humph

I think I might cut out sleep out of my schedule entirely. I mean the only real sleep I’ve gotten in the past week was chemically induced. Besides, I can sleep when I’m dead, right?

I have the planets stupidest gag reflex

Swallowing liquid cold meds triggered it.  Swallowing a melatonin triggered it.

Tonight is not a good night.

Shockingly, my tummy is now upset.

Welp

The gods of cough syrup have released their judgment on me.  Keep your fingers crossed I feel less like death come the morning.

hryhrtyry

I think a bus hit me in the four hours of sleep I got last night.  I’m so freaking exhausted and I have a headache and my throat hurts and my ear aches and I want nothing more than to skip anatomy lab and go home to sleep.

Rape Prevention Program

I saw this flier on campus today and I took it with me.  The more I looked at it, the more I realized that this company is coming from a good place and probably didn’t realize the ways they were rubbing a portion of the population the wrong way.

I sent them the following email.

To Whom It May Concern:

I’m a university student pursuing a degree in Community Health with a minor in Human Sexuality.  I saw (the above flier) at the bus stop Monday evening.  I have several problems with this flier.

The first problem is that it’s titled “rape prevention program.”  The only way to prevent rape is to prevent rapists from raping people.  Victims of rape can’t prevent rape in themselves.  It’s rather backwards to put the responsibility of preventing rape on the shoulders of those who are raped.  If it were called a self defense program, as opposed to rape prevention, you’d probably get a more diverse group of participants.

My second, even bigger, problem is the bullet points.  The first bullet point says “don’t be a victim.”  That implies that people who are raped have a choice in becoming a rape victim, when in fact that they don’t.  That choice is made for them, by the rapist.  While you probably didn’t mean to come across as victim blaming, you did.

The third bullet point, “control fear through training” also made me pause.  Fear isn’t inherently bad.  Fear gives you an edge.  It pushes adrenaline through your body, enables you to remember more fine details, and fight back harder.  Fear is useful.  I have a hunch that you really meant panic in place of the word fear.  Panic is decidedly not useful, but fear is.

The background you chose for your advertisement plays on every womans worst fears: the masked attacker jumping out from behind the bushes.  These kind of rapes occur in less than 10% of rapes, the other 90% of rapes are acquaintance rapes.  While a self defense class like the one you’re advertising might be useful in a rape like the first example, it’s likely to be far less useful in an acquaintance rape.

I know what you were trying to do.  You were probably trying to scare women into taking your self defense class.  Your flier relies on stereotypes  and peoples fear to be effective and is only effective because of those fears and stereotypes.  I’d suggest that you find a way to sell your class without relying on these stereotypes and fears.

Thank you for your time

I know it probably won’t change anything, and that’s ok, because I’ve told them my opinion of their advertising techniques and given them a place to start if they wanted to tweak it. I’ve done what I felt I needed to in any case.

Online Dating: You’re doing it wrong.

Sorry the picture is so small.  Click it to make it bigger.  Anyway, this charmer who I’ll call “wannabegangster478.”  I don’t really have a whole lot to say about this profile, because it mostly speaks for itself.

I’d like to draw special attention to his profession, his interests, and the line “i have only ****ed 4 woman my whole life i have alot of respect for my self… ”

 

We can’t go back…not now, not ever.

It wasn’t a coat hanger. It was a wire.

The theory was that by inserting the wire through the cervix, moving it around a bit and then removing it, an infection would result and the pregnancy would be aborted. It worked. It was March 1967.

Afterward, after I watched the ‘doctor’ wash his hands with one of those little soaps wrapped in white paper, after he tilted the bedside lamp just so and after he said, “That should do it,” I got dressed, left the motel with the flashing vacancy sign, made my way to the bus station in downtown Detroit, and rode in the dark in the eerie silence of a mostly empty Greyhound all the way back to Mt. Pleasant, the tiny Michigan town where I was a freshman in college. Curled up next to the window under my black pea coat, I wondered how long it would take, whether it would be on the bus or later. I worried that something a lot worse than being pregnant would happen to me because of what happened in the motel room, that I’d get sick or bleed to death. I wondered if I would ever feel right about what I had done and if there had been choices that I hadn’t considered. I remember feeling like a mouse that had found the tiniest hole for escape while a giant tomcat loomed. I was distraught, empty, and alone on that bus. Back in my dorm room, Jane, my roommate, held both of my hands in hers and said, “It will be ok. You’ll see. You’ll have lots of children when the time is right.” It was a gesture of kindness and compassion that even now brings tears to my eyes.

I was 19. I had slept with my boyfriend just a single time. When I missed my period, I ever so reluctantly made an appointment with the town gynecologist who confirmed the pregnancy and then quizzed me incessantly about whether I knew who the father was. Did I know who the father was? Of course. There had only been one person ever. Yes, I knew.

The doctor told me to tell my parents but I couldn’t. My mother who had suffered for almost her entire adult life with severe depression was so deep in her terrible place, on the couch or in bed all day, sleeping or staring, that I almost cancelled my departure to college. The last child at home for many years, I had become her driver and caregiver when these episodes occurred. Leaving seemed like the worst kind of betrayal and yet the pull of the relief I knew I would feel being out from under her mental illness was irresistible. I really wanted to be in a place where people were happy. The thought of going home, sitting down on the couch, where I knew she would be, to tell her I’d gotten pregnant was unfathomable. Without question, I could not do that. My problem, then, was mine to solve.

My father, matter of fact as he was about everything, would line up a Justice of the Peace and get us married but my boyfriend had already nixed that plan. He had a friend who had a friend who knew about the ‘wire’ plan. We didn’t have the $250 it would cost to pay a bonafide illegal abortionist so the only option was amateur hour. There was no real discussion. The wire became the path we would follow. I was cornered. I knew I was alone with the consequences whatever they would be. My boyfriend could walk away and no one would ever know. He was free. I was cornered.

I grieved and was wild for a full year after that. I broke up with my boyfriend, realizing right away that any man who would advocate the wire wasn’t lifetime commitment material. I drank too much, bounced from guy to guy, and remember not much from that time except long times in the shower crying in grief and guilt. For years, I counted the days and months – how old the child would be if the pregnancy had not been terminated. The guilt was overwhelming. But as I matured, I recognized the decision for what it was – what I believed was right. I accepted responsibility and forgave myself. In the truest terms, I did what I had to do.

But what I had to do was a dreadful thing. The lack of safe, legal, and affordable abortion put me in a dingy motel in downtown Detroit to undergo a risky, unsanitary procedure that could easily have maimed or killed me. That I lived to tell the tale, to write about it on this page, is a small miracle of my life.

Six years later, abortion became legal in the United States. Of any accomplishment of the women’s movement, this one was always at my core. It wasn’t right for women to risk so much in order to be in control of their own reproductive lives. It wasn’t right to punish women who have been cornered by circumstances – unplanned pregnancy, no job, no money, no options – by daring them to find the $250 illegal abortionist in their city or worse. It wasn’t right that women should have to pay for a mistake with their fear, risk their future health and their very lives while men could walk away and be free. I was happy, so happy about Roe v. Wade. At last, I thought, this one thing for women – at last.

Twenty-five years after my abortion, busloads of anti-abortion protesters came to my town. Each morning they would pick a different abortion clinic and turn out by the hundreds to harass women coming for their abortion appointments. The crowds could be enormous with people waving signs with what they claimed to be pictures of aborted fetuses, and singing “My God is an Awesome God” verse after verse, hour after hour. Right away, I signed up to be a clinic defender and each morning I’d get up at 5, pick up a friend, and go lock arms with hundreds of like-minded folks to ‘protect’ that day’s abortion clinic and the women who needed its services. We’d stand there silently while the protesters yelled at us and sang their hymns. They’d call us baby killers and murderers.

Sometimes it would be nose to nose, shoulder to shoulder. The protesters would bring their children, too, and they would be singing “Jesus Loves Me” between choruses of “Awesome God.” We’d all be standing in a giant scrum while morning traffic zoomed by, horns honking in support of both sides. Special protectors in orange vests would shepherd each woman into the clinic for her appointment while protesters surged to scream at her. I couldn’t believe how evil and cruel it was to be screaming at a woman when she was in such a terrible situation, when she was cornered.  I wanted to yell at them, “HASN’T ANYTHING BAD EVER HAPPENED TO YOU?

Where is your loving kindness?

And here we are again. Demonizing women. Limiting birth control. Shrinking access to legal and safe abortion. Daring women to go find the wire. All while men can walk away and be free.

It makes my 64-year old soul angrier than almost anything. The extreme hatred for women voiced by politicians, the talk of legitimate rape, the unbelievability of the idea of an ultrasound probe, the intent to demean me/us – it all puts me back on the bus in the dark, by myself, cornered and alone.

It’s so wrong to treat women this way. So wrong.  We just can’t go back.

Source

As a woman who grew up with abortion being legal, albeit hotly contested, stories like this make me cringe.  They make me cringe because I’ve never been that girl on the back of the bus, and I don’t have to be, mostly at the expense of women before me.  Thousands of women in generations older than my own have been that scared nineteen year old, or perhaps worse in the morgue dead after a botched abortion.  Those women sacrificed, the vast most of them didn’t make those sacrifices with any sort of political end in mind, but they sacrificed all the same.  They sacrificed feeling safe, comfortable, and protected during their abortions.  They didn’t know how it would end.  They didn’t really have a solid plan if things went south during the procedure.  Women of my generation, we’re lucky.  We can get an abortion and we know that it’s statistically a far safer procedure than labor and delivery of a child.  We can go to the hospital to get it done, where if there are complications, we’ll be ok.  Now, it’s a short, easy procedure most of the time, where the doctor usually talks you through each and every step as their doing it and tells you what to expect.

I don’t understand why there are people who think that illegal back alley abortions are a better option to legalized abortion.  I don’t get it.  Countries that have strict limitations on abortion, or where abortion is illegal have higher rates of abortions than countries that don’t.  If you want to really prevent abortions,  make birth control free for everyone, not just insured women.  Require comprehensive sex ed.

good girl.

I was called a good girl today.

“Good girl” is like effing crack.  unffff.

It’s -almost- better than an orgasm

I won’t give up…

This song makes me melt.  Every. Single. Time.

Cheerleader rape compensation

Click me.

I followed her story fairly closely, and her story is potentially a shining example of rape culture (the coverage was so one sided, it’s hard to tell.)

I’m very sorry for the hardship this young woman endured, and at the same time, I have almost no sympathy for her as far as how she acted.  The alleged rapist was never convicted, therefore he was treated like an innocent man as far as the school was concerned and let back on the team.  The young woman was unable to let put her personal feelings aside while cheerleading and refused to cheer for the alleged rapist.  She couldn’t perform her job as cheerleader, therefore she was let off the team.

Whenever someone pursues a civil case like her family did, there is always the possibility that they will have to pay compensation to the other side.  It’s always a gamble.  Any lawyer worth their salt will tell you that it’s a gamble.  They gambled and they lost, twice actually, having to pay the school compensation was a highly predictable end to her case, an end I can’t imagine was totally shocking.