on pale palin

I have zero respect for antichoice politicians, that goes without saying. Apparently there is more to liking Sarah Palin than her antichoice positions.

She’s a hockey mom. Okay, GROSS. Friedan identified how pathologizingly dehumanizingly awful it is to be a slave to your own offspring and linoleum flooring and never see the light of day or your own name on a pay cheque. And that was 45 years ago. The banality of suburban existence has been satirized effectively by X number of films , novels, sit-coms, etc. Why would we suddenly find this appealing?

Okay then maybe just focus on how she’s a mom. But whatever. So is my mom. And my mom’s actually an advocate for women and mothers, and you don’t see her running for vice-president. Palin’s a white woman who procreates like a bunny well into her trisomy-21-predisposed forties, and like I have argued before, I argue again that in this fearful, xenophobic era of anti-islamicism and waning western fertility, the white woman who actually bites the bullet and sacrifices her body, time, career, fun, independence, etc to give birth is the new prophet.

And not only that, she’s a mom to a Down’s kid! Well congratulations. It is nice when some rich, powerful person takes on a little extra responsibility, not that Palin is actually able to be responsible for baby Trig, what with running a massive election campaign and all, and then possibly having to RUN THE WORLD. But let’s not forget she hid the pregnancy because she thought people would oppose it. Honestly, who opposes Down’s kids? Really, in this day in age? Maybe I am deluded, but I believe you can decide not to continue a trisomy 21 pregnancy and that is fine, and if you don’t terminate, everybody thinks Down’s kids are endearing and that you are a saint.

And not only that, she’s so into keeping the WASPY race going that she promotes teenage pregnancy! And WASPY pregnancy is so desirable it’s above scandal! You can have an “unwed” pregnant daughter not yet old enough to toast her fecundity with a glass of champagne; you can have rumours that your last pregnancy was actually your daughters’; you can waltz between the gossip minuets of adultery, firings, and reckless amniotic-fluid-spilling trans-continental-flights- and you will survive the media tempest because you once graced the cover of vogue and now self-populate half of the town of which you were once mayor.

Be pretty, be white, be playful, and goddammit, be fertile, and you won’t threaten a soul.

on film criticism

Jezebel.com gets me through the workday. Jezebel told me Sisterhood of the traveling pants 2 “has intelligence and heart”. http://jezebel.com/5033753/sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants-2-puts-sex-and-the-city-to-shame

So even though it has the most unintelligent title in the history of chick flicking, M-L-T and I wanted to go. It’s been raining for two weeks and we couldn’t face the ever-more-prepubescent bar on Friday in our soggy-frizzy state. I hadn’t seen the first version but she gave me the summary: Carmen, Lena, Tibby and B share a pair of pants as they travel around, fedexing it luxuriously across continents.

The film is not intelligent. It won’t warm the cockles of your heart, although the olive-skinned and blue-eyed figure drawing model that Lena briefly dates will warm something in you. What the fill did accomplish was to piss me off royally for it's absurd approach to reproduction.

See Tibby and her boyfriend Brian date for ten months and then have sex for the first time. The condom breaks. Rather than go out and buy Plan B at the 24-hour drug store very likely to be open at that hour in NYC, Tibby launches herself into a depression that causes the breakdown of her relationship, hallucinations about parenting, and an inability to work or communicate with loved ones. Weeks pass before she even gets a pregnancy test!!!! She dances around in the sacred “pants” and begs the heavens for a miracle in the form of her period, which, of course, comes. Thank god cause otherwise she was totally going to have to have a baby and fail school, work and life in general.

Lots of tweens and teens are going to see this movie. M-L-T and I had to LINE UP in our small city to see this movie! What on earth kind of idiotic message does this send? That having sex results in broken condoms and months of panic and break-ups and unemployability? That beautiful researchers didn’t invent Plan B and smug regulators weren’t coerced into improving its availability? That abortion isn’t an option? Holy shit.

Next up to bat is the storyline about Lena, who broke up with her Greek boyfriend Costos only to realize a while later that she still loved him, by which point he had slept with someone else, got her pregnant, and had to marry her. WHHHHAAAATTTT??? The linear correlation between pregnancy and marriage is archaic but that’s not actually what pissed me off- in the end it turned out the new girl had LIED about getting pregnant in order to manipulate Costos into marrying her. ‘Cause that’s what us bitches do.

Heart-warming indeed.

I have nothing else to say, other than if you want to watch a movie about four women in NYC and don’t mind it being a racial white-wash, SATC:TM is a way better choice.

on sobey's

It’s not just Pisani, or that I donated blood on Wednesday and went through the regular Do you have sex with a man who has had sex with a man? business again, but also that it’s AIDS conference time again, so I have AIDS on my mind.

At the research centre where I worked in Halifax, we had a unit devoted to gender and AIDS. (For the record, Pisani is critical of this whole Aids & Development, AIDS & Gender stuff...she believes it hides what really causes AIDS: lots of sex and shooting up). When the XV International AIDS Conference was held in Bangkok in 2004, I remember my colleagues going. And coming back with reports of how the conference was literally Olympic. Tens of thousands of people attended. The theme was, afterall, “Access for all”. But I had to wonder if it cost my organization over $25,000 to attend a conference championing condom use and cheaper drugs (Duh, right?), whether something was amiss.

It’s four years later and the conference this year is in Mexico, and the G&M’s dependable Andre Picard is down there reporting with his ubiquitous glee for inflammation. Today his articles are about “The scale-up of antiretroviral therapy is the most ambitious public-health undertaking of our lifetimes”…note that public health is historically about sanitation and disease prevention, not mass medicating…and you’d never have to medicate someone if you prevented their infection in the first place…but the times they are a changin’…and anyway I like drugs, who doesn’t?

Next article: The vilification of lack of access to the female condom.

Choice quotes:
“The fault lies not with the product itself but with set-in-their-ways policy makers”
"This is a 15-year scandal born of ignorance and inertia,"
"The female condom is 18 times more expensive than a male condom. It's obvious why women are not using it more," he said.

HAHAHAHAHA. In all honesty, would you ever, ever use a female condom? Would you? When you could instead ask the guy to wear the condom? It’s not like the female condom is some genius sneaky way to get around a pushy guy who won’t agree to condom use. Not that I’ve ever used one, I refuse. It’s like sticking a Sobey’s bag inside you. It would suffocate my cervix. It would obviously sound ridiculous and probably get bunched up. How would that situation be easier on a subjugated woman? Most of the barrier contraceptives people have developed for women are practically weaponry (ever cut your foreskin on the lip of a diaphragm? Well me neither but anyway. Ever even SEEN a Lea Shield? It’s like the Keeper, which I personally feel is bad enough, but it is five times as heavy and hard as a rock. Plus it causes toxic shock syndrome).

The female condom is a failure, sort of like those baby walker things we had as kids and that caused a lot of fall-down-the-stairs-head-injuries were a failure. THE DESIGN SUCKS. I’d rather these expensive conferences deleted the arguments about policymaker inertia over a sucky thing, and got back on the train of telling men that condoms prevent disease and yo, you should use one, especially with sex workers, what are you, STUPID? Tell women that condoms prevent disease and that they have every right in the world to ask to use one and they don’t need to go around sneaking Sobey’s bags up themselves to protect themselves, that protecting yourself is noble and normal and not something to hide and decent men will be up for it. Honestly. I know I know, women are forced into unprotected sex- but the female condom would not help them, it’s as obvious as a float in the Macy’s parade and just as uncomfortable.

on second thought

so you know how i wrote about how Pisani pissed me off a bit? well, her high school flippancy still bothers the serious nerd in me, but in acknowledgement of my own penchant for sarcasm, I gave her a break and read her book. In summary, these are her scarlett letters against the AIDS industry:

“the Community” is bullshit. Infected housewives have nothing to do with prostitutes, in fact they hate the prostitutes (who their husbands visited, causing their infections). Don’t put any old infected person in the same support group.

Peer education is bullshit. Prostitutes can’t teach each other supportively how to prevent HIV because they don’t trust each other because they compete for clients.

AIDs is not a job qualification; having AIDS does not make you a good counselor, researcher, or policymaker. “Participation” by infected but otherwise untrained people in these activities can and does screw them up.

Bush gave $15 billion to AIDS in the developing world to divert attention from his racist, illegal war in Iraq.

The unfortunate result of lots of money for ever-cheaper antiretroviral meds is that more people live with HIV chronically; the longer you live with it, the longer you have to infect other people with it.

NGOs serve a few people well. It’s like World vision foster children: sure, one child goes to school, but what about the starved economy of the entire nation?

Government can effectively do prevention, and get at way more people than grassroots groups.

Sub-Saharan Africa has more sex, more promiscuity, more men having sex with young women, more dry, damaging sex- and as a result is the ONLY place in the world where non-sex-worker heterosexuals are contracting HIV like wildfire. EVERYWHERE else, the problem is largely the domain of drug injectors, sex workers and the people purchasing sex from them, and gay men.

Wet, monogamous (even if serially), enjoyable heterosexual sex has a hard time spreading HIV. If infected people didn’t have sex with younger generations HIV would die out almost entirely because of effective prevention of mother-infant transmission.

African leaders and Islamic and Christian leaders have spread lies about HIV and are responsible for seas of infections.

Not supporting safe-injection sites like Vancouver’s Insite is INSANE.

Having lots of sex partners at one time spreads HIV more effectively than having lots of sex partners one after another after another.

You are most infectious in the 6 months after contracting HIV; which is also when you are least likely to be aware of your infection.

Prevention has lost ground to treatment in terms of financial investment. Big surprise there.

Generous confidentiality about HIV testing might have been a mistake in terms of protecting the infected: if it’s so unworthy of discrimination, why so much pressure to hide my HIV status?

….

I hand it to Pisani, although some are quite obvious, and all took way too long to communicate, these are great points.

on wisdom

Over the weekend I read The Book of Negroes in the backyard and got a wicked sunburn on my already pretty damn brown shoulders and got me a fine education about Black Loyalist originations and reimmigration from and to Sierra Leonne. I recommend that book like I recommend nothing I have read since maybe the Pornographer’s Poem. Masterpiece of blood and guts and the absolute gorgeousness of literacy.

Then I cracked open my other Friday noontime purchase from Westminster Books, Elizabeth Pisani’s “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, brothels, and the business of AIDS”. And yes, its one of those shock-value titles to tweak the entertainment potential of a fat hardcover tome on epidemiology and officialdom, exactly the same foes Mary Roach addresses in her non-fiction sex-sci adventure, “Bonk”. So espoused to her investigative journalism into the underfunded international departments of physiological sex research, Ms Roach volunteers herself and her poor but obviously devoted husband to go into an MRI while, er, bonking. Now Dr S volunteered herself for an MRI back in March for a mutual friend’s psych study, and she emerged from it uncoupled and extremely traumatized by voluntary claustrophobia. I don’t know how many atavan Roach could take and still be conscious enough to orgasm, but I can’t see how she wouldn’t need plenty. That said, I thought Roach was a bit of an exhibitionist (ahem, which I love), and a bit of a loon (also pretty endearing). I got through her book. It was kind of like following the easy prose of Liz Gilbert except the traveling companions wore lab coats.

Pisani is of course taking some cues Roach earlier caught: to be reviewed by the likes of the G&M and Salon (and promptly land on bestseller lists), be cheeky enough to sound interestingly naughty, be friendly enough for the science to sink in, and convince your reader you are embedded (Roach took the bed part very seriously). I wanted to read Pisani’s book because I am very, very critical of the overfunding of “health” budgets, whether they be government departments or university allocations or “non-profit” fundraisers. So if she has a story to tell about how this or that health department received a gazillion dollars in aid for AIDS and all they did with it is pass it back to the donor country in consultant or whatever fees, or spend it to study costs, or bleed it to big pharma who are already rich on our impotence…well, that sounds like the kind of dirt I like to roll in.

Pisani begins in a flippant tone about how as a young teenager she was brought by businessy parents to Hong Kong and she just loved learning about the sex culture and checking out the girlie bars and drinking cocktails, and it inspired her to learn Chinese and live in Asia working for Reuters. Huh? You loved being fifteen and going to girlie bars?

As I will get into, I feel a lot of kinship with Pisani, and that is probably what pisses me off about her. When I was a young teenager (younger than 15) I was brought into a very sexualized foreign culture, I was prodded with sexualized language all day long in school and all evening long at the local beach, and I was literally poked with erections when I went out anywhere without my family. This did not inspire me, this almost destroyed me. I did not think this was neat or exotic, I thought this was depraved pederasty.

As a result, I am about two pages into The Wisdom and I suspect Pisani of being a big fat liar. Then she decides to go to grad school and finds herself in epidemiology, mostly unawares as to what the field of study actually is. Which is where I was in 2004 when I knew I wanted to study how sex was manipulated to sell drugs, and I knew economics was too dry a dismal land to get that saucy. And then she recounts her embarrassingly green reaction to an introductory lecture covering case-control vs cohort studies, a greenness I also felt hearing the schpeel on day one of my last degree. She says she tells everyone she studies “sex and drugs”, which is what I, obviously, said. Hearing of my thesis plan, more than once a biostatistician would chime in “and rock and roll” to add an extra nugget of canned humor to my laboured wit.

So Pisani is a liar and her prose came in a can and I’ve been there before but she actually got a PhD and I didn’t. Probably I am jealous that she enjoyed her oversexualized adolescence while I got scarred, and she got published while I got a sunburn reading in July. But that’s not what this post is about. What I really want to get to is who the hell is she writing for? Yes it’s absurdly narcissistic, but I should be her obvious reader, right?

When I started my job in the civil service I stumbled into the most astoundingly hysterical universe of inefficiency and pretentious urgency. I laughed at the poise of authority taken by my “superiors”…I mean, telling me what to do while you fondle your lapels…you HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING, right? Wrong. For a bit. I mellowed (I forgave their hunger and my own righteousness) and they all got used to me, but it was not so long ago that my forehead was in an angler’s knot I was so confused by the waste of energy that is contemporary government.

Pisani begins the actual AIDS-related part of her memoir/epi pulp with a description of UNAIDS in the mid-1990s, when the frantic alarm of the urban eighties deaths had worn off and the Stephen-Lewis-style pandemic was not yet foretold. The UN epi office got staffed, politically correctly, with people who really had their nose to the ground, who were in the thick, who walked the streets: a flamer in a Jean Paul Gauthier tee. (I think Pisani is serious in thinking this limp image will work for me. It won’t. My supervisor back in the ole’ Southern Ontario epi department runs Fashion Cares, wears head to toe Gucci, and is the most aggressive and cutthroat professional academic you ever saw straddle the piggy banks of WHO and CIHR). No faery dust. No tokenism.

She compares the happy go lucky gay colleague to the inertia of acceptably defining the homosexual for UN analyses. Not “gay”. Not men who have sex with men. Not males who have sex with males. XY + XY +/- HIV? Back again, repeat. Forget finding decent data in the genderbent thicket of Bangkok, what are you going to call it once you’ve got it?

So I realize that situation is academic, pedantic, semiotic, and, like, super annoying. In Halifax I worked on a study about economic inclusion of lone mothers, and we spent an eon arriving at lone mothers in lieu of unwed, single or pathetic wench. KIDDING. We also had to justify focusing on mothers in lieu of parents. But the point of the language yoga was that justification: why does the mother matter? BECAUSE OF GENDER AND POWER. Why exactly do some men who have sex with men not want to be called gay? Hmmm…same reason.

My mother worked for an AIDS org almost ten years ago, when we were newly back from the aforementioned sexualized country where gender and power blazed openly in rumshacks cramped with lazy ass men and grand hotels staffed entirely by black uniformed women working double shifts. Mom came home one day pickled over this men-who-have-sex-with-men “bullshit”. I could not understand why my infinitely compassionate mother cared what some guys wanted to call themselves. Like, what the hell does that really have to do with you? But what mom brought to the label was rage that her peers were starting to lose their health to the dishonesty of “men who have sex with men”: married women were getting infected because their husbands were hiding sexual practices, and, preferences. Now in her fifties, my mom has similar disgust for men who leave their wives for (oh god it is true) their secretaries. My mother has no patience for men who behave with the self-interestedness of little boys.

In The Wisdom, I fear Pisani will actually skip the ugly that she advertises sticking her fingers into the eyes of. She is certainly avoiding the ugly of her own memoir. She is now going back and forth to Kenya to steal weekends with “the boy” she really likes. Roight, because international Reuters journalists who live on kirsch in Geneva and paper their office walls in doctorates date BOYS.

There is a difference between being accessible and being insulting. Pisani is so terrified of her own power that she is debased to ignoring mine.

on auctions

in case somehow you missed my PR campaign for this shindig before, here she be one more time:
http://theartsauctionforchoice.ci-fi.net/

The Arts Auction for Choice
7-10pm Wednesday, July 16
The Palate Restaurant
462 Queen Street, Fredericton NB
The aim of this auction is to showcase regional talent while drawing attention to severe barriers to reproductive choice in New Brunswick. The event is organized by an independent group of young New Brunswick women. Proceeds support the Morgentaler legal defense fund.
Enjoy live music by the Olympic Symphonium, wonderful catering by The Palate and fine wines.
Jennifer Phillips as Mistress of Ceremonies
Liz Isaac of Tim Isaac Arts and Antiques will act as auctioneers.
Dr. Jo Ann Majerovich will speak about the state of women’s reproductive rights in New Brunswick.
Film screening by Fredericton experimental filmmaker Michelle Lovegrove Thomson .
Tickets are $35 and are available by calling 260-5501 or at the door.
Artists and craftpersons
In accordance with Canadian Artists Representation (CARFAC)
guidelines, artists have set a value and reserve price for the sale for their works and will retain 40% of the selling price.
Contributors include:
Adam MacDonald, print
Alexandra Flood, paint
Amber Friedman, fibre
Andrea Crabbe, photography & paint
Angela Black, print
Anne Pryde, ceramic
Beth Biggs, metal
Brian Atkinson, photography
Brigid Toole Grant, paint/print
Brigitte Clavette, metal
Bronwen Cunningham, fibre
Bronwyn Gallagher, fibre
Carol Collicutt, paint
Chris Giles, photography
Christina Thomson, photography
Darren Emenau, ceramics
Dean Gallant, wood
Doug Rigaux, Hand-made drum
Elizabeth Burtt, fibre
Erin Hamilton, fibre
Helen Stanley, ceramics
James Wilson, photography
Janice Wright Cheney, fibre
Jennifer Beckley, fibre
Jennifer Pazienza, paint
Jon Sawyer, glass
Judy Blake, ceramics
Julie Henderson, wood
Karen LeBlanc, fibre
Kathy Hooper, paint
Katie FitzRandolph, paint
Kim Vose Jones, fibre
Kyle Cunjak, photography
Lee Horus Clark, ceramics
LESLIE317537, multidisciplinary
Linda Brine, fibre
Lorna Drew, paper
Rilla Marshall, fibre
Sarah McAdam, metal
Sarah Petite, paint
Suzanne Hill, paint
Wendy Johnston, ceramics
Whitefeather, fibre
And more!
Dr. Henry Morgentaler
More than anywhere else in the country, NB aggressively restricts women’s access to timely abortion. It is only possible to receive provincially-funded abortions in Bathurst and Moncton, and then only with the referral of two physicians, one of whom must be a gynecologist. This requirement violates women’s constitutional right to timely abortion, a medically necessary service. As a consequence of these conditions, the vast majority of women abortions in NB are provided by the Fredericton Morgentaler Clinic. In direct violation of the Canada Health Act, Medicare will not cover services performed at the clinic and patients must pay out-of-pocket. One year ago, Dr. Henry Morgenaler requested “standing” (the right as a man) to sue for access to publicly-funded abortion in this province on behalf of women. He has yet to receive it, and he must be granted standing before the case begins Dr. Morgentaler is 83 years old and frail. The auction is to support the Morgentaler legal defense fund, and to support the rights of women in this province to choose legal, safe, and accessible abortion services.
More information about access to abortion in New Brunswick and Canada:
The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada
http://www.arcc-cdac.ca/home.html

on mayo

I was away in the bush getting blistered and scratched and altogether well-loved for a while there, and I didn’t read one line of news or check my email. So all kinds of things happened without my gert alter ego getting puffed up. I’ve been back from never-neverland for two days and here’s a summary of what I skirted:

C-section rates have never been higher; another man went to jail for killing his wife and child; the FDA is discriminating against older women who would like to be vaccinated against HPV (even though HPV can come in many forms, can go away and come back, and can never have been contracted by older women who are virgins/monogamous); Mr. Max is claiming he didn’t know about his bad-girl girlfriend’s bad-girl past and so he is INNOCENT and frankly SHOCKED (oh me! oh my!); women aren’t as pleased as men the morning after one-nighters (because of some ludicrous evolutionary psychology proposition about female fearing of the dangers of childrearing…WHEN will evolutionary psychology catch up with the brilliant evolution of humans to TAKE BIRTH CONTROL? (My personal theory: women’s pleasure is often a little more tricky to crack, takes a little longer than seven minutes of practice…no?); California caught up with Canada and let gay couples wed (next stop in the catch-canada relay: universal health care!); Jamie Lynn Teenager had her baby and took her straight to Walmart; a gaggle of US teens made or did not make a pregnancy pact, regardless, they are pregnant and they are teens (I recall the pregnancy pact being up there with “let’s have a house together on the seaside and drink tea and raise four snuggly gray kitties” in terms of top childish girl-to-girl promises, but even when we made up these silly stories we knew we’d have careers and fulfilling sexual and equal partnerships before we got around to cottaging together in Velcro rollers); AND, finally, prudish objections were made to men kissing over mayonnaise sandwiches, the virgin mary breastfeeding, italian women breastfeeding, and women in Malaysia wearing lipstick (unless they WANT to get raped, of course). How we got to the 21st century of breastfeeding since little baby jesus was breastfed and STILL we debate whether this is indecent, I dunno. I’m stumped. The lipstick thing, uh, yeah, whatever. But the men kissing? That riles me up. I love men kissing, for starters. And I love mayonnaise on sandwiches! What could be more wholesome than natural mayonnaise and a little natural man-on-man domesticity in the morning? Are you kidding me? There were enough objections to a little g’bye hon peck that the ad gets pulled? Because it might SCAR THE CHILDREN?

Last time I checked, kissing= good, horrific homophobic assholeness = scarring. It’s pride week! Make out!

on lower case letters

bell hooks is the other writer, besides the obvious e e cummings, who caused me to write in humble but also glaringly narcissistic lower case letters from the teenage discovery of poetry and for the rest of my life. In 2001, my brilliant Brown summer love from 1997 asked me to have an environmental economics prof of mine send him a pdf library of tradeable emission permit literature. I carbon copied the old bf to the request, and Raj sent back a shocked retort: is this prof such a big deal you’ve started using capital letters?

In 2001 I also went to hear bell hooks speak, in a giant evangelical church dug much deeper into Oakland than my telegraph ave muscousy-peach stucco sublet. Snuggled into the pews between power buttocks and yards of extensions, my brilliant White summer love and I were sheepish, in the black sheep sense of the word as well as shy to the point of sweating. Bell hooks writes beautifully and honestly about love as action, I milked her words for a wedding reading last year to great appreciation. She is not all hugs and buttercups when it comes to loving thy systematically privileged historical enslaver, but I wasn’t really expecting it. I can handle that my Boer ancestors are an embarrassment, and I can own up to how that embarrassment has rendered me advantaged.

Her opening act was Rebecca Walker, famously half-black, half-white & half-Jewish and as categorically jeopardized as they come. Except of course she is gorgeous, always a plus when you are pushing buttons. Walker’s mother wrote The Colour Purple, which was so doused in incest and religious fanaticism and racist hatred that my own purple heart fell out onto the page, and I disturbingly demanded equally harrowing plot lines from literature ever since.

The Walker women are now feuding because Rebecca claims Alice denigrated motherhood in that quintessential second-wave way we WASPs summarize as Julianne Moore’s belted-waist & blossom skirt suicide in The Hours: it is horrible, you lose yourself, and then you die.

Hmm.

Rebecca’s newest book is called Baby Love. It’s about her choice to mother and how lovely it is, despite her adult suspicion of the act, and her mother’s persistent and politicized discouragement. To the point of disowning Rebecca. Holy jesus Alice, and I thought Celie’s story was brutal.

My mother disagrees with me when I am prematurely unequivocal. She encourages caution when I say things like Love Is Bullshit or Without Nationalized Daycare No one Should Procreate. But I can safely say from the way she coddles my poodle that she would unequivocally find my reproduction The Best Idea Ever. So although I wish Obtaining Grotesque Amounts of Higher Education ranked a little higher while my biological clock remains in its manufacturer’s packaging, I am grateful that Mom managed to pull me out of elementary school to attend feminist protest rallies and she still took pride in the undrugged birthing of three chubscicle babies. But her sacrifices were always apparent, and for the time being they really do not seem like sacrifices I’d be willing to make.

My impulse is to accuse Rebecca of being too harsh, regardless of the accusation that Alice cut her from her will and started the antagonistic fiasco from the start. Rebecca is being pouty. Poor little brilliant Rebecca who’s mom is an even more brilliant writer and thinker and fighter, who was (what with the time constraints and all), a less than coddling mama. Lucky Rebecca had her father’s other wife to look to for a model of stay-at-home mother-smother.

Not to turn this into a tirade about the impossibility of being the perfect power leader- cupcake baker chimera, I had to voice how irritated Rebecca has me. And yes, that’s well and good for me to say what with my mother having worked part-time while my nose ran and my bones grew. What is always left out of these mommy war gripings is the possibility of debating daddying for while. Come on Rebecca, do that for a minute. Without necessarily attaching photos of the Jolie-Pitt bonanza…let’s just take a wee break from judging our mothers and ourselves as (potential?) mothers.

on salami

Remember a few posts ago I said I was going to the big city for a meeting about women and law? And I wondered if it would be tired and depressing? Well it wasn’t, it was the best damn weekend of feminism a girl could ever hope for.

In addition to campaigns around Morgentaler’s case in NB and the third federal reading of C-484, the org is also currently involved in some family law stuff. This is one productive femmy group. They’re responsible for women being able to give their children a maternal surname (not sirname); for spousal support in same sex partnerships; for balanced tax benefits (and penalties) between support-paying separated parents; for fathers having employee benefits to childcare; for the sharing of CPP between elderly ex-spouses; for the elimination of the “spouse in the house” rule governing social assistance in Ontario (last time I checked this still applied in NB); for the requirement of legal aid provision to poor families; for retroactive child support; for enforcement of child support; and for the equitable sharing of economic consequences of divorce. Major shit. If you want to join a local branch, especially if you are a law student or lawyer, contact me.

Meanwhile we workshopped in my favourite focus group style: Like, we know it is insane to kick a girl out of a soccer game because she wears a hijab, but is it insane to be furiously opposed to FGM? No. So, discuss limits of respect for religious freedom. Until happy hour. I love that.

My former supervisor had her team over my last night in town. She is the bossiest powerhouse I have ever encountered. She never met an opinion of her own she didn’t like. So we cooed at coworkers’ babies and barbequed salami (seriously, that happened. My supervisor is CLASSY) and the six-year olds flooded the sandbox with unsupervised access to the garden hose. Then my supervisor told me she completely disagreed with all of my always ridiculous plans and that she really wished I would just become a lawyer.

Speaking of which, Babs became a full-grown full-blown lawyer last week. Congrats.

on gin and juice

Tonight I’m flying. When Dr S and I travel she goes a lighter shade of Irish pale and her teeny hands in baubly big rings grip the arm rests with the supernatural brute strength typically reserved for saving babies from car wrecks, etc. I’ll share a few empathetic rounds of airborne gin sodas with her, but honestly I don’t mind planes at all. I mind luggage. I mind packing it, I mind carrying it, waiting for it, setting it down and briefly losing it, etc. And I really mind being told by strangers who don’t know my needs and wear ill-fitting navy blue uniforms what I can or cannot have in it.

And I am of course no new parent, but I am some ticked about the minor special-interest piece in the Globe today about the flyer who had to dump 1.5 litres of BREAST MILK she had dutifully pumped while at a conference because, of course, security wouldn’t let on board with it because her infant wasn’t with her because, you know, she was on a BUSINESS TRIP and left the babe home with Dad and a fridge full of pre-pump.

Going without perfume, hair products, and self-tanner every time I go away so that I don’t have to check my bags is, in my opinion, a womanly and unpleasant experience that I just have to endure for the sake of my inner impatient demons. But refusing to let breast milk through security is SEXISM. You know how people are always cheaply asking about or excusing sexist this or that, like dull jokes or entrenched remuneration disparities, wondering what sexism is? Well breast milk banning is sexism. That’s the definition of sexism. Making a stupid, inconvenient rule about liquids and ON TOP of that stupidity, not thinking about how this might impact one of the two uniquely womanly productive activities on this earth is SEXISM. Only women produce breast milk, only women will be affected by banning it from air travel. (And of course the babies who don’t get the nourishment- but that’s another story). I am honestly stupefied…it’s the tackiest thing I’ve had to read about in ages. I cannot believe we have gotten to the brainless lemming point of body regulation where no one had the cajones (including the breastfeeding flyer) to say “FUCK OFF, don’t be so effing afraid of boob juice, get out of the way I’m boarding and the cooler’s coming with me.”

I feel like boarding tonight with a case of Picarroons and screeching something along those lines while wearing a string bikini.

on couchetard

Though he couldn’t have possibly known it was coming, Michael Wolff’s post-Spitzer piece in this month’s VF about political men and their sexual downfall makes for smugly coincidental reading in the first sexy minute in Canadian politics since ooohh, Belinda chose an (unfortunately short-sighted) career opportunity over a potato-faced but powerful man. This is the minute of Mad Max and Julie, whom M-L-T deliciously nicknamed “Julie Couchetard”. Aaahmazing.

Wolff has a couple of theses going. Among them: the infidelity of the White middle-aged men (who dominate politics, obvs) exposes their characters as weak and pathetic brown-nosers of the derrieres of the young and well-endowed in a desperate attempt to disguise self-defining middle age. Because being weak and pathetic makes for a lousy leader image, the electorate is keen on the opposite of the White middle-aged man: Hilary or, and as was confirmed last night, Obama.

And he goes where I think I’ve gone before, egging leaders to open up and speak out about their kinks because between Facebook, the polipaparazzi and the Patriot Act, baby you have no where to hide. Better to be kinky and proud than caught with your pants down.

Wolff also blames women for ganging up en masse to make White male sexual depravity so unacceptable and, frankly, so little fun. Right muffin, we’re sorry about that. He counters with some irritating militant imagery: you know Obama isn’t depraved not because he is too damn physically fine to ever use interns/escorts to assert his sustainable architecture of gorgeousness but because Michelle Obama would whoop his ass if he ever stepped out of line. And by line we mean her first lady G string. (Sorry again but just what about Michelle Obama differentiates her from other reasonably gorg charismatic stylish powerhouse partners - besides her unreasonably gorg husband?)

Hmm.

There is no arguing. Couchetard whooped Mad Max’s ass. But she had gangs of bikers behind her. She had top secret file blackmail. And anyway Bernier wasn’t infidelous- HE BORED HER.

I definitely do not want to think about Harper having sex. But sex is apparently how political careers live and die. Are his zombie eyes immunity from the sex slanderous political arena of the over-surveyed era? Or can a kid dream?

on Spain

The New York Times had a piece yesterday about the most logical and yet astounding emerging trend in the bewilderingly inequitable American system of private health insurance: the denial of insurance to women who have had a C-section. WOW. As if the pain and immobilization, risk of infection or death were not enough for someone to deal with! This is exactly the type of thing we never foresee until it is too late, proof of the axiom that the more we know the more we know we don’t know, and another notch in the adjustable ward bedpost of medical progress as women’s regress.

Not that the C-section is anything terribly new- it’s at least of the Roman era- but there has been considerable progress it the quality and quantity of its use. I am reading a not-new-either book by Matt Cohen called The Spanish Doctor, a medieval tale of dodgy and heroic medicine in the context of serial Jewish genocide and ghettoization. It’s good, I recommend it. M-L-T’s sister is in Spain right now and Spain was on my brain, so I picked it up. In one of the first scenes, Haveli, the doctor, is called to the home of a wealthy, heirless Christian merchant whose wife is near-death from labouring a very crooked babe. The merchant makes it clear the life of the infant should come before that of his bride, but Haveli decides not to wait for her death to remove the baby from her womb: he drugs her with four cups of wine, and cuts.

After the medieval bedroom procedure Cohen describes, it’s certain she cannot conceive again. But now not only is C-section not counter-indicated with future pregnancy, vaginal birth after caesarean delivery is also possible. It’s pretty sleazy for insurance companies to automatically assume you will get pregnant again, require another C-section and cost them money, just because you did once before.

In Canada at the moment we do not face even a fraction of the peril Americans encounter when they need health care. But some things you do need insurance for, non-hospital-administered drugs especially. And we imperil our likelihood of qualifying for insurance by seeking out unnecessary health care. (Some C-sections are obviously needed! Just not as many as women are receiving!).

Last year when I studied genetic screening of infants we faced the unanswered question of how abnormal but not necessarily “positive” results would affect insurability. It is hard to worry about what infants will be asked by Blue Cross thirty years from now, so it didn’t weigh too heavily on me. But last week Women’s College in Toronto announced it is now offering genetic testing to all Jewish women to detect BRCA1 and 2 positivity- markers for breast and ovarian cancer risk. Jewish women appear to host the BRCA genes at far greater number than non-Jewish women; the Women’s College project may find justification for a more systematic screening program. Cancer drugs- including prophylactic tamoxifen- cost a lot of money. Are these volunteers jeopardizing insurability? Does it make economic sense to require insurance companies to turn a blind eye to voluntary genetic testing results? Hardly just for the genetic testing industry and the pharmaceutical industry to reap while the insurance industry pays. If anything these markers of medical progress provide increasing evidence of the need for a complete extraction of health care from the market, and complete socialization of the burden of treatments.

on chemistry

Last night I accompanied my mother to a dinner party for the women’s peace group she’s been involved with locally since moving here in the seventies. I would always go if I was in town and now I am always in town. The women meet at an old cottage downtown wallpapered in works by the Bobaks, matched in charm by a backyard garden of gaping June tulips and pond koi fish. The make gluten-free dishes, having at one creative moment past thrown the pots they now present them in. They lament the waning productivity of their organization and the soreness of their hips. I got restless.

When Pini and I lived in NDG, somehow, and I forget entirely how, we were sent to Toronto for a meeting of the now-defunct national congress about gender equity and learning. We took the greyhound and stayed at the Yonge/Eglinton apartment of Pini’s mentor, an Amazonian blonde grad from our college about ten years our senior. She wore shiny emerald green blouses and took us clubbing…all I remember is the men in her lawyer friend group couldn’t get in because they wore the wrong shoes.

The meeting was a last ditch and expensive attempt to save a long-beloved and respected federal-level organization that was similarly suffering from waning activism. It was a horrible experience. We were distrusted and accosted, I guess for being new and young and chipper. We weren’t even twenty. The facilitator had explained there would be a “feminist philosophical” approach to conference participation, and we were instructed to move freely between sessions, to choose and change our minds and “explore”. Even in a late-adolescence hour of pre-cynicism, I had my doubts about this “system”. And when we attempted to leave one sour session we met what was nothing short of verbal spanking. We hadn’t had much of any attachment to the group and still we were socially forced to share the feeling of a piercing rip from the nipple as the organization limped into rhetoric and irrelevance.

There aren’t a lot of groups that champion women’s barriers to learning. Just like there aren’t a lot of groups that point to the separate experience of women in war and other contexts of violence. Old-school second wave activism was about womanly chemistry, lentils and candlelight vigils and tongue-twisty protest chants. These groups fall apart from inclusion. What a hoax to bring token youngins like us to Toronto! Can that chemistry ever be inherited? At last night’s dinner table I felt more an anthropologist than a daughter of the gentle, water colour & chintz revolution.

This weekend I am going back to Toronto for a women & law group’s AGM. Report on generational translation to follow…

on a second self

There’s a lot of hubbub on the femmy internets about “women writing”…queue jezzie and salon and so forth…and before you crease your brow in bewilderment about who would call a woman writer a woman writer in 2008, recall that this is all in response to SATC:TM bursting onto our small town screens in clouds of urbane fairy dust, not to mention it’s premiere in the glacially cold epicenter of it’s production: New York, New York. The debate is more along the lines of whether the syrupy narration by C Bradshaw is as intolerable as the sound of someone biting their acrylic nails than whether “women writing” is of greater quantity or quality than evah.

I’ve never been to NY. My fair lady M-L-T went in April and came back with skinny jeans and some killer lines from Legally Blonde: The Musical. My naughty peer Kittentits went in March and came back with plunging necklines in proletariat jersey and a sneering critique of The Hipster Party. I am afraid to go not because of sexual crime rates and racial divides and grimy rat-infested subway lines, but because if I go to Manhattan I promise you I won’t ever leave.

Used to be I blew every red cent I earned in my idyllic job as a low-level bioethics ponderer to fly myself and the mini poodle home every long weekend, drink the local beer and get doused with the testosteronic sputum of the townie lads. My romanticization of the local wolf/woodsman chimera long ago dissolved in the wet blankets they’re doubly swaddled by…so I’ve taken to monthly trips back to a most accessible metropolis for the health-sector-swarmers like myself. TORONTO.

It is the phallic architecture. It is the dapper metro strangers and the once-overs. And yeah, it’s the latest and greatest medicine from the grandest grand dames of the white coat. But mostly it’s that I can go a minute and a half without being identified and forced into small talk. Or I can shop until my heels break off. And then I can meet someone who is bright as infrared and get knocked about by their wit over gin in the sunshine.

For all Dr S and I nostalgically dreamed of the lazy hours and maritime sea breezes and long taking of liquored-up coffee, there was a lot more pleasure in the cosmo life. It was so incredibly self-centred. My knickers weren’t all knotted up about local sexual health access disparities and I worked with winking wrinkle-less brainiacs, sneered at professional wear that wasn’t low-cut and sealed every workday with happy hour. I never, ever wore a bicycle helmet. Scandal.

What perplexes me now is why New Yorkers need to blog so much. What’s with all the narcissistic semi-anonymous “women writing” in New York City? Isn’t the pleasure of a city that disowns you enough? Your displaced reflection in the shiny skyscraper? Do you really need a second self, a wordy identity, when you are blessed with an environment that is equal parts threatening political boxing ring and anonymous sexual play pen?

I kid!
I write!
I book a ticket…YYZ

on immersion

The announcement of midwifery legislation in this here backwoods province came with the inevitable essentializing cooing about “natural” and “home” birth…and such cooing does grate my nerves, oui, but the announcement was (pardon the pregnancy pun) overdue and is basically fantastic. Midwifery is a back up plan to the mature student academia-addicted drive I have to apply to medical school and become an ob-gyne by the time I myself would be of advanced maternal age. And it’s nice to know that the back up plan would at least be legal where I live.

Another recent and notorious legislative announcement, the eradication of our province’s treasured, flawed and still self-defining language immersion, was so cerebrally grating to one of our, ooh I don’t know, PAIR of high-risk pregnancy specialists that she is jumping ship and moving away, taking her kindergarten kinder with her.

Back in the autumn an ambitious childhood friend of mine was leading a call for applications to a provincial leadership program. The process involved submitting an essay about the applicant’s idealistic vision of the province in the future. I applied so that I could write about my vision of here as a place where women weren’t forced to carry pregnancies they did not want, weren’t subjected to the highest rates of episiotomies and C sections in the country, weren’t denied public sexual health care if they were over the age of 24…etc. It was not my friend who did the adjudication, but as you can well imagine, I was not chosen. But it is apparent that women will leave here if our needs- which include our need to not have children we don’t want, and our need to protect the children we chose to parent- are kicked at.

A bit of a game my essay might have been, but the vision is quite serious. So the midwifery announcement is a coup in that even if you wipe away all the essential oils and earth mothering of midwifery stereotypes, the presence of midwives will free up sparse obstetrical resources. With midwifery covering the uncomplicated labours, ob-gynes can focus on births requiring surgical intervention- not to mention a host of gynecological issues such as abortion. They won’t need to schedule a predictable regimen of C sections just to be assured every pregnant woman does get some attention during her delivery. (Of course I am exaggerating but that’s what I do). One step forward, two steps back…

on moxie

Oooh, the stuff of an international Bourne thriller…Harper’s sending spy teams out to find you love-liars…you marital phonies…you refugee heart-breakers…Don’t protect us from nuclear fallout or military exhaustion or threats to language or equality rights…but please sir, protect me from my fetishization of the dark foreign stranger come to sweep me off my privileged pedicured white girl feet.

Next month is my ten year reunion for an international fairy-tale cooperative high school tucked into the mossy flesh of Vancouver island’s southwest coast. Maybe four of us managed to live there without falling in love. We didn’t have a single cynical thought between the hundred of us. I wouldn’t exactly call the lasting romances that resulted “convenient”: mountains of paperwork, explosively expensive travel, delayed careers, distant family, eventual separations and, occasionally, the most darling half-this half-that babies you ever laid eyes on. Some of us didn’t stay with the foreign partner we found at age sixteen, but ended up with another some while later, so the departure cities for those reuniting in June are flung about like confetti.

Difference is erotic- this is obvious, this is heterosexuality just as much as it is Orientalism or the colonial fetish in any other time and place. Having Harper suture my bursting lust for the Other is a practical joke. Eyes-rolling, I have thorough awareness of the planning industry, but I believe marriage is potentially sexual and impulsive (and isn’t the extreme opposite-arrangement- more frightening?).

Are phony marriages really on the rise? Or is marriage dissolution?

When gay and lesbian marriages were legalized across this reasonably progressive country, Moxi, my Latina schoolgirl friend and I discussed getting married. She was paying a fortune to study at U of T. She was living in a basement, working illegal bar and au-pairing. Our mutual European friend had just married a Canadian and her congruent challenges had dissolved in the marriage license ink. Do you know how much it costs to go to U of T if you are from Lithuania?

We didn’t do it. We were cowardly and a bit wistful, imagining how we’d still be hopping around on our twin self-shot-off-feet when our own dreamboats rowed into town. We didn’t know if we could actually stand living with each other for the requisite two years. We didn’t even know if our career trajectories could conceivably keep us in the same province for two years. (They didn’t. Wise girls).

But really, how phony would my and Moxi’s partnership have been compared to the half-dozen middle-aged arses who I know left their wives since Christmas to run off with secretaries? What is more foolish?

Improbable, immediate, international love happens. Aren’t we self-doubting enough already about affection without Harper’s intervention?

on the growl

After spending seven of a twenty year sentence in jail, convicted of homicide because of a still birth, Regina McKnight is going home. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that her 2001 trial was unfair.

Regina McKnight was caught doing coke a few MONTHS after the poor woman suffered a stillbirth. So it was argued that her coke use caused the stillbirth. Seriously, this happened.

If I experienced a stillbirth you can believe me I'd be on every drug I could get my hands on to escape the depression I'd be feeling.

A minute of grace and thanks for extremely overdue justice for Ms. McKnight.

Now, a long while to wonder why the hell are we so into punishment? What have we lost that we think we'll get back by decimating Regina McKnight? Why are we so weak that we prey on the most vulnerable, the grieving, the unlucky?

This morning and everyday I escort at the abortion clinic I wonder why the middle-aged male protestors won't just ask me to arm-wrestle. Let's do that, hell, I'll easily lose. Let's do that big man and you can feel big and the patients can walk into their appointments without having to muster up some extra heroic shield. Already facing growling self-judgment, do these women really need to defend themselves against strange angry men? I offer up my arms, until perhaps the moment I might become a patient, then I would like someone else to.

I get very angry; I am not a court so to punish I get angry and look with a look that cuts down like a machete. No matter that my anger is relatively benign or at least irrelevant, I still regret being so angry and everyday am reminded that compassion is more productive. So, compassionately, a handshake for the SCSC. But how to both growl at McKnight's prosecutors AND plead for a culture of compassion when it comes to reproductive matters?

on commenting

okay so that whole restricting comments thing is not working out. it's too restrictive and basically i can't figure out how to remove the straightjacket while still feeling secure, so, insecurity it is!

here's what mise-en-abyme had to say about the matter anyhoo anyhow

"I want to reiterate, for the eleventy-billionth time, that when someone has a viewpoint (usually feminist) that veers from the accepted societal norms, it is not because they are uninformed (i.e "Ignorant" with a capital I), it is because they have a DIFFERENT opinion!

Mind-boggling, I know.

oh, if I had a members bill for everytime I have been told by a man that I just don't "understand" the issue. I understand. and I disagree from an informed (often thoroughly) position."

and here's what clyde had to say last night about basically everything she thinks:

"i'm right".

loves it.

-gert

on alice

in light of receiving my first anonymous message from a frothy anti-choicer, i have made some changes to the comment section. you can only comment if you are a "member" of this blog. and believe me sweet pea, i am selective. this is not only because it pisses me off when anti-choicers call me ignorant, but because i foresaw the deluge of hate mail i might receive should word get out about saucy gert.

the skirt of my alice b toklas is a feminist project but the feminism it espouses is mine and maybe not yours. it is about reproduction, sexuality, health, medicine, fashion, art, economics and power. it is pro-choice. it's politics are that peculiar mix of libertarian-socialism adopted so often by those who loath arbitrary regulation and love paying taxes for kids' to get an education. it loves men and not just for their bodies. but it really, really loves women.

a century ago alice and gertrude were partners in paris who hosted cocktail hours with the day's powerhouses of creativity, intelligence, and sexuality. when gertrude wrote she was autobiographical and her prose curled up in a loop and she repeated things she repeated things she repeated things. and so the skirt of my alice b toklas admires words, independence, and the perfection of a hem-line two inches above the knee.

on bill

It is reprehensible, he’s a misogynist, it’s pop and trite and terrible, all those mucousy scribblings, yes, but anyway I occasionally read Perezhilton.com. And among his glossary of hate crimes is the increasingly frequent pointing of a fascist finger at women who behave “inappropriately” while pregnant. Bad bad pregnant woman charged with a DUI, he publishes her photo like she’s Mansonic and on the run.

This month the rallying against bill C484 is revving up. The “Unborn victims of crime act” is a private member’s bill that has already passed second reading. It makes harm to a fetus a separate crime to that of harm to the pregnant woman, effectively giving personhood to the fetus. Supposedly an anti-violence-against-women response to an Edmontonian woman’s death by bullet-to-the-belly when she was six months pregnant, the bill’s introducer, MP Ken Epp, has been seen protesting choice. It is true that the greatest threat to a pregnant woman’s life is homicide, but similar bills in the US did nothing to amplify penalties against abusive partners (not that that necessarily reduces domestic violence anyway), and did everything to criminalize a woman’s actions during her pregnancy. If it is a crime to harm a fetus, a pregnant woman’s drug use (even legal and highly necessary drug use), addiction, and hell, any activity that she might fall down doing is criminalized.

The crass and nauseating extent of the bill’s potential ramifications is enormous. Forget the what-ifs (what if she’ll commit suicide without her anti-psychotics? What if she lives or works around second hand smoke? What if she didn’t know she was pregnant? What if she was trying to self-abort?). Start with WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU THAT YOU NEED TO CONTROL PEOPLE SO BAD, MISTER EPP? And why would I be so naïve as to imagine this bill will not affect the provision of abortion, the purposeful termination of a fetus?

It is disappointing if a child is born with FAS. But more children are born with disabilities that have no link to alcohol. Are we also going to criminalize mothers with bad genes? Unfavorable uterine environments? Advanced maternal age related to having ambition and a successful career?

Where the hell will this Atwoodian state reproductive control end?

Obviously this bill needs to be tossed. But more broadly, let’s face facts: the vast majority of women can and WILL get pregnant. Women, duh, struggle with addiction, mental illness, and pain. They drive cars, go running, and get out of bed in the morning. Life is risky. Pregnant women are putting the fetus at risk by carrying the pregnancy. Pregnant women are vulnerable to violence because some men for some sick reason hate women even more when they are pregnant.

Today a possible “National Birthing Strategy” was announced in Ottawa. Again, forget how Atwoodian that title is. Ignore how it makes you imagine being raped by (at the very best) a turkey baster. Pretend you believe the bureaucrats behind it actually thought it would invoke safe and gentle births awash in olive oil and lavender and love. Also forget how irrelevant it is for the feds to fund a national strategy affecting what is in provincial jurisdiction only. Forget the waste.

The strategy is a reaction to the dramatic jump in NICU exports to the US. We have so many neonates in need of intensive care that we do not have the resources to provide, we send them southwards at huge expense and inconvenience to the new parents.

A number of explanatory factors undoubtedly lie behind the surge. The key issue is that more of these babies are being born AND improved technology means more of them can live, provided the technology and providers are available, which they are not. Yes, drugs and alcohol and bad luck can result in serious neonatal complications. But beyong that, even though maternal age at first birth (and associated complications) is rising steadily, and more mothers are using fertility treatments that increase the risk of multiples (and of complications), the supply side of neonatal care hasn’t shifted with these trends. Does anybody think that difficult newborn cases are going to stop if the NICUs just persist in being underfunded?

Pregnant women are not healthy sedate obedient married 27-year olds who refuse to touch a drink or a prozac or a coffee for almost a year. They aren’t. They are 40 and drank seventeen martinis that Saturday before their first missed period and they are addicted to benson and hedges lites and yeah they know it’s bad. But none of these things are crimes nor do they merit passive aggressive refusal or diversion of health care. Pregnant women are women and JUST women. They don’t need extra doses of judgment and disciplinary action.

Men who fatally shoot women in the gut, however, need incarceration and rehab.

update on loss

remember back in march when i wondered about ways to address miscarriage and still birth? when i said we really had to figure this out for oursleves as employers and employees, because sooner or later we'd have to acknowledge the grief and meaning of these losses? well what do you know...a lawyer is FIRED from an EMPLOYMENT law firm in SAN FRANCISCO because she had a miscarriage and the firm was none too happy she'd dared get pregnant in the first place.

http://abovethelaw.com/2008/05/paul_hastings_farewell_email_a.php

more to come on the popular and overwhelmingly irritating social urge to punish pregnant women...

on champagne

In Saturday’s G&M, which I read on Sunday, as is my custom, Karen Von Hahn opined about champagne complaints. Things like “champagne has become so popular that production within the snobby confines of Champagne cannot meet demand, and, alas!, the delicate demarcation must be expanded, boo hoo.” Or, you know, whining that your child only got into four med schools, but not U of T.

Living a half-hour from Niagara for three years, and with a woman who likes to celebrate so consistently that we’d even pop a bottle to mark the occasion of getting our dog’s hair cut, I developed a tongue for bubbly. Doused in local bitter ale since my last provincial emigration, I can’t honestly count myself among the wine snobs anymore. My champagne complaint is that I lease such a sprawling flat, with such generously high ceilings and expansive antique windows, that I simply can’t heat the place. It’s not possible to get it warmer than 15 degrees. Even, apparently, in the springtime when it is 20 degrees outside. As a result of my space greed, I have suffered blistery burns on my right boob and left bicep from clutching a hot water bottle too tight, and maxed out my massage benefits, regularly going in for professional assistance in unclenching from the cold. These are champagne complaints if ever I made ‘em. Characteristically, I am going to solve my problems by moving. I’ll let you know when and where.

Meanwhile I was watching prime time drama with my mother and the actors were complaining about having to have sex too many times during the 48 hour ovulation window in an effort to get pregnant. Oh boo hoo indeed. The retched “work” of “making” a baby.

But is infertility a champagne complaint? It’s worth asking, especially while the economy is tanking and millions are starving in a global food crisis and it’s STILL a political and financial struggle to prevent and terminate pregnancy…is it a human right to procreate? I’m going to keep campaigning for NB to step up to the plate and cover the cost of women choosing NOT to have children, but what about the reproductively unendowed who choose to parent?

We never hear of it, but do women/couples who do NOT have tens of thousands of surplus liquidity to spend on fertility treatments also champagne complain for pregnancy? As much as I abhor the technology-driven re-commercialization of medicine, my jerk-reaction thinking is primitively like the SPCA: pay the fee to prove to me you really want this. But then of course what proof of commitment is a deep pocket?

There is a thread of thinking that spins motherhood as such a compulsory experience for women in this (alienating) backlash era that fertility treatment should be covered because it would be as damaging to go through life without a wanted baby as to be forced to bring to term an unwanted pregnancy. Being socially bullied into maternity does not exactly sound like a medical necessity.

Yet a baby, unlike every other “accessory” of the modern age, does not come “in degrees”. It’s not like buying the knock off or taking public transit or renting or eating cheap food from cans. There are no substitute goods, no heterogeneity in the market. Fertility is not a Baby Duck complaint either, as it were.

So what I’d like to see somewhere, even in a novel?, is the fertility complaint explored outside of the Rosedale estates, outside of the ivory tower and kitten heels on King and Bay, outside of where the market alone negotiates the meaning and meaningfulness of childbearing. There is more to this than poor little rich girl crying into her Veuve...

on pomeranians

In between conference sessions on Friday my sister and I drove out to the Oromocto SPCA to walk mutts. That SPCA looks like the dregs of a very desperate trailer park, and although it’s not so bad once you’re inside, I kindly beg you to go adopt some big beast if you’re at all interested. There was a little Pomeranian with a dopey expression, as big as my big hand. Poor fellow had been hammered by an asshole and left for brain dead, but he was walking and smiling, and adopted. Even though a feisty little pom pom bit my thumb near off at a dinner party in our town’s swanky waterside neighbourhood last week, I still would have taken this little vegetable home.

As a consequence of giving up all food and bringing it back at an uncharacteristically lethargic pace, I now do really appreciate the eating of meat, despite regrettable environmental consequences, slaughterhouse nastiness and all. Rare steak righteousness eventually overtook my bleeding heart. But dogs are another matter entirely. I am one of those freaky spinsters who relinquishes her best furnishings as dog beds and dresses her canines in secondary fur coats. Dogs do not get hit on the head with a hammer.

Yet I have a friend, name withheld, who is a brainiac and a few degrees ago (academic, not Celsius) ran cardiac tests on dogs. She was testing how their hearts stopped. Meaning, of course, she had to stop them.

The dogs were specially bred for research purposes. I imagine that means bred for boredom, captivity, homogeneity, quiet. I don’t really know and I don’t think I asked. Dogs died and she’s a cardiac brainiac now. She’ll keep you alive. And yes, you matter more than a dog.

Which brings me to PETA, and Pam Andersen, this week off to the White house to call of outdated animal testing. I don’t know the details, maybe the tests she’s twisted-knickered about are really unnecessary. Maybe they are old fangled. Point is Pam is just another of PETA’s innumerable bunnies-for-bunnies. But besides anoretic eating extremes, what do women’s bodies have to do with the treatment of animals? Must such a straight electric-fence link be made between chattel treatment of women and chattel treatment of, uh, chattel?

update on blood

Picard weighs in on the arbitrariness of banning men who have sex with men from blood donation:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080424.wlpicard24/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

on the oven

Personal pet peeves include: dearth of public garbage cans for dog shit; whipped cream; cheapskates; flat gin and tonics; jack johnson; men who can’t salsa but ask you to dance with them anyway; the Chrysler 300; any and every comment about defecation; confusion between RU 486 and Plan B; cooled coffee; crookedly hung art; crowds and queues; children made to pose in photos like mini adults; bullshit; people who don’t print double-sided; and

How women in office buildings won’t shut the fuck up about competitive calorie counting.

Oh my god it is a pain in the ass to come to work come spring, and not because it’s so damn beautiful out that I’m drooling at my view of the sunny Scotia Bank. Apparently women who work in office buildings did not take science 000 and exclaim with evangelic fervour that SODIUM HAS NO CALORIES!

All day long all people have to talk about is which brand of yogurt wins for calorie-per-125 ml- serving, whether or not glucose is a type of transfat, and that you can probably burn juice calories faster than milk calories because juice is thinner.

These people are employed through your tax dollars.

And, lest I forget, I am also repulsed by women baking for staff meetings. I am revolted by women with candy saucers out on their desks. I literally have to keep a six foot distance. Have you ever, ever, ever heard of a man baking a goddamn muffin to call a nine o’clock in the board room? Does my CEO have scotch mints below his doctorate? Why on earth would you escape to an office space if your environment was no different than the foyer of a desperate housewife?

Glass ceiling looking a tiny bit like the uncleaned roof of a General Electric oven.

on the inappropriately clothed

It is obviously spring now. There are teenagers in flipflops smoking on parkbenches outside my office window. But nobody is falling in love or anything, in fact there are a number of cases lately of falling out of it. Still, I hang my hopes on the inappropriately clothed. I love the inappropriately clothed. If I didn’t work in what counts as an office tower in this diminutive city, I’d be inappropriately clothed and smoking on a park bench.

When I was stuck in suburban Quebec City, extremely sad and extremely lonely, I coped by disappearing underwater at the Laval pool everyday (Olympic sized. Simply incredible) and counting laps, breaths, anything. This is exactly how I coped with being extremely sad and extremely lonely since I was twelve years old. That summer though I was out one morning at 5am walking off sad lonely steam in the neighbourhood when I found not one but two immaculate rusted over 1975 bronze CCM commuters. A hers-his pair of ‘em. I gripped each handlebar stem in a fist and shoved those beauties up the hill. I scavenged rags and cleaners out from under my then-boyfriend’s-parents’ sink and set to work. By 8 the household was awake and scandalized that I had dumpster-dived in what turned out to be the bf’s uncle’s driveway. I was beaming. I had my ticket out of suburbia.

When you don’t know how to drive, and I didn’t then, a bicycle is the power of a room of your own (something else I didn’t have then) times about a billion. Somebody pissing you off? LEAVE!!! Get on your vehicle and get the hell out of there. Shove a pump in your handbag. That’s it.

I learned how to drive about two weeks later. And driving is wonderful. You can, most importantly, cart crap around with you when you drive, like poodles and cases of wine. Even still though, I do not own a car and there are so many bikes in my house right now it's Brest at the beginning of the Tour.

Spring comes and the last dark crusts of snow melt into the gutter and yet all that can cure the sad loneliness of winter is a good long bike ride. Everyday 'till the November blizzards. Even though cycling is as pleasurable as sex while driving a convertible in Europe, it is not that popular among women. I have never understood this. Women need to take over roadie culture. It’s physiologically obvious. Drawbacks include hard breasts and enormous legs, but whatever. Swimming causes hard breasts and giant shoulders.

Dr S reminds me that side effects are sometimes entirely necessary, even partly curative, depending on what you are trying to treat.

on the man

All my (American) femmy blog favourites have had some coverage on the (Canadian) Walrus blog by Edward Keen, “Act Like A Man”. Although not put in so many words, Eddie is basically wondering why it is such a big deal to expect men to take pride in being responsible, capable human beings. He uses UFC and facial hair to colour his pallid analyses, but it comes down to questioning why males resist employment and moving out of their parents’ homes, and what the hell happened to courage and integrity and plain old talent. It’s cute enough, overdue to say the least. We’ve been in a static wait for the self-aggrandized GI-Joe-playing Bush to Act Like A Man and apologize for a hysterically manic spending spree of the entire American economy and hundreds of thousands of lives on a losing war. Our own childish and slovenly national leader is no better in The Man department, greedily hoarding power in areas he has no talent for or jurisdiction over. Hillier, now stepping down in a rare state of sustained honour, was one of few who had the cajones to stick up to our rolly-polly creepy-eyed PM, and that was in the unfortunate context of amplifying our military might. We recall when Linda Keen flared her testicles in the fight of nuclear safety, she was promptly canned. That doesn’t mean I didn’t join a cheerleading squad with her initials stitched across my breasts.

Which brings me back to the other Keen’s blog, and Acting Like A Man, a critical response thus far to his blogging. To which I say, "Of course you don’t have to actually be chromosonely masculine to take action against impotence!" And I am not likely to worry about “Acting Like A Man” being unnecessarily gender-loaded vernacular for Grow Up. It’s the dude’s blog, he can call it what he wants and I’ll take the same liberty. I hope it catches on, though, this responsibility and integrity thing.

on troublemakers

Barbara Seaman, author of The Doctors' Case Against the Pill and a longtime women's health shit-disturber, has died.

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/178/8/988

on not working at a strip joint

i promise not to turn this into a work blog, but i can't quit smiling this afternoon, it's Friday, oui, and this is what a visiting surgeon, whilst sipping a weak cup of tea, said to me today:

do you have callouses on your bum from getting grabbed so much?

(honestly, is that funny or is that funny? he didn't even say ASS. loves it).

on plastic

In Newfoundland and here at home, pathologists are getting the slit-eyed once-over by a suddenly skeptical public. How do we know if these folks in their lab coats can really tell if we have cancer?

A series of public inquiries will have to be left to handle that. What we do know is that cosmetic surgery ain’t no specialty, there is no accreditation and therefore no way to be bitch-slapped for doing a bad job. This gross regulatory oversight got a bit of exposure back in the fall, when a pretty and young TO professional lost her life to liposuction under a general practitioner’s knife.

A Toronto-based friend of mine, now in medical litigation, did some academic work on just what is the legal framework buttressing cosmetic surgery and found, well, NOTHING. A GP can go for a three hour CME workshop on breast implants and then hang a sign outside her practice saying “Cosmetic surgery, Breast augmentation, Get it here!” Really.

Were I a plastic surgeon who actually studied the art and science of body reconstruction and perfection for about 5 years post med school, I’d be ticked off that the unqualified competition were calling themselves surgeons, taking away my customers (say what you want about “health-care-for-hire”), potentially doing physical harm to said patients that I will have to clean up later, potentially disfiguring the public understanding of plastic surgery, and wasting GP time that could be used for chronic disease management, reproductive care and all the other general problems GPs are trained to care for.

The plastic surgeons DID get pissed, and today the College of Physicians and Surgeons (the body responsible for the professional standards and training for specialists; which is not their union nor the body that presides over the affairs of general practice) meet to approve (or I suppose, not) additions to the vacuum of cosmetic surgery regulation. These will include that GPs not call themselves surgeons nor advertise to provide services for which they are not trained.

Say what you want about an individual’s decision to get liposuction, but any way you slice it (erg, sorry about that), he should be reasonably informed about what he’s getting himself into. My GP can do my pap test…but my boob job? No thanks.

On prison, redux

Surprise surprise, Darcie Clarke moved to quiet Merritt, BC specifically to get away from the man who is suspected of killing her three children. Surprise surprise, she didn’t think leaving was enough, so she had a peace bond between them. And surprise surprise Allan Shoenborn violated it. And paid a whole $200 in fines! And the next time he was in jail, they let him out on bail because the court neglected to take note of all of these screeching sirens and neon flashing red flags! They forgot about how he’s a drunken wife abuser!

I kind of wish my tax dollars could stop going to inquiry after analysis after assessment all proving once again that the most dangerous thing a woman can do in a violent intimate partnership is leave the man. Actually I don’t know what is more depressing, that we keep finding the same thing and are seemingly powerless to change the dependent variable, or what this damn dependent variable turns out to be. I actually was commissioned in ’06 to do one of these reviews, reporting on years of domestic homicides and suicides in New Brunswick from the bowels of our province’s coroner’s office. I found what everyone finds: combine separation, alcohol, mental illness, a history of violence, useless peace bonds, and someone ends up dead. If there are children, it’s often the children.

BC has a Child Death Review Unit., and particularly in high-population jurisdictions like BC, these coroner outfits are valuable for tracking trends in accidental deaths (the BC CDRU’s latest report is on unsafe infant sleep practices). It can also trace how fatal child abuse might be found at the intersection of miscommunicating health, community, and education services. (NB, too, has a child death review board). But the Shoenborn children’s deaths are not about their being children, vulnerable to accidents and the excessive force of unfit parents. (Not that I am saying Mr Shoenborn was a fit parent; he clearly was not). The Shoenborn children died because the father was out to injure their mother.

You leave me, I’ll leave you with nothing.

The frequency of child death involvement in domestic disputes and the articulation of separations is disgustingly high. In the NB review I completed, almost as many children died as women. And more men died than women, because of so-called “love triangle” killings of women’s new partners, suicides, and murders of sons. The separation of Child Death Review and Intimate femicide-focused domestic violence death review hides the deadly extent of intimate partner violence, and also frankly results in double counting.

More to the point, all this counting doesn’t seem to be stopping anything. One would think that if decades of research in this area showed the stark clarity of the explanatory factors listed above, it would be pretty immediate- banally status-quo- to check if a separated man was an abuser, an alcoholic, mentally ill, and had a peace bond against him before releasing him from prison. Have these facts all stapled together in a file, and make a sensible call to keep him a spell. In my secondary research, I read that men who have a history of incarceration for domestic violence are less likely to reoffend lethally. Initially I was surprised- obviously these men are violent, and violence escalates, that’s the thing about violence. But in prison, the men sobered up. They got psychiatric help. Frankly, they learned that their pathetic behaviour made them each an excuse for a man. So they changed.

on eating fish

This morning i forwarded a pretty depressing news item about the closure of the wild california salmon fishery to a friend of mine in conservation ecology. We're both pretty involved in "local activism" as it were, me marching around for reproductive freedom, him marching around for wetlands and woodlots. Our causes admittedly do not overlap much..It's hard to fit everything in in a day.

His reply to the news of a collapse of the fish stocks:

"Thanks... pretty disturbing news - To put it in your terms it would be like vaginas falling off the face of the earth; but I guess in my terms that would be pretty disturbing as well, ha."

Yes indeed.

on dear

On Saturday I had to drive to Moncton by myself and very dangerously tired, for a meeting, about cancer. It turned out to be unequivocably worth it- one of those rare meetings that left me squeezed of a bit of cynicism in each of the ten topics I am most cynical about, including cancer advocacy and provincial language politics.

There were seven deer on the median, near the exit to Sussex. On either side of the divided highway the deer fence continues for nearly a hundred kilometers. And there were seven of them stuck in the middle.

This morning a big game biologist was telling the host of CBC Information Morning that there have been 1000 deer roadkills in New Brunswick. Which is astounding and gruesome. Except that is the count since March 20, the start of spring. I spat my coffee across the kitchen floor. A THOUSAND?

Personally, I’ve never killed an animal on the road. But I only got my license about two years ago (part of a frantic, overdue response to a summer of isolation in suburban Quebec), so I wager my luck is near to running out. I’ve never even been in a car that killed anything. Except, notoriously, the two times my father, with our entire family in the Jeep, hit a moose. But neither time did the moose die (nor, improbably but somewhat obviously to those who know me, did any of my family).

But seeing the deer I didn’t think of those accidents. I thought of a story I hadn’t read since the fall of 2000, “the Doe”, by Molly Gloss. Kate, a woman with a family, goes off for an annual weekend of alone time. On the drive back, she hits a deer. It’s raining and dark, and Kate touches the deer’s wet khaki rump. And feels the fetal heartbeat.

She sets out flares and locks herself inside her car. A vehicle stops, a boy in late adolescence gets out and comes to Kate’s window. His girlfriend stays in the car. Kate explains to the boy what has happened, that she wants to call a vet. The boy asks if she has a gun, says something will have to be done. Kate says nothing, implying she cannot be expected “do something”. This silence goes on uncomfortably long. Then she persuades the boy to drive to the next town to get help. He thinks it will take too long, the deer will suffer too much, but he agrees.

He drives off, and Kate leaves her car and finds a huge slab of rock, and brings it down on the pregnant doe.

on tea

For the record, Dr S hauled me out of my misanthropic curled-lip antisocial state, and had me eat a steak and drink some freaking wine. I was a generous honeypot within minutes. Tannins & hemoglobin, the bitch elixir.

on hulahoops

I admit I am not in a good mood. I wish I was- it’s above zero in this country, there is no precipitation, it’s a Friday, and somebody brought their toddler grandson to our office today. I should bust out a hulahoop. But I’m grumpy.

My dear sweet (okay, sometimes she makes me crave toothpaste she’s so sugar) friend and I had tea this afternoon, outdoors, next to some geekchic teens playing chess so quickly they’d constantly be twitching multiple plastic pieces in each snarled hand. A woman wheeled her infant by and I said “hi baby”. And the woman said instructively to her baby, “On dit ‘Bonjour’”. And I said very ironically, “Oh, un petit bébé Francophone!”, and his mother said, completely without irony, “Bien non, un bébé Français. De Paris”.

Gawd I’m a sucker for French snobbery.

So there we are, drinking tea, which I hate, but I am trying to drink less this week on account of the soggy excess of travels to TO, so tea it is. And my friend tells me about her friend whose boyfriend won’t let her visit her old penpal female friend blah blah blah. Then she tells me about her other friend who dumped his girlfriend when she got pregnant, and promptly brought a new one home, blah blah blah. The she tells me about this more-than-a-friend who keeps her skychecked but can’t get over his baggage, blah blah blah. And I have to abruptly (erg, rudely) stop her and we start talking about our mothers. I know- amazingly a more sumptuously satisfying gossip item.

Until I am out of this unfortunate mental fog please mercifully do not talk to me about men unless it is to exclaim at their dashing heroism or gray-templed wisdom weakening your knees, ok?

on skateboard injury

So novelist Meg Wolitzer has a new book out she’s titled “The Ten-Year Nap”. Well if that doesn’t sell itself I don’t know what would- “The Nanny Diaries, part XX”?

Honestly what title could possibly invoke more ennui? WHO BUYS THIS SHIT?

And why bother reviewing it? A tale of overachieving, upper middle class women who succumb to the cutesy gurgling of the newborn only to find themselves a decade later, still fashionable, fit and hopelessly vapid as unemployed housewives on the Upper East Side. Wow, how inventive. How controversial. Entering the Mommy Wars indeed.

Give me a break. And a national day care program. And “The Feminine Mystique”, the 45th anniversary edition.

Writers like Wolitzer, and her narcissistic memoirist peer Rebecca Eckler, the self-styled Mommyblogger and litigiously-insistent originator of Apatow’s “Knocked” Up plotline, cause me to daydream wistfully of tube-tying ceremonies in bleach-perfumed boardrooms on the 188th floor.

Of course I like babies. In fact I really, really like babies. I think they are so damn fat and adorable. But you have to be kidding me if it is (publishable) news to someone that her career will go into cardiac failure if she takes ten years “to nap”. Ten years ago we barely even had the internet!!!!!!

Ten years ago we didn’t have adequately available daycare and we still don’t. If you are brilliant and a New Yorker corporate lawyer and not getting enough flexibility to take care of your kid when he’s sick, how about demanding better treatment by your employer? Like, instead of taking ten years off and then demanding to be let back into the labour force, pouting over your displaced pension and permanently-eroded earning potential. Maybe if the wealthy and powerful among us weren’t the first and the most graceful to cave into the inevitably-self-destructive anti-reproductive norms of the workplace, things wouldn’t be so excruciating for the moms who balance three lousy minimum wage jobs AND twins on either hip.

In the movie “Little Children” (which I loved, not just because of Winslet in the red one-piece, because I also read the book, yo), Brad Adamson is a stay-at-home dad who’s wife is disappointed in him because he can’t muster up the wherewithal to write and pass his bar ads. He feels like a loser. He frankly is a big loser, but at least he stays in shape. His kid is a regular that-kid-from-Jerry McGuire-type cutiepie. It’s not the kid’s fault. It’s Brad’s lack of adult contact, the monotony, the isolation. He gets depressed. He finds a woman in a similar (but more patriarchally familiar) ten-year-nap, and cheating on his wife with her is the natural equivalent to a strong dose of Percocet. At the end of the story, he regresses not from just constant hanging out with kids but to being one, and hits his head attempting a skateboard stunt. He wakes up from his concussion (nap), and asks for his wife. And I believe we are supposed to think that after this crisis, things are going to change.

Leslie Bennett’s wrote an a 21st century take on Betty Friedan’s wake-up call, “The Feminine Mistake”. I thought that was a pretty cheeky title. It didn’t come in pastel with Kinsella curlicue font, let me tell you. She wrote damning of the wasted investment and shocking naivete of professional women vacating corner offices, diplomas and diaper bags in hand. Wolitzer concedes, in an interview with Salon’s Rebecca Traister, “There is something inherently appalling about really intelligent people, in any context, not using their minds.”

And it’s not just the democratic tragedy- that so much talent is concentrated on 1.2 kids who spend seven hours a day in elementary school anyway. It’s that it makes the stay-at-homers crazy. Woolf’s house-bound housewife Clarissa Dalloway’s experience parallels Septimus Smith’s PTSD. They are confined; they are confused by memories of past freedom, joy. Septimus jumps out of the window. Brad falls off a half-pipe. Friedan’s generation take Valium with gin.

The women in Wolitzer’s novel make greeting cards.

She exclaims that “You're not thinking about the young woman who can't have the things that you are so cavalierly tossing aside. This story isn't clean”. The story doesn’t sound any good, either. But the market responds to it. And day care staff gets $8/hour.

on grad school

January 2002 I made the socially punishing mistake of starting grad school mid-session, mid-team, mid-winter. Only one classmate would talk to me. Her name is E. We remain close. Her early relocation to Ottawa, recruited by the feds, facilitated our friendship- I was in the capital often enough for academic conferences to follow her emotional and professional process as faithfully as true friends typically do. At some point I met her sister, who I do not know if I would count as a friend, I admire her a bit too much for that to be possible. She’s older than us but delicate. She is serious but not brittle. She is, of course, an academic. In corduroy from Queen West’s Preloved and wearing woolen tights and insulated wellies, she joined E and me for a coffee one sunny frigid morning at Bridgehead. She’s been a doctoral student for at least as long as they flirtatiously claim it’ll take when you first start, beaming authoritatively at you and drafting a supervisory schedule in such hieroglyphic script you believe it might actually mean something.

E recently put in a Phd app. I recently ran off from a program. E’s sister is staying the course. She has other pursuits to break up the long self-analyzing moments between chapters. She has a peculiar layered fringe over her forehead, a small face, child-like eyes that dwarf her other features. Letting her latte cool and breaking apart a pastry, she explained:

The popularity of grad school among young women- and at least half of the faculties are at least half full with women- is attributable to the “post-feminist” threat of their otherwise entrance into the workforce. To keep these ceiling-hungry, entitled and intelligent (and often gorgeous) women out of power, credentialism and academic elitism has shifted into a feminized overdrive. Grad school is a perfect pressure cooker: an average of ten years of social disassociation, from both productive and reproductive labour, alienates women when they finally defend an otherwise unread thesis and enter either realm…an alienation that can push them right back into the ivory tower.

Did I mention I want to go back to school?

on subsidies

From the curios of immaculate conception to the perversities of public health in Ontario…

The day I arrived in slippery gray (but so succexy) Toronto, the province announced a $150-million dollar package intended to cover all screening tests for men, the media brouhaha resting on prostate cancer screening in particular. It used to be that unless you were a high-risk candidate, a PSA-level blood test cost you roughly $30 out-of-pocket; under the new scheme it will be OHIP-covered, always. As luck would have it, I was actually in town for a conference about screening. For the first time in my new position, I was attending sessions dominated by well-groomed men in suits, orated by overconfident American experts, and consensus-bound by the most unlikely sentiment: criticism of the screen-happy status quo.

Needless to say there wasn’t a single urologist sitting cabaret-style among us. And it wasn’t open to special interest groups or industry reps.

Here is the deal with prostate screening: First off, that digital rectal exam that gets the butt end (ergh) of about half of all men’s health joking out there is, actually, almost useless in the detection of PC. There are other uses for DRE, but as prostate cancer detection it has low specificity and low sensitivity- so lots of men who have it are told they don’t, and lots who don’t are told they do. The PSA is better at finding what it intends to find, but then there is the often-neglected question with screening: what are you going to do with what you find? Screening is not done for the sake of screening, but to lead to interventions and, hopefully, reduced morbidity and mortality.

Mortality from prostate cancer has stuck at 3% since they started tracking, while incidence trends have mimicked the popularity of the PSA test….rising when there are encouraging population health measures like the Ontario announcement last week, and falling when the debunking message reaches a receptive clinical or policy audience. In short, detection has done nothing to improve mortality. When PC is detected, men can “watch and wait”, or have surgery. One percent of patients die in these surgeries. Morbidity is high and horrific: at least 30% of patients end up with incontinence (urinary and/or rectal…ew), and another third with impotency. Since PC has such a long lead time, these men may be very young when they go under the knife, and have to live with the dual devils of incontinence and impotence for a very, very long time. Which arguably would be okay if the sacrifice was saving their lives, but it isn’t. Mortality simply has not changed.

About 30-40% of men are found to have prostate cancer when they die. In the vast majority of cases, the PC didn’t kill them. Any number of other diseases, infections or injuries did.

It is not harmless generousity to push PSA testing by way of economic incentives like McGuinty’s subsidies. As far as I can tell this financing package is yet another distraction from the failure of the cancer industry (including public-administered health care provision) to do much of anything to reduce cancer mortality since the disease blimped out of social hiding some decades ago. While I gather many physicians have seen the evidence of the bigger trials (PLCO and ERSPC), PC remains misunderstood by most men and frankly most policymakers. Clinicians continue to offer it because patients ask because they hear the hype, hype that comes from groups that respond perversely to the risks of testing by promoting its availability. This phenomenon is apparently called the “popularity paradox”. The campaigning is the loudest for tests that are the most likely to cause harm…as if the patient groups behind these campaigns are responding with evangelism to their cured existence, even if campaign masters’ own cancers were not discovered through screening.

I asked Dr. Gilbert Welch, who wrote the controversial “Should I Get Tested for Cancer?” if somewhere in his book I’d find an economic analysis. He scoffed. Even if population screening wasn’t extremely costly and wasn’t eating up time in pathology labs and primary care visits, it would be harmful because it leads to physical harm. Men get hurt by these unnecessary surgeries. To Welch, an economic analysis was irrelevant, because there would be absolutely nothing to file in the benefits side of an equation, and the harms are overwhelming.

So, what can a man do in the face of one of the top three cancers among men? Pay attention to his body and talk to a physician when something changes. Some would argue that incredibly detailed discussions of all the risks of PSA testing and seeking informed consent is the way to go; I am cynically proposing “informed decision-making” is not economically or ethically worth the time: if it’s a bad test, don’t offer it, period. PC is one of those cancers that is either never going to progress to causing symptoms, let alone death; or be curable once symptoms arrive; or be incurable no matter when you detect it (including through presymptomatic screening programs). Only very very rarely will presymptomatic diagnosis be necessary for cure…certainly not often enough to justify the harms of general screening.

I realize this post isn’t terribly Alice B. But then my Alice would be incredibly cranky if her man had unnecessary physiological impotence for the last thirty years of his life.