A few days before ovulation, the glands in the cervix produce a special type of mucus. You can determine it yourself on the outside of the vagina. This slime is clear and shiny, like raw egg whites, and sometimes stringy. Then you are fertile.
I had a little cold, but not corona, and decided to join for a night cap in M.’s room where T. and B. were hanging on the couch after dinner with good prosecco that T. always brings. Whilst eating left-over supermarket Tiramisu from the box, we found ourselves talking about underwear. The conversation started when I complimented my friend B. on some beautiful undies that I had stolen from her closet after I had bled all over my own during sex on her couch after the party where we all fell in love with Nsasi, as in they literally put a spell on us. We were just looking at them in their magical kitchen booth broiling their trance for us and we remained under it for the rest of the night, leaving with a full heart and maybe chlamydia as well. The panties were a kind of “granny” model but make-it-sexy, with a high cut in the front, a bit 80's and fairly sheer. B. complimented me back. To be precise, she said “your underwear game is actually also very strong!!” to which M. asked “but where do y’all buy nice underwear??” I said that most of my underwear was purchased at Weekday, "BUT (and this is where we all found ourselves a bit baffled) I keep ruining them because there's a couple of days, right before my period where my discharge is so acidic that it bleaches the crotch of my underwear.” T., B. and M. just screamed in absolute agreement. And then we just sat there for a while, realizing that we all experience this phenomena, and that we had all wondered if this was like a weird trait of our own pussy, or if it were a general thing.
And apparently it’s a very general thing. To dick owning people reading this, I can imagine you wonder: is this a daily pussy practice? To which the only correct answer is: Oh no no no... it is most certainly not. It’s two, maybe three days of the month where this happens. In my cyclical experience it happens somewhere after my ovulation but before the PMS really fully hits. It’s a strange and thriving time. Your fertile days are over but even though in theory you can now fuck without protection, you’re not so UBERhorny as earlier in the cycle. Instead, you are just PRETTY horny, but in a bit of an agitating, I would say testo driven way, and during sex you don’t really get wet-wet-wet. And then, it is somehow a Wednesday or a Friday afternoon and you get up from your chair in bus 80 with end destination Haarlem CS, it happens: “FRHGFROP” a blob of white goo comes out all of a sudden, but like so much that you can feel it happening instantly and you know it is getting into your underwear and leaking straight through it.
I have the sense that the BLOB in porn (since it looks a little bit like a creampie) is considered a sign of extreme horny sexy, but I don’t really think it is HORNY-horny as such. I mean, sure it is SEXY but whatever, everything is sexy. It’s just not that bodily lube-reaction to make X slide in smoothly <take-me-now> kinda substance, on the contrary. It is definitely more yogurt than lube. And just like yogurt, it's not really lube, innit.
There are actually three different fluids at play inside the pussy: there’s discharge, the clear or white-ish stuff that has a slight odor and appears throughout the cycle. Arousal fluid (the wet-wet-wet) has more of a slippery texture and is present only when horny or during sex. And cervical fluid, which is more like mucus, feels sticky, and appears most often during ovulation to assist spermz in successfully reaching an egg. So if the BLOB is not hawt, or then what is it actually for? Discharge is composed of mucus, fluid, shedding cells, and (good) bacteria. The rest is made up of transudate from the vaginal walls and secretions from glands.
We learn about pH value: the scale between basic bitch and acidic runs from 0 to 14, whereby a pH of less than 7 is considered acidic, and above 7 basic. For pussy it shifts throughout the cycle: between 3.8 and 4.5 which is MODERATELY acidic.
However, what constitutes a “normal” pH level can vary based on the stage of
your life. For example, during reproductive years, pussy should be below, or equal to 4.5. Whereas after menopause and right before menstruation a healthy pH tends to be higher than 4.5. Basically, pussy gets sweeter the older it gets. After menopause a drop in estrogen levels occurs which causes the vagina to return to a state similar to pre-puberty, which leaves pussy a bit dryer again.
But not only the pH value changes throughout the month. The fertility app that I use to track my cycle, tells me to take a meticulous look at my discharge. It wants me to disclose the following information: is it a lot, or is it light? Is the consistency sticky, watery, creamy, or does it look like egg-white perhaps? An age-old technique to track fertility is to scoop some of the discharge straight from your vulva and grab it between your thumb and index finger. Subsequently you rub the finger and the thumb together as if you’re trying to describe something complicated. For example, imagine you’re in your studio trying to solve an art-problem and you’re almost there, but not yet quite. After this gester of fingerspitzengefühl (I think this should be the name for the app) you open and close the index finger and thumb, turning it into a Pacman eating eggs. When it is possible to form a slimy thread of discharge (as if the Pacman is having morning-sickness) you are fertile.
But why is this bleach blob missing in the schedule?? Why isn’t there space for the acid burner of my crotch, the buttermilk of my muff, my cunt ayran? The obvious reason is that it’s deemed irrelevant. Once the egg is released, you’re no longer fertile, so why bother tracing your discharge. The egg stays alive in the fallopian tube no longer than 24 hours whilst it travels to the womb. Sperm on the other hand stays alive in the belly for about 6 days. And their life expectancy can even extend to 9 when there’s multiple fuck-people involved. Have you ever wondered why the shape of a dick is the shape of a dick, with that mushroom shaped tip? With the edge of the tip one scoops out the cum of a lover’s previous cutie. In cum live three types of sperm cell variants: a neutral one (not the sharpest tool in the shed, but a fairly mediocre sperm cell that likes football and good vibes only), the SWIMMER (obviously a bit of a Chad), and the most interesting one: the blocker. The blocker is a sluggish sperm cell with a very broad wiggly tail, whose sole purpose in life is to block other people’s swimmers from reaching the egg.
Meanwhile in the cycle, you do the math, the ovulation around day 14 minus 6-9 alive sperm days (depending on slut era yes/no) are the amount of RED days in my app. However no ovulation is that static, and also, after the liberation from the nazi’s, people reported to have 2 ovulations a month, so really this method is all just a little bit of a gamble. But the problem with this way of thinking is that fertility becomes the main reason to track your cycle. It assumes heterosexual CIS-people having monogamous unprotected sex only witheachother with the risk or wish for pregnancy. But tracking cycles shouldn’t only have to do with fertility, instead it’s a form of mental health regulation and empowerment to understand when your crazy HORNINESS is driven by hormones, and when you really JUST like the person. When you have thoughts about hitting or murdering a person or yourself, but it turns out you just have PMS. We ought to let go of the idea that the menstrual cycle is inherently gendered, and replace the pink and purple apps with hormonal cycles that everyone, regardless of their gender (assigned or otherwise) experiences. Besides, none of these apps consider endometriosis, a condition where cells grow outside the uterus, or PCOS: a hormonal problem related to ovulating, high levels of androgens, and many small cysts on the ovaries. The apps only show how the tech industry makes money from “intimate surveillance”. Whilst all I want to know - MORELESS - is when the BLOB is coming and how BLOB could be made useful within my cycle and beyond.
With a large spoon I scoop out the last bites of Tiramisu. The cold substance warms up in my mouth. I would say it’s definately heavy, creamy, slightly strechy and very sweet. A pH of about 7.4! By now most of my underwear crotches are bleached. In every single knicker, the piece of fabric (underwear sold in the EU is bound by law to contain a cotton liner in order to prevent candida, also known as yeast infection or thrush) at the very center, where my inner labia folds out and where the urethra and the vagina softly rub their backs against each other, a slightly discolored spot is visible with the bare eye, and that’s a guarantee.
Bits of this text are set in Louise, an open source typeface designed by Ange Degheest as a tribute to neon signs and to teacher and political activist Louise Michel.