance, we must
sprinkler sit in the dark of night.
I was a sporty kid. I played basketball. By 13 I was almost 6 feet tall and not
completely unco-ordinated. This made me the rebounding object of dribbling desire
for ambitious sporting coaches looking for a ‘big’ girl to crush the opposition. When
other kids in my country town were smoking and having sex I was on a basketball
court. I trained up to 2 hours a day, and every weekend. As a girl from a tiny country
town, my increased abilities meant increased need for travel. Most weekends were
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spent driving or flying to other locations for carnivals, or camps and other generalised
forms of sport-ture.
Once my period arrived this created a problem. You see, as previously mentioned I
couldn’t use tampons, and as indicated by the double loading, I had a lot of
embarrassment about the whole thing. Then there was this inexplicable requirement
during the early 80’s for girls playing basketball to wear what were known as ‘briefs’.
The word basically tells you what they were. Undies. While the boys got to wear big
comfortable shorts, we girls had to wear high cut lycra pants. They were like
swimming bottoms. Or dance pants. I guess the sportswear was part of a bigger move
to drive more interest in girl’s sport, particularly from creepy old men who like to see
your lady bits come flying out at a jump ball. All it meant was that during most of my
most intense and hard core physical performances I had a bit of arse cheek hanging
out. My coaches’ most oft repeated refrain was ‘Nolan! Stop picking your bum!’
Many a pass was missed due to me trying to retrieve my sports briefs from my arse.
It is not comfortable running or jumping in undies. Especially when they are made of
lycra and cut to sit high on your hip. They were modelled on the 1980’s malliot and
meant to make your legs look longer. God forbid you actually used your legs! They
barely managed to contain arse cheeks and pubic hair, a sanitary pad was absolutely
impossible to conceal. It looked like I was smuggling a salami. Wearing a pad in a
pair of these running briefs meant everyone knew you were wearing a pad. You
certainly couldn’t wear two.
It caused me so much anxiety I almost gave up playing. Plus I had a male coach who
just didn’t seem to notice my distraction wasn’t from a lack of passion. It was because
my stupid vagina in the stupid pants was causing me distress. So this is how it
happened. I am playing in the grand finals of a State championship, somewhere like
Townsville or Mareeba. I can’t really remember which. All I know was it was
fricking hot. It was somewhere in North Queensland. Before the era when people had
air conditioning. The stadium was full of people. It was full because we were playing
the home team. I had my period. I got it the morning of the final. I thought I was
going to make it through a championship bleed free, but no, my uterus had other
ideas. It wanted to be the star!
I won’t wear a pad in those sports briefs. Firstly because they’re too big and
embarrassing. But also because I didn’t bring any with me and I’m not going to ask
anyone. As a kid I was perfecting the ‘pretend its not happening and it will go away’
technique that works so well. Try it with teen pregnancy! So I decide to roll up some
toilet paper. I make a pad. Very crafty. These days you could put it on Etsy. So
homecrafted. It takes forever. Any woman who’s had to hand roll her own toilet paper
pad knows exactly what I made. A hard clump of paper which I then wedged in my
undies.
So I had a pad. But I had a new problem. No adhesive. The toilet paper clump was
clearly not going to stay in place. It was mobile. In fact the more mobile I was, the
more mobile it was. I tried sticking it in with chewing gum, but the toilet paper would
move and I kept getting gum stuck on my labia. So I just settle on lodging the wad
and using my mind power to keep it in place.
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I should have been concentrating on the game. I was the star player. But all I could
focus on was the foreign object moving in my gusset. During the game I get a lot of
ball. And that's good, because I use the ball to push down the toilet paper that has
moved up the front of my lycra briefs. I was worried that someone was going to see
the indentations of a sanitary pad, for anyone watching from the crowd, it looked like
I had a semi erect penis. I was transitioning before it was a thing. The game is tight.
There’s barely a point in it. I’m playing ok, but I’m very distracted. As you would be
when you have half a roll of loo paper in your dacks. The toilet paper wad is a very
intrepid traveller. It makes it’s way up the back of my briefs. Then I started to panic.
It looks like a shit. I can feel myself really bleeding. I’m not game to look down.
There are 400 people watching and I’m bleeding like a murder victim. I want to die. I
probably look like I am dying. Actually, I am dying. On the inside.
There’s hardly any time on the clock. We are three points down. I get fowled taking a
shot. The shot goes in so the 2 points count and I’m awarded one shot from the free
throw line. It’s like in the movies. Except its usually a bloke not a woman, and
they’re not bleeding from the cock.
If I get this next shot we tie and go to extra time which means we are still in the game.
If I miss, we lose. It’s ok, it’s not like its all up to me, the girl bleeding to death at the
free throw line. The stadium is quiet. There’s nothing like the quiet that decends at a
moment like this. It’s like the universe opens up. Everyone is looking at me. It’s up to
me. Wow. For a milli second I forget my trauma and I really enjoy the power. I like
being a game changer.
Then I spy it. My toilet paper friend. It has fallen out and is lying in a bloodied lump
at my feet. The referee see’s it. But he’s not going to pick it up. The other players see
it. I think everyone in the stadium has seen it. Time stops. I feel everyone looking at
me. Looking at the toilet paper. Looking at me. I don’t know what to do. Do I
pretend it’s not there? Do I run away crying? So I bend over and pick up the toilet
paper. All eyes are on me. I bring it to my face and I pretend to blow my nose and
then stuff it down my bra. I take the shot. I miss. I lose the game.
But I keep my dignity. Well kind of.
The first punchline to my first ever public performance. I’m filled with shame. But I
am hooked.
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