Bad Feminist: Essays (33 page)

More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to
justify
or explain why they take birth control—health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there’s anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy. In certain circles, birth control is being framed as whore medicine. We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, “I’m on the pill because I like dick.” It’s extremely regressive for women to feel like they need to make it seem like they are using birth control for reasons other than what birth control was originally designed for: to control birth.

When progress is made, such as the Affordable Care Act requiring private health insurance companies to cover preventative services and birth control without a copay, said progress is hampered by the government shutdown in October 2013 because Republicans tried to include a one-year delay for the act in their budget proposal. Time and again, we see how women’s bodies are negotiable.

I cannot help but think of the Greek play
Lysistrata
.

What often goes unspoken in this conversation is how debates about birth control and reproductive freedom continually force the female body into being a legislative matter because men refuse to assume their fair share of responsibility for birth control. Men refuse to allow their bodies to become a legislative matter because they have that inalienable right. The drug industry has no real motivation to develop a reversible method of male birth control because forcing this burden on women is so damn profitable. According to Shannon Pettypiece, reporting for Bloomberg, Americans spent $5 billion on birth control in 2011. There are exceptions, bright shining exceptions, but most men don’t seem to
want
the responsibility for birth control. Why would they? They see what the responsibility continues to cost women, publicly and privately.

Birth control is a pain in the ass. It’s a medical marvel, but it is also an imperfect marvel. Most of the time, women have to put something into their bodies that alters their bodies’ natural functions just so they can have a sexual life and prevent unwanted pregnancies. Birth control can be expensive. Birth control can wreak havoc on your hormones, your state of mind, and your physical well-being because, depending on the method, there are side effects and the side effects can be ridiculous. If you’re on the pill, you have to remember to take it, or else. If you use an IUD, you have to worry about it growing into your body and becoming a permanent part of you. Okay, that worry is mine. There’s no sexy way to insert a diaphragm in the heat of the moment. Condoms break. Pulling out is only believable in high school. Sometimes, birth control doesn’t work; I know lots of pill babies. We use birth control because, however much it might be a pain in the ass, it is infinitely better than the alternative.

If I told you my birth control method of choice, which I kind of swear by, you’d look at me like I was slightly insane. Suffice it to say, I will take a pill every day when men have that same option. We should all be in this together, right? One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, “Are you on the pill?” I simply say, “No, are you?”

I have regularly thought, with shocking clarity,
I want to start an underground birth control network
. Of course, I also think,
That’s crazy. These smoke screens are just that. Things are going to be fine
. Later, I realized, the belief, however fleeting, that women might need to go underground for reproductive freedom is not as crazy as the current climate. I was, in my way, quite serious about creating some kind of underground network to ensure that a woman’s right to safely maintain her reproductive health is, in some way, forever inalienable. I want to feel useful. I want to feel empowered.

When I started imagining this underground network, I had a feeling, in my gut, that women, and the men who love (having sex with) us, are going to need to prepare for the worst. The worst, where reproductive freedom is concerned, is probably not behind us. The worst is all around us, breathing down our necks, in relentless pursuit. Either these politicians are serious or they’re trying to misdirect national conversations. Either alternative continues to expose the fragility of women’s rights.

An underground railroad worked once before. It could work again. We could stockpile various methods of birth control and information about where women might go for safe, ethical reproductive health care in every state—contraception, abortion, education, all of it. We could create a network of reproductive health care providers and abortionists who would treat women humanely because the government does not and we could make sure that every woman who needed to make a choice had all the help she needed.

I spend hours thinking about this underground network and what it would take to make sure women don’t ever have to revert to a time when they put themselves at serious risk to terminate a pregnancy. It could be fictionalized as a trilogy and made into a major motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence.

It surprises me, though it shouldn’t, how short the memories of these politicians are. They forget the brutal lengths women have gone to in order to terminate pregnancies when abortion was illegal or when abortion is unaffordable. Women have thrown themselves down stairs and otherwise tried to physically harm themselves to force a miscarriage. Dr. Waldo Fielding noted in the
New York Times
, “Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion—darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.” Women have tried to use soap and bleach, catheters, natural remedies. Women have historically resorted to any means necessary. Women will do this again if we are backed into that terrible corner. This is the responsibility our society has forced on women for hundreds of years.

It is a small miracle women do not have short memories about our rights that have always, shamefully, been alienable.

There’s a great deal about our culture that is aspirational—from how we educate ourselves, to the cars we drive, to where we work and live and socialize. We want to be the best. We want the best of everything. All too often, we are aware of the gaping distance between who we are and whom we aspire to be and we desperately try to close that distance. And then there are superheroes, mythical characters embodying ideals we may not be able to achieve for ourselves. Superheroes are strong, ennobled, and graceful in their suffering so we don’t have to be. In
Superman on the Couch
, Danny Fingeroth writes, “A hero embodies what we believe is best in ourselves. A hero is a standard to aspire to as well as an individual to be admired.” We crave the ability to look up, to look beyond ourselves and toward something greater.

We are so enamored with this idea of the heroic that we are always looking for ways to attribute heroism to everyday people so we might get just a bit closer to the best version of ourselves, so the distance between who we are and who we aspire to be might become narrower.

Heroism has become overly idealized, so ubiquitous that the idea of a hero is increasingly diluted. Athletes are heroic when they are victorious, when they persevere through injury or adversity. Our parents are heroes for raising us, for serving as good examples. Women are heroes for giving birth. People who survive disease or injury are heroes for overcoming human frailty. People who die from disease or injury are heroic for having endured until they could endure no longer. Journalists are heroes for seeking out the truth. Writers are heroes for bringing beauty into the world. Law enforcement officers are heroes for serving and protecting. As Franco and Zimbardo suggest in “The Banality of Heroism,” “By conceiving of heroism as a universal attribute of human nature, not as a rare feature of the few ‘heroic elect,’ heroism becomes something that seems in the range of possibilities for every person, perhaps inspiring more of us to answer that call.” Or maybe we have an excess of heroism because we have become so cynical that we no longer have the language or the ability to make sense of people who are merely human but can also rise to the occasion of greatness when called upon.

Heroism can be a burden. We even see this in the trials and tribulations of comic book superheroes. These heroes are often strong at the broken places. They suffer and suffer and suffer but still they rise. Still they serve the greater good. They sacrifice their bodies and hearts and minds because heroism, it would seem, means the complete denial of the self. Spider-Man agonizes over whether to be with the woman he loves and cannot forgive himself for the death of his uncle. Superman is reluctant to reveal his true identity to the woman he loves to keep her safe from danger. Every superhero has a sad story shaping his or her heroism.

Heroes also fight for justice. They stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. It’s easy to understand why we might aspire toward heroism even as we are aware of our limitations. As I watched the George Zimmerman trial unfold in 2013, I also thought a great deal about justice and for whom justice is intended. Zimmerman was on trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy who was wearing a hoodie and walking around being black. Zimmerman was a neighborhood volunteer watchman in his gated community in Sanford, Florida. For whatever reason, he wanted to protect his community. Perhaps he was as susceptible as any of us are to aspiring toward heroism.

Nothing is ever simple. The Zimmerman case was about race—and when a high-profile case is about race, tension is inevitable. Very little about the conversation surrounding this case was rational. Zimmerman claims he shot Martin in self-defense, but Martin was unarmed, carrying a pack of Skittles and a bottle of iced tea. What, precisely, was Zimmerman defending himself from? This is one of the many questions for which we will never have answers. Some people, though, are trying. Fox News pundits hypothesized that yes, indeed, candy and a bottle of iced tea could become murder weapons.

What we do know is that a young black man is all too often suspected of criminality. Frankly, all black men are all too often suspected of criminality. In his beautiful essay for the
Sun
, “Some Thoughts on Mercy,” Ross Gay writes,

Part of every black child’s education includes learning how to deal with the police so he or she won’t be locked up or hurt or even killed. Despite my advanced degrees and my light-brown skin, I’ve had police take me out of my vehicle, threaten to bring in the dogs, and summon another two or three cars. But I’ve never been thrown facedown in the street or physically brutalized by the cops, as some of my black friends have. I’ve never been taken away for a few hours or days on account of “mistaken identity.”

Throughout the essay Gay talks about how this education has shaped not only how he sees the world but also how he sees himself. No one is exempt. I don’t believe, much, in statements like, “We are Trayvon Martin,” but for black men, it is often true.

Zimmerman’s lawyers worked, throughout the trial, to demonize Martin, to make him into the scary black man we should all fear, to make it seem like George Zimmerman had no choice and did the right thing. That strategy worked because Zimmerman was acquitted. Those lawyers played on the idea that a black man—or, in the case of Martin, a black boy—is someone to be feared, someone who is dangerous.

In theory, justice should be simple. Justice should be blind. You are innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. You have the right to be judged by a jury of your peers. The principles on which our justice system was founded clearly outline how our judicial system should function.

Few things work in practice as well as they do in theory. Justice is anything but blind. All too often, the people who most need justice benefit the least. The statistics about who is incarcerated and how incarceration affects their future prospects are bleak.

I would like to believe in justice, but there are countless examples of how the justice system fails. In Georgia, Warren Hill, declared mentally retarded by four experts, was scheduled for execution on July 15, 2013. He was reprieved, though he remains on death row. Hill murdered his girlfriend, received a life sentence, and while in prison murdered another inmate, which led to the death sentence. Hill has committed a crime. He deserves to be punished. Will his death serve as justice for his victims?

Would justice in a courtroom, by way of a guilty verdict against George Zimmerman, really have been justice for the murder of Trayvon Martin? Would that measure of justice have comforted his parents and loved ones? “Justice” is, at times, a weak word. We would like to believe that justice is about balancing a crime with a punishment, but it is never an equal transaction. For most victims of crimes, justice is merely palliative.

It would be just as easy to demonize George Zimmerman as it is to demonize young black men like Trayvon Martin. I hate what Zimmerman did. I hate how his trial unfolded. I hate the way his lawyers treated Rachel Jeantel, the young woman with whom Martin was speaking on the phone just before he died and a key witness for the prosecution. Jeantel did not bother hiding her disdain for Zimmerman’s lawyer or the court proceedings, and he did not bother hiding his disdain for her. I hate what Zimmerman stands for and I hate that he was acquitted, but I also understand that he is a man who was raised in the same country as Paula Deen and he happened to have a gun. These things are connected.

Trayvon Martin is neither the first nor the last young black man who will be murdered because of the color of his skin. If there is such a thing as justice for a young man whose life was taken too soon, I hope justice comes from all of us learning from what happened. I hope we can rise to the occasion of greatness, where greatness is nothing more than trying to overcome our lesser selves by seeing a young man like Trayvon Martin for what he is: a young man, a boy without a cape, one who couldn’t even walk home from the store unharmed, let alone fly.