Maybe we SHOULD keep our legs closed
Hi! I'm a little late on this one today. This week was weird in a different way than the previous week was weird, and I was otherwise occupied. Oh, okay. We had a tornado within five miles of the trailer park and the power was out for more than twenty-four hours. I have to say that as I grew up in the South and therefore spent my formative years in Tornado Alley (with the exception of 1987 to 1989, which years I spent in the shadow of the northeastern edge of the Ring of Fire), there was many a time we had a nasty enough storm that a tornado warning was issued, and sometimes we even saw the sky go a funny color, but I never had the nasty I'm-gonna-die foreboding that I did early in the morning on Wednesday. Okay, now I know what that feels like. Let's never do that again.
I should also update everyone on the biopsy thing since I already wrote far too much on the subject of my recent health woes and then I kind of left some of you hanging. Not only did that come back benign, turns out your milk ducts can age just like the rest of you, and sometimes it shows up on a mammogram. Nowadays I just assume the human body will do weird things as a matter of course, but it still surprises me sometimes.
However, I may have a heart issue. I am not sure yet what it might be but I have my suspicions. Probably a thing I can live with, because if it's what I think it is I have had it all my life anyway. Just one more thing to keep my life interesting, I guess.
And speaking of interesting. I have been studiously trying to ignore the fact that, unless I can figure out some way to move back to Ohio and not wind up homeless, which is not going to be anytime soon anyway (and we're talking on the order of a couple years at least), for better or for worse I now live in one of the most anti-abortion states in the Union, and it's mostly worse. I may be in menopause now after a false start in early '22, and that's a relief, but I still didn't want to see how bad it was because I am not the only woman living in this state and a whole lot of us are still fertile. I can only take so much bad news.
Well, with the recent hijinks in Arizona and the liberal media going into predictable and justified hysterics and also suddenly remembering that it's women who get pregnant [gasp], I had occasion to see a map of the United States on Dad's television screen complete with a color key for which states have the worst restrictions... and Louisiana has outlawed abortion at conception. And I have some questions about that. What do they mean by conception? Do they mean fertilization? Because if that's what they mean, there isn't any pregnancy yet at fertilization. The fertilized egg must implant itself into the uterine lining for the pregnancy to actually begin. If the fertilized egg just passes out of the woman's body, how do you know that's happened, and how would you prosecute it, since women don't usually make this happen on purpose? This ranks up there with lawmakers labeling the procedure to clean out a woman's uterus after an incomplete miscarriage as an "abortion," resulting in formerly-pregnant-but-still-carrying women dying of sepsis. If you scoffed at the idea that legislators who know absolutely fuck-all about female anatomy or the pregnancy process are nevertheless writing laws about it, you need to wake the fuck up, because that is exactly what's happening.
That's bad enough. But it was the news that Virginia is now aiming both barrels at women's right to contraception that really pissed me off.
I am fifty years old. I have been politically aware since I was twenty or so. (Probably longer than that, but previous to that age it was more a child's understanding of things.) Roe vs. Wade was handed down almost a year before I was born, which means my mother literally chose to have me, because she had the option to not have me. I am absolutely fine with that, and feel more secure in my existence than people would who were conceived before January 1973, which is the exact opposite of what anti-abortionists tell me I should be feeling. And I've been watching them at work since the mid-1990s as well. I've seen the antics. I've heard the bullshit arguments. I've been outraged at the acts of terrorism. (Anti-abortionists and white nationalists, who are kissin' cousins anyway, are the reason I roll my eyes when people of their political ilk scream about "Muslim terrorists crossing the border." Is that professional jealousy I'm hearing?) None of it is new to me. Everything they're doing now is exactly what they said all along that they wanted to do.
In all that time, the liberal response has been the following:
-Threatening women with the repeal of Roe if we didn't vote for Democrats
-Refusing to make some version of Roe into federal law so we wouldn't have to rely on Supreme Court precedent
-Complaining that women are always responsible for contraception and demanding that scientists invent contraception for men but never demanding that men wear condoms (unless they were gay men, hence not in any danger of impregnating a woman, because apparently safe buggery is more important than not dying in childbirth)
-Doing absolutely nothing to make it safer for women to avoid sexual contact with men, since so many of us wind up in "romantic" relationships where we are actually economically dependent on them. In fact, gutting welfare and allowing the states to scale it back further
-Doing nothing to prevent men from using pregnancy and childbearing as a means to trap women. In fact, advocating for fifty-fifty custody under nearly all circumstances
-Doing nothing effective or meaningful to counteract the economic consequences of bearing children. In other words, they know having kids makes women broke or broker, and they don't care. At best, they make some anemic effort to "help" us and then let Republicans walk all over them to kill the bill in committee, veto the bill, or water down the law
We shouldn't have needed this latest insanity of Democrats no longer knowing what a woman is to understand that the Democrats have never really been in our corner, with the exception of individuals in that party who have done some real work for women and girls -- Hillary Clinton, for instance. (Yes. You can laugh at me all you want, but also go read about what she did with her life before she married Bill. Have you done even half that much for women and girls? No. Shut up, then.) But we need to start understanding it NOW, because the future they threatened us with is here, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS A DEMOCRAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE AND WE VOTED HIM IN. Guess we don't have to listen to that threat anymore, ladies. They fucked up good this time.
One nasty comment I kept hearing from the anti-abortionists year after year was some version of, "You should have kept your legs closed if you didn't want to get pregnant." And, true to form, the main way liberals responded to this statement was going, "Women have AGENCY and SEXUALITY and can fuck ANYONE WE WANT and YOU DON'T GET A SAY," as if us fucking whoever we want ensures we never face an unwanted pregnancy.
And we just sat there passively going "YEAH!" in response to whichever side we agreed with (unfortunately, some women hating themselves is a plague that is also taking down the rest of us), and nothing ever got better.
It's time to stop waiting for the adults to come back into the room. We ARE the adults, and clearly we can't trust anyone else to work this out for us.
I'm going to go back into my personal shit for an illustrative example.
I've had two kids. Pregnancy One was pretty uneventful until I went into labor, with the exception of a near-fainting episode because I rode my bicycle to the movie theater during the summer before I knew I was expecting (and this is probably related to that heart issue I might have, by the way). Pregnancy Two was on a whole 'nother planet. For about a week, maybe a bit longer (it's been twenty years!), I had this absolute blowup of inflammation body-wide that concentrated mainly in my big joints, especially my knees. You could SEE it in my knees -- it was horrid. It hurt to roll over in bed. I had to go up and down stairs sideways because my knees couldn't take the load-bearing otherwise. It was so bad that one of my babydaddy's cats even tried to "help" by sleeping across my knees when I was in bed and purring on them, which he had never done at any other time. He knew I was bad off. I sought medical attention two or three times only to have the inflammation subside before I could get in to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist, at which point the Catholic OB clinic it was attached to told me they couldn't see anything wrong and so my care would proceed as normal. After that, the festivities began with my daughter's father treating me like shit and making me miserable and finally kicking me out because I wouldn't shut up about it.
Fast-forward to when Kid Two was maybe two or so. Babydaddy and I were in the car one day and somehow lit upon a conversation about when and whether to try for the next kid.
I KNOW, RIGHT
I didn't even bring up the fighting or the reason I was not living with him. I reminded him of my inflammatory episode and expressed my fear that if I got pregnant again, it might happen again and for the entire nine months next time.
"Okay," he said. Thirty seconds later HE BROUGHT IT UP AGAIN.
I thought, Okay, that's it. Fun park's closed. And I had never had a lot of willpower where he was concerned up to that point. But I made good on it that time. That was 2006 or 2007. I have had no potentially procreative sexual contact since. With anyone.
And strangely, mysteriously, in all that time, somehow I have never given my daughter any younger siblings.
Imagine that.
It helps that no one ever tried to rape me. And I'm not full of myself in expressing a concern about potential rape. Men have fucked knotholes, tailpipes, sheep, six-week-old babies, and old women. You don't have to be beautiful or sexy to be a target. So that concern was never off the table for me, because I knew better. But I got very, very lucky, especially when you factor in that I spent several weeks last year living in my car and sleeping at rest areas.
So I'm aware there are still risks. But I'm wondering why more of us women aren't looking seriously at celibacy as an option.
Y'all know most men think sex is like porn and have never developed actual bedroom skills.
Y'all know forty percent of you have never had an orgasm, not even by yourselves, and that that's likely a conservative estimate.
Y'all know heterosexual relationships are all too often a bum deal for women.
Y'all know they make sex toys now, some actually quite good, and that those are legal in most states. (What the fuck, Alabama? Wait, okay, you're still allowed to own them there, just not sell them. So you have no excuse in Alabama either!)
WHY are we continuing to put up with this shit? Because, ladies, the abstinence-only people are absolutely right: you're never going to make a baby if you never go anywhere near semen or sperm.
I differ from the AO people in that I don't think a woman is immoral if she has procreative sex, and women have absolutely no obligation to sAvE tHeMsELvEs FoR MaRriAgE. All I am saying is look at the basic cause and effect.
It isn't any more helpful to believe that not wanting to be pregnant will save you from getting pregnant if you are still fucking men, than it is to believe that a man can become a woman by thinking he is one. They are both magical thinking and they both get women into a lot of trouble. And it is still magical thinking if you're using contraception, ladies. Contraception fails, especially since if you are on the pill or using a barrier (diaphragm, sponge, etc.), he thinks he doesn't have to use a condom. We all KNOW contraception fails. We use that as an argument for keeping abortion legal, remember?
You're going to go back to "what if I'm raped," and that is legit. I will point out that, except possibly in Virginia the way they are going, contraception and emergency contraception are probably still legal across the United States. Check the law where you are, but I don't think they've gotten that far yet. Still, how is "I might be raped" an argument for continuing to, as the kids put it, letting men "nut" in you? I might burn myself on the stove, so let me go jump into this housefire! No? Well then. The statistic saying one in four women become rape victims does not mean those women are raped daily or even once a year. If you are in a relationship, though, you might be having sex daily or at least fifty-two times a year. See the problem?
So it's something to seriously consider. The best part is, now we get to see for real how many of these men are actually "good men" when they are facing the prospect of no more nookie. At least the bastards have not banned female ownership of firearms, and we can still lock doors. The lives of women and girls are on the line here, and we need to stop talking about feminism and actually start doing it. If that means we all take up with battery-powered boyfriends until men stop treating us like baby-growing farm animals? So be it.