Tallulah Pomeroy - A Girls Guide to Personal Hygiene: True Stories, Illustrated

A Girls Guide to Personal Hygiene Copyright 2018 by Tallulah Pomeroy All rights reserved First Soft Skull edition: 2018 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pomeroy, Tallulah, author, illustrator. Title: A girls guide to personal hygiene: true stories, illustrated /
by Tallulah Pomeroy. Description: New York : Soft Skull, [2017] Identifiers: LCCN 201703957 3| ISBN 9781593761820
(pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781593761998 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH : GirlsHealth and hygieneComic books,
strips, etc. | Graphic novels.

Classification: LCC R A 777.25 .P66 2017 | DDC 613/.04243dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039573 Cover design by www.salu.io Book design by James Sutton Published by Soft Skull Press 1140 Broadway, Suite 704 New York, NY 10001 www.softskull.com Soft Skull titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West Phone: 866-400-5351 Printed in Canada 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is dedicated to the girl who did a shit in the sink. Youre an inspiration to many. Contents Foreword A Girls Guide to Personal Hygiene began when I overheard two girls talking about a friend of theirs. When this friend had been on tour with the rugby team at her university, shed drunkenly done a shit in the sink. Ew, gross, said one of the girls to the other. Shes not a girl if she did that.

She may have a vagina, but shes not a girl. I thought that was pretty funny. I wondered how many things I had done that would make me not a girl in their eyes. And what about my girlfriends? I set up a Facebook group to nd out what disgusting things everyone had done, intending to make a small book out of the stories. It wasnt just nosiness. Id realized that most of the pressure to behave in a certain feminine way comes from other women.

If we could admit that we are pretty grossthough not all of us have gone as far as that rugby playermaybe we could relax a little. But the seeds of the project were sown earlier, with Wetlands by Charlotte Roche. Read this, said a friend. Itll make you feel like a prude. I did; it did. In the novel, the protagonist, Helen, is stuck in the hospital following some anal pubetrimming gone wrong, and if that makes you squirm, just you wait.

Helen unabashedly revels in all her crevices and odors. Id rarely even heard anyone say discharge, and here was Helen joyfully wiping hers in public places for the pleasure of knowing it would get on someones hands. It was a revelation. It didnt make me want to go smearing my bodily uids out in the world, but I became aware of things I do that I keep secret for fear of being improper. Id been indoctrinated into being uncomfortable with my own body. Were told to take care of our lady gardens with a delicate intimate wash, destroying all our lovely self-cleaning systems in the process, and as Helen would saygetting rid of the attractive personal wafts that tingle the nostrils of admirers.

Girls who think we should smell oral, I decided, arent having much fun. The response to the Facebook group was amazing. At rst we were tentative, but soon it turned into this huge repulsive outpouring. I almost wished I could close the lid again. There were stories that made defecating in a sink seem like a pretty polite thing to do. Wheres your modesty, girls? went a voice in my head, probably the voice of the teacher who told my date at the school disco to take his hands off my bum.

Sure , the voice went, were all human, but do we need to shout about it? And while I admired peoples honesty, it was another thing for it to be my own project. Id meet friends of friends who knew of the group, and theyd start going into detail about the last time they shat themselves in public. Nice to meet you, too , Id think, but were at the pub. Can I drink my beer and not talk about poo for a minute? Just because I started this damn thing doesnt mean Im hungry for poo stories. Im not making this book to ll a gap in my bookshelf, because nobody was writing about my favorite topic, personal hygiene. I have a tendency to birth ideas and then abandon them.

Like the goat farm I was going to set up with my sister. We made a list of appropriate goat names, from Abigail to Priscilla, and that was where it ended. No doubt the Girls Guide would have gone the same way if it werent for the collective enthusiasm of the other girls who were taking part. They gave me condence, and I didnt want to let them down. Id been made uncomfortable in my new position as a receptacle for other peoples dirty stories, but it was exactly that sense of shame I wanted to combat. I began to like the new conversations we were having in the pub about what made women feminine and what an equivalent book would be for men.

And the group evolved on its own, becoming something more than just an outlet for long-buried atrocities. We started asking questions PLEASE , IS IT JUST ME ?!!!and offering helpful hints about things like those new period pants Ive yet to try. The responsibility I felt toward the other girls was also a burden. What had begun as a tiny idea was becoming unwieldy and public and a little bit scary. I enlisted the help of my friend James, a graphic designer. Wed wanted to make a book together for a while, but due to the aforementioned habit of carelessly ditching ideas, Id never managed to give him any material.

Now I needed him to relieve some of the pressure on me and provide another perspective. James is a very clean person, as many designers tend to be, and his enthusiasm reassured me I wasnt making something so obscene Id be hounded from society. We chose which stories to publish together, gravitating toward habits and private routines over anecdotes. Accidents happen to us all; no surprises there. I wanted to hear the things girls do but usually hide from everyone, even in our climate of public sharing. It was interesting to see which stories we each found unendurable.

James was made faint by the one about freely bleeding into your pants, which didnt bother me at all. I was more disturbed by people eating their own toenails. James made sure we chose stories of varying length and tone, while I looked out for ones that would make good illustrations. Starting the drawings was a whole new kettle of sh. Originally Id envisioned little cartoons, drawn over the course of one afternoon. But now that people were paying attention, that didnt feel appropriate.

Women had taken time to write their confessions in funny and interesting ways; I wanted my drawings to live up to the stories. After the usual procrastination period of several months, I started laboring over sticky pen-and-ink drawings and meticulous collages, trying to be professional. The Girls Guide was never meant to be professional, though, and it was when I returned to what I love bestdrawing quickly and easily with my fountain pen, no drafts or second thoughtsthat it came together. Its funny how long it takes to learn that what comes naturally is the good stuff. The rst incarnation of the project was a small zine with twenty illustrated stories, risograph-printed by Hato Press in London. We launched it with an exhibition at a youth center in Bristol in the U.K.

I hoped teenagers would read the stories and learn early on that girls can be gross, and thats all right. Get em while theyre young. Its probably too late for my grandmother; she came to the launch, beautifully dressed for the occasion, but Im sadly never going to hear the word discharge pass her lips. My favorite response to the show was from an eighteen-year-old boy: Its such a relief. Im moving in with three girls next year, and now I know theyre human, too. Now the book is much longer and fuller than the original zine, and Im interested to see how the Girls Guide fares with a new audience.