All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death—could now be declared invalid, unnecessary, one never felt it at all. One was only told it, and now one is to be reprogrammed, fixed up, rendered again as inviolate and unstained as the “modern” little girls in the Tampax advertisements.
