Been getting a lot of the same questions since I started my blog, so I’m putting them all here. My ask box is closed. For any other questions, use your imagination or die wondering, I guess.
Hold up. You have teeth on your vagina?!
Technically, I have teeth on my vulva, but I’ll try not to be pedantic about it.
Were you born that way?
I was born with my lower teeth in the same way I was born with my upper teeth. They were recessed, waiting to erupt and break skin.
When did you find out you had them?
I was 11 when they broke through. The pain woke me up from a summer lie-in, a burning, itching, and piercing pressure ripping through the skin of one of the most sensitive parts of my body. I woke up howling.
I tried scratching to at least relieve the itching, but my fingers met thirty-two bleeding wounds, each with something jagged pushing through it.
My mom burst into my room as I was staring at my blood-covered hand and crying. “What happened?”
I answered between those involuntary, hitching sobs kids do when they’re trying to act brave. “Mommy I—hichichic—I think—hichichic—I got my period.”
She softened and chuckled, assuming I was being dramatic about cramps and not teeth stabbing their way through my genitals. She said she’d get me a pad and an Advil and it would be over in a few days.
“But what—hichichic—about— hichichic—the bones?”
“The bones?”
She pulled me into the hall bathroom and asked me to show her what I meant. When I pushed my shorts down and showed her the white crowns of teeth emerging from the last place they should be, she screamed.
Which, honestly, fair.
How do sex partners react?
Until I was 23, I told guys I didn’t like to be touched there, that I was saving it for marriage. It was torture, treating men like gods who deigned to let someone like me pleasure them while I got nothing in return, because wasn’t the most valuable thing I could offer them a thing to be screamed at? I preferred lovers who left before morning so I could finally get myself off, fingers gliding past slick enamel as I imagined them seeing my secret and wanting it, lowering themselves to kiss it the same way they did my mouth, tongues breaching ossified walls to explore the inner soft.
Have you ever found someone who was cool with it?
I thought Samuel (name changed obviously) could be that man. We met in a History of Medicine master’s program, his thesis on the field of plastic surgery, mine on the history of teratology—the study of the people old schools of medicine labeled marvels, God-touched portents, monsters.
We bonded over the power struggles and breakthroughs of Victorian medicine, took daytrips to Philadelphia and wandered the exhibits of the Mütter Museum, sharing reverent silence as we passed the wax bust of a woman with a dark horn curling from the center of her forehead, skeletons with calcified muscles, conjoined twins linked by bridges of flesh and bone.
I thought he’d be unfazed by a body like mine. I imagined him seeing teeth on a vulva and saying, “Oh, is that all? Call me when your colon is the size of a foal.”
I wasn’t prepared to be his museum exhibit come to life.
It was a humid June night a year into our relationship, and I was loopy on wine and carbonara from the Italian place we’d just left, and he had an arm around my waist, and his chest rumbled against my ear when he told me he loved me for the first time.
“When we get home, I want to show you something,” I told him, and he must have heard the desire weighting my voice, because he kissed me the second we crossed the threshold of his apartment, peeled away my little black dress, carried me to his bed.
“Don’t freak out,” I said, wine blurring the edges of my words as I pushed down my pantyhose and underwear, laid on my back, and spread my legs.
He didn’t scream, just said, “Oh!” like a boy getting ready to imprison a weird bug in a jar.
I withered. “What do you think?”
He ran a finger over the crowns of my lower molars. “This is wild. Is it real?”
“It’s real, baby. No more secrets. I want you.”
He backed away from me and laughed. “Be serious. You really expect me to put my dick in something that has teeth in it?”
I snapped my legs shut. “You know, my mouth has teeth in it.”
We broke up after that.
So, you’re single? What’s dating like now?
I have three rules: go on at least three dates to judge his character, have the conversation before we’re alone with our clothes off, and never trust a guy who’s too into it. Trust me, the guy who says, “Oh, that’s not for me, thanks,” is a thousand percent better than the guy who gets obsessed with you because he’s a “monsterfucker” and had a formative experience watching the Hydra eat Hercules in Disney’s Hercules.
Post pics?
No.
Can we DM you for pics?
Fuck off.
Why not pull them out?
Have you ever been to the dentist? Have you ever been to the gynecologist? If someone found a fun new way to combine those experiences that made them 1,000 times more intimate, painful, and expensive, would you be thrilled to try it?
Do you like your teeth?
I guess, yeah. I take a lot of pictures of them, for no other reason than they’re mine and I’ve never seen anything like them. In the right light, they look like a moat of pearls guarding an oyster, effervescent and marine. I think, this belongs in a museum.
Forget the Mütter, baby, put me in the Met.
