Your Body’s a Wonderland: Underpinnings

June 10, 2010 by 3 Comments

Dear Millicent,

There has been a lot of shock at the recent report that teens are using the rhythm method as a form of birth control.  The CDC reports that 17 percent of teens report using the method, up from 11 percent in 2002.  There has been criticism about how teenagers define the rhythm method, the likelihood that they are actually taking basal temperatures and checking their cervical mucus, and how abstinence-only education could be responsible for the upswing.  These are all good points, but I write in defense of the rhythm method, and to suggest it can do that thing that Gossip Girl can’t: empower teenage girls.

Here’s why: the amount we don’t know about our own bodies is astounding.  I am a 29-year-old woman who actively researches women’s health.  I have a poster about the menstrual cycle on my office wall.  I had the luck of attending school in counties where comprehensive sexual education was part of the curriculum. I have access to knowledge, resources and healthcare.  And for 15 years, I thought I had a monthly yeast infection.

How? Okay, after the initial shock at 14 of realizing that tampons go in an entirely different hole than the one we pee out of (it was like the first time you notice there is a pocket on the inside of the blazer you have owned for  years), I took to heart all of the health class info.  We were told to not wear wet bathing suits too long because being a lady meant one day buying Monostat 7.  “Discharge” was a newly relevant and terrifying word. Hell, it still is, and is way too vague.  The idea of menses was alarming enough, but at least I knew what blood looked like.  And it’s not like you can show your dirty underwear to your friend and say “does your discharge look like this?”  And then there were pantyliners.  I understood their purpose, but could never tell if real ladies wore panty-liners every day, or what (like, were they for your period, or for your dirty dirty dischargery?).

So, you are on the watch for a yeast infection which is described as itching with the infamous “cottage cheese like discharge.” This again is really abstract, and again, terrifying. And, vague.  Sometimes it might not itch, sometimes it might be another kind of infection, and sometimes it might go away on its own.  Sometimes Monistat might make it worse. Sometimes it might hurt. Sometimes you might never know you have a yeast infection.  And if you think you do but aren’t sure, you should go see your doctor, which means the hassle of a pelvic exam just to figure out what the eff is going on down there, because something is going on down there.  So, for the majority of my reproductive life so far, I thought I had a strange mysterious appearing and reappearing yeast infection or vaginitis. Turns out I was just a reproductive age female doing what I do: ovulating.

Here is what nobody ever told me, or at least ever told me in a way that I understood: something is always going on down there.  I knew about ovum and fallopian tubes and all that. But I never knew about cervical mucous.  I didn’t know that as you near ovulation, your estrogen levels rise and make this mucous.  More estrogen means more mucous.  I also didn’t know that without this mucous, sperm doesn’t have a chance in whahoodle to make it to the egg.  Sex does make babies, but mucous is the real moneymaker. At our most fertile, this mucous looks like egg white, and if you put it between your fingers, it should stretch to 3-5 inches without breaking.  This happens every month! We have superstretchy goop every frickin’ month, and nobody ever told me!

I found this out by reading Toni Weschler’s book Taking Charge of Your Fertility.  TCOYF is a revamp of the rhythm method, and looks at how to use the info to both avoid and accomplish (is that the right verb?) pregnancy. If you prescribe to her regimen, you take your temp every morning before waking up, and also note the state of your delicate flower. The range of adjectives for cervical mucous was a life changer for me:

dry, nothing, sticky, tacky, crumbly, gummy, creamy, lotiony, cloudy, milky, eggwhite, stretchy, clear, watery

There’s another set for “vaginal sensation”:

dry, nothing, sticky, wet, moist, gooey, cold, lubricative, slippery, humid

It all changes every day as you near or retreat from ovulation! It is never the same! We have stuff coming out of us practically all the time!

And it’s not just about knowing what you make. It’s about knowing where you are in your cycle, and what your chances are of getting pregnant.  It’s about knowing how your hormones are acting, if your headaches are cyclical, what the great circuit of being female means specifically to you.  It means I actually feel empowered, and it has nothing to do with my politics or family planning intentions.  It has to do with I actually understand what the hell my body is up to.

And this is why I am for teenagers taking on the rhythm method.  I hope it’s not their only form of birth control, but if all girls had this kind of personal knowledge, I think they have a better chance at sexual autonomy.  I was just at Women Deliver, a conference on maternal healthcare (which pretty much means the economic, social, cultural, and physical injustices that need to be addressed to help less women die from preventable deaths). On a panel on modern contraception, Ward Cates, the President of Research for Family Care International, referred to The Standard Days Method (basically the rhythm method) as “an underpinning at the least…letting women know about their cycle.”  It seems that this knowledge is missing even in developed countries, and if it could exist as an underpinning of our own sexual health knowledge, teenagers and old hags like me are lucky to have it.

I want to crack a joke here about John Mayer and mucous, but I like my mucous too much.

Yours,

CF

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Miss USA: Why Beauty Pageants Matter Again

May 18, 2010 by 2 Comments

It’s hard to understand the vitriol aroused by a contest where pretty women parade on TV until you realize that beauty pageants have a history of defining the culture they happen in. It’s not a pretty history: eugenics play into it. Crowd control play into it. Sexism abounds. Above all, though, beauty pageants have been a way for American culture to have a conversation with itself about what its ideal woman would a) look like and b) be.

I’m not going to go into the usual objections to beauty pageants. Putting aside the ways in which they oppress women (no argument here—they do), I’m more interested in figuring out what the culture gets out of them. Particularly the culture that’s currently offended—namely, conservative culture. Sexualized images of women are everywhere. What makes the pageant an especially charged community exercise, and why does it bother people so much when it gets decided in an unexpected way?

No one much cares when beauty pageants proceed according to the expected script (I’ll get to what that script is a bit later). Sure, there are quibbles or boozy disagreements, but all in all, the nation shuffles along with whatever beauty takes the crown. A 1975 article in the Washington Post on that year’s Miss America beauty contest describes this vague engagement pretty accurately:

“Nobody ever has the foggiest idea why one girl wins and another doesn’t. Bert Parks, the master of ceremonies, a perfectly preserved specimen of early middle age though he dates from the last year of King Tutankhamen’s reign, made a great point of reminding everybody that Miss America is not, repeat not, a beauty contest. Nor a talent contest. They never used to say that. They only say it now to keep peace among the television audience (and last year the show drew half the viewers watching anything at all) who tend to say: “Waddya mean, Miss Slopebone won? Wadda dog.”

No one knows why one girl wins and another doesn’t, but it’s clear that there are prescribed limits: “Miss Slopebone” is not, whatever her many faults, Lebanese. It’s the unsettling exception—the Carrie Prejean, the Rima Fakih—that activates a particularly virulent backlash, along with strangely urgent demands that there be a recount or a reckoning. What exactly are the critics trying to correct? What are the stakes here?

They’re higher than we think, and for reasons even they don’t fully understand. I don’t need to trawl the Internet to show how bizarre the screeds against the recently crowned Miss USA have gotten, so I’ll anatomize instead. As I see it, the rage about Rima Fakih’s coronation settles into three basic categories that have plenty of overlap between them.

1) Conspiracy: The URL to Debbie Schlussel’s article on the subject says all you need to know, and more coherently than the article itself, which you shouldn’t bother with. Here it is—read it as you would a poem:  http://www.debbieschlussel.com/22000/donald-trump-dhimmi-miss-hezbollah-wins-miss-usa-was-contest-rigged-for-muslima-hezbollah-supporter-miss-oklahomas-great-arizona-immigration-answer/

Schlussel will be glad to know she’s in good company; Celeb Jihad has also called shenanigans on the Miss USA contest organizers:

Given that Rima Fakih is the first Arab-American to be named Miss USA it is more than a little suspicious to find out that she is a complete whore. Obviously pageant officials hell bent on defaming the Muslim world, choose Rima Fakih to win knowing she was nothing more that a wanton Jezebel to embarrass us proud Arabs. There is only one thing left to do to make this right. Rima Fakih must be stripped of her title, dragged into the middle of Time Square, and lashed with bounded reeds by none other than Donald Trump himself.

2) Race/culture/politics. Fox News focuses on whether or not Miss Oklahoma was “sunk” by Oscar Nunez who asked “the immigration question.” This is the category of complaint I find most interesting, not for its crazy content but for how it helps us track the complicated minuet of genetic and cultural categories that constitute the conservative account of “Real American” identity. For many it’s a dormant assumption, but the fact is Miss USA is supposed to represent an ideal average. A representative specimen of Real Americanness. She should be the womanly embodiment of apple pie.

Apple pie is not Muslim! This is a profound point, although it may not sound like one. Racism is in the background and foreground, xenophobia photobombs the discussion, but neither race nor terrorism adequately represent what conservatives are actually talking about.

It’s worth restating: they (and even we, perhaps!) experience the Miss USA pageant as a conference of sorts that stipulates the necessary and sufficient conditions for Americanness. This becomes a problem when the category gets stretched to include Muslims because, in the conservative discourse, the terms are opposed.

A design problem of the Miss USA pageant, and one reason the stakes get so high, is that there’s only one of her. The pageant is really a contradiction in terms: pageants have historically represented communities, but the award in its present instantiation devolves on an individual whose body is her main representative asset. For a solitary body to represent a community is of course bizarre; the pageant, as an instrument of community-building, has never worked in this way. Even Homecoming Queens emerge from a context—a football game, floats, an entire participative panorama of which they are a figurehead.

The beauty pageant in its present practice has none of the features that made pageantry a place to communally practice being an American, but it still retains that cultural function. This is confusing.

To show how pervasive this function of the beauty pageant became, it’s worth taking a look at how other cultures struggling with hybrid identities within America perceived the practice as a point of entry into American culture, while negotiating how exactly they would preserve their own traditions. Here’s Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s take on how the beauty pageant facilitated that cultural transaction in San Francisco’s Chinatown (from her article “Loveliest Daughter of Ancient Cathay,” published in the Journal of Social History):

It’s difficult enough when a body is asked to represent an immigrant population. When it’s asked to represent a nation, the subtext is clear: this will be a statement on what an American is and on what she is not.

That we’ve internalized this function, and that conservative culture has especially, is pretty easily confirmed by a quick glance at your current Fox News programming. Chances are the female reporter is an aggressive specimen of the “American” as codified by beauty pageants of yore. (By the way, the 1922 Miss America is noted as having been “Typically American.” 1940’s Miss America is a “typical American girl; prefers tall men; doesn’t care whether Franklin Roosevelt or Wendell Wilkie wins election.”) These Miss Americas were, like Fox News’ reporters, white, blonde and blue-eyed. 30 Rock has built a season on Fox’s consistency in this respect.

In the wake of Fakih’s coronation and Miss Oklahoma’s loss, Fox News is asking everyone to VOTE as to whether or not she was “sunk.” That the language extends the promise of real representation, due process, is not coincidence. They’re trying to get this verdict on Americanness repealed. However haphazard, however baseless, Miss USA has ostensibly said something new about what an American woman can look like and be.

3) Sex. Now news headlines scream that Rima Fakih has been in the vicinity of, may even have touched—and danced on and around!—a stripper pole. Strip of her crown! they scream, unaware of the irony they drip.

Let’s start with 3) and get some context. To the hyperventilating hanky-holders: reach for your smelling-salts and remember the times we live in. There’s a national conversation happening because incredibly talented eight-year-olds in a dance competition were dressed in fishnets and lace. That’s how normalized faux-stripping and its accoutrements have gotten. It didn’t occur to the hands-on parents involved that there was anything amiss in these costumes.

I linked to Amanda Hess’s take on this because her point bears repeating: what really concerns us about little girls acting like adult women is that we don’t want them to, maybe ever—they aren’t sexual beings we can consume now, and that raises the question of whether we want to consume them and whether we should want to consume anyone in that particular way, even if they’re adults. This is, in short, an opportunity to have a conversation about what kinds of women we want girls to be able to be.

Beauty pageants are, oddly enough, a space for that consensus to be transacted too. More on this in a minute.

First, let’s settle  whether Fakih’s behavior with a pole is relevant. Here are the eligibility requirements to become a Miss USA contestant:

Eligibility requirements: In order to compete in your state pageant and go on to compete in the Miss USA competition, you must meet certain requirements. You must never have been married and not presently be married. You must never have had a marriage annulled. You must never have given birth, be pregnant, or currently be a parent. You must be at least 18 years of age and less than 27 years of age on February 1st of the pageant year you intend to compete in.

That’s it. Nowhere is it stipulated that a contestant limit her proximity to poles. And about those poles: remember that sad-sack figure we like to alternately Desex and Hypersex, the Suburban mom? That virginal commercial mother with the yellow gloves and the Book Club? She, insofar as she exists, takes poledancing classes instead of Jazzercise. If pole-dancing has made it to suburbia, it’s not a useful index of someone’s aberrant sexual experience (which is really what this is all about). Fact is, every year, thousands of vaginas are penetrated with nary a pole in sight. Poles may evoke stripping, but they are not in themselves moral turpentine.

(This reminds me of the anti-Laudian Puritans who campaigned against the Maypoles, but I’m trying to stay on track here.)

Objection 3) can be safely dismissed. It’s not a problem—not legally, not ethically. Onward.

Let’s go back to 2). Race. Politics. Culture. And note that, mere days after demanding the removal of the veil in the name of Christopher Hitchens (and, incidentally, oppressed Muslim women everywhere), here we are, trying to measure and prove a Muslim woman’s sexual excess and punish her for it.

Are we really this misguided?

Yes. We’re confused. And that confusion can’t quite be chalked up to idiosyncrasy or race hate or the boneheaded kind of conservatism (though these can clearly help). There are reasons underlying Fox News’ anaphylaxis to Fakih, and they go beyond Schlussel’s moronic conspiracy theories. The real reason, I think, is that the beauty pageant has a long, long history in the US, and its outcome is an annual rehearsal and renegotiation of the genetic and cultural grounds on which citizenship and representation are based.

There’s real anxiety here, and it’s not new. Our history’s roots are showing. So Miss USA, against all odds, has become relevant to the cultural conversation.

It pains me to say this, but regardless of the fact that Miss USA got started because the Miss America winner refused to pose for publicity pictures in a bathing suit; irrespective of Miss USA‘s elimination of the “Talent” portion of the competition, making it difficult to take it seriously as a “scholarship program”; setting aside that if Miss America is Victoria’s Secret, Miss USA is Frederick’s of Hollywood, and that in SAT parlance Miss America: Doris Day::Miss USA:Veronica Lake; overlooking, moreover, that the self-proclaimed guardian of feminine virtue is a man whose moral bankruptcy trumps his financial ones, let’s look at how beauty pageants in general—and Miss USA in particular—became the site of a major annual “Real” American conversation.

To understand this, it’s worth taking a look at how the history of the pageant shaped early twentieth-century American communities. Richardson Wright writes warmly about the pageant’s social function in the September 1919 issue of Art & Life. He praised it for two things: flattening class distinctions (such that the high-class lady bowed to the plumber in a local play) and—more importantly—making a community amenable to orders and consensus. He explained American docility as a function of the pageant, which he paints as proto-military and characterizes as a school:

But these past years have only served to prove a point that the pageant sought to sustain—given a topic or centre of interest, an entire community, and entire nation can be taught to act in unison. Under the spell of a great ideal and marshalled by capable leaders, a crowd of one hundred million on this side the Atlantic were taught to go this way and that, to wear these clothes and eat that food. … To-day, as we look back upon them, we wonder why our people were so docile, so ready to obey orders.

It would be easy enough to dismiss this under the generality of patriotism; but is it not a solemn fact that for years previous to the war scores of communities in America were going to the school of the pageants, learning these very lessons under the guise of the outdoor festival? The play-acting of those years was, in reality, a training for our people in the art of concerted action. (Art & Life, Vol. 11, No. 3, p. 164)

He’s not talking about the pageant as we understand it now, of course. He means outdoor community theater and any other organized group activity involving costumes and, well, pageantry. He means this:

Miss USA may not take place outside, but it inherited some important aspects of Wright’s pageant—it remains in some fundamental sense a “school,” a place where the nation simultaneously chooses the woman that best represents it and learns what the category of American womanhood now contains.

So how did Wright’s 1919 pageant, an expressly communal activity, become (by 1921, when Miss America started) a rather joyless and inherently competitive beauty contest?

Kimberly A. Hamlin offers one interesting possibility: her article (published in “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant” in 2004)  characterizes the early Miss America contests as both a conservative response to the pageantry of the Suffragettes and a commercial display of scantily clad young women (intended to attract tourists to Atlantic City). Miss America was invented as a means of transforming the communal pageantry of the Suffragettes into a rivalrous “divide-and-conquer” contest in which women were encouraged to compete against each other.

Another (and theoretically compatible) possibility? Eugenics. The major conversation during this time period concerned the startling fact that Americans should understand themselves as human “stock.” Eugenics was transforming the world and helping it become all it could be. Old American heroes were rehabilitated and brought into the brave new world: George Washington was praised not only for his pedigree, which was judged exemplary, but also for “prizing and utilizing superior seeds” and “increasing the best bred livestock he could secure in America and Europe.”

The conversation of what it meant to be American had suddenly become sharply and urgently genetic, and criteria that had previously applied to plants and livestock were rushed onto human beings for the sake of public health and with the hope of helping the nation evolve.

A little history:

In the 1920s, eugenicists adapted public health contests to create “Fitter Family for Future Firesides” contests. Designed by Mary T. Watts and Dr. Florence Sherbon, these contests were deliberately staged at agricultural fairs. These contests encouraged families to re-imagine their histories as pedigrees subject to scientific analysis and control, while appealing to a deeply rooted sense of nostalgia for the rural family as the nation became increasingly urban, as rural children left farms, and as the culture of the Roaring Twenties challenged “traditional values.” As such, the fitter family contests fused nostalgia for the farm family with a modernist promise of scientific control. (Laura Lovett, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics,” The Public Historian, Summer 2007)

Americans, urged to regard themselves not as individuals, but as genetic units, with a larger patriotic mission to improve the race in exactly the ways they’d improved their livestock and their crops, were asked to present themselves for inspection. Here’s how Lovett’s history of the Fitter Family Contests starts:

The 1911 “Million Dollar Parade” of prize livestock and other agricultural products at the Iowa State Fair concluded with an automobile filled with preschool children. A runner on the side of the car proclaimed them to be “Iowa’s Best Crop.” A later report of the event noted that these children had participated in a preschool health examination competition in which the examiners followed the only criterion available to them at the time: the methods of observing used by stock judges for determining prize livestock.
Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office, wrote a post card to the Iowa contest-organizers stating that stock judges always took inheritance into account, warning, “You should score 50% for heredity before you begin to examine a baby.”  … The Iowa administrators took note of this caution, but did not change the way they thought of their better baby contests until they observed for themselves how calves were sometimes judged. At Iowa county fairs, a calf would be examined on its own and then carefully compared to each of its parents. To contest organizer Dr. Florence Sherbon, this comparison suggested that perhaps they needed to judge entire families instead of just individual children.

Eugenicists agreed.

On a funny note, fair managers were a little wary of all this: Mr. Eastman, the manager, “did not deem it wise to place human stock first on the [fair] program.” As a compromise, he sandwiched the Fitter Family Contest between the “Pet Stock” and the “Milch Goat” categories.

By the early 1920s, Better Baby Contests had spread across the country, as had the Fitter Family Contest (which has a fascinating history that should interest students of public health). Being judged for your fitness had become something to do at the County Fair. If you won, you were a fit American.

The Miss America contest started at approximately the same time.  Charts of the Miss America contest winners include categories for eye color, hair color, bust-waist-hip measurements, measurements of the calf, upper arm, lower arm, wrist, thigh, and ankle.

Wikipedia tells me that “in 1935, Talent was added to the competition. At the time, non-white women were barred from competing, a restriction that was codified in the pageant’s “Rule number seven,” which stated that “contestants must be of good health and of the white race.” No African American women participated until 1970, although African Americans did appear in musical numbers as far back as 1923, when they were cast as slaves. Until at least 1940, contestants were required to complete a biological questionnaire tracing their ancestry.”

A final tidbit from Oct. 10, 1963: “Judges Skip Over Miss America Measurements,” from The Owosso Argus-Press. “Each year the question always arises. How do officials of the Miss America Pageant prevent contestants from padding their bust lines? They don’t try.  “We couldn’t care less,” said Miss Lenora Slaughter, executive director of the pageant. “We’re not in the body business. We’re just looking for a typical American girl who has beauty, poise, charm, talent and intelligence.”

We dismiss Miss America and Miss USA as campy live versions of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue at our peril. This is a persistent phenomenon, and ridiculous as it may seem, it signifies. It shouldn’t be ignored. The reaction to Fakih’s coronation demonstrates this like nothing else could, and it’s worth thinking about how to intervene in the American—in the real sense of the word—conversation about national identity so that conservatives and liberals don’t proceed along parallel, or increasingly divergent, paths. It’s an irony that it took a beauty pageant to show us the full instantiation of the Ugly American. Still, we can all be better than our history.

M

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , ,

An Open Letter to St. Joseph’s Hospital, Concerning Sister Margaret McBride

May 17, 2010 by 2 Comments

Sister Margaret McBride was automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church for her participation in a panel that recommended an abortion in the case of a pregnant woman whose pulmonary hypertension made it a virtual certainty that both she and the fetus would die if the pregnancy was carried to term. The Catholic Church has shown itself to be ethically and morally compromised. It has dedicated its resources to self-interest and self-protection. It has shown no concern for its children, its women, or any of the vulnerable populations it ostensibly serves. It has consistently protected only two things: its power and its priests.

It has, moreover, taken a position that punishes virtue and right action and promotes evil.

Last March, after it was discovered that a 9-year old girl in Brazil was raped by her stepfather and was pregnant with twins as a result, her mother arranged for her to have an abortion, as she was unlikely to survive the pregnancy. The Catholic Church excommunicated the girl’s mother and the doctors who saved her life. The stepfather was allowed to remain in the Church.

Below is the Vatican’s statement [from Vivirlatino]:

“It is a sad case but the real problem is that the twins conceived were two innocent persons, who had the right to live and could not be eliminated,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re to a local daily. Re—who is the head of the Roman Catholic Church’s Congregation for Bishops—acknowledged that “life must always be protected” yet did not say anything over the girl’s life being in danger by her pregnancy.

Aside from excommunicating the girl’s mother, Sobrinho also had the gall to disparage the raped child:

The stepfather was not excommunicated because the church said that his action, although deplorable, was not as bad as ending the life of an unborn child.

“It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,” Sobrinho said.

Catholics like Sister Margaret McBride are a ray of hope in the darkness. However, she is not a Catholic anymore. And as of this writing, neither am I.

To whom it may concern:

I am writing, as a Catholic, to commend Sister Margaret McBride for nobly advocating for appropriate and life-saving patient care. Her recommendation to end the pregnancy of the patient with pulmonary hypertension whose life was at risk was sound, based not only on medical advice, but also on compassion, forgiveness and charity. That she did so at considerable risk to her own career and worse, her membership in the Church she has dedicated her life to serving, only attests to the strength of her faith and of her character. St. Joseph’s should be proud to have her as an employee.
Sincerely,
Millicent

St. Joseph’s Hospital can be contacted directly here:

https://www.stjosephs-phx.org/Who_We_Are/Contact_Us/index.htm

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Uncategorized

The Pill and Why You Should Talk to People at Parties

April 27, 2010 by 1 Comment

Dearest,

Since we met 2010, there have been a series of trend pieces looking at the 50th anniversary of the Pill, the crazymaking nobabymaker. May is the actual anniversary month, and I bet once we hit May 1, there will be another big round of analyses. When I look at the history of the pill, I am surprised by how young it is, and that we are only the second or third generation to know of it, and perhaps the first to assume it (and access to it) as part of adulthood. Most women I know have at least tried the Pill as they navigated the great art of birth control, and that first prescription was a marked moment where they recognized the specific revolutions of their body.

And, most friends now rely on other protocol for contraception. But, the Pill is the gateway, that first commitment to the idea that contraception is part of the plan. And, it’s formal. There is an appointment, discussion, a piece of paper, a record. A scouring of information (that first compact, with the pamphlet that has so many rules about days and times and symptoms, on the same paper they print tampon instructions on), and a daily reminder that you are not going to have a child.

I’m sure the round of posts and articles to appear this month will echo, expand, and reverberate the themes of reproduction, autonomy, women’s health, and pop culture. We get to talk about how our bodies our significant, and the weirdness of chemically controlling them. It’s an easy topic to get long winded, overly metaphorical, and melodramatic/nostalgic about. But, I look forward to it, and offer that over the next few weeks, we open an epistolary conversation (perhaps three weeks on, one week off?) about any and all of it.

For starters, here’s the Pill as a lesson in networking. PBS offers an outstanding history as part of The American Experience, with complete timeline and gallery, including one intern’s post about cataloging birth control pills for the Smithsonian. The history here is amazing, and the entire timeline is worth reading.  Here is the networking bit:

  • Katharine McCormick is one of the first women to graduate from MIT (this is 1904)…her major, helpfully, is biology.  She is also mega-rich–she marries Stanley McCormick who is heir to the International Harvester Company fortune (his dad designed a new reaper, with all kinds of interchangeable parts that redefined American farming).  Her husband is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and she “vows never to have children and develops a staunch belief in the value of contraception.”
  • Meanwhile, Margaret Sanger is at work as a nurse and “dreams about finding a “magic pill” as easy to take as an aspirin that could be used for contraceptive purposes.”
  • In 1917, McCormick and Sanger meet up “and strike up an enduring friendship. Sympathizing with Sanger’s movement, McCormick makes small contributions to the cause and smuggles diaphragms into the United States for Sanger’s clinics.”
  • In 1934, at Harvard, Gregory Pincus “gains fame and notoriety at the age of 31 when he claims to have achieved in-vitro fertilization of rabbits. Pincus is vilified in the national press for tampering with life. Harvard does not grant Pincus tenure.”
  • In 1941, a chemistry professor, Russell Marker, figures out how to make synthetic progesterone from wild yams.
  • 1947–Katharine McCormick’s husband dies, and she inherits all his money.  In 1950, she writes Margaret Sanger and asks what kind of research is being done, and what is the best way to put her fortune to use.
  • 1951 is a big year:

January/February: Margaret Sanger, now 72 years old, makes one last ditch effort to find someone to invent her “magic pill.” At a dinner party in New York City she is introduced to Gregory Pincus and implores him to take up her quest. To her surprise, he tells her that it might be possible with hormones, but that he will need significant funding to proceed.

April 25: Sanger [Margaret! remember that letter!] manages to secure a tiny grant for Gregory Pincus from Planned Parenthood, and Pincus begins initial work on the use of hormones as a contraceptive at The Worcester Foundation. Pincus sets out to prove his hypothesis that injections of the hormone progesterone will inhibit ovulation and thus prevent pregnancy in his lab animals.

October: Pincus goes to the drug company G.D. Searle and requests additional funding from them for the pill project. Searle’s director of research tells Pincus that his previous work for them was “a lamentable failure” and refuses to invest in the project.

October 15: Unbeknownst to Pincus or Sanger, a chemist named Carl Djerassi working out of an obscure lab in Mexico City creates an orally effective form of synthetic progesterone — a progesterone pill. The actual chemistry of the Pill has been invented, but neither Djerassi nor the company he works for, Syntex, has any interest in testing it as a contraceptive.

  • In 1952, Pincus quickly shows that the progesterone works as an anti-ovulant in rabbits (it is also fitting that rabbits are the fertility researcher’s test animal of choice).  Planned Parenthood won’t fund the project, “deciding his work is too risky.”
  • Meanwhile, Dr. John Rock has been studying the rhythm method, advocating for birth control, and risking his teaching career by teaching medical students about diaphragms.  He and Pincus meet at a medical conference where Rock says that he has been testing progesterone as both a contraceptive and as an infertility drug.
  • 1953, Sanger connects McCormick with Pincus (finally–if this was a movie, that letter would be killing me by this point! I would be yelling at my television).  She writes him a check for $40,000 in order for his research to continue, and promises whatever support he needs.
  • In 1954, Rock and Pincus join forces to get FDA approval, and put together the 21 day on, 7 day off setup of the Pill.
  • By 1955, it’s announced they have found a birth control pill. The first product announced is called Enovid (and it’s a liquid!)
  • 1959: “Less than two years after FDA approval of Enovid for therapeutic purposes, an unusually large number of American women mysteriously develop severe menstrual disorders and ask their doctors for the drug. By late 1959, over half a million American women are taking Enovid, presumably for the “off-label” contraceptive purposes.”

Lots more fascinating bits in this story. Lesson here: go to dinners and conferences, read your mail, and don’t forget to ask for money for the projects you care about.

Yours,

CF

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Part 2: The Brits Get It

April 15, 2010 by 6 Comments

Dear Millicent,

So, as far as accepting and reveling in the fact that women are as uncertain and undefined (unshaped? we do wear formative undergear), America is kind of one note.  We have raunchy women (Chelsea Handler, Margaret Cho), we have shocking women (Sarah Silverman), we have mature irreverent women (Bette Midler, Whoopi Goldberg, Bonnie Hunt), etc.  Usually, they more or less stay in the bounds of their particular stable.  Women are allowed to be all of these things, but they have to stay in their compartments, just as a Sex in the City character must stay in costume as if they were assigned Power Ranger Colors.

In part 1 of my ramble on women and comedy, I introduced the Nu woman (a label that sounds irritatingly like a birth control brand).  What I meant by it is a woman who is as flummoxed, average, and compelling as men are portrayed, and who usually has a messy life that is full of unguarded or foibled moments of humanity.  This means she is not a smart Miranda, a creative fucked up Carrie, a sweet Charlotte, or a ravenous Samantha.  She is a dash of all of them, and some other stuff that Patricia Field will never get to accessorize.

The Brits, who have a long history of not demanding perfection from their televisions (see jokes about teeth, unhappy endings. etc.), understand the Nu woman, and benefit in spades. Their television is at least twice as good as ours, and at times is actually perfect (I attribute some of this to the fact that they are willing to end shows before they collapse in on themselves, usually limiting a show to 2 seasons with a reunion special somewhere down the line.)

When asked who she would want to direct her movie “Best Buds,” which promises to be a Nu woman heavy film starring Natalie Portman, screenwriter Jamie Denbo said:

“Somebody with a great comedic sensibility, who doesn’t distinguish between male and female comedy. So basically, somebody British. It seems to be a very American thing, distinguishing between male and female comedy. Overseas it feels like, If it’s funny, it’s funny.”

Here’s the proof in the pudding:

1.) Green Wing: In this show, the women are as sexually voracious, despicable, introspective, and timid and coarse as any of the equally extreme male characters.  Dick jokes abound, as do vagina jokes, and calls on male violence, female jealousy, and all the very ugly things that people do to each other to answer their own needs.  It’s a ridiculous show, and a marvelous one.  Topics include incest, seduction, murder plots, and apparitions of Jesus as well as passing exams, kissing too many people at parties, and the difficulties of having a roommate with wonderful hair. The two standout women are Michelle Gomez who plays Sue White and Pippa Haywood who plays Joanna Clore.  Both woman are masters of physical comedy, and neither shy away from very direct gags about female sexuality.   When I first saw this show, I had seen nothing like it, which is ashame, because it skewers and reveals in the way that only brilliant comedy can.

2.) Spaced: Spaced was written partly by Jessica Hynes who is also an odd saint on this site, a la her character Daisy Steiner.  Daisy lives with Simon Pegg’s equally effed up character, as they both mope around and try to figure out a life that isn’t exactly finding them.  Daisy is an inspiration because she thinks she is grander than she is, she futzes and is happy to eat chips and watch television, and she is a lackluster pet owner.  She is an aspiring writer, with all of the narrative, and none of the rest of it.  She is a wonderful mess, and one that was a balm to my own messy heart.  The first female character I had seen that was so honestly ungood and reaching. The show does an amazing job of articulating that particular pang of late twentyhood, and it is neither slick nor snarky.  A rare feat, and she and Pegg are equal foundations for it.

3.) The Book Group: Okay, an American wrote this…but she wrote it for Scottish television.  The protagonist is portrayed without glamor or sympathy, and by the end of season 2, eveyr chance of a classic formula arriving is squashed.  It is an assault on the narratives we tell ourselves.   Creator Annie Griffin seriously delights in refuting the neat endings of any character, emotion, or happenstance.  It is gloriously messy, confusing, and ugly–again making for a sum total of something that is fascinating to participate in. Also, it stars the divine Michelle Gomez, who does not let us down.

4.) Peep Show: Peep Show is a male heavy show, but I bring our attention to Nu woman Sophie, who starts as love interest and becomes a bit of an albatross to both characters.  She is as effed as both our narrators, and unapologetic as she clumsily navigates in and out of the plot.  One could argue that she is there only for Mark and Jez’s growth, except that her performances (especially at her wedding) are so pivotal and grotesque, and understandable, that she is very much in the pantheon (and she also stars on Green Wing, where she quietly does a stunt on motherhood, sexuality, and doddiness that will amaze).  Also, the show insists men are as self-conscious as women are often portrayed.

5.) Lizzie and Sarah:  I know less about this show, except that it is written by Jessica Hynes, of Spaced, and that it has been described as

“challenging comedy. Lizzie and Sarah are two suburban housewives (played by Davis and Hynes) whose lives suddenly go very wrong – although, as it turns out, things had actually been going very wrong for a long time. The humour is brutal enough to make Nighty Night look like You’ve Been Framed, and there are moments of cruelty so biting that it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry; spousal abuse, murder, grief and adultery are all thrown into the mix. It would be easy to dismiss it as shocking for the sake of being shocking, were it not also brilliant. It’s funny, inventive and angry comedy, and there’s little that can compare.”

Hopefully, this all hops the pond soon.  Drew Barrymore recently said about Whip It!

“I’m a woman so I’m going to make stories about women because I understand them, but I’m also a boy and I can’t stand the term ‘chick flick.’ That turns me off. I’m as turned off by that as any guy because I am a ‘dude.’ I have a very male mentality — the comedy in the film is not little girl comedy. It’s boy comedy, it’s androgynous comedy.” [Mirror]

Perhaps “dude” is code for Nu? Maybe instead of this kind of qualifier, we can just have better television and movies, more gasps of delight, more women who aren’t as much “attractive” or “shocking” as much as fucking brilliant.

Yours,

CF

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She had me at ungraceful exposure of honest thought, Part 1

April 15, 2010 by 3 Comments

Dear Millicent,

The attacks against and defense of Tina Fey in the past week have made for an interesting keyhole to peek in on the state of women’s humor in our fine media.  Fey has been called out on being too attractive, judging other women, and saying whore all the time.  My biggest problem with her grand work on 30 Rock is that Jack always saves the day for Liz Lemon when she gets in a pickle.

But what I love love love about Fey isn’t her insistence she is ugly, as much as the depiction of society’s insistence that she is ugly–that she lives in a world where the aptly captured pretty bubble exists for the likes of John Hamm and Cerie (the braless socialite receptionist).  Jack also lives in this bubble, though his is also padded by extreme wealth, and the joke is that the world does suck for the not infinitely blessed.   We can’t hate on Fey for being good looking.  That isn’t what she is doing here.  As our parents told us all through high school, we  are all very attractive, and as we learned in high school, that does jackshit for your self esteem when you are swimming with beautiful sharks every day who don’t have the same trials of plainitude as the masses.  How can anyone fully announce their prettiness, when they are obviously not within the pretty bubble? I think Rebecca Traister nailed it in her defense of Fey when she said “Occasionally suffocating self-awareness is the hallmark of Fey’s style. She’s not pretending to be anybody’s ideal, least of all her own.”

But what this really got me thinking about is how my favorite TV creation, and one that is rarely stumbled on, is the messy woman that is neither adorable or nunnish.  This might be considered the omega female, but it doesn’t have to be.  Instead of full out loser, she is simply as uncensored as the menfolk.  She is allowed the ambiguities and inanity of being a real human.

She may be attractive or unattractive, but what makes her interesting is that the camera doesn’t cut away when things get unladylike.    Also, I should add that I’m not suggesting that fictional characters have to be painfully set in realism, as much as that male characters (especially in comedy) are allowed all kinds of disgraces and the depth they offer, where women usually don’t.

For lack of a more creative term, I’m calling these dames the Nu woman, as Nu is  stuck in the middle (like most of us) of that Greek alphabet which has become our powerseat rating system.  (Let me know if you think of a better name, the other choice I had was the Mu, or the MuNu?).  The Nu women have a little sprinkle of both Alpha and Omega in their landscape, and they are a very rare breed.  I get so spooked (happily) when I see one on my TV that I usually lean forward, and my pulse quickens. “They went there!” I think, or “A woman definitely wrote that.” or “Oh, I do get that.”  I watch with glee and worry at what they are exposing about the darker corners of my adult charade.

Faux Nu women are rampant, and perhaps we owe them a trailblazing award, but I’m not feeling generous.  They are usually identified by their escapades with the nitty gritty of grooming or birth control (I’m thinking of Bridget Jones cursing as she waxes herself, or Rachel Griffiths in the very good Me Myself I watching as her diaphragm zings across the bathroom). I’m also thinking of all the sitcom tries at this…Rachel, Monica, Phoebe…Caroline in the City…even the ladies of my beloved Girlfriends.

Elaine Bennis leans heavily toward the Nu woman, especially with her lack of sentimentality (who can forget her questioning of “sponge worthiness”), and it was her prickly self-absorption that made her a character first in that ensemble cast, instead of a woman that was only there to prod the boys along in their understanding of themselves.  We also have Maude.  Yes.  Maude was definitely a Nu.

Also, as I have mentioned before, I think the 70s were kinder to Nu woman development. We have Diane Keaton in Annie Hall, leaving her body during sex, and all the ambiguity that her character symbolizes about relationships and their unarticulated endings. And, Ellen Burstyn  in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, who treats her child with a less than standard ideal of care.  They often have moments where expected sentimentality is strikingly lacking (a woman untender and unhysterical towards her lover, a mother disliking her child or her station), and it ultimately isn’t because they are lacking, as much as resisting any pat formula that is ready to fall on them and wrap them in the expected veil.

And that is why I love the women on TV who exist as creatures of the same universe as the men.  Sarah Haskins embarked on this well with her “Women and Advertising” series, always contrasting the image of a woman (tamed, perfumed, in love with housework) to the earthy existence that wasn’t a Cathy version of pathetic ladyhood as much as the fact that girls live very much as men: they drink beer, they poop, they wake up looking less than pert.  Are their differences? Yes, but the brass facts exist that a real woman is a sloppier less attractive thing than what is usually presented, and a more interesting thing as well.

And, as we’ll discuss in Part II, the Brits are so much better at this than we are.

Yours,

CF

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Julie Powell: Teaching a Self to Fish, How to Sell Fish, The Great Bitch

March 28, 2010 by 3 Comments

Dear Carla Fran,

Since writing you about how it seems like men and women handle absorption differently, I got interested in the intricacies of Julie Powell’s position as the Fallen Blogger. (You know, I assume, that her second book, Cleaving, is all about how she went into butchery and had an affair with a man who was not her “sainted husband.”)

I read most of her Julie/Julia blog. She’s gotten a lot of criticism, much of it no doubt deserved, but when I look at that blog, I’m amazed at the sheer volume of her output. How, after working a twelve-hour day and spending four hours cooking, did she have time to write that much?

And it’s good! It’s not Crime and Punishment, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s detailed and engaging and sometimes witty, it’s honest in a way that doesn’t seem to be angling for your approval, and if it’s sometimes blunt, it’s also sometimes really funny.

Her blogging and online writing (on Slate and elsewhere) since then isn’t as pleasurable to read. It’s slightly defensive and so aware that it’s being judged while insisting that it doesn’t care about your judgment that it collapses in on itself like a bad souffle.

(I know. I’m sorry. No more food metaphors, I swear.)

Still, the tone is significantly different. I wonder how much it’s due to the ways her life has exploded into a peculiar success story. She’s a much-despised celebrity figure (the Blogger) who got The Book Deal, The Movie Deal, got played by Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, had the nerve to complain about how she was represented and is ALSO guilty of admitted, thoroughly dissected infidelity with that clownish but beloved figure of domestic bloggery, the Dear Husband, and is in fact profiting off her misdeeds and trying to turn them into literature.

Food bloggers dislike her because she is a) not a Real Cook (though she never claimed to be one) and b) because trend pieces keep crediting her with shaping the food blog as a form, when actually The Julie/Julia Project preceded the explosion of that particular genre by a good year or two. She is also, some of them complain, insufficiently communal (did not interact with other blogs, etc.), and indefensibly opposed to organic vegetables.

So, I mean, there’s plenty not to like: you can accuse of her exploitation. Of insensitivity. Of falling prey to her own success. Of not being much of a networker, blogwise. Even of being a bad writer (I haven’t read either of her books, so I have no idea how her voice translates to book form.) But the main crime laid to her charge all over the interwebs is that she is a Narcissist. She is a Selfish Narcissist who Overshares.

Some qualify that assessment. They say Julie Powell seems to think that self-awareness means calling herself all the names she knows people will call her first. If she labels herself a whore before anyone else does, she vaccinates herself against judgment by being the first to confess herself guilty as charged. This set of critics complain that this is pure defensiveness; she doesn’t really think she’s a whore. Therefore, she doesn’t really feel guilty. To admit guilt without doing anything about it, this set of critics feels, is, well, it’s downright Catholic! It’s as if she expects absolution just because she says something that’s true without feeling, in her heart of hearts, its truth and changing accordingly.

This latter charge strikes me as probably true. It’s also what Woody Allen (for example) built an entire career on.

It’s one thing to say that reading the book is boring (which some have said). Boredom is unforgivable. But what these critics are clamoring for is a redemption story. They want her to be punished and they want her to emerge a better person.  Instead, they get a story that’s hard to swallow, written by a Selfish Narcissist who Overshares.

Back to Woody. Nobody would deny that Woody Allen is a selfish, unregenerate narcissist whose every project is a paean to his own ego. But neither is anyone suggesting that his career should end because of it. Narcissism does not necessarily make for bad art. In fact, to my everlasting despair, it seems like great artists almost have to be Firecrackers—it might be the case that great artists are constitutionally shitty people.

You may think that Julie Powell is not an artist, great or small. In that case, there’s no more to say—those are grounds for dismissal.  The shittiness of her writing is fair game. But the shittiness of her person is irrelevant.  

“But she wrote a memoir!” people like to say. “So her person is fair game!”

In the immortal words of G.O.B. Bluth, “COME ON!” We know it’s more complicated than that. We like to say that “memoir” exists in a world apart and that people who take on this genre openly invite our judgement and our scorn. And they do—as writers. We can judge them as people too, of course, and we do (hi Norman Mailer!). But to mistake one category for the other and start reviewing  the person instead of the piece—to suggest, for example, that Norman Mailer shouldn’t write because he’s a misogynist oversharing narcissist and a sociopath to boot—well, if we did that, we would be calling for the burning of most of Western literature. And art.

Most writers are narcissists, most artists are egomaniacs, and most memoirs are fake. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to that, the better. Memoirs are faker than (for example) Facebook profiles, and if you think your Facebook profile is in any way a representation of the real you, well—the deposed King of Nigeria desperately needs your help. 

This is one many reasons why it’s so damn hard to write—how absolutely great, but also how absolutely selfish it feels. That’s the wrong word. “Selfish” is really the wrong category. We’re all selfish in different ways all the time, and most of those ways should be worked on.  They can hurt the people around us who we genuinely care for and have reason to treat well. But this kind of selfishness, the writing kind, is strange in that it’s basically victimless but feels especially objectionable. It feels (and I speak only for myself here) like a HUGE taboo.  

While narcissism in male artists gets painted as brilliantly iconoclastic or even excused—Diego Rivera and Pablo Picasso were just raw, ready to sacrifice convention (read: their partners) for the sake of great art, Roman Polanski anally raped and drugged children but made great movies!—women are severely punished when their desires or demands cross the line of the reasonable and prudent. (My God!!! Julie Powell cheated on her husband!!!)

I even found myself mimicking that mentality in my last letter to you. When men focus on their work to the exclusion of others, I described that as “admirably absorbed.”  Julie, who did something similar in Julie/Julia, was self-absorbed. She’s too interested in her own story, people complain, with all kinds of vicious modifiers. How dare she complain that Amy Adams portrayed her as something she isn’t, quite? She should be on her knees thanking God that anyone bothered to read her drivel. (Never mind that she earned that audience because they voluntarily read what she was writing, and that what she was writing was therefore, on some objective level outside her bitchy, selfish, narcissistic control, interesting to someone besides herself.)

I don’t find her recent online writing as interesting, and those are legitimate grounds for criticism. I hope she hasn’t gotten so caught up in the dynamic between an anonymous reading public and her public persona that she’s started writing at them instead of about something that arises from her bitchy, narcissistic self. But she might have. (I would.)

This isn’t a defense of Julie Powell, the person. I don’t know her. Do I care whether she and Eric make it as a couple? Only to the extent that she’s made me care about the literary version of them.  But I am criticizing the criticism. And I want to defend absorption as a principle and what Powell  actually did as a writer, which was, in that oldest of cliches, teaching herself to fish and selling that fish. Here’s to you and me being that “selfish”.

Fondly,

M

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Mastering The Art of Emotional Corseting: Living Rooms and Closed Doors

March 26, 2010 by 3 Comments

Dear friend,

After reading your letter about your grandmother, I’ve thought a lot about how “repression” and closed doors have gone out of fashion. Good things open doors, bad things close them (unless God opens a window). In our metaphors, anyway, we’re against keeping the private thing out of the shared space. I think all this is just a little bit wrong. When Julia Child in Julie and Julia (which I watched for the first time tonight) gets the letter from Knopf, she glances at her husband inside, takes several deep whooping breaths and steps out onto the porch for privacy. She actually leaves the house. That scene reminded me of what you said about crying your bathroom or on the street—anywhere but in the living room. Brute emotion, you called it. Whether it’s excitement or grief, does it demand total privacy because, like other completely private things, you can’t really blunt the edges so they don’t hurt or alarm the people around you? (And give them ammo too?)

I thought about this while watching Julie and Julia because Julie keeps having “meltdowns” in front of her husband that result in him calling her a narcissist (which she is—brute emotion is narcissistic) and leaving her. (For a night or two, anyway.) Meanwhile, in total and telling contrast, Julia writes her friend Avis that it’s becoming harder and harder to conceal from her husband how heartbroken she is about leaving Paris. Julia corsets her sad emotions; Julie blogs them.

It reminded me of your idea about how shared lives are half-lives, and how the things that make us tick are also the things that can make us explode. Julie and Julia shows two pretty convincing  happy, well-suited couples.  To the extent that there’s romantic crisis, it’s over how the two Julias’ search for a passionate direction leads us to look at what careerist passion can mean to a domestic relationship (basically, absorption in the work and neglect of the partner). The movie’s challenge—and I’m not sure it bones this particular duck—is figuring out how to make the weird and private “half-life” of well-loved work gel with the other weird and private “half-life” that is a couple’s world. Those two halves don’t always talk to each other, right?

You and I tend, I think, to let the latter half-life trump the first. I bet a lot of women do. Maybe a lot of people do, though in my limited experience (hello dad!) men fall into work-world and ignore the social noise around them better than women. My dad can sit in his open-plan office and ignore anyone coming up the stairs, even if they’re talking directly to him. My mom, to claim time to herself, has to close a door. Even that isn’t enough sometimes. One door in my parents’ house actually has a sign taped to it that says “PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK UNLESS IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE OR DEATH. THANK YOU.”

That door leads to the bathroom. And it has butterflies drawn on it to soften the blow.

There’s a formal desperation to that sign, I think; it exists because otherwise she would give into us all. My dad won’t, because he’s absorbed, so he never has to make the choice. He doesn’t actually realize that we’re there, and it doesn’t occur to him that we might be hurt. And so, by and large, we aren’t.

When work is like yours and mine and gets mainly done from home (and your partner’s does too), it’s that much harder to pick up the work-world because it feels antisocial. It feels—and Julie and Julia deals with the fineness of this line outright—not just absorbed but self-absorbed. It feels selfish and like a rejection of the couple-world, and who wants that?

This is why I think doors are important. Like my dad’s focus which protects him, doors protect us from having to make a choice between the work-world and the couple-world. Thanks to them, or something like them, we can fully occupy one half-life before returning fully to the next, instead of living in the liminal space between the two like one of those optical illusions that are either two faces or a vase but never actually kiss or hold flowers.

(If we could close those doors in our brains instead of relying on architecture, it would be much easier, of course.)

Remember our intense virginal past, full of (sexually frustrated) inspiration and achievement? The thing about being virginal is that (whether you want it or not) you do have a door to close.

I started this letter meaning to talk about grief, not work, and I seem to have lost my way. But I think something similar applies—shared space can almost equal shared everything else, and that’s weird when you’re dealing with an unshared loss. Mr. Carla Fran, in all his wonder, can’t overcome the fact that your grandmother was not his. You have a long past that doesn’t include him, and you will have feelings about it that he can’t feel. Your childhood, your feelings about your mother and grandmother from when you were five… those doors are closed to him, which has to be part of what makes crying in the living room so awkward. One of my dad’s favorite truisms is that when you’re born and you take your first breath, it contains so many atoms that when you die, you’ll have at least one of those atoms with you. When you have to take a breath that comes from an older story than the one you’re in (and what are grandparents but older stories?), the living room—where you do your present living with Mr. Carla Fran—might not be the place to feel an older story dying.

As I write this I wonder: besides the fact that another person doesn’t share your past, could the difficulty also be partly about the room? Parlors and studies and foyers and billiard rooms are conceptually marvelous because they suggest (rightly or wrongly) that there are right rooms for things. The living room, where you couldn’t do your crying, is a special case, partly because it’s in a thirty years’ war against the Family Room for supremacy. (Is it telling that the American family home wants to dedicate one room to Family and another to Living?) When all you have is a Living Room, a shared bedroom, a kitchen and an office, where do you cry? Your solution seems right. At least the bathroom is built to withstand water.

When my grandma died I lived alone, so there was no corseting of the kind you describe, but my living room wasn’t much comfort to me either.  I drifted to a running track that has a big hillside with little trails. I walked up the steepest one and when I was winded (a whole three minutes in), it gave me something to do with the explosive throat-knot. Those old atoms wanted out, but I couldn’t let them out in a Living Room, which suddenly seemed frivolous and dingy and small. How dare sofa cushions exist in a world where my grandmother doesn’t?

Once the big emotion passed and I got myself down the hill and home, I realized I wanted some corseting. Not for me, not exactly. I wanted (here’s a sentence I never thought I’d say or see) to be a corset for my mom. I wrote then that I wanted to be down the hallway and that still seems right. If there’s a hallway, a door’s implied. I worried about her. My mom always holds it together, but this seemed like the exceptional case: she might fall apart utterly. I worried (weirdly) about her dignity. To think of her stripped of it—to think of her, for example, sitting on a trail by a track sobbing—seemed like the worst thing in the world.

Did you have this feeling too? Mothers and grandmothers. Oof. Very hard to imagine them as elemental selves and not our structures.

Corseting is tough, as Julie and Julia acknowledges, with its triumphal last meal in which Julie successfully bones a duck. (Telling, right, that Julia is an excellent duck-boner? She’s very good at keeping her sadness in.) When my grandma died, since I couldn’t be there for my mom (she was in Chile), I drove to my Tia’s house and kept her company on her first night without her sister. I did my best. When I got there her eyes were red from crying. We didn’t cry in front of each other, although I spent most of that night awake and she did too. All in all, I think we were pretty good corsets for each other. Of course, there was a built-in pressure-valve: we weren’t sharing a room. We could keep up the decorous facade up and save the waterworks for bed. That made our corseting easier.

It’s harder to corset if you’re Mr. Carla Fran—both distant (not a direct relative) and living inside the closed door, but I think it can be done. Do you remember the scene in Julie and Julia when Julia Child, who has concealed her devastation at leaving Paris and tried to wave away the fact that her 8 years of work will go unpublished and turned out to be “just something for her to do,”  reads in a letter that her sister Dorothy is pregnant? Paul is standing there when she gets the news, and she breaks down. When she sobs “I’m so happy” into his shirt, he says, “I know.” Good corseting, Paul.

My point, insofar as I have one, is that whatever her reasons were for “repressing” her sadness and reading her letter from Knopf on the porch, Paul’s insufficiency wasn’t one of them. When her corset fails, he’s there. Her reasons have everything to do, I think, with the basic privacy we all need, whatever our sex our age or time—the space for an unfiltered reaction that doesn’t jeopardize the things we most value.

Dear friend, I’ve blathered on about this and that and the other and I haven’t said the really important thing, which is how sorry I am, and how much I wish I could be down the hall from you right now.

Fondly,

Millicent

P.S.–Speaking of hallways, Easter, mothers and Julia Child, I poached my first ever egg.

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One for Two: VBACs and Autonomy

March 16, 2010 by 2 Comments

Dear Millicent,

In her article “Do Pregnant Women Have The Right to Refuse Surgery,” Rebecca Spence over at RH  Reality Check highlights one of the craziest and mindwalloping aspects of motherhood. You and I have parsed shades of it before, looking at how the sacrifice of parenting is so much more than time and money or giving hugs and casseroles when you just don’t feel like it.

While both parents might gain the privilege of joint dictatorship over their kids’ lives, once pregnant, a woman is pushed into a new definition of selflessness.  Her body becomes a grounds for expectation, judgement, and social know-betterness.  And, while there are lots of glowy wonderful aspects, that other terrifying analogy exists: Mama as host and Baby as blood-pressure-spiking parasite.    Why terrifying? Because parasites usually win, and hosts are never defined by their exhilarating autonomy, are they?

Spence’s article focuses on the NIH’s Vaginal Birth After Cesearean Consensus Development panel, which last week issued a statement that had some good news (mostly that the regulations limiting VBACs needed to scrutinized), but the squirmy argument that there were circumstances where a doctor’s opinion trumped a mother’s wishes regarding surgery.

Spence  emphasizes “the panelists’ comments indicated that a conclusion regarding the ethical question was beyond their scope, yet stated to the press and to the audience that the body of law and ethics that protects the right to refuse surgery was not written for, and may not include pregnant patients.”

Spence asks “Are women who are pregnant simply a different form of person with a different set of rights?”

Obviously, and yet I had never thought of it before, this question is a big question in the field of obstetric ethics, and is simple (treat people well! ) and sticky (it’s ethics!).  Spence writes:

Much ink has been spilled refuting the two-patient model of obstetric ethics, which conceptualizes the interaction between mother and fetus as a conflict capable of being decided by an outside arbiter (be it a judge, ethicist, or doctor), rather than a conflict between the mother and the doctor. The manner in which the panel has cast the problem of obstetric ethics as a maternal-fetal conflict, as opposed to a woman-doctor conflict could lead one to the conclusion that a physician’s ethical obligation to “first do no harm” applies to fetuses, but not to women — an untenable position for a profession devoted to caring for women, and a dangerous position for public health. The panel’s failure to condemn practices such as court-ordered cesareans and child protective services intervention to coerce women’s compliance with doctor’s orders poses major questions about whether and how personal convictions may have been at play in this discussion.

I read this, and I think ack! The maternal-fetal conflict is real, but biological and strange and nobody really wants to talk about what that really means because by the time the conflict presents itself, it has to be come to terms with.  If my partner chooses to have a child, he deals with feelings of maturity, fears, finances.  If I choose to have a child, I have to decide whose body comes first in my judgment, the kid’s or mine. My freedom is probably tanked, but hopefully on my own terms.  If I choose to continue my pregnancy, I am both hijacked and hijacker’s big boss. But that problem is not one of obstetric ethics, it’s of how maternity is a strange feat.  And Spence here focuses on how doctors should support women in this moment: as individuals with full rights.

And, while the horrors of court-ordered cesareans exist, it sounds like the panel’s opinion is not the majority’s perspective.  Spence says:

The position taken by the consensus panel directly contradicts the thoughtful and comprehensive presentation given 24 hours earlier by Dr. Anne Lyerly of Duke University, the invited expert speaker on the ethics of vaginal birth after cesarean. Dr. Lyerly reminded the panel of “a lesson that we need to keep learning but should know by now.”

“In obstetrical decision making,” she said, “women retain their rights of bodily integrity, just as people do in all other situations. So when a woman declines a cesarean, even when it is absolutely indicated, she cannot be forced to undergo it, [n]or be punished for her decision not to. American jurisprudence supports that, as well as ACOG [the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists].”

I’m happy to see this opinion offered so eloquently, but what worries me is that the establishment still fumbles with the question.  And I shudder to think what a Law and Order episode would look like dealing with this topic.  We’re taught early on that if a woman is pregnant, the stakes are raised (think of any movie with a holdup at a restaurant or bank…usually there is a pregnant woman among the hostages).  A useful narrative device, yes:  two lives in one (get her off the boat first!).  But, while it usually expands her freedom in these fictional situations, she loses voice and power so often in real life.  The idea of woman as baby container/host/russian nesting doll is so scary—-Not because of the act of reproduction, but because of the transformation from person to object.   Here’s hoping, like Spence offers, that this is becoming a less standard standard in the medical field.

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What Utah’s Miscarriage=Homicide Laws Could Mean: Some Scenarios

February 24, 2010 by 1 Comment

Dear CF,

Your post about the pregnant Olympians was so damn good, and so timely: I opened the Internet the next day and found this news on legislation in Utah, which would allow any woman whose pregnancy ended in miscarriage due to an “intentional, knowing, or reckless act leading to the pregnancy’s illegal termination.” If the Winter Olympics had been held in Salt Lake City this year instead of in 2002, every one of those pregnant Olympians would have risked being charged with homicide if they happened to have a miscarriage.

This is clearly one of those bills that stemmed from a sensational news story—the kind we love, the kind that 20/20 and its ilk have fed us for decades. Remember when everyone wanted to come up with some way to legislate away Megan Meier’s suicide, caused by Internet bullying? This bill—which does not allow women to be prosecuted for arranging a legal abortion—was passed because “a Vernal woman allegedly paid a man $150 to beat her and cause miscarriage but could not be charged.”

Easy to see how that story caught Utah’s imagination. Let’s sit a minute with the wording of that bill, though: any “intentional, knowing, or reckless act” followed by miscarriage can result in a woman being charged with homicide. As Jezebel and others have pointed out, that last little word, “reckless,” means that legally, anything that has ever been labeled as a suboptimal practice for pregnant women could be retroactively used to charge a woman whose pregnancy has ended. Correction: it can be used to charge a woman whose pregnancy has been “illegally terminated,” meaning not that she obtained a legal abortion but that she miscarried through some other means, the legality of which is to be determined by the circumstances leading up to the miscarriage.

To see how dangerous this is, let’s pretend we’re looking to prosecute a woman who miscarried. For this exercise, we’ll look to the newspapers to get a sense of what might reasonably count as “common knowledge” that a pregnant woman disregarded, neglected or disobeyed, and how any of the following cases could arguably have resulted from “reckless” behavior.

Case 1: She got pregnant. She didn’t get the swine flu vaccine. She got swine flu. She lost the baby:

On Sept. 29, 2009, the New York Times printed this story: “Pregnancy Is No Time to Refuse a Flu Shot,” in which authors Lyerly, Little and Faden note that pregnant women “are deluged with advice about things to avoid: caffeine, paint, soft cheese, sushi. Even when evidence of possible harm is weak or purely theoretical, the overriding caveat is, ”Don’t take it, don’t use it, don’t do it.'”

They point out that many pregnant women avoided the flu shot and got terribly sick or died:

This is a sadly familiar pattern. After the thalidomide disaster of 1960s, and the very real concerns it raised about the impact of drugs on fetal development, many ended up viewing the use of any medicine by pregnant women as anathema. As a result, doctors and women alike often eschew or discontinue medications for serious illnesses, even when the harms of untreated disease, for women and the children they bear, are worse than any risks of medication.

The Montreal Gazette puts it more strongly in their Dec. 2, 2009 headline: “Pregnant women urged to get shot; Only way to protect fetus, expert says.”

(Note the language here: The ONLY WAY to protect your fetus is to get the shot. It’s a cut-and-dried case. By avoiding the flu shot, our case study was reckless. The language of the bill specifies that her behavior could be  “intentional, knowing OR reckless.” There’s no need to prove all three.)

Case 2. She got pregnant. She DID get the swine flu vaccine. She lost the baby.

“Stillbirths deter women from swine flu shots,” printed January 24, 2010, in the South China Morning Post, in which “a nine months’ pregnant woman gave birth to a stillborn baby three weeks after receiving a swine flu vaccination, the second stillbirth case involving a vaccinated pregnant woman in a week.”

Case 3: She got pregnant. She exercised. She lost the baby.

The June 21, 2005 headline of The Globe and Mail: “Pregnant women especially prone to summer injuries, study finds.”

Case 4. She didn’t exercise enough. She lost the baby.

“No Excuse for a Pregnant Pause,” Washington Post, November 29, 2005, talks about how women who don’t exercise enough are endangering their babies.

Case 5: She got pregnant. She works on a farm. She lost the baby.

The January 12, 2002 Belfast News letter “WARNING FOR PREGNANT WOMEN AT LAMBING TIME” states that pregnant women “should avoid close contact with sheep during lambing periods, the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS), the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland have advised.”

Case 6. She got pregnant. She was depressed. She took antidepressants. She lost the baby.

“Pregnant women warned by FDA to Avoid Paxil,” Washington Post, December 5, 2005.

“Taking Zoloft During Pregnancy Leads to Birth Defects.” Lawyers and Settlements, June 7, 2007. “A recently published case-control study has shown that infants born to mothers who took selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) after the 20th week of pregnancy were 6 times more likely to have persistent pulmonary hypertension (PPHN) than infants born to mothers who did not take antidepressants during pregnancy.”

Case 7. She got pregnant. She was depressed. She didn’t take antidepressants. She lost the baby.

“Dealing with Depression and the Perils of Pregnancy.” The New York Times, January 13, 2004. “Depressed women also have a higher rate of obstetrical complications and preterm deliveries, and a review of 11 studies has shown that they have 45 percent more miscarriages, said Dr. Gideon Koren, a pediatrician and the director of the Motherisk program at the University of Toronto, a risk-counseling service for pregnant women.”

Case 8. She got pregnant. She goes to the doctor as soon as she realizes it. There’s a birth defect. She lost the baby.

“That Prenatal Visit May Be Months Too Late.” November 28, 2006, New York Times. “The problem, doctors say, is that by the first prenatal visit, a woman is usually 10 to 12 weeks pregnant. ‘If a birth defect is going to happen, it’s already happened,’ said Dr. Peter S. Bernstein, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York who helped write new government guidelines on preconception care.” So they’ve restructured their recommendation: “Public health officials are now encouraging women to make sure they are in optimal health well in advance of a pregnancy to reduce the risk of preventable birth defects and complications. They have recast the message to emphasize not only prenatal care, as they did in the past, but also what they are calling ‘preconception care.'”

Case 9. She got pregnant. She lost the baby.

“Study Finds 31% Rate of Miscarriage,” The New York Times, July 27, 1988. “Thirty-one percent of all conceptions end in miscarriage, usually in the early months of pregnancy and often before women even know they are pregnant, according to a new study.”

“Trying Again After Recurrent Miscarriages,” The New York Times, March 25, 2008. “More than half of pregnancies are spontaneously lost even before the woman has missed a menstrual period and knows that she is pregnant, and about 15 to 20 percent of recognized pregnancies are miscarried in the next few months. For couples who want a baby, these are daunting numbers.”

The point—which I hope I’ve made sufficiently clear—is that miscarriages happen all the time. The cause of a miscarriage is much harder to pinpoint than, say, the cause of death in a crime victim. To pretend that “homicide” is an appropriate category here is beyond irresponsible: it’s insane. It’s hopelessly unrooted from the physical realities of pregnancy, a high-risk biological process during which a million things can and do go wrong every day. Let me be clear: to impose a causal relationship where in the vast majority of cases there is none is to devolve to a legal system where witch hunts were sensible judicial proceedings.

The other point is that the above studies are meant to be helpful and not prescriptive. Here, scientific and legal process are at odds. These findings are published in order to add to a huge data set that will, over time, allow us to form some reasonable theories on how to proceed. They are not definitive. They are not proscriptive. Anyone who has been alive for more than ten years is familiar with the health fads the medical community cycles through, in which fat, sugar, salt, cholesterol and carbohydrates star in turn as the main medical threat to our immortality. In pregnancy, as in health, there is not a clearcut right answer. The medical profession understands this, and bases its recommendations on what amount to “best guesses”.

The legal system does not. This piece of legislation is opening the door to exactly the kinds of arguments I’ve made above. You might think some of the examples I’ve chosen are eccentric or ridiculous. They fly in the face of common sense. This is exactly my concern: common sense plays no part in legal argumentation, which is why legal phraseology is counterintuitive and why it is imperative that we get that phraseology right and eliminate “recklessness” from that bill. ‘Course, my hypotheticals are nothing compared to the legal arguments that get made in real life. As an example, I give you the following article, which offers this dubious hope: should any pregnant women end up jailed by this system (charged perhaps with attempted murder—maybe she was caught driving without a seatbelt) they can argue that the fetus hasn’t been tried and sentenced and is incarcerated in violation of its rights.

Missouri Fetus Unlawfully Jailed, Suit Says

New York Times, August 11, 1989

A Missouri law restricting abortions has been used by a pregnant inmate to file two lawsuits against the state for what she contends is the illegal imprisonment of her fetus.

The suits, brought last week in Federal District Court on behalf of Lovetta Farrar, 30 years old, and the fetus she carries, contend that if life begins at conception, as the Missouri law states, the United States Constitution should protect the fetus from illegal imprisonment. The suits assert that the fetus has not been charged with a crime, granted a trial, received counsel or been sentenced.

The Supreme Court upheld the Missouri law, which bars abortions in publicly financed medical units. But the court did not rule on the law’s preamble, which states that life begins at conception.

The Kansas City lawyer representing Ms. Farrar, Michael S. Box, argues in one suit that if the Missouri law grants a fetus personhood, the 13th Amendment protects the fetus from being forced to serve a prison sentence for another person. The other suit asks for improved prenatal care for Ms. Farrar.

Fetus Called Endangered

”The fetuses should be treated as persons and should not be put in prison without a trial,” Mr. Box said. ”The fetus should not serve a sentence for the mother.”

One suit contends that the fetus is endangered because Ms. Farrar is not receiving adequate food, exercise or prenatal care. The baby is expected to be born in late November or early December, and Ms. Farrar, who was convicted of forgery, is not scheduled to be released until 1991.

The suit asks the court to vacate Ms. Farrar’s sentence or require the state to provide a special site where pregnant prisoners could receive better care. Mr. Box plans to ask the court to hear the case on behalf of the estimated 25 pregnant women in Missouri prisons.

The case has been assigned to Judge Scott O. Wright, who ruled two years ago that the Missouri law restricting abortion was unconstitutional. That was the ruling overturned by the Supreme Court.

Both opponents of abortion and proponents of the right to abortion would like to see better prenatal care for prisoners. Yet some abortion rights advocates worry about the impact of the case.

”The court might agree with some of the contentions that the fetus is entitled to personhood, which could set a bad precedent,” said Dara Klassel, senior staff attorney with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in New York. ”I hope that if the court awards anything, it is based on the woman’s rights rather than the fetal rights theory.”

Samuel Lee, the state legislative chairman for Missouri Citizens for Life, an anti-abortion group that helped draft the legislation restricting abortions, said: ”I think it’s a legitimate application of the law. I can’t speak to the validity of the claim that the prisoner is not receiving adequate prenatal care, but I think it’s something the court should look at.”

Fondly,
M

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