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...