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Running ‘till your nipples bleed

An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please.

Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat.

“I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.”

I remain frozen in my meerkat position as the murmuring recedes. Did I imagine that? What happened to discretion, to modesty? The obsession with periods, childbirth and discussing sex lives is one of the horrors of working in an all-women environment. Is there no escape, not even out in open country? Not surprising that the two men had headed off fast.

Yet what is the first thing I hear at work today? That handfuls of Vaseline are needed to stop my boss’s thighs chafing together, and that great tubs of the stuff are handed out along the Marathon route. He has run so much that his nipples have bled through his shirt, and he has to wear plasters over them, or cover them in dollops of grease. He has huge lardy stains around his man boobs.

As if that was not enough, when I get home, a friend phones and tells me that her rugby playing partner has only half a nipple on one side because, on the pitch in very cold weather, they freeze and the rough shirts rub them off with the friction. Oooh. Women are desperately unlucky to be bothered with the whole damned faulty reproductive system, with its leakages, its prolapses, its yeasty things, its viral things, too much sex, not enough sex, hideous birthing traumas or no births or pregnancies at all but, all these freakish defects are accidents of nature. The men are CHOOSING to chafe their thighs and break their nipples off. That's just weird.

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