Too often we have to wage bloody war just to say “This is my body. It is mine. I decide what happens to it.” Too often we loose that fight. Every woman has her own unique story about and relationship to her reproductive organs. This is mine.

When I was four and a half, I knew I would never have children. I can draw a good assumption that my mom (being pregnant with my brother) had given me the abridged version of where babies come from, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is standing in our backyard next to a small pond, looking up at a red maple, and thinking very clearly that I never wanted to bear children. At all.

Over the years, my family assured me that I would want kids. Someday. That the no kids thing was a phase I would grow out of. To their credit, this faded out during college, as I continually maintained that no, I was going to be a really cool aunt when my brother and sister had their kids. What grew as I made my way though adolescence, was my visceral terror of pregnancy. Not pregnancy in general, or pregnancy as it happened to others, but the idea of my own body undergoing the process. The thought conjured up a Cronenberg-esque level of horror that (being an awkward and shy teenager at the best of times) I kept steadfastly to myself. Pregnancy scared me more than STD’s, more than AIDS. It was, bar none, the worst fate my teenage self could conjure up, and not because of the absolute havoc it would wreak on my life, but because I simply conjure no more horrifying physical trauma than pregnancy and childbirth.

In my adolescent mental landscape, pregnancy was never anything other than that which others would try to to force on me if I ever committed the sin of teenage sex. The subtext being not that pregnancy *could* happen if birth control failed, but that eventually, it *would* fail. (Remember kids, no method is foolproof! Except, y’know, not having sex at all. Which is what we’d really prefer you were doing. Not having sex. Ever. But if you do, here’s a condom. Which might fail. Toodles!)

The problem with this, of course, was that I was really curious about sex (as teenagers are), and bowled over with raging hormones. This whole sex thing was something I wanted to do, on my own damn terms, and in a way that would not destroy my life.

All this made me more than a little interested in mid 90’s abortion politics. And wow was it depressing. (Especially if you were a minor with limited access to transportation and money.) What I took away from it all back then was that access to that possibly-in-the-future needed abortion was not something I could take for granted, because a a lot of people were working hella hard to make sure that I would never be able to access it even it if wasn’t actually illegal. (And look at how horribly right I’ve been proven.) Really, I didn’t want to have to get one in the first place. (But again, wanted to see what the whole sex thing was about.)

So, surgery. Let’s just take the pregnancy option off the table entirely.

At first I thought I wanted a hysterectomy. (No really, this uterus thing is doing nothing but making me miserable one week out of every four. Can’t we just get rid of it?) Then I found out about tubal ligation (I can keep the estrogen? Cool.). I also found out that it was impossible to get if you were young. That’s ok, I thought to myself. I won’t be this young forever. And in the meantime, I would be responsible, and use condoms.

Eventually, I started having sex. Of course, the first time out, the condom broke. It’s funny how that can happen when you tell teenagers they should use condoms but don’t actually teach how to use them correctly. In spite of living though the 80’s and 90’s AIDS panic, no one (in school or out of it) had ever taught me how to correctly use a condom. Or how to use it incorrectly. Handing them out was deemed a victory in the war for safer sex. Cue several weeks of panic that I couldn’t share with ANYONE, as the boy in question had urged me not to go to my mom (He may have been under the impression that she’d gut him. Mom can be kinda fierce.) and I (not thinking too clearly) had agreed. I had no close friends I could talk to. Just me and him with this terrifying secret. Thankfully, it was a false alarm. We broke up not long after, though I don’t doubt that would have happened regardless. I’d fancied myself in love (or possibly very strong like), but I was more enamored with the concept of being-in-love and the longed for “normality” of having a boyfriend than I was actually-in-love with him.

I don’t remember exactly how long that stretch of time was between the condom breaking and my period coming around to assure me that no, my life wasn’t actually over. Two, maybe three weeks. I remember a sense of suffocating terror and occasional thoughts of suicide, punctuated by hiding in my room, punching my (traitorous) abdomen. I had no car, and very little money of my own. The single time my then-boyfriend had been able to get me into town to the local planned parenthood, it was closed. I felt utterly alone.

That was also the month my uncle and aunt were visiting with my newborn cousin. We had a fairly large family, and I’d never been skittish around small children (babysitting was a solid money maker, after all), so it was no surprise when they handed him to me for a few minutes. In those minutes, the terror I was living with mixed up with the reality of an infant in my arms, producing something I couldn’t put a name to, but that would have a hold on me for a long time. For years afterwards, I was uncomfortable around infants and toddlers. Again, it wasn’t something I talked about. After all, what kind of a freak is scared of babies?

Time passed. College happened. I had more sex, but no more condom breaks. There were a few skipped periods that owed more to stress and not eating enough than to any sperm-related activity, but being even a day off was a cause for fear. What if? That “what if” never came to pass, as much though luck as anything else. I did end up loaning one friend money for her abortion, and had heart to hearts with others about theirs, but I got lucky.

One summer I flirted with the idea of egg donation. I certainly wasn’t using them for anything, and several thousand a pop sounded like good money. And then I read the fine print. I would have to go on fertility enhancing drugs. Lots of them. Uh nuh, no way. I was more fertile than I had any wish to be (with a rich family history of fertility no less) and had no intention of boosting it, no matter the money. I took a job at a local amusement park instead.

By the time I was 24, I was out of school, in a stable committed (and *wonderfully* supportive) relationship, and working a real job with (fantastic) benefits. I was roundly annoyed to find out that birth control wasn’t included in my plan but ED drugs were. However, tubal ligations were covered. I could get my tubes tied! Hurrah! If I could just find a doctor willing to do said procedure. Goddam fine print.

That excitement lasted as long as it took me to go to the local Planned Parenthood, which seemed like the sensible place to start. They dealt with reproductive organs and I wanted to deal with mine. I figured it should have been like chocolate and peanut butter. After a standard exam (and god I hate those), I told the nice older (male) doctor checking my breasts for lumps that I wanted to discuss tubal surgery. He looked up at me (from the boobs he was examining) and flatly stated “we don’t do that here”.

Oh. Ok. But do you maybe have some info on where I could go to get it done?

No. They didn’t do it, and they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) even talk to me about it. I never found out if I’d tripped over one doctors’ personal issues, or if it was an actual PP policy. either way, I’ve never gone back there.

If I’d lived in another part of the country, that might have been it. I was lucky enough (though I didn’t realize it at the time) to be in north NJ, where OB/GYN practices are thick on the ground. I opened my health plan’s doctor listing, and started picking gynecologists at random. I made it though three more doctors. #1 looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language, assured me that I would change my mind, and bid me a good day. #2 went further, claiming that not only would I change my mind down the line, but I would (not might, *would*) sue him in the bargain, and he had to protect his license.

I walked out of doctor #2’s office, sat in my car, and cried. I had not imagined, when I decided to seriously pursue surgery, that I would end up feeling so humiliated. The tears didn’t last forever though, and I was still determined, because that white coated man sitting behind a desk was *not* the boss of me, and I was going to do this.

Then I found doctor #3. He* was actually willing to talk to me about the possibility of removing childbearing from the options list. Amazingly, he was willing to treat me like a rational human being who might own my own body and might have a right to decide what was done with it. It was a very refreshing change. He told me to think about it some more, and then come back in a few months. I figured there was a chance he was just giving me a nicer brush off than the others, but when I went back a few months later, he agreed to perform the surgery. Further points in his favor, he did not ask about my marital status, nor ask to speak to my fiancee about the procedure.

*Side note: the fact that I ended up seeing only male doctors is down more to chance than anything. I called several female OB/GYNs during this time, but they (along with a few male doctors) either had no appointment slots that I could fit into my schedule, or were not seeing new patients. Medicine being what it is, I doubt that my experiences would have been materially different than they were.

Surgery, no matter how ardently desired or necessary, is not a fun thing. Having my internal organs jostled, manipulated, and altered was scary, but in no way was it as frightening as the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy. (Although I do note when discussing this with others that it’s not something I’d recommend unless you are really sure of what you want. It’s surgery. It’s permanent. They knock you out for it and everything.) I was home from the hospital the same day, and in a few weeks was happily recovered, a small scar under my bellybutton the only outward evidence of what I had done.

In the years that followed, the fear that had followed me most of my life… evaporated. Infants were once more simply infants – sometimes cute, sometimes loud and messy, sometimes wonderful. I could regard children as the humans they were, instead of a vision of my own fears. It was amazing, and I do not think it ever would have happened without surgery.

The desire to be childfree is pan-gender, but for a woman to publicly state that she does not want to (eventually) use her uterus for procreation can be seen as threatening, even dangerous, and always something we will invariably come to regret. This is not so different from many arguments against abortion, which are all part of the same meta-argument: no woman can really know what is best for her to do with her own body, (and especially her girl-parts) and that she must be controlled/protected from herself. Similar desires expressed by men about their bodies are often written off as “commitment issues”, if they are even noted.

I’ve known many women with no desire to bear children (and every reason is as different as the woman herself), and some who have even managed to do what I was lucky enough to accomplish. The hurdles I faced were trivial compared to others I have heard related. (I at least was never asked to produced a signed permission note from my fiancee.) When I explain how young I was when I had the surgery, they ask how I was able to do it. I tell them “persistence and luck”.

Some women take great personal offense over the choices I have made regarding my own body, as though I was condemning with my body what they had chosen (or were forced, though circumstance or outside agents) to do with theirs. This could not be further from the truth. What I want for any woman is nothing more than the power to own her own self and make her own decisions based on that ownership.

It breaks my heart is that we seem to be getting further and further away from that goal with every new day, and every new headline. In a country where fat old men go on TV and call young women sluts for the temerity of wanting birth control, while making no bones about their love for other small blue pills, I live every day with a new terror; that my cousins and nieces and friends will not live in a world of more freedom than I knew, but in a world that my great grandmother (who bore 12 living children, and with each one the fear that this would be the one that killed her), would find all too familiar.

Also, I cannot just sprinkle some pixie dust and make it better. (Not for free anyway… my pixie dust is kinda expensive.)

Nobody hates the Yankees like New Yorkers who root for the Mets. Not the folks in Boston, not the folks in Toronto, not the folks in whatever team just lost their superstar because the Yanks offered them the annual GDP of a second-world country. You do not root for them even if they are playing an all-star team comprised of Hitler and his henchmen. The 2001 World Series, Arizona-Yankees, with lower Manhattan still smoldering from the terrorist attacks and the city stil burying its dead? Not even then.

Miss_Porcupine, explaining about NYC sports.

So, for the record, Sarah Palin is not a feminist… I’m sorry, but you don’t just get to say you’re a feminist and automatically be one. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not allowed. (menstrualpoetry)

NO. Not on, not right, just no. You DO, in fact, just get to say that you are a feminist. It won’t make me automatically agree with you (and we’re talking about Palin – a woman with whom I share not a single grain of common thought). Hell, it won’t make me do or think much of anything, really.

However, someone standing up and announcing that a woman has to pass some shibboleth, some test of correctness before they can be allowed to use the word? SO NOT ON. You know why?

Patriarchy is all about telling women what we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to do it, and how we are supposed to feel while we are doing it. I don’t care what you call yourself, if you’re doing any of the above, you are feeding into the power structure you claim to be fighting against. (Or maybe the feminism fairy gave you special I-get-to-be-in-charge pixie dust.) I call bullshit.

You want to know what happens when feminist women become overly-concerned with gatekeeping? You keep out the wrong people. Beating your womanist breast over Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist will have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on Sarah Palin, but will absolutely have an effect on women who might agree with some of her politics, who might self-identify somewhat with her. It will make them reject everything you stand for and maybe you’re thinking that that’s just fine and dandy, right? You don’t WANT women like that in your precious and pure movement, disagreeing with your politics and questioning your -isms.

It means that maybe those women (whom you do not deem worthy of using the word feminist) won’t ever question their own internalized misogyny, (like I didn’t all though my 20′s) that maybe they’ll pass on that same awful internalization to their daughters. But that’s ok right, because they failed your litmus test, because they don’t conform to YOUR vision of what a feminist woman is supposed to be or do. Because you might not have the power to make the world better, but you sure as hell have the power to kick people out of your little corner of it.

I spent a significant chunk of my life rejecting the term feminist because according every feminist I came across in the 80′s and 90′s, almost everything that I liked or did was incompatible with then-current feminist theory, (porn, casual sex, geek/tech-culture…) and even the things that I did agree with/fit into were presented in such a black and white, us vs. them mode that I wanted nothing to do with them. Second wave feminism did very little but tell wee!me I was wrong, bad, and a complete failure at feminism. You think this fed into my internalization of female things equaling things that were worthless? You bet your ass it did. (Well, if I suck at being female* anyway, then I might as well reject as much of it as I can.) For third wave feminism to run to the other end of the field and do the same damn thing makes me want to… well, you saw the post title, right?

I find Palin’s politics horrifying, and her personal and public actions to be every bit as reprehensible as any fear-mongering, demagogue-leaning, anti-intellectual male.** I die a little inside every time I run up against anyone who thinks she’s ever-so-great, but the solution to people not agreeing with me is not to turn my back and kick them out of the club house. I want to leave a slightly better world for EVERYONE, not just for the people I happen to agree with. On a less idealistic note, telling a not-at-all-small percentage of the women in this country that, by association, they are not good enough to come into the feminist clubhouse is no way to sway them to your cause.

**Srsrly, if you’re going all second wave anyway, you might want to take note that she’s done exactly what the second wave told my mother’s generation they could do, which was: anything a man could do. Just in this case the man happened to be Bill O’Riley. So congratulations!

“The Child” goes out of its way to avoid exploitation, but it plays like a Merchant Ivory production of a V.C. Andrews novel. (source)

This has me envisioning some amazingly lush southern-gothic kinda horrifying trainwreck, and I think I might even pay money to see it.

Desktop Publishing (Teterboro,NJ) – Industrial Distributor of machine shop supplies is seeking a full time, entry level desktop operator

Dumb, but not snark worthy. (Everyone is advertising for “entry level” openings lately ’cause no one wants to pay for experienced workers.) However, it often leads to…

to work on catalog design, sales brochures etc.

Unless they’re coming in as someone’s assistant, this is not entry level work. Well, not if you don’t want the work to suck. And I say this having been hired fresh out of school to *do* jobs like this, and I did not know my ass from a hole in the wall. I was unhappy, my employers were unhappy… it was a bad idea all all around.

Applicants must have extensive knowledge of Photoshop, Pagemaker, Indesign, Adobe Acrobat and in preparing files for printing.

“Extensive knowledge” does not dovetail with “entry level”. No, really. Once again, the words do not mean what you think they mean.

That’s not a huge hardship. I only get a real burning urge to listed to them every few years, (ah, nostalgia) and we do still have a tape deck in the house, but 1.) these are old tapes and every run though the player degrades them a smidgen more (not that I took stellar care of them back when…) and 2.) I’d have to dig though the damn closet to get to the storage bin, and that’s a lot of work for something I’m going to have to re-pack into storage. Also, 3.) I am quite used to digital convenience by now and would like to use some of these tracks in a modern (ipod-esque) manner.

So this may be one of my spring/summer projects. If I don’t get distracted first. :)

We’re looking for someone who is facile with setting up web sites, installing scripts, cpanel, email autoresponders, web 2.0 sites

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

AND, who wishes to learn internet marketing techniques including on page and off page SEO, list building, article marketing, membership sites, etc

We want some magic pixie dust to make our website better. Actually, we just bought the pixie dust, but when it doesn’t work, it’ll be your fault.

This is an ideal spot for a student just starting out.

We prefer a blank slate we can brainwash. Also, we’re going to pay peanuts and students work cheap.

Most of the websites will be constructed by others but need to be installed on our hosting accounts and adapted to our business systems which include tracking, linking, building content and backlinks, etc.

We just dicked over our last developer. Hard.

You will have the opportunity to learn internet marketing techniques, specialized internet marketing software, and observe/learn from senior web designers.

Want some kool-aid baby?

This is a paid position.

Technically.

Skill at copy writing a plus (article rewriting, sales copy, web site content, blog posting/commenting, etc.)

You will wear many hats and grow to resent them all.