Love in the Time of... OW

I spent my lunch break this Monday buying an umbrella at Macy’s. Before the employee helping me showed me where it was, she was stopped by a man who asked her if she had kids. "NO!" she yelled, "I’m a VIRGIN!" She then proceeded to show me a display of titanium umbrellas, explaining that she knew they’d hold up in severe weather, because her "spine is made of titanium, and it hasn’t given out during sex yet… virgin? HA!" I can’t say that when I asked her for help I expected to learn about the duress her spine experiences during sex, but if that little lesson meant assurance my umbrella will hold its own in the rain, then all right.

I bought the umbrella and went back to work. My manager had suggested I go to Macy’s in the first place, and asked if I had found what I needed. I told her what had happened. She was horrified – and confused. She didn’t understand why I was amused, but was not particularly shocked by what had happened. I shrugged and went to the backroom to put my stuff away. When I got back out, there were customers in the store, and we didn’t continue the conversation.

I wasn’t taken aback by the Woman of Steel because, for some reason, people have always shared random facts about themselves with me. I don’t know what it is, but many times, all I have to do is breathe near someone and they’re ready to share their deep dark secrets with me. With friends and family, this type of thing is not so much out of the ordinary (in fact, I tend not to question it at all). Strangers spilling their guts to me, on the other hand, took a bit longer to get used to. But, I directed a forty woman cast for The Vagina Monologues. And I still have regular interactions with customers who are quick to share many an unsavory concern with me. My favorite to date would be the man who told me he was hurt because he was sleeping with a sixty-five year-old neighbor of his, and thought that she was willing to have sex with him, but not commit, because he had dry skin on his left shoulder blade. At this point, there’s a ton that I’ll laugh at but not so much that can shock me.

Or so I thought. Later Monday evening, my friend Chris told me a story about a customer in a café he once worked in. The man was a regular, and when business was slow, they’d chat. One day, the customer showed Chris some tattoos he had on his bicep. They were lines… which marked the depth of how far he’d gotten his arm into men’s anal cavities by fisting them. I cracked up and squealed and hid and involuntarily clenched my own butt muscles - which I decided must have been my way of assuring them that I would NEVER allow such an invasion to occur. In any way, shape or form. Ow, ow, ow. No thank you. Arms are not tiny, and Chris assured me that this fellow did not have abnormally petite arms. I was incredulous. Was such a thing even possible?!

I don’t pretend to understand biology or anything remotely intricate about the make up of the human body, but it seemed to me that such an act would have to severely injure the man allowing such an excavation. I called Noori, one of my roommates from college, who is now in medical school. Noori probably curses the day she told me that she was pre-med, because I took this as permission to ask her any and all remotely scientific questions that crossed my mind. Sometimes they were medicine-related, but most of the time they were more along the lines of "You took Chemistry - do you think the fact that the intercom in my room crackles even when you aren’t in your room means that there’s a ghost in our apartment?!" I figured since she graduated with a Biology major, this question had to be up her alley.

"Hi Noori!! I hope I’m not interrupting your work, but I was just wondering if it’s actually physically possible for a full grown man to stick his arm into another man’s rectum so far that he gets in up to, like, mid-bicep?"

She didn’t even pause.

"Yes."

"NO WAY! Explain!!"

"The human body is continuous. There might be some resistance, but if you really forced it, you could technically get your arm in that far."

"How do YOU know?"

I could hear her roll her eyes.

"You know how doctors snake cameras through peoples’ bodies, and they enter through their butts? For rectal exams? It’s the same concept. Though I imagine that after you have an entire arm inside of you, you might have a hell of a lot more trouble sitting down afterwards. For, like, a week. At least."

You learn something new everyday.

Image of a rectal thermometer probe for rats via adinstruments.com.