recurrent anxieties of the reproductively viable

First of all, I'd like to thank this particular Anonymous for her moving and insightful narrative on dating in a post-abortion consciousness. I highly recommend all my readers, particularly the male ones, click the link above and take the time to read it.

The only bone I'd pick is that I wish she wasn't anonymous. I know, I know, the story of one's abortion is inevitably a personal one and she has the right to privacy if she chooses to take advantage of said right. But the writing is so good and the story so very necessary that it seems a shame she doesn't feel comfortable attaching her name to it. It's also slightly dismaying that, while she disavows shame for having undergone such a procedure, she can't quite bring herself to fully, publicly own it either. That said, I'm not really comfortable speculating on her possible motives for remaining discrete. I can only say I wish it weren't so.

Moreover, though, I think she's getting at something pretty interesting. That being this thing wherein men can't seem to help having reactions and opinions regarding the function and repercussions of abortions. Even thoughtful, well-meaning, open-minded men. And the troubling thing, for me anyway, is that it doesn't matter what those reactions or opinions are-- they all just feel wrong, on an inexplicably emotional level.

Now, I've never been in a position to have to present an unexpected pregnancy to a lover. I've been lucky and gotten careful. Or so I tell myself. I can't go on the pill because those artificial hormones wreak coked-out-rockstar havoc on my brain chemistry, so, for the most part, I've had to either shack up with a chick or find alternative methods of prophylaxis. But that's not to say that there haven't been plenty of months when I've smiled quite broadly at the 36-hour-late reddish smear in my underwear. It's a good feeling when you can banish the split-screen cold-florescent-clinic-on-one-side-toy-strewn-living-room-on-the-other vision from your head one more time.

But nonetheless, I've had two versions of the abortion discussion with different men in my life. Both have left me feeling unsettled about the person I've been fucking.

The first type of discussion I've had has contained the relaying of the story of when [insert specifics of a boy here] accompanied a former girlfriend to a clinic. These stories are often quite wrenching. Given, I have a history of hooking up with some pretty soulful guys, so the ones I know, anyway, are rarely left unaffected. They speak of the relief they've felt when the girl they loved but knew they wouldn't marry admitted she wasn't not ready for a baby either. They speak of the helplessness and of how the line between being supportive and pushing their beloveds towards something they're never completely sure she wants can be terribly illusive. And they speak of their white-knightish moments of falling in love all over again with the crumpled, anesthetized girl in the recovery room.

Now, if you're the next girl in line, and the guy you're dating tells you that he may never fully fall out of love with the girl who might've born his child, primarily because he can't get the image of her, small and drugged and cramping, out of his head, you come to understand the unintended bonding agent that is the post-abortion romance. The guys I've known who've been through this experience with women they've loved have felt the guilt and relief and conflict without really knowing which of their emotions, if any, were appropriate to share. Now, I don't mean to diminish whatever feelings-- torn, guilty, sad, detached, or relieved, like Anonymous was-- that the women themselves have felt. But I do mean to point out my own naive mystification at the emotional involvement of the men who've been through it, in their weird, undefined role that falls somewhere amidst bystander, instigator and hand-holder.

Abortion affects men-- the good ones, anyway-- in ways for which they have minimal tools for the management thereof. The smart ones, the ones who value female reproductive rights, the ones who say all the right things about gender equality when talking in political abstractions, still have no idea how to handle the reality of abortion. Mostly, the defer to us. As well they should, of course, but then what becomes of their own lingering anxieties? The anxieties so politically murky that it's hard for them to even articulate them without feeling like they're trampling sacred female ground?

I know I can't answer those questions. All I do know, though, is that I've felt some empathy for those guys and, inevitably, mourned that whole bit about them still being a little in love with other women. Because it seems like the ones who've been able to articulate those stories have been the ones blessed with both the greatest emotional largess and most bountiful intellectual gifts. A guy who can both enchant my brain and pierce my cold, cold, slutty heart with a story about how he tried not to be a jerk while his girlfriend was saddled with all the repercussions of their collaborative error? Yeah, I'm a goner. Why wouldn't I feel a little wistful that such a guy is inextricably bonded, through a shared event (I'm resisting calling it "trauma" here because Anonymous' point is well-taken: abortion can often seem traumatic to men (and, well, me, because I've never been through it) when it is really merely an avenue out of an impending, much realer, more enduring trauma), to another girl?

And then there's the other kind of abortion discussion I've had. The one in which the guy squirms in his seat and sputters and calls me "conservative" when I say that the choice in favor of aborting isn't automatic for me. Don't get me wrong-- I want the choice there. I really do. Heaven help the Supreme Court Justice who takes it away from me. But the thing I always want to ask (but always seem to forget, so disconcerted am I, in that moment) the guy who had implicitly assumed I'd banish whatever fetus of his seed found its way into my womb is, "What part of the word 'choice' do you not understand?"

Truth be told, if I got pregnant this week, and decided I wanted to birth something, I'd be fucked. Thus far, my lifestyle has been fairly unaffected by the recession, but I'm not tiling my bathroom in gold bullion, either. I buy shoes. I buy books. I buy lipgloss and fancy $12-a-canister tea. I own two gorgeous Kate Spade bags. I'm single, I'm childless, I pay my bills and I have a little cash left over sometimes. No doubt, the arrival of Brown Rabbit Jr. would decimate all semblance of a life I've cultivated. Beyond that, I have a relatively steep mortgage that buys me all of 785 square feet in a walk-up that's a good mile from the nearest metro station-- a mile and a half from the nearest organic grocery. My condo is bursting at the gills with books, shoes, cookware and roughly half the furniture that filled my house in Tucson (which had nearly three times the square footage of my current abode.). Where on earth would I physically put a kid?

And then there are all the other questions: What would I do about work? I work some long hours sometimes. Would I ever have friends again? Probably not. Would I be able to stomach having more conversations with someone pre-verbal than with all the smart, creative adults with whom I've populated my life? Eesh. Doubtful. And then, of course, there's the writing. My junior year in high school, I took English with the woman who's now the book editor for The Nashville Scene. She was a poet-- and a good one. But she told me a story about how it was different for a woman to have a family and write than it was for a man to have a family and write. A friend of hers from graduate school was wildly prolific and had produced a nice stream of publications. He had three kids. My teacher had two kids and was working on a third. She said she didn't think she'd ever write seriously again. Her friend had a wife. She did not. You can't be a writer and a parent unless you have a wife. Or so the moral of her story went.

So, you get the picture. Getting pregnant and opting out of abortion would mean an end to my life as I know it. This much is altogether too apparent. But today, at 32, aborting really isn't my only option. Eight years ago, I was making $8000 per annum. I was in grad school. I was suffocating in stifling, monogamous monotony. I was collecting fine art degrees that the American economy continues to deem useless. The chances of me having the wherewithal to manage childrearing were comically minute. Today, having a kid would be difficult. Really, really difficult. But it would be dishonest for me to nonchalantly reassure one of these men that it could never happen. Because, well, it's just not impossible anymore.

So, I suppose I've been resentful about that assumption. The assumption that says believing that a woman has a right to make reasoned decisions about her own reproductive well-being equates to a woman being obligated to abort her fetus were an accident to occur, I mean. And while the revelation-of-battle-wounds type of discussion provokes what may well be misplaced empathy for the collateral damage done to the souls of men, the other type of discussion leaves me fuming. How dare these men insinuate I'm betraying my own feminist persuasions because I insist on viewing my choice to abort or not to abort as just that: a choice?

Ultimately, however, I just feel like congratulating Anonymous all over again. I truly appreciate her demystification of the experience and the fact that, for her, it was a completely managable event that didn't really have much in common with the psychological bigness we all (or, at least, I) have been conditioned to attribute to it. In this way, Anonymous did an amazing thing. She refused to give the assumed trauma of The Big A power over her. And isn't the refusal to bend to the socially proscribed powers that be, even the victim narrative of the "abortion survivor," a big part of why any of us who identify as "feminist" take on that mantle in the first place?

If I knew who she was, I'd buy her a lemon cupcake-- but a small token of my good will.

Regarding the sale of intact hymens

Thanks to Jen for sending this article my way. I've posted on virginity and I've posted on prostitution-- of course I'd find an article about a girl auctioning off her maidenhead to be of interest.

That said, there are several wonky things within the article itself. Let's start with the ridiculously uninformed interview between Natalie, the girl in question, and Tyra Banks embedded within. OK, I know Tyra's audience is primarily composed of the little sisters of Oprah's audience members. By and large, it's clear that the show makes the inference that they are mostly ignorant of the sex work trade, so I have minimal qualms making the same assumption. In other words, it's not surprising that Tyra's audience acquires a collective look of slack-jawed horror at the merest whiff of something that suggests hookerdom... such as selling one's virginity to the highest bidder. The idea that selling sex could be something other than utterly morally reprehensible is a wholly foreign notion to those sweet white girls. I take that for granted.

But god, Tyra's questions! They all sound like tiresome school-girl gossiping. But Natalie! What if he's, you know, icky? What if he wants you to give him a beeeee-jay? What if he wants to see your butthole? Or show you his? The girl's 22 years old, for heaven's sake. What Tyra's audience will learn about sex or feminism or Natalie herself or anything else from such an insipid, infantalizing line of inquiry, I'm not real sure.

But then the article quotes Jezebel: "So does this make Natalie the first official virgin/whore?" Now, to me, this is a truly hilarious question. The first official virgin/whore? Aren't these Jezebel writers supposed to know a thing or two about sexual politics? Honestly. The history of prostitution is fraught with the auctioning off of girls' hymens. The entirety of the geisha culture was built upon ceremonial deflowerings-- bought by only the wealthiest of men. And up until the last few decades, marriages were not much more than glorified exchanges of goods: unsullied pussy for farm animals, plots of land, cold hard cash-- you name it. I'll name it, for ease of reference, "dowry." It's certainly not like this Natalie girl coined some new idea under the sun-- that's for sure. True, it might be slightly more rare that Natalie herself will profit from this transaction, as historically the recipient of the payoff for virginity has not been the woman herself, but rather, her daddy, her pimp, her madame, her household--whatever. But even at that, she's hardly the first girl to get dollar signs in her eyes when she first held a hand mirror between her legs.

Ultimately, however, so what if the article and its accoutrements are generally uninformed? A badly written article doesn't make the source story less baffling. The truth is, the article says that Natalie's highest bids are topping $3.5 million. Just last month, I posted this Voltaire quotation: "It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue." For my money, virginity seems like a real disadvantage. Sexual skill and experience are incredibly valuable assets for both men and women who seek to have fulfilling sex and relational lives. And yet, apparently there are still scads of bozos out there who think that what is bound to be Natalie's ignorant fumbling is not just worth something, but it's worth $3.5 million. Lunacy!

Wait, no... there must be more to it. Please! Someone! Sign me up for bad, clueless sex with a virgin. And please don't let the bad, clueless virgin sex be free! God forbid.

Yeah, does that sound as stupid to you as it does to me?

And then there's poor Natalie herself. Toiling away on her potential master's thesis on "the dichotomous relationship between virgins and whores." As if this topic hadn't been the written into the ground by every newly feministic college fresh(wo)man who ever lived. But poor Natalie is pursuing her Master's in marriage and family counseling. Yeah, that's right. A virgin wants to coach you through the rough spots in your marriage. A virgin wants you to put all your trust in her that she will lead you through the dark and foggy path of sexual discord within your long-term romantic relationship. Given, assuming the highest bidder has his way with her before her degree is complete, she'll no longer be quite so ill-equipped. But nonetheless? If I ever find myself in dire need of help in the boudoir, I want the sluttiest girl (or boy) available to help me out of my rough spot. Or maybe more precisely, to help me find my rough spot.

Above and beyond all this, though, the article poses the question as to whether or not putting your pussy on eBay conflicts with either general morality or feminist thought. Now, I think I can summarily dismiss the morality question, as I've stated a million times on this blog that I cannot fathom how consensual sex and morality are even related. Morality doesn't even come into play here as it doesn't seem like anyone's rights are being infringed upon. The feminism question, however, is a little dicier for me. On one hand, I heartily resent anything that perpuates putting valuation on something so meaningless as a grown woman's virginity. I can't, for my life, see how this does any favors for any of us. On the other hand, I heartily endorse any woman's decision-making process with regard to her own cunt. It's hers. If she wants to smack a price sticker on it, that's her right. I don't feel comfortable expressing any opinion that would oppose her. And to that end, I suppose I come out siding with the latter hand.

Of course, that doesn't mean that I don't secretly hope she fucks somebody else, say, the night before her date with Mr. Moneybritches, just to make a statement that would undermine the whole money-for-hymen dynamic completely. That would be sweet.