Sixteen, Silent, and Somewhere Else: My First G... · Storyflo

I left my body before I left the gynecologist’s exam room. I didn’t have a word for it yet. I was 16, staring at ceiling tiles while a stranger’s gloved hands moved inside me, my most private and sacred parts, and by the time he finished, some version of me had already gone silent and small, and stayed that way for decades.

I’d been dating my boyfriend for two years and believed I loved him. A friend a few years older gave me the name of her gynecologist. I doubt she recommended the experience, it was just what you had to do if you didn’t want your parents involved and you think going on an oral contraceptive is the right next step. She was 17, and neither of us knew yet what vetting would even mean.

I made the appointment myself and sat alone in the waiting room. I tried to look like I knew what I was doing, like I was worldly, but inside, I was panicking.

He asked if I’d had sex yet. I hadn’t. Then came the pelvic exam and the Pap smear, cold and quick and utterly indifferent to whether I was present for any of it.

So I wasn’t. I wanted the appointment over. I wanted the prescription for the pill. I wanted out, and the fastest way out was to leave first, quietly, from the inside. I had learned that years earlier, like many girls do.

For years I mistook what I did in that room for shyness. I would try to find ways to stay present when my spirit rose to the ceiling and watched what was happening. It was my nervous system doing precisely what nervous systems are built to do when a body is being handled instead of asked: it leaves, because it has already learned there is nowhere else to go.

Dissociation, I’d later come to understand, is the body’s oldest form of self-protection, efficient and adaptive and older than language, and mine had already been well trained by sixteen.

This experience was not about one careless doctor: it is what medical training still rewards, throughput over presence, procedure over permission, a pelvic exam handled like a checklist item rather than as first contact with another human being’s body. No one taught him to ask if I wanted to be there or if I was prepared for sexual intercourse or even pleasure, because no one asks that in medical training, and no one asked me because the architecture of that visit was never built around my consent to begin with.

I have spent 30 years and seven books trying to undo what that seven minutes did to me, and I suspect the girl on that table is the reason I became the kind of gynecologist I am now, the one determined that no 16-year-old would leave her body behind in my exam room the way I left mine in his.

A doctor who treated my first visit as an important rite of passage. A sacred ritual of information and education. An initiation, not a quick procedure to complete as soon as possible. A conversation about pleasure and desire, asked with curiosity instead of measured off a checklist before a prescription was written. A diagram of the whole anatomy, including the clitoris, most of which lives beneath the surface you can see and extends nine to eleven centimeters into the body, accomplishing far more than anyone had ever told me it could. An explanation that female orgasm is not a smaller, slower version of male orgasm, but its own physiology, deserving its own instruction and its own respect.

A hand mirror, so that instead of leaving my body, I could have met it for the first time and marveled at the beauty and architecture of the female vulva and vagina, and especially the clitoris.

I wish someone had asked, gently, whether anything from my childhood still lingered in my body and colored my expectations of privacy and consent. Whether anyone had ever touched me without my permission, even though the quick gynecological visit was never built to hold a question that large. Now I believe it should be built to hold it anyway and to ask.

This is the visit I try to give every young patient now: her body introduced to her with curiosity instead of processed with a checklist, pleasure named as a legitimate subject instead of an afterthought, her nervous system treated as intelligent instead of inconvenient or ignored.

I believe this as a physician who was once that girl on the table: a first exam either teaches a girl that her body belongs to her, or it teaches her the opposite, like it was for me. Maybe that experience grew the capacity in me to imagine a different possibility for girls and young women who are on the cusp of sexuality and body literacy.

What do you wish had happened instead?

If you have a daughter, or a young woman you love, what do you want for her?

And if you’re a clinician: what would you have needed someone to teach you, so you could give her something different than what was given to you?

Sixteen, Silent, and Somewhere Else: My First G... · Storyflo