Y2Ko.b. by Samantha Eyler
“Here were clinical images of women touching their own bodies”
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It was roundabout the time of my prepubescence, while I was preoccupied with dismay at the churnings of my own inconvenient physiology, that my preacher-father grew deeply preoccupied with Y2K.
This wasn’t odd for him. My dad enjoyed seizing on mini-Apocalypses of all sorts (the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges were particular monuments in his mental landscape) and turning them into practice scenarios to prepare us, his family and his flock, for the persecutions awaiting us during the End Times.
In fact my dad had elaborated his own maverick eschatology, a narrative so far outside the mainstream religious dogma—even within our fundamentalist evangelical circles—that it would eventually cost him his ordination as a Baptist minister.
It went something like this:
One day, any day now, a world leader called the Antichrist was going to appear. (Dad’s bet was that it was the current Pope.) This Antichrist would inaugurate a seven-year reign of death and plagues called the Tribulation, during which time he would force everyone in the world to accept a mark (the number 666) on their hands or foreheads.
This mark would guarantee their short-term survival but, alas, consign them to an eternity in the Lake of Fire. To avoid this damnation, all Christians had to prepare ourselves to get beheaded.
Like, literally. By a guillotine.
With this grim future looming ahead of us, Dad conceived of his task as both pastor and father as keeping us, his flock, always psychologically and emotionally prepared for our impending martyrdom-by-beheading.
For him Y2K was a like a gift from God, offering the perfect direction in which to channel not just his inner Apostle Paul, but also (I suspect) his sense that his particular genius had been unjustly overlooked by the world. When those computers rolled over from “99” to “00” and went haywire or simply shut down, that would spell the end of the technological age and all the social distortions that it brought along with it. At the dawn of January 1, 2000, just being what he was—the escaped shampoo thief-cum-Baptist preacher, the stubborn nonconformist, the gun-toting cowboy—would finally be an asset to my father, not a liability, and he would shine.
So, as he always did when bitten by a new bug of fanaticism, Dad set us to work. We started stockpiling things in our Wyoming basement, canned goods, toiletries, bottled water—fallout-shelter supplies of that nature. Then we all settled back and awaited 12:59pm on December 31, 1999, and with it, our practice run for the End of the World.
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Roundabout this time I, the preacher’s only daughter, was a preteen living in a fog of existential anxiety. I could never manage to explain the alienation to anyone, but later I would understand it as having something to do with my certainty that, if I was to be spared eternal damnation, I would have to literally surrender my head.
I had read once that human eyes continued to see for two minutes after a person’s head was cut off, and that the effect of seeing one’s own severed, headless body was instant insanity.
I tried to convince myself that, in the moment of truth, I would certainly choose those two minutes of insanity – those two minutes contemplating my body decoupled from the seat of my own consciousness – over eternal hellfire. Nevertheless, a still small voice nagged: it was really quite hard to be sure what one would do under such circumstances, wasn’t it?
These considerations were complicated by agonizing doubts about my own righteousness, which I increasingly felt to be under threat by the inconvenience of a dawning sexuality. Our Good Book made clear that, while it may be better to marry than to burn, the flame of sexual desire—especially on the part of women, who should be demure and passive and virginal at all times—was a source of great evil.
And that great evil seemed to be colonizing my body without my consent. I had long ago (mostly) weaned myself off the terrible sin of masturbation, but was still often awakened in the wee hours by my Kegels gasping at some dream or another over which I had absolutely no control.
The workings of my vagina were in general entirely mysterious to me. At a loss as to how to have any sort of sensible conversation on the subject with anyone I knew, I turned to dictionaries and encyclopedias, cross-referencing words like copulation and coitus and intercourse until I’d put together a fuzzy understanding of how bodies were meant to fit together.
For detailed diagrams on the biological engineering of which I was in possession, I turned to the informational leaflets on toxic shock syndrome that I found inside the boxes of tampons stored in my family’s Y2K stockpile in the basement.
As any woman knows, these leaflets show drawings like this:
And this:
Why the discovery of these leaflets should electrify me was unclear, but it did. Here were clinical images of women touching their own bodies in ways that I had expressly prohibited myself from ever doing – and seemingly with no sign that they suffered that inconvenient sexual burning I was trying to banish from my life forever.
I had never had a period, and was not at all looking forward to the prospect. But driven by this strange new fascination, I started stealing tampons from the Y2K stockpile and following the instructions in the leaflet to insert them. I would then take a quick physical and psychological scan to determine my feelings on the small curiosity of having an object in my vagina, and then remove the tampon and throw it away.
Like mostly everything else in my evangelical life, this odd compulsion came accompanied with good doses of both guilt and fear. Firstly, there was the theft that was involved: I was careful to distribute my removal of tampons across several different boxes so it wouldn’t be too noticeable that they were missing when, after Y2K, some menstruating woman came looking for them. But as my test tampon insertions carried on indefinitely, some of the boxes became noticeably lighter, and I thus lived in fear that I’d soon be discovered and punished for all this pointless fiddling with my own vagina.
And then, one day, I was indeed discovered. My usually taciturn mother found an empty o.b. wrapper in the bathroom bin and confronted me about it, suspicious and confused as to why her non-menstruating daughter should be using tampons. Being the only other female on our farm but still utterly incapable of discussing anything whatsoever related to my own genitals, I had no choice but to tell my mother a bald-faced lie and deny having anything to do with the tampon wrapper.
It’s safe to say that my righteousness levels and existential anxiety were in no way helped by this sin. Soon thereafter I managed to wean myself off the tampon fascination, and I felt like a much better person for it.
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The night my period finally did come, I instantly knew what it was, due to all my dictionary cross-referencing and o.b. tamponning experience. I couldn’t admit any of this to my mother, though, so I went to my parent’s room crying and pretending to think I was ill. My mother, endlessly delicate and business-like as usual, consoled me and offered up a panty liner, not a tampon.
It was my father, though, who was perversely moved by the event. I felt his eyes falling on me in a different light in them as he teased me about having “become a woman” in a way that seemed not just entirely tasteless but even lecherous. And myself, by extension, thoroughly lewd and tarnished for being the object of it.
With blood dripping out of my body onto the totally inadequate new pad, I was drowned by violent hatred and revulsion for my father and for myself and for every single thing around me in equal measure, except for my mother, who was the only one who understood any of it.
I cried until dawn.
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On December 31, 1999, by then aged 13, I went to bed early and spent hours watching the green digits on my alarm clock flick toward midnight.
In the months since the tampon events and the arrival of the period I had undergone a sort of hardening against the insanity my family operated in, had discovered a way to freeze out my father’s excesses, and now, awaiting his long-anticipated mini-Apocalypse, I was no longer afraid, certainly not thinking about my own beheading, just lightly curious.
When the clock rolled over to 12:00 and nothing happened, there was no surprise, just something like smug satisfaction.
I rolled over and fell asleep.
The next day, my dad said nothing whatsoever about Y2K.
In fact, as far as I can recall, I never heard him mention it again.
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Header image courtesy of St. Francis Elevator Ride. To view his Artist Feature go here.
Samantha Eyler is an American writer, editor, and translator focused on gender, politics, and Latin America. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, New Internationalist, Quartz, Role Reboot, Everyday Feminism, Post Everything at WaPo, and elsewhere. She lives in Medellin, Colombia, with her baby girl Jasper, her baby daddy D, and her dog Jinx. Follow her on Twitter at @sameyler.