Blog For Choice Day Presents: A Birthday!

Roe vs. Wade is thirty-six years old today! This means that, if it were a person, its friends and relatives would already be talking to it about how it totally should have had a baby by now, don't you think? Because, you know, time is running out for it and they don't want it to give birth to a hideous mutant child (which is what happens if you do it after thirty-five, modern medical science wants you to know!) and, you know, they don't want Roe vs. Wade to miss out or anything. Unless Roe vs. Wade were a dude, in which case people would leave it alone, respect whatever decisions it made, and (in most cases) not even frame its childlessness as a conscious decision, let alone some kind of failure or tragedy.

Roe vs. Wade would not be a dude, however. Roe vs. Wade would pretty indisputably be a lady. Roe vs. Wade would be the girl who tells you, over drinks, that she had an abortion in high school, and that when her friends found out, they stopped talking to her, and that this is why she's not good at trusting people. Roe vs. Wade would be the girl who went to the "family planning clinic" that turned out to be a an anti-choice center where people showed Roe vs. Wade gory movies, and called Roe vs. Wade once a month, every month, to tell her how old her "baby" would be if she'd had it. Roe vs. Wade would be the girl who went to the clinic for EC and had a lady doctor deny her treatment because said lady doctor "didn't believe in abortion," then heard the lady doctor tell her to her face that she "should have kept her legs together." Roe vs. Wade would be the girl who knows that, even if she technically has a choice, she might not be able to exercise it freely, safely, and without scary repercussions.

Roe vs. Wade would not have felt the condom break until it was all over. Roe vs. Wade would have realized, too late, that the birth control pills were expired. Roe vs. Wade would have had a doctor who forgot to inform her that the antibiotics he'd prescribed for her would make her birth control ineffective. Roe vs. Wade would have looked up stuff on the Internet about how to bring on a late period - Dong Quai extract, megadoses of Vitamin C, all of that hippie goddess nature business - and Roe vs. Wade would have taken them until it became obvious that the period was not "late," it was simply not going to happen, and then Roe vs. Wade would have gone to the bathroom and cried a little and wondered how to tell her boyfriend something she didn't even want to know herself.

Roe vs. Wade would keep track of the news. Roe vs. Wade would watch the presidential debates. Roe vs. Wade would wonder how in tarnation Sarah Palin could call herself a "feminist" and then spout nonsensical slogans like "choose life" when the point is that "life," in Sarah Palin's fantasy world of the future, would be the only option, and hence not a choice. Roe vs. Wade would watch a man who wants to run her country, the population of which is a little over 50% female, use derisive air quotes around the phrase "women's health." Roe vs. Wade would definitely not vote for that dude. Roe vs. Wade doesn't hate herself that much.

Roe vs. Wade would wonder, however, why even the dude that she did vote for speaks out in favor of limiting her choice and making sure that she exercises her right to choose for the "right reasons," when, as far as Roe vs. Wade can see, that dude does not possess her biological equipment, and will therefore never need to exercise that option himself for any reason, and will therefore never be in a position to judge or even fully understand the reasons of those who do. Roe vs. Wade would wonder why that dude, whose name is Barack Obama, persists in carrying on the liberal tradition of prefacing his pro-choice statements with statements to the effect that abortion is always no good and very bad and a bummer and should happen less often. Roe vs. Wade would feel obscurely shamed by these statements, and uncomfortable with hearing them from the mouth of a man who wants to represent her, and Roe vs. Wade would not speak up about that except to a very few people, because Roe vs. Wade would have been told nine million times that Barack Obama is going to fix the world and bring hope to the people and take us all to Chuck E. Cheese on our birthdays, and Roe vs. Wade would have been told eighteen million times that everyone else is way worse than Barack Obama and she's lucky to have a candidate who supports her choice at all.

Later, after Barack Obama had been inaugurated (in a ceremony which prominently featured a man who compared Roe vs. Wade to a Nazi), Roe vs. Wade would wonder when Barack Obama would get around to rescinding the Global Gag Rule and Bush's most recent HHS regulation, and would wonder at the significance of the fact that those were, respectively, one of the first things that Bush effected while in office and one of the last. Roe vs. Wade would make the mistake of wishing aloud that there were a president who advocated as fiercely and unequivocally for her rights as the last president advocated against them. When Roe vs. Wade did that, she would be called divisive and an extremist and a single-issue voter. Roe vs. Wade would be pretty much used to that - used to being told that her rights don't deserve to be made central to progressive platforms, even though she and women like her comprise a pretty vital portion of the progressive base, and their votes, organizing time, and support are always fervently courted (or demanded) when the dudes that are her "allies" have something they want to accomplish.

Roe vs. Wade might like babies. Roe vs. Wade might be indifferent to babies. Roe vs. Wade might want to have babies, when she is in a position to give them the care they need. Roe vs. Wade might have babies already, and know that her ability to care for them will be compromised if she has any more. One thing that is for certain true about Roe vs. Wade is that she would have the ability to differentiate between a baby and a pregnancy, and an unwillingness to make one of her body's involuntary processes the defining factor in her life. For that, Roe vs. Wade would be attacked pretty much constantly, and on all fronts.

Roe vs. Wade would have a lot to deal with, you guys. Which is why we have her back.

And This Is Why I Read Bitch

From "The Ambition Condition: Women, Writing, and the Problem of Success," by Anna Clark:

Perhaps you know about Emily Gould’s cover story, “Exposed,” in the New York Times Magazine last May. Even if you didn’t take in all 8,002 words on the former Gawker editor’s gains and losses from blogging about her personal life, it would be hard to miss the criticism of the piece elsewhere... Whatever the valid faults of Gould and her article, the attacking comments were unmistakably gendered. “Attention whore,” was one favorite catcall. “Get over yourself, sweetheart,” advised a commenter. Another scoffed, “You are just a stupid little girl”—a comment 67 others recommended. What’s more, the comments were full of parental advice offered as if to a 10-year-old and intended to steer the writer away from, well, writing: “Don’t you have important things to do?”; “Like your tattoos, I’m fairly sure you’ll regret all this by the time you get into your 40s”; and, “You really want to find some meaning?… Go to the local VA hospital and volunteer to spend a week changing bedpans and rewrapping dressings. Or try teaching English as a second language to a new immigrant...or read to the blind.”

And then there was this one: “I suspect that one day, when a stalker appears in this girl’s life (you can’t call her a woman), she will have no idea that she brought it upon herself.”

Yep, it’s all the fault of the “girl” writer who put herself out there. Add the Gould Incident to the uneasy history of ambitious women writers told that they have nothing of worth to say.

Oh, and also:

So goes the equation of female ambition with selfishness and unhappiness. But the translation of this old story into the world of writers takes a curious turn.

Anyone who’s stepped into a literary community—readings, performances, writing workshops, MFA programs—will testify to the disclaimers that issue regularly from the mouths of women writers in particular. “This is just something I thought I’d try,” and “I’m not really a poet, but…” are words regularly uttered even by those who made drastic life changes in order to carve out time to write. I prepared for months for a major fiction contest in college, for instance, which I entered five years in a row, claiming to others each time that I just “threw something together.” Later, I applied to a single MFA fiction program, and told no one until I got in. I just didn’t want anyone to know what I wanted most. Perhaps I was preparing for failure: If I said openly that I not only wanted to be a writer but that I worked hard at it, my ambitions could be judged against external rewards—and easily dismissed when I missed out on them.

Oh, and:

Furthermore, to even say that you want to write lasting novels, garner hundreds of thousands of blog hits, or handmake a chapbook is to expose yourself to the “who are you to think you have anything to say?” sort of pummeling that Gould received. It can be tempting, then, for women in particular to write quietly and hope that the work will speak for itself. But by not owning up to her ambitions—whether they are in the public or private realms—a writer feeds the machine that discounts the aspirations and talents of all women writers. The silence is implicit support for editors who claim that their byline disparity is because women don’t want it enough. It sets an example for other writers that ambition is something to be ashamed of. Though it might be the last thing in the world she means to do, by keeping her intentions for her work hidden, a female writer allows others to make assumptions about her work, and to decide where it will and will not go.

Seriously, I may never stop quoting this piece. Read the entire thing. It's brilliant.

Also, since we've fallen onto the subject, most of my opinions on personal writing, and on the Gould backlash (which, by the way, did I mention that JOSH FUCKING STEIN wrote a nasty Page Six article about Gould which was met with just about zero backlash, even though it had his name on it and pictures of him brooding in a sweater, as opposed to her anonymous blog which disguised his name, and she was supposed to do what? Let him control the public representation of a difficult period in her life? Fuck that) were summed up by Melissa McEwan in a blog post that has nary a mention of Gould, so yeah, read all of that post, too:

Making the personal public and political is serious business. Because women's stories aren't told, it's incumbent upon female feminists to tell their own stories, to fill that void, to be unrepentant and loquacious raconteurs every chance we get, to talk about our bodies, our struggles, our triumphs, our needs, our lives in every aspect. It's our obligation to create a cacophony with our personal narratives, until there is a constant din that translates into equality, into balance.

Telling our tales is not a weakness. It's a strength.

No matter who says otherwise.

Correct. Also: if a woman writes something you like, tell people about it. It's not going to get out there on its own.

[Via.]