Introduction

One night at sleepaway camp, ten-year-old me lay in a bunk bed playing Mad Libs with my cabin-mates. From the other side of the cramped wooden room, one girl read out a prompt to describe "a bad day." Another suggested, "the day before your period!"

"What's a period?" I asked.

"It's when your thing bleeds and you grow hair there," she replied matter-of-factly, if not totally correctly. At the time, I didn't know better. I was horrified to learn this bad day was in my future - and even more terrified to later realize it was not just a day. In health class that fall, I received more education about periods - and more miseducation. Warnings about cramps, PMS, and unplanned pregnancy dominated the female discussion. Then came the male lesson, which covered phenomena like erections and wet dreams that were physically, if not always psychologically, pleasurable.

As I wandered through my school's moss green carpeted hallways, I fantasized that by some feat of magic, I could become a boy. That I could avoid the agonizing puberty awaiting girls. The expectation of female pain continued from high school whispers about first-time sex into my twenties and thirties, when healthcare providers shrugged off my sexual struggles and chronic illness symptoms. The message was clear: Women were cursed. Penises - conflated with men in my early education - were simple and easy and happy. Vulvas, vaginas, and uteruses were tricky, problem-prone, and burdensome.

Nurturing a Better Nature

Philosophers, theologians, and scientists alike have dubbed women deficient since the dawn of Western civilization, and the belief in women's physical inferiority lingers. It lingers in doctors' dismissal of women's health complaints. It lingers in jokes about women's premenstrual incompetence. It lingers in the very notion that men and women are the only people to exist - and exist as biological opposites. It lingers in the expectation that menstruation should hurt, that sex should hurt, that childbirth should hurt, that being a woman should hurt.

Today, actresses from Zooey Deschanel in New Girl to Natalie Portman in No Strings Attached are seen doubled over in pain and unable to function during their periods. Losing your virginity is dubbed "popping your cherry." Articles lament the "elusive female orgasm." The underlying assumptions are couched in biological arguments about the evolutionary role of PMS, the hymen, and anorgasmia. On the surface, statistics appear to support these hypotheses. Up to 91% of women suffer from period pain.1 One in thirteen currently experience pain during sex.2 Between 5 and 10% of women have never had an orgasm.3 Women report poorer physical health than men and are more often diagnosed with chronic pain, anxiety, and depression.4 Yet nothing about these disparities is inevitable. It is our continued reliance on ancient theories about the female body - not the body itself - that makes womanhood synonymous with pain. Media, politics, science, and medicine can make the fruits of oppression appear natural, neglecting that nurture shapes nature. That's exactly what's been done with women's pain and pleasurelessness. The curse is not womanhood; it's misogyny. It is a cultural curse we are under.

Imparting the stories of women and gender-diverse people who alchemized pain into pleasure, this book aims to give readers a new perception of their bodies - one that challenges the bleak messages around them. One that simultaneously acknowledges their pain and their capacity to move beyond it. One that proves we need not surmount our biology to attain equality. It's inequality that flies in the face of our design. As I paint this large-scale picture, you'll follow my own path from pain to pleasure - one full of sexual exploration, spiritual growth, and trying times as I mourned the curse seemingly on me and all women, then uncovered the blessings behind it.

Through my own transformation, I realized our views of women's bodies have enormous stakes. If we deem some gender inequalities innate simply because they're physiological - neglecting how inequality shapes physiology - societal problems from the orgasm gap to the female chronic illness epidemic seem like nature taking its course rather than injustices to be rectified. And so nobody takes a stand against them. More than that, women's sense of confidence and competence is under siege. When women learn they are built for less pleasure and more pain than men, they accept lives where they experience just that. Feeling unequal on a biological level, they carry themselves with an air of inferiority. It follows them to work, into their relationships, everywhere. No matter how many feminists challenge stereotypes about women's mental unfitness, the denigration of our physical and sexual selves continues to tarnish our views of gender in every arena.

The Path from Paradise to Pain . and Back

As a child, I was flooded with inaccurate, decontextualized, and downright frightening information about my body. I missed out on years I could have spent enjoying (or at least working toward) radiant health, relishing life-affirming sexual connections, and celebrating my body rather than feeling ashamed of it. But in the end, I found the resources to turn things around. Through the support of women around me, I learned to advocate for my right to respect from doctors, attention from sexual partners, and a life that's not just comfortable but joyful. Some are denied these opportunities their whole lives due to gender, race, class, and ability barriers. Nobody teaches them anything other than that it is normal, acceptable, to suffer and forgo pleasure. That period pain, PMS, and painful sex are inevitable. That female arousal is finicky. That women are innately inferior. Yet when we dismantle this myth, a sense of innate equality takes its place. And with this sense of innate biological equality, women feel justified in fighting for social equality.

I'll begin Eve's Blessing by examining where the notion of female defectiveness comes from, starting with the Greek philosophers' juxtapositions between the sexes and the Bible's punishment of Eve, then making my way through history, from the superstitious virginity tests of medieval times to the early modern era's marriage manuals. I'll document how the Enlightenment-age gendering of bodies makes healthcare an uphill battle for sex and gender-diverse people, how Victorian purity ideals spawned a view of women as passionless, and how two murderers shaped popular discourse around PMS. These ideologies' repercussions reverberate through hospitals and bedrooms alike, compounded by modern injustices like rape culture, media sexualization, and medical bias that keep women from enjoying their anatomy. We've incorrectly diagnosed women as broken when they're showing us what's broken about the world.

Nobody knows this better than those who have dealt with pain and pleasurelessness themselves - and been told by peers and professionals alike that their complaints are invalid. I have spoken to many such people and will weave them into the following chapters, showing how their stories have unfolded within a broader cultural crisis. Drawing on my expertise as a sexologist, psychotherapist, and birth doula while quoting experts from doctors to theologians, I'll unveil the epidemic of female pain and pleasurelessness as symptomatic of a sick society. I'll show how toxic consumerism contributes to period pain, how under-researched, underdiagnosed gynecological conditions cause painful sex, and how sexual violence spawns anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. Women struggling with their bodies are canaries in the coalmine, alerting us to the stress, disconnection, and exploitation endemic to Western culture. And certain populations like women of color and gender-diverse people are particularly vulnerable. While the ideas I'm critiquing conflate women and wombs - and I'll sometimes do so for linguistic simplicity - I'll examine how they can affect anyone who has a vulva, uterus, or female identity. In fact, the same stereotypes that spawn assumptions about female inferiority also erase those outside the gender binary. I'll demonstrate how this plays out using interviews with intersex, two-spirit, trans, and non-binary people abused and neglected by the healthcare system.

Welcome to a New Womanhood

Despite the heavy subject matter, this book ends on a triumphant note, documenting how people are creating new bodily realities for themselves and others. I'll chronicle how the early chapters' characters realized their challenges reflected underlying problems - then solved them. Readers will find out how one woman learned her "normal" period pain stemmed from a common yet poorly grasped illness, how another invented a device to treat painful intercourse, and how one discovered her orgasmic capacity at a masturbation workshop. Though the last few millennia have devised a dismal definition of womanhood, a new narrative of our bodies is emerging, thanks to women like these. Forward-looking healthcare providers and entrepreneurs are combating period pain and PMS. Activists, artists, and academics are spreading awareness of what women...