Archive | |We the (Vagina) People of the United States| RSS feed for this section

Individualism and Abortion and Gun Rights, oh my!

4 Jan

Did you guys read this article in the New York Times from yesterday (January 3, 2014)?  It’s about abortion restrictions.  It’s basically like an abortion restriction round-up from the last two years AKA all the articles that made me and my friends REALLY mad (plus Wendy Davis!)* smashed up together into a two-page summary.  So, yea, if you need to be reminded of all the shitty things that happened in terms of women’s access to abortions, then read the article.  I mean, I know there is nothing I like better than reading about that shit first thing on a Saturday morning.  Anyway, I just have a few little things to say about it.

Just to get this one thing out of the way: it makes me so fucking angry.  I wish there was a way for me to record myself saying those words because there is an intonation that I think is incredibly important to really getting the message across.  You must seethe when you say it.

As one does, I have been thinking quite a lot about individualism.  I think this country has gone absolute bat-shit crazy about individualism.  God forbid you mention the idea of relying on others and you’re a communitarian, or, as some would say, a socialist (although the two words actually mean different things).  Personally, I wear the badge of communitarianism happily and proudly.  I like it because it doesn’t completely dismiss the importance of the individual, but it says that traits held by individuals are largely formed by the community that surrounds them.  So like, I wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t grown up where I grew up and around the people whom I grew up around.  I think this is a belief that is held by most people if you ask them (as long as you stay far from words like ‘socialist’ and ‘collectivist’).  When you step up to the policy and governmental level, however, getting anywhere close to the idea of communitarianism is hugely problematic.  Remember the whole “you didn’t build that” fiasco with Obama and Romney during the 2012 campaign?  I think that Obama’s sentiment, that the business built by someone is reliant upon the foundation laid before them, is pretty much communitarianism.  It isn’t dismissing the importance of the individual’s contribution to society.  Instead, it emphasizes the fact that the opportunity to build the business wouldn’t have presented itself had the infrastructure — be that physical, political, or cultural — not been previously created.  We are all connected to what came before us and what comes after.  Basically, we don’t all start from scratch.  If we did we would just be running around and around on a defective hamster wheel, getting nowhere and seriously in need of WD-40.

This is all connected, I promise.  Just bear with me.  So we have, on the national stage, this ridiculous idea of the individual that is connected to the American Dream which, if you ask me, no longer really exists.  That unquestioned devotion to the boot-strappers mentality is part of the poison that has leached throughout our entire national conscience.  It’s like a fantasy to think that we live in a society in which someone can come and make something out of nothing.  And you know what?  Sometimes the fantasy is borne out.  But that story is becoming more and more rare.  Economic mobility in the United States is less likely than it was in previous generations.  According to a chart created by Miles Corak, professor of economics at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs in Ottawa, among “developed” nations, the United States has the highest level of inequality and one of the lowest earnings elasticity (or the lowest intergenerational mobility).  And yet we still cling to this idea of individual opportunity, that we all have a chance to better our lot, without paying any attention to the role played by opportunity.  Our parent’s wealth, our geographic location, the color of our skin, the levels of education attained by those before us, our debt loads.  These things all matter.  We do not each exist in some weird vacuum, unaffected by what came before and yet capable of achieving our wildest dreams if only we work hard for them.  Other things, things beyond our control, matter also.

So, now here we go.  Now this is where it all starts coming together.  We have this idea that we love, as a nation, of individualism and opportunity, except for when it comes to social issues and then we think, or at least some of us think, that what happens inside the body or home of our neighbors is our business.  Many of those same people who got mad at Obama for suggesting that infrastructure mattered to the success of the Republican candidate also think it is their moral responsibility to regulate what a woman decides to do with her own body, with her own pregnancy.  Many, though not all, of them are also the same people who cling crazily to their guns.  Not even literally, in some cases, but what the guns represent.  This idea of the rights of the individual and the need that each person has to protect him or herself from the government because the government, in all its lumbering bureaucracy, is coming for them.  Seriously, people, if we couldn’t manage gun control after Newtown, and if we couldn’t all laugh Wayne LaPierre off the stage for his suggestion that “the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” AKA lets arm guards at all school to protect the kids (with no real attempt to explain who in the world would pay for it) then the guns are safe.  But that’s not even the point.  Here’s the point.

I see a serious disconnect, as many people do, between gun rights and abortion rights.  I know that maybe this is like comparing apples and oranges, but it seems to me that a lot of the states that are protecting their guns and limiting women’s access to abortions are, well, the same damn states.  So let’s take one second here.  I read this article in the New York Times a few months ago about this face-off in Dallas between a group of three women associated with the gun control group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America having lunch and talking about stricter gun control and a large group of men and women, members of Open Carry Texas, standing outside the restaurant strapped with shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s and AK-47s.  The Open Carry people had no intention of hurting the women physically, what they did want to do was intimidate them.  Which they did because there were roughly 24 of them with long-guns strapped to their backs.  I don’t know anyone who would willingly, and without fear, walk out of a lunch meeting and then through a large, intimidating group like that.  Both groups, it can be argued, were exercising their various rights, but only one group had the ability to kill members of the other.  This is where individualism, I think, should be curtailed.  When your individual choice has the potentiality of impacting the individual choice of another person.  My ability to choose to have an abortion in no way impacts another person’s right to choose not to, but someone else’s decision to carry a gun could potentially end my life.

I know, I know, people are going to say that I am choosing to end the life of whatever is growing inside my body. Honestly, I am more concerned with myself, or with other women, than I am with a ball of cells.  Maybe that is heartless but it’s true.  I am more concerned with the life that is as opposed to the life that may be.  I guess all of this is to say that I am confused.  Why are your guns okay but my morals are not?  Why can you build an empire without any consideration of those who paved the way for you because you are an individual and therefore the only unit of import, and yet you can regulate what I do within my own womb?  Why are you as an individual more important than me?  And how does my decision to end a pregnancy impact your life in any way?  The answer:  it doesn’t.  You don’t get to have your cake and eat it too.  You want to argue individualism and rights?  Fine.  But be consistent.  Don’t be so arrogant as to think you know what is better for half the population.  And while I am at it, if you are going to try and regulate abortion access, why do it across class lines?  The result of the way the “right to life” people have approached this issue is to make access more difficult for those women living in rural areas, for those with full time jobs, for those with limited money and transportation opportunities.  Jennifer Dalven of the ACLU said, “Increasingly, access to abortion depends on where you live.  That’s what it was like pre-Roe.”  I would argue that it also depends on what you have, or don’t have.

Listen, if people are going to argue that the American Dream is still around, that we all have the ability to achieve whatever it is that we want, stop erecting roadblocks for women, and specifically for poor women, and more specifically for poor women of color.  Either that or just come out and say it:  you want a country in which only people that look like you can achieve the American Dream because, from where I sit, that is exactly where we’re headed.

*Did anyone else stay up really late during Davis’ filibuster in the Texas Senate?  Seriously, having live feeds of Senate buildings is genius.  Also, I cried.  Just in case you were wondering.  I was so impressed by her and her colleagues, so speechless by the tens of thousands of people watching and so excited to be Twitter communicating with other people who were watching it I really just couldn’t even stand it.  Who knew government could be so engaging?

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Harassment via Loud Speaker! A Novel Experience!

19 Nov

What follows is a rant.  So, consider yourself warned.*

As I have mentioned before, I enjoy running.  I love that it allows me to move my body. I love that I get to clear my mind.  I love that, as a four-season runner, I get outdoors on days when I normally would cower inside, wrapped tightly in my house sweater.  (Yes, I am aware that the fact that I have a “house sweater” makes me sound old.)  Perhaps most of all, I love that when I go out for a run I leave all technology behind.  Well, okay, that is not entirely true.  Sometimes I bring a podcast with me but that is only on days when I run over 13 miles.  Aching hips and the monotony of repeated running routes can spell the premature end of a specific workout and can, if repeated weekly, make the race I am training for terribly uncomfortable.  Believe me, I know.  And so, on those high mileage days, I allow myself a slight distraction.  Normally, though, I find the freedom from technology and the ability to take in the sights and the sounds of my neighborhood a perk to my running habit.

Today was no different.  I am just starting the process of training for the Manhattan Half Marathon at the end of January.  Yes, January.  In Central Park.  Sadly, this will not be my first time being stupid enough to run this race.  I am actually embarrassed to say that a few years ago when I ran it the temperature at the start was something like 13 degrees with a real feel of like, 5.  For the entire first loop of the park my feet were so cold they had gone numb and I literally felt like I was running on planks of wood.  It was absolutely terrible.  And yet I registered for it again.  Like a moron.  So I headed out of my house for an 8-9 mile training run, abandoning my phone on my bed.  I made my way up and around the cemetery and then, on Fort Hamilton Avenue, I experienced what was perhaps the worst case of street harassment directed at me ever in my life.  Well, it’s tied with that time the food delivery guy grabbed my ass like three houses up from my front door.  So there I was, minding my own business, enjoying the fall colors and the weird car-repair place that looks like an old-school drive-in restaurant with those girls that deliver the food on roller skates, when I heard, from what sounded like an intercom,

“Can I eat you down there, honey?”

Wait, what?  I stopped running.  I honestly could not believe that what I thought I heard was actually what I heard.  I looked around, saw an out of service MTA bus, the driver staring at me.  And then, just as I began to run again, thinking my ears must have deceived me it happened again.

“Can I eat you down there, honey?”

I turned around.  Through the haze of my anger the only thing I thought was that it must have been coming from the bus.  I took note of the time, the bus number, the cross streets.  I thought about whether or not I could give a description of the driver.  I hyperventilated.  Running when you are insanely angry and feeling violated and kind of afraid is no easy task.  I rehashed what happened again and again in my mind for the next mile until I convinced myself to let it go and think about something else.  Without a phone I couldn’t report it right then and I couldn’t snap a photograph.  I did, however, check my memory of the bus number every 5 minutes or so to make sure that when I made the report, which I was most definitely going to do, I would have all the details correct.  So I enjoyed the rest of my run as best I could, which was actually made easier by the fact that the park is one of my safe spaces.  I am always, always happy in the park.  If there comes a day when I am unhappy in the park, I will move away and not look back.

I arrived home and immediately went online to find the number to report complaints about MTA subways and buses.  511, in case you were curious.  I called and, after going through a whole lot of different menu options, I was connected with an extremely unhelpful lady.  The conversation went as follows:

Me: Hi. So I would like to file a complaint but I first am wondering whether or not it is possible for MTA bus drivers to make announcements on some sort of outside speaker.
Lady, snottily:  Well, why would you want the inside announcements to be heard outside?
Me:  Well, I wouldn’t, which is actually part of why I am calling. I just don’t want to make a complaint against someone and have them get in trouble for something that it is not possible for them to have done.
Lady:  So tell me the complaint and I will let you know.

I relayed my story to her.  She laughed.  Asshole.

Lady:  Well, I just can’t imagine anyone would say something like that.
Me: Yea, I couldn’t either until someone said it to me. So you can imagine why I would want to report this person.
Lady: Hold on.

I was then on hold for like 5 minutes while she did some combination of the following things: continued laughing, told all her friends about what I had told her, pretended she was doing something when actually she was just sitting there playing Candy Crush on her phone, or sought out a supervisor or bus-knowledge-haver to find out whether it was possible to make outside announcements.  She came back.

Lady:  It’s not possible.  Anything else?
Me:  No.  Thanks for your compassion.

It occurred to me that maybe the lady on the phone was lying.  I don’t know why she would do it but I thought it possible.  I hung up the phone and immediately posted on Facebook the following message which some of you may have seen:

Does anyone know whether MTA drivers have the ability to make announcements that can be heard outside the bus?

I received the following message from my friend Kevin which was so funny that it almost made the whole experience  worth having:

Does anyone know whether MTA drivers have the ability to make announcements that can be heard outside their heads?

Anyway, the whole experience sucked.  And it sucked even more because I was so convinced that it was the MTA bus that I didn’t look around for vehicles like cop cars and tow trucks that would be more likely to have outdoor speakers.  But also, it’s like, fuck you.  Who does that?!  Who makes sexually explicit comments to someone running over their fucking intercom?!  It’s like, let me broadcast that I am completely devoid of a moral compass.  Let me express my manhood by publicly making this woman feel entirely disempowered.  I hope someone sticks a nail in all his tires, breaks his speakers, and kicks him in the nuts.  Not necessarily in that order.

*That was really for you, Dad, since I know how much you love the rants. 🙂

Tags: , , , , , ,

When Life Gives You Lemons…

17 Oct

It has been a particularly warm fall here in New York City. So warm, in fact, that today, October 17th, I am sitting here at my desk wearing shorts and a tank top.  You might ask why I am not outside, traipsing around, enjoying the weather.  Well, for your information I already did that.  And I will do it again just as soon as I finish writing this blog.  Moving on.

This past Tuesday, after doing the important morning things (coffee, snacks, newspaper reading) I decided to go out in the world and have myself an adventure.  I wandered down fifth avenue and then I said to myself, “self, today is the perfect day to go admire some furniture you cannot afford.”  So I walked down 9th Street to Find, my favorite unaffordable furniture store, where I found the most beautiful mirror I have ever seen in my life.  So beautiful that I took photographs of it.  Photographs that I will not post here because if one of you sees it, loves it, and then goes and buys it I would be so jealous that I don’t think I would be able to be your friend anymore.  After ogling the mirror for some time, and then wondering to myself how much I could get the store owner to lower the price if I paid in cash, I went on my merry way down to Red Hook to visit Fairway for the first time since it reopened post-Sandy. I love Fairway.  Mostly, I love grocery stores and it is the biggest one with the most things (smoked salmon ends!  HUGE pickle bar!  All of the cheese!) so I love it the most.  On my way there, and just as I was approaching the Added-Value Community Farm, a pick-up truck made a right hand turn in front of me.  As they went into their turn, the passenger leaned out of the window and yelled

“You can walk all over me in those boots any day, baby!”

They subsequently sped off, leaving me alone, on the side of the road, wearing my boots, face as red as a lobster.  There I was having a perfectly wonderful Rebekah afternoon when some motherfuckers in a pick-up truck have to go and piss all over it.  I stormed the rest of the way to Fairway, thinking mean thoughts.

Upon arriving and seeing the vast array of vegetables, the anger started to melt away.  And then I saw them: papaya chunks!  I know that they are not endemic to New York and that some people think they taste like vomit, but I love them and they remind me of happier times.  So, I grabbed them, thought about the other things I wanted to buy and then realized I was in dire need of a basket.  I quickly stashed my papaya chunks on top of one of those wire coupon racks when I saw the most wonderful sight:  the assholes from the pick-up truck walked right by me into the store.  It was like a gift from above.

My mind started racing.  What should I do?  Should I say something?  Then my heart rate picked up.  I knew there was no way I would let myself leave that grocery store without giving them a piece of my mind.  I wandered around, plucking things off the shelves — salmon ends, some soy sauce, black licorice — trusting that whatever had delivered these upstanding individuals to me would insure that we crossed paths at an opportune moment.  And then, it happened. I went to check out and, wouldn’t you know it, they got in the line right next to me!  I was hoping that the timing would work out and that I would finish checking out first, head out the door, and then wait for them like a creeper outside to let them know what was what.  In the meantime, I figured I would give them the stink eye.  I have a really good stink eye.  But then the thing that always happens to me happened.  I picked the slowest checkout line ever and so, despite having gotten in line first and having fewer items, the two men headed out the door.  My only recourse was to burn holes in the backs of their heads with my eyes.  I felt defeated.  Saddened.

But then, I had a realization!  They have a car.  And a rolling cart which, after being unloaded, needs to be returned to its home.  My spirits immediately improved.  When I was done paying for my items I headed quickly out to the parking lot and, lo and behold, there was the maroon pick-up from some 45 minutes earlier.  I strode defiantly across the parking lot, eyes glued to the offending dude wearing those stupid reflective sunglasses that should only be warn by actors playing police officers on television.  He was wearing a wedding ring.  Of course.  When he looked at me and acknowledge my rapid approach I slowed down, smiled and said:

“Maybe next time you decide to yell your opinion on someone’s outfit out your car window, you will consider the fact that you might see her at the grocery store 10 minutes later.”

I stayed long enough to see the shock register on his face, turned on my heel, and walked in the direction of my house, huge grin plastered on my face.  It was the moment I have waited for.  I felt like a super hero.

—

Just as a little extra something to make you laugh, today when trying to send a text with the word “city” in it my phone inexplicably autocorrected it to “butt.”  I was really happy I caught that one.  Otherwise the text would have read:

“You leaving the butt now?”

I have been laughing for at least 10 minutes.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Bitch, Make Me 300 (Feminist) Sandwiches!

28 Sep

On September 24th, New York Post writer Stephanie Smith published an article entitled “I’m 124 sandwiches away from an engagement ring” which opened as follows:

“My boyfriend, Eric, is the gourmet cook in our relationship, but he’d always want me to make him a sandwich.

Each morning, he would ask, ‘Honey, how long you have been awake?’

‘About 15 minutes,’ I’d reply.

‘You’ve been up for 15 minutes and you haven’t made me a sandwich?'”

I will give you a moment for an exasperated breath and a huge eye roll.  You back?  Does this make anyone else think of that scene from Pleasantville with William H. Macy?  You know, that whole “where’s my dinner?!” thing?  Okay.  I would just like to point out here that in my mind, the joke about a woman’s place being in the kitchen is never funny, ever.  I cannot even stand it when I overhear people “jokingly” say, “bitch, get in the kitchen and make me a sandwich.”  You know what? Make yourself your own damn sandwich.  And also, you know why that joke is not funny?  Because there are too many people who actually believe that a woman belongs in the kitchen making food and I would venture to guess that a lot of people who make that joke actually believe that a little bit themselves.  It is not funny because we still have very powerful gender stereotypes that tell us what jobs are within the realm of a man’s world, and what jobs live safely in a woman’s.  Sandwich-making is, historically, woman’s work.

Anyway, this Post article acted as an admission of ownership.  For the previous 176 sandwiches, Smith had been keeping a blog at 300sandwiches.com that had garnered the attention, according to The Post, of such culinary greats as Emeril Lagasse, Michael White and Ken Friedman.*  The blog was a documentation of the 300 different sandwich creations Smith had thought up on her journey towards marrying her live-in boyfriend.  You see, after making her boyfriend an apparently life-altering ham and swiss sandwich where the “lettuce was perfectly in line with the neatly stacked turkey slices,” (siiiiiigh) her lovely boyfriend declared her “300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring.”  And a blog was born.  Only it wasn’t until this Post article that Smith took public responsibility for it.

As part of her explanation for her blog, she talked about being in her mid-30s and wondering where the relationship was heading.  She was feeling a lack of security that was not put at ease by the daunting task ahead of her.  In her words,

“Ten sandwiches or so in, I did the math. Three sandwiches a week, times four weeks a month, times 12 months a year, meant I wouldn’t be done until I was deep into my 30s. How would I finish 300 sandwiches in time for us to get engaged, married and have babies before I exited my childbearing years?”

Oh, woe-is-Stephanie!  Stephanie wants to finish making these sandwiches SO badly that

“Even after covering movie premieres or concerts for Page Six, (she) found (her)self stumbling into the kitchen to make Eric a sandwich while (she) still had on (her) high heels and party dress.”

That actually just makes me feel a little sad.  Seriously?  Could that be any more…ridiculous?  If it was so important to make the sandwich at that very moment, why didn’t she take the less then 2 seconds necessary to kick off her heels?  Eric couldn’t possibly have been that hungry.  And also, in Rebekahland, and in the land of most of the ladies I know, making a sandwich while wearing high heels and a party dress is not something to be proud of.  It is something to never be spoken of with anyone ever.  But that’s just me.  And my friends.  To each her own.

Here’s the thing I guess.  I think it is crappy that a blog that I find to be in somewhat poor taste is getting so much interest, a lot of it positive.  I simply don’t understand why there is this belief amongst women, spoken of in Smith’s article, that to prove you are “wife material,” you have to demonstrate your prowess in the kitchen.  There are lots of women who don’t know how to cook, don’t have time to cook, or simply do not like cooking who are very successful partners.  There are lots of men who don’t know how to cook, don’t have time to cook, or simply don’t like cooking who are very successful partners.  For a multitude of outdated reasons, we are more easily forgiving of men than women in this particular regard.  That should not be.

I also think she is very smart, knows the writing world and knows what sells.  I think she wrote this blog with thinly veiled hopes that she would get a book deal out of it.  If that happens, good for her I guess.  I just hope sandwich-making in exchange for an engagement ring doesn’t become a thing.  And lastly, while I find the premise of this blog icky and while you couldn’t pay me to date someone like Smith’s boyfriend Eric, I don’t think it is doing damage to the feminist movement.  Although I wish she would engage a little more critically with her project, she is still a business-saavy woman with a well-paying job who is turning her personal life into a potential money maker.  How very American of her.  I don’t know.  I’m on the fence about this blog.  I don’t like it, that much I know.  And normally I would say that it’s none of my business to have an opinion on it but she made it public.  So, I guess if someone said to me either you give me your opinion on this blog or I will shove you off a cliff, I would say this:  this blog is a sign to me that people are not critical enough of their roles in the world and I think we all need to work very hard to change that.

On a positive note, out of this blog we got the hashtag 300feministsandwiches which is AMAZING and hilarious.  I seriously love internet feminists.  Here are a few of my favorites:  from @nprmonkeysee: Lucretia Mozzarella And Tomato; @CecileRichards: burn your bratwurst!; and @DailyDot: Who’s hungry for a little equal pay-strami on rye?

So if we have to put up with Smith’s personal foray into gender stereotyping (which is also at play in the fact that she is waiting for him to propose rather than just popping the question her damn self) in order to get some good jokes I guess it’s all worth it.

*Admittedly, I have no idea who either Michael White or Ken Friedman are and the only reason I know who Emeril Lagasse is has something to do with cajun seasoning and non-stick pans but if The Post says they are important, then it must be so.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Internet is SUCH a Crazy Place

28 Aug

So, a couple of things have happened since I last posted.  So, last week I wrote a post about the whole incident that happened in Ireland at an Eminem concert at Slane Castle.  I didn’t really expect too much of a response since a lot of people were writing about the same thing but I was wrong.  Somehow my blog got linked on a Flemish-language newspaper and my blog EXPLODED in Belgium.  (Keep in mind the word exploded is entirely relative.)  So I had my two best days ever in the history of my blog one right after the other.  I even got some hits off of Twitter which basically never happens for the following two reasons.  One, I am confused by Twitter as a general rule and two, I have like 51 followers.  I had 52 but then someone unfollowed me.  When you have basically no followers you notice the ebb and flow.   Then this sad thing happened.  I noticed that, after the HIT EXPLOSION my daily hits were slightly higher than normal and came from search terms instead of my blog followers clicking on their emails or my Facebook friends finding the link there.  I then noticed that I was getting all sorts of hits from people looking for the image of the girl giving head at the concert.  (If you don’t know what I am talking about, just read the aforementioned blog, it will fill you in.)  So, okay, I have a few things to say about this.

First of all, seriously people, I don’t understand what is so damn exciting about a photograph of a girl sucking a guy’s dick.  If you really want to see what sucking a dick looks like, go suck a dick.  Set up a camera on the other side of the room and have it take a photo of you in the middle.  Put a stupid lime green hat on the person on the receiving end of the oral gratification, have that person throw his hands up into the air and basically you have the photo.  Not that exciting, really.

Secondly, if you really insist on seeing the photo, which makes me think less of your value as a human being because neither the girl nor the guy featured in the photo gave their consent, why don’t you try searching Google images?  You know what Google images is?  A way to find images.  You know what a photograph is?  An image.

Thirdly, porn.  It exists and it is everywhere.  The beauty of porn is that if you are turned on by people that look as though they are not consenting of the photograph being taken or the film being filmed, you can find that only the people actually have consented.  Acting, you know?  So you get the best of both worlds.  You get to view people engaged in sexual acts that maybe look like they are not participating willingly or as though they don’t know they are being photographed/filmed, but you are not being a horrible creatch and reinforcing all the fucked up gender stereotypes that run so rampant throughout our culture.

Fourth, think about what your desire to look at this photograph means and start asking yourself tough questions.  Do you think she deserved all the negative attention she is getting?  Why?  Would you feel the same way if the roles were reversed, if it was a man pleasuring a woman?  Would she still be the slut?

Fifth, I hope you read my blog when you accidentally got there.  I hope you read it and starting thinking about your role in the world.  And I hope you know that I think you are a complete asshole.

So another thing that happened is that I received an email from my friend Debbie complete with a screen shot that demonstrated the fact that my blog has been banned by the company for which she works.  We think it is because I wrote a post about going to a male strip club and that, throughout that post, I used the word “penis,” both in the singular and the plural, very liberally.  On the one hand, I sort of feel as though you haven’t really made it until you’ve blown up via  Flemish newspaper and been banned in a couple of offices.  On the other hand, I use the word “vagina” ALL THE TIME.  The word vagina is even in the title of one of my categories.  And yet it wasn’t until I used the word penis that my blog got banned.  So, that’s fucked up.

And finally, today I received a comment on my blog that said the following thing:

“Read on twitter you do a bit of bartending, would you be interested in us customizing your own bottle openers? We have a free promotion going on right now, send an email!”

My very own FranklyRebekah bottle openers.  I never thought I would live to see the day.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

A Bit About my First Twitter Altercation

22 Aug

So this is one of those instances where you, fair readers, are just going to have to bear with me on this little adventure through my mind.

So have you all heard about this incident involving an Irish girl at an Eminem concert at Slane Castle in Ireland?  No?  Well, let me give you the run down. So this past weekend Eminem gave an outdoor concert at Slane Castle.  At some point during the show, some guy (who it turns out is from Belfast) took a photograph of a girl giving head to some other guy and then posted the picture online.  As you can imagine, the picture went viral within hours and people all over Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and whatever other social media the kids are using these days came up with two (that I know of) different hash tags to allow them to discuss how much of an immoral slut she is.  This shit was everywhere.  (To their credit — and because the girl is 17 which, depending on the country, makes viewing images of her in a sexually explicit context equivalent to viewing child pornography — Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have done what they can to remove the photograph from users’ pages.  We will see whether going forward they will track down and report those who have distributed the images over the past few days.)  Following the incident and upon finding out that the image had gone viral, the girl had to be hospitalized and sedated to calm her down.  I hate to think what this girl is going to have to endure in the coming months.

According to the internet, she is a slut.  And according to one Jamie Glavin with whom I had my first-ever Twitter altercation,

“People defending the actions of that fucking #SlaneSlut need to be fucked into a bag, drowned and burned. Fucking stupid Useless cunts”

Okay, so first of all I don’t actually know what that means.  How does one get fucked into a bag?  And once one was drowned, why would it matter that one was then burned?  Or are some of us “fucking useless cunts” drowned and others burned?  Is it an every other?  Do we pick out of a hat?  And where does this Jamie (a) find the energy to fuck all the “useless cunts” and (b) track down all the bags into which he fucks us?  I wanted to ask him all these questions but unfortunately the character limit on Twitter would not allow me the pleasure.  I did, however, report his behavior to Twitter which will likely do nothing.  I still felt slightly vindicated.  He then posted the following status on his Facebook page:

“I have an awful feeling that if I make a slane girl related status I’m gonna end up on the news and eventually in court for hate crimes. I can’t handle that kinda publicity. However, I will let slip that I am more than willing to slowly kill, gut, skin and cook any of the stupid cunts that consider defending her as they are truly the proverbial fucking cherry on top of the fucking miserably disgusting cake that this country and its people have become. I’m a burn this motherfucker down.”

Obviously I have been having a lot of fun cyber-stalking this guy because I have way too much time on my hands.  Also, Jamie Glavin is just a perfect example of someone who is an idiot.  Also, a perfect example of someone who believes that women exist for public consumption. These people are, sadly, everywhere.  Just yesterday, while standing outside of a bar on 1st avenue with two guy friends while they smoked, an old dude walked up to me and said “you really shouldn’t dress so sexy.  It’s making it difficult for me.”  To which I obviously responded, “the way I dress is none of your concern.  Don’t talk to me.” Me being a female in shorts and a tank top in the middle of the summer in New York City makes me a consumable sex object.  Because I am in possession of breasts and a vagina, people have the right to come up to me and comment on how I am dressed and how the way that I am dressed impacts their day.  Me calling people out on that fact makes me a bitch, makes me unable to take a joke, means that perhaps I shouldn’t dress the way I dress because I am “unable to handle the attention” that my behavior generates.

So let’s put this into the context of this incident in Ireland.  So the photo of this young woman giving head goes viral.  As does the photo of her kissing the same young man and the one of that young man with his hands up her shorts.  There is never a time, however, where the young man is accused of being a slut, of being immoral.  His behavior is never questioned.  Him having his hands up her shorts is a demonstration of him accessing that which he deserves, while her “allowing” it to happen makes her a whore.  He is still pure and good and dominant.  She is a slut whose defenders are all “useless, stupid cunts.”

Let’s take this even one step further.  About a year ago a photo of an Irish guy named Eamon Keegan licking a woman’s breast at a soccer game in Poland spread like wild fire through the intersphere.  According to Keegan, this incident came about because, “We were all in Poznan, with all the Irish fans at the game and these two Croatian girls walked through and everyone started singing ‘Get your t*ts out for the lads’ and they actually did.”  The photo went viral.  The Ireland defender Sean St. Ledger starting a Twitter campaign to make Keegan a Twitter sensation.  Keegan even won the “Irishman of the Year” award run by the popular website balls.ie.

So you know what? The problem is not the women and men who defend the honor of yet another teenage girl who unwittingly became infamous online.  The problem is the people who take these photos and share them, immortalizing moments that maybe we wish we could forget because, honestly, we all have them.  The problem are the people who think that the victims of these online bullying campaigns deserve to be criticized by people all over the world.  The problem is the attitude that “lads” should be celebrated for public sexual acts while the women are lambasted.  Eamon Keegan is a hero while this young lady is a piece of of garbage who opened herself up to public criticism because she dared engage in sexual behavior at an outdoor concert.  It is people like Jamie Glavin who think it is their right, no, their responsibility, to denigrate a young woman that are the “the proverbial fucking cherry on top of the fucking miserably disgusting cake that this (world) and its people have become.”

Tags: , , , , ,

Because Women are Defined Forever by the Politicians they Fuck

24 Jul

I am an avid reader of The New Yorker.  For the first few months I received the weekly magazine, I awaited its arrival with baited breath.  I was riding the train to and from class in Manhattan on a near daily basis and had plenty of time to rip through the half dozen or so articles, the Talk of the Town, the book and movie reviews, the satire.  When I first started reading it, I read it from cover to cover, making sure not to miss a thing.  I was almost compulsive about it.  As time went on and I stopped going to and from the city as often, I began to fall behind.  I now have issue upon issue filed away that I have yet to touch and still I save them, sure that one day I will return for all the valuable information I didn’t have time for in the past.  I refuse to intentionally discard any of them, so consider myself slightly lucky for the loss of a few issues over time.  (Of course, the obsessive side of me is agitated by the holes in my carefully organized collection.)  I am actually half convinced that one day I will be found dead in my apartment, crushed under the weight of piles and piles of back issues of my favorite magazine.  

Recently, I have been in a slight New Yorker rut, toting around unopened issue after unopened issue.  Today I decided all that would change.  I grabbed the July 22nd issue that has been wrinkling in my shoulder bag (a shoulder bag that, by the way, is imprinted with an old New Yorker cover, how predictable) and decided to quickly read through the Talk of the Town so I could more quickly get to the article I was really interested to read, an article by Rachel Louise Snyder called “A Raised Hand:  When domestic violence turns ugly.”  Well, I got waylaid by a Lizzie Widdicombe piece called “On the Couch:  Comeback” that touches upon the return to the political scene for two disgraced New York politicians:  Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner as comptroller and mayoral candidates respectively.  I have actually been thinking about how to address this exact topic for some time and Ms. Widdicombe, whom I normally enjoy quite a bit, gave me just the fodder I needed.

Just today I was ranting about the return of Spitzer and Weiner, lamenting the fact that if a female politician were to “sext” someone a photo of her tits or use the services of an escort, her career would be over.  There would be no comeback attempt because there would be no chance of anyone taking her seriously.  She would be a whore.  She would be a bad example for our children.  People would be digging into her past, looking for any sexual deviance.  If she had made an allegation against someone for sexual misconduct, it would be dredged up, analyzed and mocked, more so even than at the time it was filed.  She would go from being a respected politician, to being maligned by the newspapers in the same way as was Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the “call girl” who’s mere existence brought down Spitzer,  a woman who was, after all, simply doing her job.  Dupre, as it turns out, is more than just her job.   According to the assistant editor of Rolling Stone Andy Greene (as quoted by Widdicombe), Dupre was a singer with a voice “not much worse than Britney Spears.” But, he continued “it’s a really tough road for her to have a music career because she’s a prostitute.”  Apparently, her time as a sex worker makes it near impossible for anyone to imagine her as anything other than that.  Dupre is a prostitute, Spitzer is someone who gave in to temptation; Dupre lacks morals, Spitzer is merely weak.  For many Americans, being a paid participant in the sex trade devalues a person, and yet high powered men who pay for the services of women like Dupre can get their lives back in order with a few well-timed apologies and maybe a publicized visit to a therapist. Spitzer, after all, was given two shots at being a talk show host.  And now he is back in politics.  None of this is to say, of course, that people utterly forget what happened, that the offenders aren’t mocked ruthlessly (I mean, Weiner, really? The jokes write themselves!), or that a return to the political scene is easy.  The point is that a return is possible, which it is not for women.  Until recently, Dupre wrote a sex column for the New York Post because once you’ve been a sex worker that’s pretty much all people want to hear out of your mouth.  Anyway, back to Widdicombe’s article.

In her short piece, Widdicombe talks about the entrance of these two men back into the political scene.  She takes the approach of analyzing their “infidelities” using the perspective of marriage councellors, making the argument that these two men need to salvage their voter-politician relationship much in the way they had to salvage their marriages.  (Granted, this is going to be much harder for Weiner given the recent release of more information about his sext-ploits.)  In conversation about Spitzer’s return, one therapist she spoke to, a Doctor Jim Walkup, said that voters “remember the look of that woman” (italics mine), referring to Dupre.  And, a Doctor Christina Curtis added, “his wife” — Silda Wall Spitzer — “having to go up to the podium, and the humiliation.”  She is remembered for, and defined by, her humiliation.  The New York Post, oh-respectable publication, called her “the first door mat” and I think I read somewhere that she blamed his visits to Dupre on herself.  Patriarchy at its finest.

I actually don’t really know where to go from here.  I guess part of it is that I would expect for The New Yorker to have a more nuanced discussion, even in a short piece, of the roll that gender plays in all of this.  The writers have been known to say much more with much less words.  These men have taken advantage of their power and privilege and although they were forced to resign their seats at the time, they are still relevant.  But what about Dupre?  She is just “that woman.”  And despite her high powered career, our national memory of Wall Spitzer is best captured in these words by Katy Waldman of Slate:

“Silda Wall Spitzer impressed herself into our collective memory when she stood, chalk-gray, beside her husband as he resigned from the New York governorship in 2008. It was a wrenching image of devotion or delusion, depending on your take…”

I guess what I am looking for is a simple admission that when these high-powered men take their dicks out, there is collateral damage and that the damage generally has a female face.  Monica Lewinsky, after all, is remembered for little more than that stained blue dress but the reality is that she wasn’t simply an exploit, she was and is a person.  Furthermore, despite the fact that Bill Clinton earned himself the unfortunate nickname “Slick Willy,” his opinion still matters.  His support of Barack Obama makes a difference.  He is still respected.  And yet the only thing that matters about Lewinsky, even all these years later, was that she gave the President head in the oval office.  These women are all human beings.  They deserve our respect and they deserve to be acknowledged for something more than simply their involvement in some dude’s temporary political undoing.  We have to acknowledge the power dynamic that exists between a well-established, well-respected, powerful man and the oftentimes much younger women that get wrapped up in, and brought down by, their after hours activities.  We have to acknowledge that men of power, and specifically straight, white men of power, get a pass from us when they fuck up, even when they fuck up over and over again.  Sure, give Spitzer and Weiner another chance, but lets not use it as an excuse to unearth topless photos of Dupre.  The women that get caught up in all this are simply living their lives, and they deserve to go on living it outside the shadow of some powerful guy.  They also deserve a second chance.

Tags: , , , , , ,

You Live Here, Why Not Travel There: The Case for Sustained Female Tourism to India

12 Jun

I traveled to India for the first time in December of 2003 with 21 other students and a few professors.  We spent about 8 weeks learning about sustainability, the economy, tourism, ecology, agriculture.  We spent a good amount of time in the homes of different families who welcomed us with open arms  (well, for the most part).  I returned just after I graduated college in the fall of 2005 with a good friend of mine, Abby, and spent about 4 months traversing the sub-continent.  It was an amazing trip, cut short mostly by the fact that I had run my travel fund dry.  I spent my entire trip in the company of others and the only close-call of a sexual nature came at the hands of a fellow traveler.  I went back for a third time in the summer of 2011 with two of my girlfriends from graduate school, one of whom is fluent in Hindi.  This led to some surprised faces and a pretty awesome night in which the operators of a government bus hand delivered us to our hotel so we wouldn’t have to face tracking down an auto rickshaw after midnight on our own.  I would go back in a heartbeat if I could find a companion and if time and finances allowed.

So I must say I am more than a little saddened by the recent reports that, due to highly publicized sexual assaults in India, tourism has dropped, and especially amongst females.  A June 10th article on the New York Times blog, India Ink entitled “India Scrambles to Reassure Tourists Shaken by Recent Attacks on Women,” discusses the issue.  The article, by Neha Thirani Bagri and Heather Timmons, explains that in the first three months of this year visits by females to India fell by 35%.  Thisfall-off has been linked by many to the fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi this past December.  There have also been assaults and rapes reported by tourists over the last few months, including a 30-year-old woman who was gang-raped in a resort town in the north and a 39-year-old Swiss tourist who was raped by four men in Madhya Pradesh.  Listen, I get it, the prospect of being raped or sexually assaulted in a foreign country where you’re not familiar with the language, the customs, or the legal system and where you are far from home and your friends and family is terrifying.  But the thing is that, as a female, I live in almost constant, albeit dull, fear of being sexually assaulted and I think, when pressed, many women would agree.  In fact, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a woman in your life who has been neither threatened with sexual violence nor had sexual violence committed against her.  For my part I have been groped and spit on in the street, been the victim of an attempted rape in my own home, and ran screaming from the house of someone I considered a friend, although not a close one, when my strong and loud repetition of the word “no” went unheard.  My stories are not unique.  And every single one of them happened here, in the United States.

That’s not even the point.  I am not here arguing that there are more rapes in the United States than elsewhere.  I don’t know that we could ever accurately know that given the poor reporting rates at the global level, a fact I have discussed elsewhere in this blog.  Clearly, I have spent more of my life here and so it would follow that most of the bad things that have happened to me also would have happened here.  What I am saying is that the articles covering the decrease in tourism have not done much to reverse this trend by encouraging a more nuanced discussion.  So, here’s my attempt.

As a commenter on an article I read said, India is a very big country, 1,269,219 square miles, with a lot of people living in it, over 1.2 billion according to the 2011 census.  There are places that are more safe and places that are less safe, much like here.  There are people who are likely to rape and people who are unlikely to rape, much like here.  In the Times article, the authors quoted a 24-year-old from San Francisco, Corinne Aparis, as saying “It scares me to think that there’s that type of deep hatred toward women — that just being a woman is enough of a target and reason for some men to inflict such violence on me.”  The thing is, she could be talking about anywhere.  This quote is taken as something specific to the Indian context but that could not be further from the truth.  For evidence of that fact just watch the movie Compliance, read about the Cleveland, Texas gang rape of an 11-year-old, talk to some of your female friends.

You know what is different about India?  The response.  I doubt we would have learned nearly as much about the horrific December Delhi rape if it weren’t for the response of Indians.  According to the Times article once again, “The public outrage over the December attack led to the passage of a new sexual offense law in March that imposes stronger penalties for violence against women and criminalizes actions like stalking and voyeurism.”  I personally do not remember a time in the United States when protesters lined the streets for a day, let alone weeks, in response to a rape and the subsequent handling of the case by authorities.  I do not remember a time in the United States when the national dialogue wasn’t seemingly dominated by the endless repetition of “boys will be boys,” “why was she out at that time wearing that outfit,” and “where was her mother?”  Let’s just think back to the recent events in Steubenville.  Just this past Thursday, on June 6th, Mother Jones printed an article that reported that where the two rapists in the Steubenville case got a 1-and-2-year prison sentence, one of the hackers who broke the case open is facing up to 10-years in jail for hacking-related crimes.  To me, that says a lot about this country’s priorities.

Listen, I am not saying that people’s feelings regarding safety when traveling are unjustified.  If you feel unsafe for any reason, that is your prerogative.  What I am saying is that let’s put this into a larger context.  This is not an India problem, this is an everywhere problem.  But I would go so far as to say that the Indian population at large, at least recently, has a much more proactive attitude towards securing safety from sexual violence for women and men, and towards ensuring the proper handling of sexual assault cases.  We should be so vociferous.  Rather than write India off as unsafe for women, we should follow in the population’s footsteps.  We should stand in support of sexual assault victims, try to get our justice system to do right by them, by us, and change our rape culture.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Hey Random Dude Talking to Me at the Bar: My Body Language is Intentional

14 Feb

Over the lifetime of this blog I have written quite a number of times about being a girl out in the world.  I wrote about my feelings on street harassment here, and about this guy who spit on me a few times here, and then about this time when I got aggressively poked in the face by one of my customers and it was really scary here.  I have never, however, written about being a female customer in a bar and so that is what I am going to do right now.

I am sure that some of you, dear readers, are going to think that I am overreacting.  But what I talk about here is symptomatic of a larger issue which is that, as a woman, I feel as though some people think that I exist for public consumption.  That me being somewhere is an invitation for someone to enter my personal space.  That if I am alone in a bar or a cafe, that clearly I want someone to talk to me, that I am asking for someone to approach me, that I cannot possibly want to be sitting by myself.  But the thing is that I am a strong, independent woman and I don’t need a man by my side at all times to demonstrate that.  I don’t need a protective buffer.  My body language and facial expressions, which I know from experience speak loud and clear, should deter someone from approaching me at certain times unless, of course, they are so full of themselves and entitled to think that their presence in my world is necessarily a positive, and welcome, thing.  Okay.

Recently I realized that it is really difficult to go straight from spending all day in the study center of my school reading about urban agriculture to the drunken mess that is Thursday nights at work without being a little shell shocked and irritable.  So, the past few weeks I have left the study center 45 minutes early to head to a small bar near my work to unwind with a glass of wine and my beloved New Yorker.  I have no intentions of talking to anyone other the bartender and even she I only want to politely order from and then be safely on my way to “alone,” unwinding time.   Would it be nice if I could actually be alone?  Sure.  But sometimes we have to take what we can get.  The first week I did this the bar was pretty crowded and I was sitting alone somewhere in the middle of it, scarf wrapped around my shoulders (it was one of those super-cold nights and I just couldn’t shake the chill) nose deeply in magazine.  I was not looking up or around.  I was not making eye-contact with anyone other than whatever cartoon happened to be on the page I was reading and I am pretty certain those cartoons weren’t looking back at me.*  Anyway, some dude that I guess was sitting at the end of the bar closest to the door whom I hadn’t noticed because, as I just said, I was not looking around, walked by me and, as he passed said quietly

“You’re looking very elegant tonight.”

I muttered a quick ‘thank you,’ thinking it possible that I knew this man from my bar seeing as how I work only a few blocks away.  I looked up and caught his eye when he did one of those “look back over the shoulder to see if I had heard him and then wink in a super awkward way that makes me think he thinks he is way sexier than he is.”**  I definitely did not know him.  I tried my best to look uninterested and went back to reading.  (Also, in my mind a scarf wrapped around my shoulders over a teal sweatshirt is not exactly what I would call elegant but whatever, to each his own I suppose.)  When it came time to leave, I packed up all my things and could sense him looking at me from the end of the bar, awaiting the chance to talk to me again as I inevitably walked past him out the door.  I resolved myself to look straight ahead and avoid eye contact, in hopes that if he was a regular at this bar that he wouldn’t take a brief conversation now as an invitation for more conversation later.  He said a quick and quiet “good night” and I returned the pleasantry with the accompanying smile that I reserve for people that I feel I should be polite to but really would rather ignore.  I didn’t slow my steps and walked out into the chilly evening, en route to a night of work and forced socializing.

The following week I decided to give the same bar another shot figuring, hey, that guy wasn’t really that bad.  I mean, he wasn’t pushy or anything.  He didn’t know that I wasn’t interested in talking.  I walked into the bar and walked straight towards the end of the bar that was completely empty.  There was no one within 5 stools of me.  Perfect!  I opened my magazine, pulled my glass of wine and my water in close, and got to reading.  In the middle of the article I realized oh, hey, I just read like three paragraphs and retained absolutely none of it due to brain over-saturation so I directed my attention to the bookshelf directly in front of me and started looking at the items on the shelf.  I then looked back down at my magazine and just at that moment I felt a hand on my shoulder (why?!) and I heard someone say, quietly,

You look sad.

I looked over and there he was.  The same man from last week.  Maybe.  They all sort of look the same at some point.  Touching my shoulder.  I looked at him and said, in a way that I hoped came across as partially light-hearted but mostly bitchy and authoritative,

This is what I look like when I’m happy.

He looked a little shocked so I smiled a half smile and added

I am just decompressing after a long day before work.  I’m fine.

I looked back down at my magazine, hoping he would get the picture, but no.  He started asking me what I was decompressing from.  What I had been doing all day.  Where I had to be that I started work so late in the evening.  None of this conversation is particularly interesting so I will not recount it here but I do want to ask a few questions.  Why in the world was this guy talking to me?  Why was he touching my shoulder?  What about my posture, about my face in a magazine, about me staring directly in front of my seat making eye contact with no one was inviting of conversation?

Okay, so here’s the thing.  If I go to the bar by myself and I sit there, no reading, looking around, smiling at people then yes, sure, come over and say hi.  There would be something about my body language that would be inviting, that would say that maybe I felt like meeting people.  And this guy doesn’t know me.  He doesn’t know that I don’t go into a bar to have a glass of wine and meet someone new.  I go there to be alone because most of the time I am surrounded by people that I have to interact with and it’s nice to sometimes be surrounded by people all doing their own thing.  Sometimes its nice to be alone in public.  For those reasons I try to make it abundantly clear by my body language and behavior exactly what I want and what I want is to be left alone.  What I do not want is someone who does not know me at all to tell me what mood I look like I am in. That’s basically as bad as walking down the street and having a stranger say “smile princess” or “come on, sweetie, it’s not so bad.”  You know what?  Maybe it IS so bad.  Maybe I just got really bad news.  Maybe I have a tooth ache.  Maybe I am deep in thought.  Maybe I don’t want to be condescended to on my way to buy a box of tampons.  Maybe I am not here for your enjoyment.  Maybe I do not owe you a god damn thing, including a smile.  You didn’t do anything to deserve it.  What I also don’t want is someone who I don’t know touching me unless it is a warning touch like “you are about to get hit by a car.”

Basically what it boils down to is this:  I was alone.  I was not near anyone else.  I was minding my own business.  I tried to make it clear through my behavior that I wanted it that way.  That is why I sat as far away from everyone else as possible.  It wasn’t so we could have a private area to have an extra secret conversation, it was so that we wouldn’t have a conversation at all.  Take a hint.  Be aware.  My presence somewhere is not an invitation.  And just because I responded to your compliment with a terse “thank you” last week does not mean we are friends.

Also, to the guy the other night who tried to draw my while my friend was outside having a cigarette, no.  That’s weird.  Also, I took a peak at the other “drawings” on the page and I’m pretty sure they were all stick figures.  I’m pretty sure I could do that, too.

* I am thankful for this realization because if I thought they were looking back at me I would have a whole other post to write.  Mostly, it would be elucidating my experience in the psych ward.

** In reality he really wasn’t sexy at all.  I’m pretty sure he was about 25 years older than me.  Thanks but no thanks.

Tags: , , , , , ,

Sometimes I Feel Like the Joke is on Me

29 Jan

To my squeamish readers:  I am about to write about my period.  So if you are too immature to handle it, stop reading now.  But probably don’t tell me that because next time I see or speak to you I will mock you.  That is a promise.

Sometimes I think my period is a cosmic joke.  Or, I guess, sometimes I hope it’s a cosmic joke because then I can assume that someone, somewhere is finding it funny because I most certainly am not.  Ever.  (When I figure out who is laughing at my pain there will be hell to pay!)

Mostly the whole thing just sucks.

My period has always been heavy and long.  Right when I think it couldn’t possibly get heavier or longer, it does.  It plays tricks on me.  For days before it actually starts, it pretends like it is starting.  A little blood here, a little blood there and then suddenly BAM!  There it is.  There it is and there it stays for the next 6-7 days of torture.  And then maybe it doesn’t completely go away for another day or so, just to twist the knife a little.  My period, in short, is a jerk.

So today, day 4, my period was like

“yea, I think basically I have finished depleting you of 50% of your blood so I’m gonna slow my roll a little.”

In response I decided to follow the directions in my box of tampons which instructs me, in roughly these words, to just use the smallest absorbancy tampon that is appropriate for my flow.  Okay.  I assessed and I downgraded.  And what happens?  My period gets heavier.  It’s as if it knows.  It’s all,

“Psych! You think I would let you get away without ruining any of your underwear?  Without staining any of your jeans?  Well, wait till you get a load of this!”

ZOOM!

Inevitably, this happened when I was out running errands.  There I was, in the pet store, looking for cat food when all of a sudden I thought to myself,

“Wait, is that…?  Is it…? Oh you have got to be kidding me!”

Quick!  Pay for the food!  Stop making that weird face!  Don’t walk like you have a pole shoved up your ass!  Just walk quickly and calmly back to the house.  It can smell your fear and it will fuck with you.

Luckily I made it with limited muss and fuss but with an extreme amount of resentment directed at my period.  It’s as if it’s a highly competitive athlete that wants to outdo its last performance.  Like my period and I are on different teams and it takes my handling of it as motivation to do better next time.  Go big or go home, it thinks.

Recently, it’s decided that the heavy bleeding is not quite enough so it’s added cramps.  Bad ones.  I mean, not so bad that I can’t get out of bed in the morning, but bad enough that when I am standing up, I can feel my lower abdomen throbbing and the only way to deal with it is to bend at the hip at about a 60 degree angle.  I know that’s the best way to deal with it because my cramp day always, 100% of the time, comes when I am working, and I work on my feet so I get a good amount of practice.  I only work 3 days a week and I generally only have one day of cramps but that day always, always, always falls on one of my three days behind the bar.  So there I am, conspicuously leaning on the bar and grimacing.  I’m sure I make a very welcoming impression on customers.  Sometimes I want to look at people and be like

“I don’t usually stand like this!  Or make this face!  It’s not my fault!  I am dying of blood loss!”

But that would be weird and would probably scare a lot of people away.  So I just take more Advil.

One thing I can say about my period, although don’t tell it I said this because then it will somehow change its stripes, is that it doesn’t really effect my mood all that much.  I don’t become any more bitchy or snarky or quick-tempered than I usually am.  I also don’t become terribly emotional.  I suffer alone and in silence.

At least one time during the week of uterin-purging I think to myself,

“If there was a god, he* wouldn’t let this suffering continue.”

But then I realize that no, he probably would, because he wouldn’t get it.  He’d be thinking that he had to deal with having a random erection during heath class or the time his voice changed in the middle of his 7th grade presentation of Lord of the Flies.  He’d be thinking that anyone can deal with a little bit of blood every once in a while.  He’d be thinking that we ladies get to experience the miracle of childbirth.  Well, god, if you’re really there, I would like to refer you to the UberFact I read the other day that said

“Giving birth is the second most painful thing a human can experience — the first is being burned alive.”

Miracle of childbirth my ass.  So god, if you’re there and you’re laughing, if you find this funny, I will hunt you down and kick you in the nuts.  We’ll see who’s laughing then.

*I use the pronoun “he” because if god were a woman, this shit never would have happened in the first place.  She would have been like

“Bleeding for days on end?  Cramps?  Mood swings?  Water retention?  Oh, hell no.”

Tags: , , , , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →