This week I'm continuing to read about Hobby Lobby and their sanctimonious ilk not wanting to provide contraception to their employers because according to their uber-conservo logic, contraceptives are the same thing as abortion. Never mind scientific evidence and the simple fact that if one is not pregnant one cannot have an abortion. Reality appears to have no jurisdiction in their dark and scary land of cautionary tales; uteri littered with the remnants of tiny dead people, Kermit Gosnell and his house of – I think we can all agree on this – horrors. But they seem to be going us one more, and in a strange direction: any pregnancy that may have occurred but did not is an abomination. No condoms, no pills, no IUDs, no rings, no Depo, no nothing. Every sperm is sacred, as Monty Python once said.
And just so we're square, this line of 'infringement on religious freedom' is also brought to you by the folks that brought to the news an employee that said something pretty dickish to a Jewish customer about why they don't have Jewish holiday things there. But I digress.
Then the sex-negative education push gets in my mental pathway and I am left to wonder: if married grown-ups imbibe and use birth control, they're wrong, too?? Family planning at all is unacceptable?? In the world of failed abstinence-only education, even when married (or otherwise committed-to-one-another people) can't practice medical birth control for any reason whatsoever??
I can't get there.
I can't help but feel a little lost during all this nonsensical discourse. It's been a difficult year, in that respect. These policies, and proposed policies, hit me directly. Sometimes the comments people make hit me more directly than others, and not in a good way.
I've written about this in the past, so maybe you know this already. I got HPV from a guy that I had dated. Twice. HPV can clear up, but sometimes the damage it does to a woman's body does not. That's me. I had a hysterectomy at thirty-three because the HPV gave me such a tumor-ridden cervix and uterus that most of the baby-making factory had to go. I was fine with it. I wasn't planning on having any more kids anyway. It's still scary, though. This person that was with me and wanted to have a family, even though I didn't, gave me a virus that made it so that I would never be able to produce a family, in the biological and traditional sense of the word. Don't get me wrong; I hated being pregnant. He didn't know he had it, so I don't blame him. HPV affects women; not men. The irony of the man that was mad at me for not wanting kids with him made it so that I couldn't have kids with anyone, right??
Anyway.
I didn't qualify for any kind of medical care that I could afford until Governor Gregoire fast-tracked the policies of the Affordable Health Care Act in Washington State. One of the first things that happened to me once I finally had coverage, for the first time in my adult life, was my diagnosis. Scary, lonely, shitty. And all the while, all around me, people are shitting all over the ACA. The reason I'm not dying is such a bone of contention for so many conservatives.
How does this tie into the whole Hobby Lobby controversy?? Join me, won't you . . .
Let's take Pam Stenzel, for example. An abstinence-only “educator” that spent years working at the government-funded religious organization Crisis Pregnancy Centers, shaming sexually active young women, and now is paid to speak to young people in public schools around the country (and the world, as she claims).
Just let me side-bar for a second here and say that abstinence can be a wonderful thing. If that's what's right for you, then you go. There is absolutely no shame in abstaining. I want to make that clear. However, there should also be no shame in not abstaining, if that's your choice. I do not subscribe to the theory that sex is purely for procreation. It is okay to have recreational sex. We live in a world with lots of scary diseases, and an unplanned pregnancy can suck out loud, but we have a myriad of ways to make choices about the sex we choose to have responsibly. So when people that fancy themselves educators, such as Pam Stenzel, use shame and blame tactics to frighten young people into abstaining, I think that's kind of bullshit. Sex is biological. We all want to get schtupped, and that's okay. But shaming is mean, and it doesn't work. (Okie-dokie, Ann Coulter – you suck as a human being).
Pam Stenzel is quoted as having told a room full of high school students recently that “if you take birth control, your mother probably hates you.” That's not even slut-shaming; that's an attempt to shame something like 99% of all women, because that's about how many of us have used birth control during our lives. To call that “slut-shaming” insinuates that all these women are sluts, which is a smelly pile or bull feces. It blows my mind that this woman gets a big ol' paycheck saying things like that about most of the population of American women. What IS that??
I've read articles in which young women that are not considered “pure” are compared to ABC gum. What kind of a horrible thing is that to say to a person, let alone a kid?? According to these purity-purists, you're as disgusting as trash if you have sex outside of marriage. Not even recyclabes: TRASH.
And then there's the believe that people that can't procreate traditionally (an argument usually projected at gay people) should not be allowed to get married, because marriage is for procreation. If there are people out there that don't want to make babies, then they shouldn't get married.
This fucking sucks!! These people and their weird ideas for how others should live their lives are really, truly ugly and usually poorly thought out.
But during the time last year when I was scared for my dirty, slutty, cancer-riddled life, some of these messages got to me in a way I wish they hadn't. But they did.
I can't have babies, so I should not experience love or sex or a relationship. I should put on my spinster dress and get some more cats and plants. I like cats and plants and everything, but is my status as someone that can no longer produce really mean that I can't be loved?? Or, let's go there folks: fucked?? I don't deserve intimacy or companionship or kisses because I am one of the Slutty McSlut-Sluts that lost her child-bearing abilities to a virus that happens to sluts when they go around being slutty.
See?? Modest is hottest. Virginity is in. And if that's not you, then you are a whore and you deserve what you get.
Well, I don't accept that. I don't think other people should have to accept that, either. Some of these speakers receive exorbitant amounts of money to preach faith-based ideas in public schools which, frankly, should be illegal. But it also burns my biscuits that these assholes are paid to compare our kids to trash in order to get their point across. It's disgusting, and people that do that should be ashamed of themselves.
And that's where my difficulty begins. Are those of us that are unable or uninterested in furthering the species to be treated at second-class citizens?? Society is already pretty mean to gay people about it. We've been pretty mean to people of color about it. Women that don't wish to go into the baby-making business are treated pretty shittily. Is that really what all of this about?? That only the viably fertile deserve physical and emotional love??
Like I said, I try not to listen to these assholes, because they seem to have a pretty incendiary things to say to people with different ideas. But sometimes it works: it hurts. It's not effective in reducing rates of young people going at it, but it does do harm when shaming people that are already vulnerable. Part of me does feel singled out by the whole thing. 'YOU, Sasa, are a slut. YOU did this to yourself. YOU deserve every terrible thing that happens to you, because YOU did not do things the way I said God said to. No one will ever love you.”
This is how we talk to people, or allow people to be talked to.
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