Someone really needs to remind me that it is vital — not merely for my work, but for my sanity — to talk to like-minded women doing the kind of work that I do.

I just got off the phone with the magnificent president of this organization, and this project, who just added this project to their roster, and I feel like I just got out of a cool lake on a too-hot day, man. Amazing the difference a half-hour conversation can make.

I think I often forget how fringe people like me really are until I connect with others in the same or similar position, and then I hear that instant connection we have, and I remember, quite profoundly. Such a treat to be able to connect that way, to race to support each other’s work, and just be able to talk to someone else who loves all the obscure authors no one else even knows about who write about the kind of issues I work with, who I don’t have to explain the pertinent issues to, and who just plain Gets It.

A nice shot in the arm for me, too. I am hoping to be able to bust out a bunch of materials in the next week so that we can do a big Scarleteen fundraising and awareness drive on and around Valentine’s Day, so I needed the boost.

* * *
On an entirely different topic, this commercial?

This PSA is dirty, dirty pool, especially for those of us dog and animal people who ALREADY feel terribly about animals stuck in shelters or without homes. Hell, I can’t even ever let myself volunteer at a shelter because I know full well that I’d have dogs coming home with me nightly. I don’t even let myself get off at the bus stop that’s near the shelter here, even when it means I have to go several blocks out of my way: it’s just not safe for me.

It’s that “I know I am a good dog,” line which is the absolute worst. To the point that when I saw it, it caused me to burst into tears (which I just did again, in watching it so I could link it), clutch my dog (who was looking at me like I’d lost my mind and squirming to get the hell away from her deranged owner) and then race to the computer because I needed to see many pictures of happy dogs posthaste.

Sure, it’s obviously an effective ad, and sure, Pedigree clearly has a great agenda with promoting shetlter-dog adoption. Here’s hoping it helps.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate them and think they are a very bad dog right now. No biscuits for them.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, rantapalooza | permalink | comments (5) »

I’ve recently been unable to put down The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. (It’s a tough month for my bedside table, which has had to bear the physical and emotional weight of that book, as well as bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, Jackson Katz’s The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature.)

Even though every single first-person story in it makes my heart hang heavy, even though if I read it at night, I have to fight off the urge to allow myself to cry myself to sleep. It’s important. So important.

I was just mentioning today to one of the amazing young women at the All Girl Army, blogging for choice today, that while it is, absolutely, positively vital to talk about backalley abortions, to talk about what abortion was like before Roe vs. Wade (and what it still is like in areas where abortion is illegal or inaccessible), it’s equally important to talk about what choice as a whole was like and still IS like, even with the help of Roe and other supports. I think many often forget or simply don’t know the combined impact Roe vs. Wade,Title X and other feminist initiatives had when it came to reproductive choice no matter the choice a woman made. More accurately, no matter what a woman did or what was done TO her when she became pregnant before she had any sort of choice.

Before (and in some cases, still well into) the mid-seventies, we all too often forget that most women simply didn’t have any real choice. We all too often forget that decisions like Roe vs. Wade protect us because of the choices many of us still don’t have, and the world we live in which still threatens or refuses us all or some of those choices.

No choice for a safe, legal abortion.
If a woman was able to access abortion and got very lucky (or was simply very privileged), then she could contact, get to, and pay for a private — albeit illegal –abortion, done in sanitary conditions, by a doctor or nurse, under great secrecy. Those women were few and far between, to say the least. And even those women, in the “luckiest” conditions, often had to go back home, do all their grieving alone, suffer any side effects in secrecy and silence, and if they became ill due to the abortion, often did not or could not seek out care.

As for the rest who wanted or needed abortions, but who didn’t have the connections or the means for a safer illegal abortion, I think by now most of us — especially those who read women like me — have a pretty good idea as to what backalley abortions or self-attempted abortions were like. The tools of these abortions were knitting needles, coathangers, scissors, sticks; bleach, whiskey, turpentine or gunpowder douches. Women who got backalley abortions were often blindfolded so as not to be able to identify their abortionist, driven to remote areas, passed person to person. Many women who died from illegal, unsafe abortions slowly bled to death, in terrible physical and emotional pain, utterly alone: many were silently, slowly and painfully dying or becoming seriously ill while going to school, working their jobs, or sitting at the dinner tables with their families. That’s pre-Roe abortion history about as condensed as it gets, friends: that’s the light summary.

No matter the type of abortion, before Roe, as many as 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred annually in the United States and as many as 5,000 to 10,000 women died every single year following illegal abortions. Nearly four times as many women of color died as white women. That figure doesn’t account for injuries, physical as well as psychological, both of which were vast. No matter the type of abortion or the type of woman, nearly ALL of those women still suffered alone. They did not have support groups for abortion, nor any cultural sentiment which allowed them to feel any grief (rather than guilt), they did not have sound (if any) aftercare, they did not have any context to talk about their feelings or experiences, they often did not even have the allowance to say, out loud, to anyone, that they had an abortion or had been pregnant.

No choice to safely abort, but also no choice to parent, or no choice not to.
For those who either did not want to or simply could not access any means of abortion… Just in the few decades before Roe, around one and a half million women were sent away to maternity homes and tricked, coerced or outright forced into giving their babies up for adoption.

Some of these homes were okay enough places to stay (however much a place can be “okay” which robs you of a child you gave birth to and wanted), but some were not a far cry from — nearly identical to — the Magdalene Launderies. Women staying in them were hidden and isolated from everyone but the other women in the homes, shunned by their families (and sometimes the men who got them pregnant in the first place) and often during the rare times they could leave the home, they would be easily identified and harassed in the streets: insults and/or vegetables hurled, the works.

Like women who aborted during this time — and in my eyes, this is all the more painful — these women had to leave the homes after giving birth and pretend they had never been pregnant, that they were never mothers. Some of them would have contact with their infants for months in the home before having them ripped away from them. Women with postpartum depression had zero support. Women whose whole lives had been shattered were totally unacknowledged. Open adoptions arrangements (however flawed they can sometimes be) were not available: the rights of birth mothers were preciscely nil. If and when they were at all visible, these women were often disdained by their families and communities. But for the most part, they were and are often still, invisible mothers, invisible women. Too, we have plenty of history of mothers giving birth and being forced to give up their children to other women in their families: married sisters or aunts, even their own mothers, after which the mother of the child would be forced to spend her life pretending that she was sibling or cousin to her own child.

Of course, we also have the myriad women who did not want to remain pregnant and parent, but who found themselves forced into parenting, and often, unwanted marriages as well. For whom having to get married, bear a child and parent was ordered as punishment for being wayward (for as well all know, much like HIV is Gods punishment for being a deviant — even if you get it as the straightest, most vanilla person there is — pregnancy and parenting is Gods punishment to women for not keeping themselves chaste).

My mother was one of those women. Abused, lambasted, shamed by her family and told she had no other option but this to even attempt to redeem herself in their eyes, that of God and those of the whole world. (As one of “those” children, let me tell you from a child’s perspective how much fun it wasn’t to grow up looked at by a strict Irish Catholic family as the accidental, half-blood-Dego bastard child who carries the shame of her mother in every pore of her being: to be told, quite incessantly, that you were an accident, a punishment, an extension of sin. Or to reach an age where you’re well aware that your mother is working double and sometimes triple shifts, and you’re all barely scraping by, all because of you, a fact which the family who PUT her in that position reminds you of frequently.) This is some of what happens when choice is thought to stop at sex alone, if choice was even an issue WITH sex, especially when you consider how very many of these women were raised with the mutually-exclusive notion that they were both supposed to police men AND somehow also defer to them.

There are vast and varied tales of these scenarios. For women of color, while there were a scant few homes that catered exclusively to them, they just plain weren’t white enough for the maternity homes, so however horrendous an option that was, even that one wasn’t available; both per finances and connections (as well as due to racism from providers) private, safer illegal abortions weren’t optional, either. For the most part, women of color were those whose choices were the most terrifying sort of backalley abortions or forced parenting, ready or not, wanting or not. Bear in mind, too, given rates of incest, how many women were forced to parent the children of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and how many children grew up in these scenarios.

So, we then also had millions of “fallen” women forced to be mothers, often without the means for prenatal care for themselves or their babies, often pushed into greater poverty than they already lived with, often pushed into marriages that were unwanted, unhealthy or abusive.

And no choice to become pregnant or not.
I feel like what also often gets lost in abortion and choice debates is any address of how much sexual responsibility is and always has been put, disproportionately, on women. This is particularly of import for the youngest women, who obviously, I have great personal concern with. Teen women are incessantly blamed for not properly policing their male partners: especially when those male partners are same-age, but even when those partners are full-fledged adults, even sometimes when they are far older and predatory. Abstinence-based sex education makes this girl-blaming a critical part of their curriculum. Last I checked (which was very recently) at least 25% of the youngest teen women report that their first sexual experiences were coerced. The greatest rates of rape are — and generally always have been — to women under 18. And in many cases, as with sexual crimes so much of the time, these young women are held partially or even entirely responsible for being victimized. Bear in mind that many of these young women are reared with the same-old antiquated ideas about whose fault it is when they’re coerced into sex (theirs), or become pregnant (theirs), and pushed into one choice or another that they wouldn’t choose if they really had all the options available to them — including access to EC, thank you very much — and told that the person fully responsible for living with whatever “choice” they get is, guess who, them.

Let’s also remember that around 32,000 pregnancies as a result of rape occur every year just in the United States right now: I do not know what the rates were in the decades before Roe. Assuming the rates were at least the same or similar, though they were probably higher, that’s at least 32,000 women a year — more than die from breast cancer every year; only about half that many people die from drunk driving accidents annually, so where’s our PSA and OUR special fundraising wristband, right? — with NO choice as to whether or not they became pregnant, and no choice as to what to do about it. That’s tens of thousands of women every year with NO real reproductive choices whatsoever, and yet, often held responsible, in part if not in full.

Even when we’re not talking about rape or strong coercion, let’s not pussyfoot: women have intercourse they do not want to have ALL the time, every day. Out of feelings of obligation, out of a need to keep the peace, out of a need to feel, or assure a partner is feeling, “normal” per heteroseixst or gendernormative dictates and ideals, out of a need to keep a partner around so that they and/or their children have some means of survival and shelter.

Often, these same women cave when it comes to birth control due to a partner’s urging — it’s okay, you don’t have to use the condoms tonight, or okay, you’re so sure withdrawal works and you’ve worn me down arguing, or okay, you want to have intercourse RIGHT THIS MINUTE so I won’t go put the cervical cap on, or okay, I ran out of pills because the pharmacist didn’t have any this week, but we can do this anyway. Often, these women become pregnant, and these scenarios do not constitute full choice, no matter what spin you put on it.

Mothers STILL tell daughters that it is their duty to acquiesce to their husbands with all things sexual, and to service their “male needs,” whatever those may be. I have users at Scarleteen who have been reared with these attitudes with some regularity, and they are incredibly difficult to unlearn, especially when they continue to be surrounded by them in their communities and closest relationships.

Access to birth control, too, we often forget, was still incredibly limited pre Roe, and is a major factor in choice issues. When the pill came into circulation in the 60’s, half the states in the US only provided it for married women. Well before then, the Comstock laws made access to other birth control methods illegal. Before 1960, the vast majority of citizens had only condoms — which, without the male partners support, were useless — and withdrawal, which we know to be about as close to useless as it gets, and which also relies on male cooperation. And yet, when pregnancy occurred, it was often still thought to be the woman’s fault: her fault if she couldn’t “control” her male partner’s sexual advances, her fault if her male partner refused to use a birth control method, or she couldn’t access one that worked for her. This is history that is insanely pertinent right now, as things like the Global Gag Rule, Title X cuts (my clinic here sadly is shutting down this month), limiting access to EC and attacks on choice persist. The same people and forces who seek to limit or remove access to safe legal abortion, and thusly regress all the choices we have, are most often the same people seeking to limit access to contraception or contraception education, especially to those most at risk and with the least agency: the youngest women, the poorest women, the most marginalized women. Access to birth control is STILL a serious issue and a serious problem in this regard: the increased access we see has not by any means fully extended itself — or anything close — to the women who need it the most, and for whom even with legal abortion, even with changes in adoption, even with better welfare and treatment of single mothers, have far more limited choices than women with greater privilege.

Let’s not forget…
That tied up into all of this is also access to reliable, accurate and unbiased information about birth control, reproduction and sexuality as a whole. That’s not just a women’s issue, by any means, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while lack of that information does everyone harm, men and women alike, it ultimately harms women the most. Everyone is harmed by sexual shame, by a lack of understanding of their own bodies and health — and that of sexual partners — by purposeful misinformation about sexuality and sexual and reproductive health. NOT everyone will become pregnant because of it, get cervical cancer because of it, wind up in rape or coercion scenarios because they don’t know the warning signs or are told to disregard them, or be unable to make a sound reproductive choice when pregnancy occurs that is best for them. (And that’s not even touching on issues of intercourse or other sex under obligation, sound counsel, prevention and address of sexual abuse, understanding of how women’s sexuality even works, the whole bag.) These things will happen to women, who even just by sheer biology, whether we’re talking about pregnancy or cervical cells, bear the greatest burdens when it comes to sex and the opposite sex.

In a culture/community/relationship or under a system which does not support an equality of full reproductive autonomy and agency, it is a given that sexuality and reproductive information will follow suit, and either protest that full autonomy or undermine it, and often quite intentionally.

Choice isn’t just about abortion.
Reproductive choice is an octopus of an issue. It’s not only an issue of sex and gender, but also one that strongly involves race and class.

Real reproductive choice includes a woman’s inarguable right to abort, parent or give a child up for adoption 100% informed, willing and able, as well as support for any and all of those choices, the choice to prevent pregnancy with safe, easily accessible and affordable birth control, the choice to have sex at all, and, by extension, the ability to obtain reproductive healthcare and sound information on reproduction and sexuality and most of all, to be held to sexual responsibility which is fair, sexual mores which are realistic, inclusive and not laden with sexism, and to live in an overarching environment which honors and safeguards a woman’s right to real and complete ownership and care of her own body and everything within it.

What you see here is about as abbreviated a take on these issues as it gets. However thick this text, it’s a serious condensation of this issue. What Roe vs. Wade did and does, what all the additional laws, policies and initiatives which support its principle do, is far, far greater than allowing access to merely abortion. We allow anyone to take Roe and everything related to it away — we even give an inch when it comes to this — we aren’t just removing access to abortion: we are removing a critical element of the whole of reproductive choice. Roe is foundational in many, many respects (when you really start to look at how much was built off of it, or arose because of it, it’s truly dizzying). You remove that row of bricks at the bottom of a building, you remove the stability and integrity of the building entire, and it will crumble in time. This is an absolute given, not theory or hyperbole.

This is the case whether you have never had an abortion or never intend to have one. This is the case whether you have had or do have the agency to make whatever choices you want, and may even still with regressions to choice policies, be it due to your sex, color or class. This is the case no matter which of those women above your mother was, or even if she was none of those women at all: this is the case no matter how it is you’re rearing your daughters. No matter how affected or unaffected you think you’ll be if that building built on Roe ever crumbles, you and your sisters will be buried alive in it, most likely just as we were before.

And as far as I’m concerned, if there’s even just one woman in the world who doesn’t have ALL of these choices, all of these aspects of choice? Then there’s no woman in the world who’s really got’em. Considering that even with Roe, even with policies that support choice there are still myriad women without them, both globally and right here at home, the fact that anyone still needs to defend or explain the importance of and need for Roe, today or any other day, to anyone at all, boggles the bloody mind.

Blog for Choice: Lots of people are doing it today, however. I’d encourage you to do so, or to avail yourself of their words, and by all means, as ever, to do all you can to work for choice in every way you can.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, sex/life, Blog for Choice | permalink | comments (0) »

Excuse an interruption to the pornography discussions with a few administrative notes and requests:

1) For those who have wanted a feed of the journal, it lives here.

2) I put a note up about this at Flickr, but while I am here, I am DESPERATE for photo subjects in and around Seattle. Per usual, I primarily shoot women, and if nudes are the order of the day, I only am comfortable right now shooting women, female couples, or gay male couples. Also per usual, I’m very much interested in women on the margins in terms of who tends to often be least visible: women of color, or size, older women, disabled women, etc. Nudes or eroticism are never a requirement with me: it’s all about capturing my subject in what is most expressive and true for her, however she feels most at home in her skin. I prefer to shoot out of doors, or in a location the subject likes as opposed to in the studio (especially since my loighting setup blows right now), but shooting here (I’m in a very easily accessible area of Ballard) is also always an option. If you or someone you know thinks you might have interest, drop me an email.

3) For those of your with sites currently linking to journal.html can you update those links to journal/ for me? Thanks!

4) In finishing the resource list for the book, I’m coming up short in a few areas. For instance, my contraception references are really quite clinical. Does anyone have any books they’ve liked and used that are more down-to-earth per contraception resources? Also interested in suggestions per body image, self-esteem, male sexuality, safer sex, and sexual orientation from a braoder perspective than that just aimed at GLB’s. Cheers.

P.S. My big crush right now is the PATHWAY act. I’m really, really curious, if this passes, if it might finally involve a revisitation of the ERA. But I don’t want to get too optimistic: a bill finally recognizing the realities of feminist thought and observations when it comes to HIV is cool enough as it is.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, photography & art | permalink | comments (4) »

While we’re on the topic (and people are still rocking the comments from the last entry, and I am actually getting more editing/biblio work done today), it occurred to me last night as I laid in bed reading a Starhawk novel and feeling a bit ashamed about it that…

Utopian novels are pornography for activists.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually think Starhawk is an incredible woman who is really inspiring and has a great take on…well, everything. And she’s not a bad novelist, not at all: I like her style a lot, and I liked her books a lot. Still do, in spite of myself.

But, in explaining to Mark that while I felt the need for a novel — having over-read work-related stuff and nonfiction lately — I wasn’t in the mood for say, Vonnegut, I summed up why The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury had express appeal as being because “queer crunchy granola ladies try and save the world, have many challenges, but ultimately, succeed due to butt-busting, queer crunchy granola awesomeness.” I can’t fathom that part of the motivation to write utopian novels, and to read them, is not to validate our idealist fantasies.

In other words, my butt-busting, queer, crunchy granola-lady self just needed some activist porn.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, home, pornography | permalink | comments (5) »

I can earnestly say that testifying in a federal court, to a federal judge, with the ACLU and against the United States government was not only utterly painless, it was really, really quite enjoyable. It’s like being wary as hell to get on a big scary rollercoaster, going on anyway, getting kid of sick but having a really good time all the same, getting off, and begging to get right back on again.

I’m employing some tact in the following portrayal of my testimony, believe it or not. I feel it’s a bit inapporpriate to take the “I kicked the government’s ASS!” approach right out here in the public eye. Oh. Oops. Anyway.

I can say that while providing vitally necessary testimony, which no other plaintiff but me could have provided (which is pretty dam cool, right?), to help protect our first amendment rights, I not only got through it and didn’t bungle anything at all, I — merely in being truthful, brave, and in being myself — totally, utterly kicked righteous ass and had a profoundly good time doing it.

I expect to be nervous with all things home-leavy and public-speaky, because I always am, and the fact that my left thigh was covered in hives the night before I left for Philly last Tuesday appeared to be clear evidence of this. I never get hives.

The the flights were utterly unremarkable and painless, to the point that somehow, by the second flight, I forgot I was a smoker. (This happened twice this trip: and I have no explanation for this whatsoever: I could more easily find a fine explanation for a Mystery Spot than I could for how a 25-years-addict forgets she is one.)

It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon, several hours before my evening prep for the trial the next day that I started to realize that I wasn’t actually at all nervous. By the time Thursday morning rolled around, after I had woken from having almost zero sleep and my babymaking dream (we have now named the infant in my dream Slimerella: when you don’t intend to have kids of your own, you forge attachments to the symbolic ones, I guess); as I was walking the eight-block dead-girl-walking trek to the courthouse with Ben, my ACLU lawyer and the brother I really should have had, who found my dream highly entertaining, I felt just fine.

For those new to my adventures, I hatehatehatehateHATE public speaking. Doing it makes me weak in the knees, lightheaded, and totally nauseated. More than once during a speaking venture, I have nearly fainted, and more than once I have almost wet my pants. Hours and sometimes days before a public speaking engagement I am a completely neurotic mess who spends all her available time praying for every kind of natural disaster to prevent the engagement from happening. I have turned down — to my great shame — a couple of gigs I was really honored to be asked to do, which would really have benefitted me, because of this stupid phobia. Needless to say, then, I fully anticipated it hitting me like a bag of rocks when the public speaking I had to do was to defend the constitution quite literally in front of the ACLU and the federal government, the latter of which I had a very healthy fear of instilled into me by my commie pinko father at a very early age, drills to hide from them should they come for us and all.

During this walk, I wondered if maybe going without sleep, food and even coffee was why I felt okay. Or if I had someone just become completely delusional per the import of what I was about to do. Or if the orgasm I had the night before had made me just that stupid.

As I entered the courtroom, anticipating that the nerves would finally, hit, they still didn’t. I gotta tell you, though: if ever in doubt that we live in a very rich country, check out a federal courtroom. Swanky business, this.

So, the day’s testimonies start. First up was this intensely wonderful school librarian as an expert witness on filters and how they — and bonafide guidance and supervision — work just fine if someone wants to be sure minors don’t have access to certain content. This woman also got in a closing statement that was the Rocky moment of the morning. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t Norma Rae, and standing up and cheering was not appropriate.

(Iris Tava Smathers) I think the
4 best filter is librarians and teachers and parents who pay
5 attention and who talk to kids and say, you know, this is
6 good information. Here’s how you decide what’s good
7 information. Here’s how you decide what’s not going to
8 accomplish your task. And there are things that are bad
9 decisions for you to look at. But I think you need to, I
10 think you need to tell kids why and, you know, teach them to
11 reason because if we throw up a lock on the door and they
12 don’t know what is on the other side, when they get into a
13 position where they have to be on the other side, how are
14 they going to navigate if they don’t have those skills. And
15 I think that is my job and a teacher’s job, and then
16 hopefully the parents’ jobs to teach them to discern in cases
17 like that.

I heart librarians this much. Always have, but my adoration exponentially increased that morning.

Then came (sorry, expert witness-guy) a bunch of insanely boring testimony explaining filtering software for PDA devices. This would have been the one period of time in which I did start to feel the profound lack of caffeine and nicotene in my system.

And then came me. And I still felt fine. I went up, I sat down in a very cooshy chair (though I’d not advise, should you ever find yourself in this position, wearing double-lined wool trousers when sitting for some time in a leather chair, just FYI). Before I was supposed to, actually: I underestimated the importance of standing formally while putting my hand on the Bible, possibly in part because the one in the drawer at the hotel had the traveling dildo on it, so it seemed pretty casual to me.

The judge had a great vibe. I adore my ACLU lawyer, and we’ve had these conversations for a couple of years now. So, during his questioning, I blame my unfamiliar feelings of calm and competence on familiarity.

Most of them. The spelling of things out loud occasionally got me flustered, because I had traumatic spelling bee flashbacks.

17 A I operate Scarleteen.com, Scarletletters.com.
18 Q Maybe you should spell each one when you mention it for
19 the first time.
20 A Sure, scarletletters is S-C-A-R-L-E-T-L-E-T-T-E-R-S.COM.
21 Then there is also Femmerotic.com, that’s F-E-M-M-E-R-O —
22 yeah, see, spelling bee — E-R-O-T-I-C.COM. And then
23 heathercorinna.com, spelled like my first and last name. And
24 allgirlarmy.org.

I wasn’t as witty in this trial as I was in my deposition last year — mostly because I was not as nervous, and thus not suffering from verbal diarrhea, and because it’s a lot more formal a setting — but I did get a few zingers in, and had a few priceless moments (which don’t translate as well in court reporting, sans my imitable charm):

12 Q Why did you decide to publish scarleteen online instead
13 of in a print magazine?
14 A I can’t for the life of me figure out how I would be
15 allowed in a print magazine to publish scarleteen.

A much better answer, I’d say, than “Are you high? What effing country do you think we live in, anyway?”

7 Q Do you believe any of the contents on scarletletters,
8 scarleteen or femmerotic might be prohibited by the act?
9 A Absolutely.
10 Q Why do you fear that?
11 A Because even as I function under the Government that I
12 live in in this country, they have made clear that the sex
13 information that I give to teenagers isn’t what they want in
14 schools and isn’t what they’re willing to pay for. So, if I
15 were to (define) community standards just as my federal
16 government and no one else, I’d be told right there and then
17 that what I do is inappropriate and not sexually appropriate.

Take that, federal government!

5 Q Would scarletletters link to a site like hustler.com?
6 A No.
7 Q Why not?
8 A Because I don’t want to. Because a lot of what is done
9 at hustler, to me, is not sexy, it’s sexist and misogynist
10 and it doesn’t support my goals…

Take that, Hustler!

21 Q And is the journal section ever sexually explicit?
22 A Not often, but every now and then, yes.
23 Q And why is it sometimes sexually explicit?
24 A Because my life isn’t always sexually explicit.

In retrospect, a better answer might have been, “Because I have sex sometimes. Don’t you?” However, I was trying to be good, and mind my lawyers comments to me from an earlier date that unlike most of my life, what was most important was the earnest, true answer, not the most clever earnest, true answer.

3 MR. WIZNER: Your Honor, at this time, plaintiffs
4 would like to move exhibit 42 into evidence.
5 THE COURT: Any objection?
6 MS. ULRICH: Your Honor, defendant has an objection
7 to just a few of the pages. Specifically, defendant objects
8 to page 1 and page 2. These pages are blow-up images that
9 appear elsewhere within the exhibit. The image on page 1 is
10 a duplicate of page 17 and as the witness explained, page 17
11 is how that image appears when somebody clicks on the link.
12 The image on page two is a duplicate of a photo on page 26.
13 And it’s defendant’s position that those other pages are more
14 representative of the actual images on the website. And so,
15 defendant does object to pages 1 and 2.

Let the record show that this was a discussion about a photo of my breasts, being held up and on video screens while I was both attempting to still appear professional, and not take a woman objecting to my breasts for the first time in my life personally. I have never had a pet name for my body parts, but I’m seriously considering calling my tits Exhibit 42 from now on.

25 Q Have you ever considered using an age verification system
1 for scarleteen?
2 A No.
3 Q Why not?
4 A Because it’s like saying I’m running a coffee shop, but
5 I’m turning away people who drink coffee. I can’t serve my
6 user base that I’m intended to serve if I put that up there.

Maybe I was starting to want that coffee after all.

17 Q What would you do if COPPA were to take effect?
18 A It really depends on, it depends on the site. You know,
19 I’d say I’d move to Canada, but I said that when Kerry lost,
20 too. And here I am. So, it’s a hollow threat coming from
21 me. You know, so given, I probably wouldn’t do that. You
22 know, in scarleteen’s case, I would keep doing exactly what I
23 do. I’d feel like I was at risk. I’d know that I was
24 choosing to take those risks.

That was the big laugh of the day, even from the judge. I’ll be here all week. Nah, scratch that: after this, I am so outta here.

(These portions are from the cross-examination by the Department of Justice lawyer)

8 Q And Plaintiff’s Exhibit 42, page 9, is the splash page
9 for femmerotic, is that correct?
10 A It’s a bad scan of the splash page, but yes.

Hello, my name is Heather Corinna, and I’m an annoying little perfectionist.

10 Q If you have photos on Femmerotic that show — would show
11 people having sex, those would be for subscribers only,
12 correct?
13 A It really depends on how you define sex.

Watching the straight people in the room try and work that one out was pretty amusing.

(For the morbidly curious, here’s the whole transcript of the day, by the way.)

Here’s the thing. When the cross started, this is where I figured I’d muck things up, talk too much, annoy the judge, forget the decorum, say something totally idiotic, like “Yes, I recognize Exhibit 42, I’ve seen them every damn day since I was 11.” My inner prankster also kept wanting to do something like plainly say “Frootloops,” to a yes or no question, or to pretend to break down and confess that I was a dirty, dirty lady who suddenly realized the great error of her ways in corrupting all the wee children, just to see what would happen.

The DoJ lawyer was the same woman who deposed me for an ungodly number of hours (which translated into around 260-some pages of transcript). We’re all still a little bitter about that. I didn’t dislike her at all during that deposition, save that she was making me stay answering questions that seemed redundant and foolish to me, when I really wanted some air, a dirty martini and a smoke. But I was so frazzled that day, I couldn’t see anyone’s strategy.

This time was different. From the minute she came to the stand, whether it was so or not, I got the distinct impression she thought she was smarter, more powerful, than I was. Again, fact or fiction, the effect this had on my was apparently quite visible. Mark said that my whole body language shifted: from sitting prim and upright in my chair, to leaning back, opening my arms and clearly sending out, “Oh THIS is how you want to play it? Well, you just bring it ON” vibes. I realized in that moment that this was just like boxing, and that my boxing partners have usually been larger and stronger than me, still never knocked me out and I’ve always been able to throw them off balance. I imagine the pinstriped vest I was wearing and that body lingo may have made me resemble an old school mafioso, especially since my lawyer made some offhand remark at dinner later about me and bloody horses heads.

Setting aside my cement shoes, here cometh the cheeseball bits. I need schmaltzy theme music: I need violins, dammit!

Did you ever read The Monster at the End of This Book? You know, the Sesame Street book where Grover is terrified of that monster — mortified, fearful throughout, knowing one is at the end — but he discovers at the end that the monster is just loveable, furry Grover? That’s how I felt about the federal government that day. There’s something really awesome about being an activist and suing the U.S. government. It is a substantially groovy thing. And it’s even better when you’re up there, doing it actively, with them in the room. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life mastering bravado, I am the macha queen in many respects when it comes to that. But when bravado translates into balls-out brave in a context like this, it is an intensely empowering thing. It’s seeing the Grover behind the monster, and having moments where you feel like it’s YOU no one is seeing the Grover in. Feeling the feds intimidated by you, when you always felt so under their thumb? This is FABULOUSNESS, especially when you’ve worked as an activist for a really long time, and your winning moments are few and far between, and buried underneath an awful lot of frustration and helplessness.

When I finished, then we all walked out into the break room, I got loads and loads of judos. I was so damn high on myself that I couldn’t even take a compliment properly. “You are a rock star,” got responded to with “I KNOW!” “You were awesome,” with “You bet your ass I was…..umm, oh, thank you.” I was tempted to ask at a certain point that everyone stop paying me compliments, because it was inflating my ego in a way I was not accustomed to and clearly unable to graciously manage.

And I couldn’t. I’d turned some sort of corner. It’s so weird, really. I wasn’t actually prepared for this particular feeling. That’s not to say I didn’t know I was doing something really important, I did. But in my mind, no more or less so than what I do every day: I think what I do every single day is just as important as this was.

So, it’s a little confusing to me as to why I feel so….different. Pardon my sounding cheesy, but I haven’t really had any time to myself since this happened to even really process it, and I suspect the delay in that may have upped the ante here.

(Which I hope also excuses my behaviour at the shoe store down the street the other day. I was returning a pair of clogs I bought one size too small — not my fault, though, the shoe-fitter needed to have told me about how to fit them properly — and the owner looked at the bottoms and said, “Oh, you wore these outside?” To which my response was, “To defend your freedom of speech, buddy! You could BRONZE those shoes!” As it turned out, I think he was more inclined to make my exchange because the shopgirl overcharged me than because of my totally uncalled for snippy retort. Thankfully, jumping right back into mounds of editing and fixing my umpteen mistakes is very humbling.)

Maybe I feel like this because something I’ve done — and a something that is about the value of all the work I do, and the vital need for it — feels earnestly recognized for a change. Maybe it’s because I don’t often get the opportunity — the gift, really — to do the important things I do and have a roomful of people I respect witness and applaud that so directly. Maybe because given the medium in which I do my work, the effects aren’t really something I see very directly, and so seeing it, feeling it, was pretty unusual. Maybe it’s because more often than not, other people have more faith in me than I have in myself, and having a moment where I understood why they have that faith, and had it for myself for a change, was pretty intense.

Or maybe it’s just because I kicked the government’s ass.

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, activism, soapbox | permalink | comments (10) »

First day back.

Much grogginess from wearing oneself out amidst three different time zones, five flights in six days, and coming back home to have several crises plopped on my plate while I also am now in the last nine days of finishing my book edits and additions.

I have a bunch of meetings and catchup this morning I am racing to do, all while still on my first cup of coffee, but later today, will fill y’all in on the tales from Philly.

Long story short? I ROCKED it. Even by the much higher expectations the ACLU had for me than I had for myself. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure who inhabited my body while I was up there on the stand, but whoever she was, the girl was golden. (I’m told the transcript of my testimony should be up by the end of today.) Unfortunately, I know for sure it was me back in my skin the next morning when Mark and I nearly missed our flight due to oversleeping and waking up still as drunk as we were at 4 AM the night before.

More news later today or tomorrow. More coffee — much more coffee — now.

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, bookish bits, activism, home | permalink | comments (3) »

I wouldn’t call what I had the other night a meltdown. Meltdown equals some sort of crying or wailing and the strong desire to consume a lot of tequila and play Joni Mitchell all night on an out-of-tune piano.

I suppose, despite it sounding flip, what I had was instead a sort of existential crisis.

In a word, I am feeling very concerned about the book. I am not concerned about the edits: those continue to go really well, my editor continues to rock the house, even to the degree of, in places, allowing me to be a bit bolder in some not-so-popular statements which my previous editor would NOT have supported. Even to the degree of sending me a book full of recipes for vegan cupcakes. I am also — so far — not concerned about the marketing issues. When I came into this agreement, I was very firm on some title (nothing cutesy, nothing too woo-woo, salacious or attempting to be outr? or purposefully provocative) and cover (NO photographs, no objectified women/teens, no “token” couple illustrations, given that unless you had ten couples on there, you’d likely be stuck with young, middle-class, white, pretty as the only representation) issues, which my editor backed me in 100%, and she is all kinds of scrappy. You can never control, entirely, the art department and marketing, but I feel pretty confident I’ll be supported in my limits. I’m not even all that concerned about it doing well financially/sales-wise or not: it’d be great if it did well, both for how much I think it’ll benefit the readers, and because making a little money after six years of working it would be swell, but my world will not end if it happens to bomb, especially since at a certain point, I managed to get decently unattached to the idea it’d ever find a publisher ballsy enough to put it out there at all.

None of that stuff or anything like it is my big worry.

My big worry is that I will fuck this up. That what seems dead-on to me misses the mark. That everything I thought I learned from, effectively, millions of Scarleteen readers over the years, and tens of thousands of emailers and board posters, is somehow wrong. That I’m either talking over or under their diverse, collective heads. That it’s too late, in the world where they grew up fed on Girls Gone Wild, cosmetic surgery as a change of clothes, and crappy gender roles that somehow have made a comeback since 1955; where 80% of girls who are sexually assaulted by their partners continue to date them, where the best a lot of these kids feel they have to look forward to with sex is maybe an orgasm and maybe a partner they can have some small measure of trust in, to really do something good for them. That something this one kid needs the most will be the thing I forgot or didn’t have room for. (And I have this new weird niggle where I feel like part of this has to address the teen that was me: like this has to somehow make things better for her in this regard which is… well, it’s a good thing I’m not in therapy right now, because that’s so textbook it’d put a therapist right to sleep.)

That I will blow what really is a unique and amazing opportunity. Few writers with a first solo book know their audience is already alert and listening before their book even gets advance press, let alone hits the shelves. I already have my readership, internationally, in droves. I already have the best targeted marketing possible, and since I built it, I don’t even have to pay for it. More to the point, I already have the trust and faith of my readers.

Which means that they have given me the opportunity to make a profound difference in their lives and in the world, and I am starting to feel profoundly fearful that someone, some way, I will waste that opportunity and not do the very best I can for them, and that their trust has been sorely misplaced.

Okay, it may as well be said, because we all know this about me already. I have a severe heroine complex. I know, I know. I have absolutely put a lot of responsibility for the world on myself, by myself, and while I certainly don’t think it’s up to me to save the world alone — or that I even could, or that absolute physical and emotional sexual health and well-being worldwide could fix all that’s wrong in the world — a lot of the time, I take more responsibility as one person than is probably sane.

But lord gawd, if I didn’t think it could make a really big dent, there’s no way I would have worked in almost nothing BUT sexuality for the last eight years. I mean, sure, I can be a horndog, but not enough of one to work as hard as I have for so little, be as isolated from every camp possible because of it as I have been, and sacrifice some of the vital things in my life I have to do this. I can’t tell you how many times over the last couple months of burning the candle at both ends with this, the ACLU case and then everything else I already do I have sat sighing with a great big miss-on for my Montessori classroom of yore, wistfully wishing I could be giving a simple, totally uncontroversial lesson in math with the red rods instead of explaining other sorts of rods entirely, and with a lot more at stake.

So, here I sit, right? I have this amazing open door. I have the goods, crafted painstakingly for years — years of writing and editing, years of broad, direct field research — and a great person to help me refine them even more and get them out there. And I really do have faith that if it were in any way possible to rear a generation or two with some WAY healthier attitudes and approaches to sex and sexuality, to their bodies, to sex and gender issues, to sexual orientation, to sexual relationships, it WOULD be a truly revolutionary thing, for all of us.

(But especially for them. The longer and longer I do the work I do with them, the more and more it emotionally burdens me and wears me out, the more I really, really want everything to be better for them in this regard. If a genie gave me three wishes, this would be one. Another would probably be for the ability to make my pug immortal. I’ll get back to you on that last one.)

It’s just that, you know, I get sent books on sex that come out for teens. And to say that sparing maybe one exception, to say I’m beyond disappointed most of the time is a substantial understatement. A lot of the time, I just want to throw the book against the wall, whether it’s because of sexism, heterosexism, a total mind/body disconnect, commercialism, a serious lack of respect for the readers and their intelligence, classism, what have you. People usually fuck this up, and that’s not just because some people are stupid. It’s because it is really fucking hard to get this right. Teen sexuality is a big-time sticky wicket, and all the more so in our culture and, from my vantage point, right now, at this point in time.

Given that, and given my various complexes, suffice it to say, I remain unconvinced that I, too, will not muck this up like so many other smart, kindhearted people have before me.

Fuck all, is that terrifying.

And I know, it’s also kind of stupid. I am as much an overachiever as ever, and thus, have in no way scrimped on research, fact-checking, and all the legwork to do this to the best of my ability. I have worked this field in a way I don’t know anyone else has. SO many people — and I’m mostly talking to myself here, to try and convince myself, but feel free to listen in if you want — have now read all or parts of this book in various stages. I have a nice focus group of ST readers on it again this time around. I’ve learned what I have per what to address and how to address it from what THEY have asked me — not what I’ve decided they need to know — and from answering them, en masse, for years. My editor has 100% faith in me. My partner has 100% faith in me, Some friends and colleagues — even some idols — I really respect and know wouldn’t do me the disservice of bullshitting me have 100% faith in me. So do these readers.

Why don’t I?

Wish I knew the answer to that.

I mean, look, I think this is probably healthy. I think anyone who really cared deeply would have this concern, and that anyone who didn’t have it likely doesn’t care as much as they should. I think my being this concerned about this will be one more thing to assure that this IS as great as I hope it can be, and do all I think it can do. I think: I also am a little worried that if these concerns escalate or go off course they might have the opposite effect of causing me to have my vision obscured by some sort of self-absorbed obsession with failure or anything less than utter heroism. I mean, I baked a pie the other night that didn’t turn out right by my standards, and despite the fact that I have anything even approaching a cooking blunder maybe once every year or two, I was totally annoyed with myself and apologizing left and right to everyone who just happened to be trying to enjoy my pumpkin-flavored self-assigned disaster.

Ai carumba. This? Right now? I didn’t need. I shouldn’t be surprised: I have an awful lot all coming together at once, and on the heels of some big changes for me, including living clear across the country and that Love of One’s Life thang kicking my rump in the (best, but) most alarming way. I’ve been so overcommitted and overworked that I haven’t been able to have any time at all to do any artwork. It should come as no great shock to me that with a project like this, all of my various complexes about responsibility, accountability, caretaking, adolescence, working-enough-to-be-found-worthy and overachieving would come to a big, puss-filled head.

I have the psychological equivalent of the world’s biggest zit, right on the tip of my nose, on the eve of the most important date of my life.

Isn’t that fitting.

(Other comments for this from the original html copy live here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism | permalink | comments (0) »

If you’re going to reach out to support rape survivors voluntarily, we need to be supported no matter how we feel about our rapes; no matter at what stage we are at in our unique healing process. Not just when it makes you feel good about yourself.

A couple weeks ago, we had something happen at no consequences for the men, for instance. Or, when a rape was described, but not expressly called rape. The numbers ranged, given the study sample (its size, the particular group/class of men, the age of the men queried, blah blah blah), anywhere from 20% to 60%.

I’ve seen studies like this before: most of us have. These numbers don’t surprise me, nor do I generally leap to the assumption that they’re flawed studies because they show a high number. After all, an awful lot of us have been raped, sexually assaulted, coerced. Even just in my own life and work, I know a high number of rape surviviors. Generally, anywhere from 30% to 70% of us have been raped or sexually assaulted, sometimes higher depending on how you classify these things and organize your data. Surviviors know the sex of the person who raped us. It is no mystery to us, it isn’t a question. In the vast, vast majority of cases, men have raped us, whether we are female or male surviviors. That a lot of men do rape or would rape is not a surprise to us. It is terribly distressing — per our safety, our relationships with men, how sons are being reared, the toxic aspects of the culture men and women alike grow up and live in, toxic approaches to masculinity and femininity, the works — and it is painful and uncomfortable to know, but a surprise it is not.

The men — including an older parent of two adult children — who engaged in this discussion (and in discussions on rape states about perps I have read elsewhere) could NOT stop quibbling about the percentages and anything else quibble-able. It could NOT be 60% of all men, they said. And no, some of us said, it very likely is not, 60% came from X study, with X age group and this scenario. *I* would never ever rape someone, they’d say. No man *I* know would rape someone. Who’d have sex with a woman screaming at you to stop! (As if this described rape as a whole, or how most women respond when a rape is taking place.) Nice men don’t rape people, and we’re nice! they’d say. All the men I know are nice!

The quibbling went on, with those quibbling knowing full well (even if they didn’t care to be mindful about it) that survivors were reading, given we have a good deal of them at the forums, given they know the editor of the whole site is herself a survivor (one who, however, does not incite their pity, as I’ll discuss in a bit). Likely, they are not as acutely aware, if aware at all, that we’re used to this sort of quibbling, this sort of denial of our reality. That we’re used to hearing that men as a whole CANNOT be doing this: that something must be wrong with these facts, and generally, that something always boils down to us as victims in the end. We’re calling consensual sex rape, or we’re wearing the wrong thing, walking the wrong place, dating the wrong kind of guy (because, you see, all rapists are evil monsters recognizable to all of us in some magical way), not saying no loud enough, often enough, with enough conviction. Or, it’s someone else’s fault entirely, not the rapists. It’s our mothers fault for not modeling right or giving us too much independence. It’s our fathers fault for not protecting us. It’s the criminal justice system’s fault. Somebody’s fault, anybody’s fault, just not the rapists fault, because that might mean it’s the fault of an awful lot of men, or men as a class, or men as a dominant power. And that, for obvious reasons, isn’t so great to know as a man, even a man who doesn’t rape and has no desire to rape.

At this point, myself included, a couple survivors and bonafide supporters entered into the discussion (most stayed out, emailing me privately to express upset with the thread’s direction). I tried, calmly, cooly, to explain that no one was accusing the men there of being rapists or potential rapists. That while it was UNlikely any of them would NEVER know a man who did, would or could rape, that the men they felt they could trust in that regard were possibly trustworthy in that regard. But that actually, someone’s “nice” husband, “nice” neighbor or co-worker, “nice” dad or brother often enough DOES or WOULD rape. That some of us have been raped by a man who was “nice” in other respects, or who would rape us, but not his sister, daughter, wife, neighbor, friend. That some of us have, in fact, been unable to have anything done about our rapes, because we were disbelieved in being raped by this or that “nice” man.

In due course, I started to feel the anger leveled at us. (And it got to the point where I closed the thread, after getting a wave of nausea, after the older man went so far as to state that women could fix rape — and stop, in his mind, being rape enablers — by partnering with “nice” men like him, and breeding good sons who thus, genetically, would not be likely to become rapists, I kid you not.) I noticed what I often notice. All too often, as rape survivors, if we are pitiable; if we are depressed, sad, downtrodden, emotional wrecks, lonely, isolated, fearful, silenced: if we are in a phase of being — or have effectively be made entire — successfully subordinate by our rapist, by the aspects of rape culture we live in, then we can realistically expect a certain level of support from the men around us (though I don’t think this is as much of a given with male survivors).

This, too, should not be a surprise. Subordinated people are objects of pity, and subordinate women, especially, are to some degree celebrated for being such when our subordination is in line with the status quo, or it is sexual subordination of a variety which meets the needs of men. We do not threaten anyone, or their sense of power. We’re as gentle as kittens. No one is concerned about being harmed by us or losing priviliege because of us. We may rise to every small crumb of compassion or care. A Hallmark card, a hug and a “you poor dear” might be viewed as great tokens, and telling us we’re not ruined, spoiled, or sullied or that it isn’t our fault a gift of incredible magnitude.

But what about when we’re not “poor dears” anymore? What about when we want to take the proverbial Hallmark card, the pat on the head, and the so-sorry coos and shove them where the sun don’t shine? What about when we’re past that point: when we know it’s not our fault, we know we’re okay, we know we’re not lesser beings?

What about when we become angry? What about when we call — or your Dad, or your brother, or your best friend — out? What about when we start to catch on to the fact that you telling us we’re not “ruined” by some other man is still you, as a man, dictating what the bounds of our sexual or physical sovereignty are?

What about when we want to start to look at WHY this has happened to us, why it could happen again, why it could happen to our sisters, and some of our brothers, why we have to live in fear of this at all? What about when we’re ready to lay the blame on WHO has done this to us: who individually, who culturally, who as a group, and not be obtuse about their sex or gender (especially since, lord knows, they weren’t about ours)? What about when we feel utterly crazy because we’re eating post-traumatic stress for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and try as we might, it is infecting every aspect of our lives, and being told it’s okay is infuriating because we are NOT okay? What about when we want to talk about how effing pissed off we are to have to try and get back our hijacked sexuality, when we want one damn night without being woken by flashbacks or nightmares, to be free of being triggered by simple daily things, to not have to live among our rapists, to not have to be careful of how we talk about our rapes or our feelings to every bloody person we know because it might upset THEM?

When we get to THAT place, see, we no longer seem so harmless. (Because we aren’t.) If someone was supporting us to feel better about themselves, to feel like a good person, to amp their esteem, in this stage of the game, it stops being a feel-good endeavor. We are not cute, fluffy bunnies who have lost their mama to be stroked, who will snuggle back with a sad, but slightly contented sigh. We’ve had enough self-pity and self-blame for three lifetimes. We’ve had enough of people giving us permission to feel things when we should not need anyone’s permission in the first place. We may be far more critical, far more watchful, far more wary. We may even seem feral, fuming, volatile at times. If we didn’t report our rape at the time, we now might, and we might be reporting your best friend or another man you liked and respected, who you cannot believe would rape us. If we were silenced before, we refuse to be silent now. We may not want to take you at your word about how “nice” you are: we may even question why you need to keep telling us how nice you are in the first place, rather than allowing us our own judgment of your character and safety. We may want you to just leave us the fuck alone for a little while.

We may want to start investigating WHY it is that men perpetrate rape and in the volume they do: this is not an abstract for rape survivors (as often it is not abstract as to HOW many have been raped by men: when you’re a survivor who isn’t silent, suffice it to say, you tend to know more surviviors then most because they’re more inclined to confide in you as to being raped), or a maybe, since around 98% of our rapists were/are male, and we know this. Some of us would very much LIKE to forget this fact, but we cannot, even if we try. We are reminded in our dreams, we are reminded in our triggers and flashbacks, we are reminded in our bones and blood. We are reminded in your language, or the language of the men you and we both know. We are reminded in the way some men pass us in the street and evaluate us as they pass. We are reminded when any level of dismay or surprise is expressed when we decline sexual invitation or innuendo. We are reminded in aspects of male-dominated culture, and the behaviour of men and women alike under that paradigm. We are reminded every time someone makes a “funny” joke about rape, and we hear that undertone which acknowledges there is a power even in saying the word in our presence; in feeling able to even play with rape as a joke, because it has not been your harsh reality to be on the receiving end or live in fear of it.

When a person is traumatized, attacked, assaulted (or has those they are close to have been such), eventually, a person processing it, wanting to know the truth of it, is going to want to look into the big why of it, to start to look critically, to engage the issue intellectually, not just emotionally, or not just in a reactionary way. Of course, when we’re talking rape, that need can be even larger because all too often, we are told covertly and overtly that we were raped because of something WE did.

* * *

Some weeks ago, one of the AGA bloggers wrote a piece about how much she loves the freedom she feels in wearing short shorts. I ended up over here weeping unexpectedly, because — odd as it sounds, given my age and the fact that in many contexts I’m comfortable being seen nude — it finally sank in for me that the reason I do not and have never own a single pair of shorts higher than my knees in the last thirty years is not because they’re physically uncomfortable, nor is it because I have big legs I feel are unappealing in some way.

It’s because when I was 12 years old, after being stalked and then assaulted by a group of teenage boys on a hot August day in Chicago where I was a junior camp counselor, the police officer called to the scene told me, verbatim, that I really should not be walking around in “shorts that short.” Shorts I (obviously) remember quite succinctly, which were mid-thigh on me; perhaps a little tighter than I’d have liked, but I was in a growth spurt, and in my family, we wore clothes out until they just couldn’t be worn anymore. Shorts of the same type, fit and size which men and women wear on any given day. Shorts which did not have “fuck me” or “rape me” printed on their backside.

I was sitting on a curb, every part of my body sore and shaking, I didn’t even know WHAT had happened to me, because I just didn’t have the context for it, and I was in an absolute state of shock. No report was filed. No one offered me healthcare, and I was not given a contact to come back into when the shock wore off and I could figure out what exactly had happened. Instead, I was told, outrightly, that I needed to dress differently, and off they went. I was 12 years old, it was 1982, and a hundred years or so from me, other kids my same age flew up and down on the swings, feeling free.

I did not talk to anyone about that attack for at least another four years. I didn’t say a word about it, I didn’t write a word about it. Only one member of my family has any real awareness of what happened to me, and even then, since I felt unable to talk about it or ask questions — even to ask why it hurt so much to use the toilet — and wasn’t asked to talk about it or invited to ask questions, that awareness is profoundly limited. Even when I did start talking to one or two people about it, including my therapist at the time, it would be in vaguries or the most timid of suggestion (and it goes without saying that I am hardly a timid person). Often, that is still how I talk about it, even with those closest to me. There’s this feeling a lot of survivors have which is that everyone knows what happened to you, even if you tell know one; like your rape is written on your face in indelible ink. Some of that is projection: but over the years the conclusion I’ve come to is that some of that feeling comes out of the fact that so many people around you often DO know or DO suspect, but wish to enable your silence.

Even though at this point, I know full well it was not the shorts I was wearing, the fact that I, a young woman in the world, was unescorted in an empty room, nor that I didn’t scream enough, fight enough, look mean enough, say this thing or that one, look this way or that, there’s a 12-year-old girl that still inhabits part of my body and she totally believed that police officer, especially since his words echoed others she had heard about herself, her sex, her gender in her world.

Obviously, at this point, 24 years later, I passed that stage of subordination, as much as one can, anyway. But part of me was deep and unknowingly in it for a LONG time, and it had some effects that only by sheer luck were not absolutely disastrous for me. Obviously, I got to the pissed-off point and then some: obviously, I’ve done a good bit of healing for myself, sometimes with the help of others.

Obviously, my life is hardly ruined because I can’t wear a given style of clothing: however, my life is irreparably changed because I cannot even put on a given style of pants without feeling a very visceral fear, and without being reminded of that day and all the various ways it — and my other sexual assaults — have altered my life because other people have purposefully stolen my ownership of parts of my life and my body. My life was irreparably changed in creating a scenario in which aspects of what happened to me and my exploring them were so off-limits that even as someone who talks about rape almost daily, I could be unaware of something so obvious and simple for so bleeding long.

* * *

I think what gets overlooked is the hard truth that if a person, and for obvious reasons, especially a man, can ONLY be supportive of rape survivors when they are subordinated — when, effectively, they are not yet survivors at all, but absolute victims, for a rape never stops when the attack itself does — then he is, effectively, not supportive of that person so much as he is supportive of his or her subordination. This does not, in my mind, make him complicit in that rape, mind, but it DOES make him complicit in enabling rape culture. And it does not make him supportive of that person’s healing and survival, for it has thus been made plain he or she is preferred subordinate.

We have a long cultural history of women voluntarily tending to men who have been wounded in wars, as veterans, as civilians. While this is not an identical issue (as a class, it is men who have waged war, even if this is not the case for individual veterans: the same cannot be said of women per rape), in many ways, we survivors are those wounded in war, a war in which we are resisters rather than participants, in which we are civilian casualties, in which we are the spoils of war. When we care for those wounded by war, it is not, ideally, out of obligation or because it is required duty — we may even care for the wounded when we strongly protest or abhor war; we may do so while we too, lie bleeding, scarred, raped. It is not — when we’re doing it right, in my eyes — about our ego, or about being viewed as a nice person. We have done so, when we do so, genuinely, it is out of empathy and compassion, out of love and care for our brothers, as their sisters.

A bit of the trouble I see in some men dealing with survivors (whether they be female or male, in either case, a rape victim is generally seen/experienced as feminized) is the inability to see women as sister, but instead, to see them as daughters. In other words, there can be a certain paternalism which I feel really inhibits empathy and compassion. However fine a father-figure a man may be or consider himself, if he is father and we daughter, we are not generally on equal footing, but viewed and treated as something to take care of, out of a certain feeling of duty and even ownership, rather than as someone to care for as you would a brother. (And obviously, ownership is a big issue when it comes to rape; a big issue for a survivor and a perpetrator.) I think that this dynamic is part of men feeling betrayed when discussion of men-as-rapists is brought to the table, feeling women have disrupted or sought to disband their brotherhood by identifying their brothers — literally or generally — as rapists. It is thought, sometimes, that we cannot understand brotherhood, and yet, I feel quite certain we can and do: it strikes me that perhaps a reason it is thought we cannot is because so many men cannot or do not feel we are sisters, but daughters.

Point is, I understand — I really do — it being hard as hell to gain awareness of how many men rape. I know that it hurts like hell, I know that not a one of us does NOT want the truth to be what it is.

Mark and I had a big discussion on this issue some time back. Before being with me, he really didn’t have any real rape awareness, so suffice it to say, as it tends to be for anyone, gleaning that awareness was neither a fun nor an easy process. We had a talk one night in which his brain clicked stuff together as tends to happen, and he asked the proverbial question: if one on every three or four women have been raped, that means one out of every three or four men have raped, right? And you know, I argued that that wasn’t really accurate, but shaking that from his mind wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) easy. He has three brothers. Sparing me, all of his closest friends are male. So, he’s sitting there, in part angry with with me — and you know, it happens: we all know about killing the messenger, but some measure of anger with them is still normal. (Some.) He’s angry with me because he does not want to think any of his brothers or friends have or would rape, and I have brought that up for consideration, by virtue of them being male. I talked (and have since) about recidivism, about how rates often differ in different communities, age groups, what have you. However, recidivism and greater incidence in certain communities/groups doesn’t change that fact that while one out of every four men might not be rapists, even when we’re talking all men (rather than in this group of friends or that), the fact of the matter is that there are a LOT of men who have raped, do rape or consider raping.

(I really appreciate Ampersand’s — who is male, and it’s odd to me that I have to point that out a lot — approach to this, by the way. For the curious on what it would mean if one study done, in which 4.5% of several thousand college men in the U.S. reported they had raped a woman, was the accurate number, take a look. Even if in the U.S. alone, rapists were were *only* that 4.5% of men…

“4.5% of the men in the United States… translates into over six million men.

To paraphrase Tim Wise: In short, “only” 4.5% of the male population is a lot of people, so that even by the most optimistic assessment of how many men are rapists, there are literally millions out there who not only would but have raped a woman. When combined with those who are less vicious - those who haven’t raped, but would be willing to in the right circumstances, and those who would make excuses for why other men rape, it becomes clear just how real a widespread a problem rape and rape-supportive attitudes are among men today.”)

But see, eventually *I* started to get mad (and do still) at even having to have that conversation in that way, with anyone, where I have to talk about all the men who aren’t rapists when I want to talk about the men who are. I explain that I too, feel angry and betrayed by how many men rape, and since I’ve not only BEEN raped, more than once, but am at a vastly greater risk of being raped again than a man is of ever being raped (especially if he’s unlikely to do time in prison, he isn’t trans or gay, nor is he often feminized: and all of those are the case with the majority of men in the world), it makes me feel all the more crappy to have this awareness because it’s also about my personal safety, on TOP of being about the same emotional betrayal., especially when you consider that the vast majority of those of us who have been raped have not been raped by a stranger, but by someone we knew, and usually had some measure of trust in.

I love the men in my life, too. I trust the men I care for, too, and I hate the idea that there are some I perhaps should not give as much trust to as I do. While I don’t have a brother-by-blood, I have had and do have brothers in spirit, whom I have loved and trusted ferociously. Who, if they raped me or anyone else, would crush my heart, and make me question everything about the people I love and trust. During the years I was teaching, I had tiny boys I cared for and cherished every day, who I loved dearly, and who I never want to imagine could become rapists (or be raped, for that matter). I do not love men less than another man does because of my sex, or because some men have hurt me. It’s ridiculous to me that that is something I even have to say to anyone at all: that I have to defend my love for men, individually and as a whole, in order to be given any credibility or patience when discussing the great harm some of them do. (As if, if I did NOT love them, that would in any way change the reality than some do that harm? Love them or not, some of them rape. Again, I feel sure that there are women out there who did love or have since loved the men who have raped me. No doubt, some of those women would likely say that don’t know any rapists, even though they climb into bed with one every night.)

(For the record, Mr. Price and I have made an awful lot of headway with this issue: most of those conversations we had a year ago, and given they were conversations he never had, it’s really pretty amazing and seriously awesome how quickly he’s processed a lot of this. He’s even gotten to be a pro per memorizing rape and abuse triggers with me and warning me in advance if we’re in situations or settings in which he thinks or knows one might come up. He doesn’t seem to get angry with me anymore for discussing this stuff: if he’s not up for the discussion, he’s gotten to the point where unless it’s clear I just HAVE to get it out there, he’ll ask to opt out.)

And really — pardon my rambling — this is the sort of thing I feel the need to call out and address. Men: it’s understandable to feel hurt, angry, even guilty-by-association to a degree, at men who rape, at the culture which enables that. I get that. We get that. And I hate that any of us have to feel that way. I wish none of us — you, me, or anyone else — did.

But to be selectively compassionate towards survivors (or even those disseminating this sort of information), to attempt to negate our realities because you don’t like them or can’t wrap your heads around them, to find us more acceptable when we are less aware, less able to work towards our own survival, is NOT OKAY. Especially if you are telling us you’re being supportive of US. More than once, for instance I have heard men complain that a given rape crisis center did not hire male help, and that complaint generally ends with, “But *I* want to help!”

Hear that “I”? That I should be the big red flag that this is about you, not about victims or survivors. That I should be your hint that you’re probably looking for something that helps YOU, not someone else, especially when the someone else’s are asking you NOT to help right now. That I should tell you all you need to know about your ability to be supportive of someone else.

(FYI, I do get the why of most rape crisis centers not having men on staff. It’s pretty obvious, especially when you recognize these are women generally calling in immediately after a rape. On the other hand, I do have a bit an issue with not having transwomen on staff. That one I don’t get.)

Nobody ever said being supportive of rape (or other trauma) survivors was easy. We KNOW it’s not easy: we’re doing most of the work, after all, and we know how much it sucks, how troubling it is, how frustrating it is, how much you want to bash your head through a wall sometimes because you’d just really like a time to come in some conceivable future where you don’t have to keep working through this damn shit you didn’t ask for in the first place. We know how difficult our awareness of these things, emotionally and intellectually, can make some of our interpersonal relationships. We are keenly aware of all of this. And you — as supporters, as partners, as friends, brothers — are either up for it, or you’re not. But if you are up for it, if you want to be, if you need to be, if you’re telling us you are, you’ve got to be up for the whole deal, not just the parts that are easiest because we are most vulnerable and at our weakest. Not just the parts where we’re victims. Also the part where we survive, and eventually — hopefully — thrive.

During some of that, you’re going to have to back the hell off. During some of that, we don’t want to be hugged, and we don’t feel like “poor dears.” During some of that, we may call you out on some of your behaviours which we feel may or do enable rape or rape culture, or which are a blockade to our healing and dealing. During some of that, you’re not going to be able to get what you might want or need from us; you might need to adapt some of your own behaviours that you don’t really want to. During some of that, or at any point, we may even ask you to reconsider friendships or alliances with other men in your life who have raped, probably would rape, set off our radars, think rape is funny in any context or who act in such a way that we feels enables rape. During some of that, you’re going to need to do your own processing without us, and not put your anger, betrayal, sadness or confusion on us.

We survivors do, and usually have done, most of our processing on our own. Maybe we have had or currently have the help of therapists, counselors, formal or informal support groups. Maybe we’ve got wonderful friends or partners, and maybe you’re one of those. But our processing is still a largely solitary activity, and you’ll probably never have any idea how much of it we do or have done.

You need to process a lot of this on your own too, or with the help of people other than us. You need to become aware of your anger and upset when it comes to our rapes, rape in general, rape culture and your feelings about rape and you, and work at putting that in the right place. You need to be aware of when something is about your needs, and when it’s about ours, and do your level best to act in accordance with both, especially when you have the lighter burden. When our healing or processing creates issues or problems in our relationships with you, you need to be committed to jointly and individually exploring and helping to manage those issues soundly and maturely, treating us as equals, while also recognizing our limitations, just as we try and stay cognizant and respectful of yours.

You need to be aware, before you offer us help and support, if that offer is about helping us, or if it’s really about helping yourself. Some of us are, for the record, happy to help you deal with some of this: just not under the guise of it being about US, and generally, not when we are in the thick of a crisis ourselves. It is advisable, however, to ASK us if we’re up to that: we do not owe it to you or anyone else to help you process or make sense of rape because we have been raped.

One of the things survivors are victimized by in rape is a total lack of boundaries. In order to help us — and not victimize us further — you need to be sure not to some of the difficulty some of us have with enforcing/having boundaries for granted (when your boundaries have been profoundly violated, rebuilding often takes a long time); you need to create and respect limits and boundaries, ours and yours.

And we will thank you for your support, and generally be very grateful for it. However, you will not receive a medal for giving it to us, nor will we think you amazingly special for getting an A because the grading curve is so low. While we recognize that that support can be incredibly difficult to give, especially during the tougher bits, we also know it to be optional, and do not want to accept it out of any spirit other than your earnest care for us and our care for you. If you have the expectation of being celebrated or seen as some sort of saint for dealing with the likes of us, I suggest you bring with that the expectation of being told to sod off when we catch on to your real motives and don’t particularly appreciate them.

* * *

To those of you men out there who have done, currently or will do the whole enchilada when it comes to support, who are willing to look at the hard stuff, and help survivors manage it; who are even willing to self-evaluate honestly in this respect, including looking at how our subordination via rape and rape culture nets privilege to you as a class, thank you. For those of you who have stood by a woman in your life for all the aspects of her healing — even the stuff that made your life far more difficult or inconvenient, thank you. For those of you who support female survivors in their sadness, anger and evaluation and are also survivors yourselves, a double-thank you. That’s no small feat. For those of you who do work to promote awareness of rape and rapists, even if your personal safety isn’t at risk, thank you, especially those of you who have to deal with other men’s disdain or resentment towards you for doing so. For those of you who help surviviors in the way THEY want to be heped, and step back from the ways they do not, even if it’s painful for you to do so, thank you.

For those of you who are trying in this respect, but not quite there yet, thank you for your continued efforts. For those of you who know you just can’t do any of this or even some of it, and know when to step back, stay out of the way, and/or voice your limitations as needed, acknowledging them as exactly that, thank you. We can’t get it all right off the bat: I sure don’t expect you to.

No matter where you’re at in this spectrum, for those of you who even took the time to read this, even if I’ve made you angry or upset, even if you don’t like hearing my words and feelings on this (and doubly, if you questioned why it was me you were feeling angry or upset with), thank you for taking the time.

* * *

(For the record, some of this stuff is also applicable to women. However, I’d have a separate letter to write to women regarding dealing with rape survivors, especially since I’ve noticed some different issues that come up there, like feelings of being “left out,” like aiding in the protection of rapists, etc. and to boot, I simply do not see the same sort of fair-weather support among women anything close to as often as I see/have experienced it with men. But the letter for women is a letter for another day. Not for today.)

P.S. M., some of this is for you, and arose out of parts of our conversation the other night. Your recent trauma was not a rape, given, but it is comparable, to say the least. I said it last night, but I’ll say it again: cut yourself a break. Healing from this stuff can take an insane amount of time and energy, and that is tiresome and maddening as hell. I’m glad you were able to get a little mad last night. I’m here if you need to get mad again, even if it’s a million times more mad than last night. I love you, and I’m here whenever you need me to be, just ask, even for the ugly, painful stuff.

(The original comments for this post are here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, rape, surviving abuse, soapbox | permalink | comments (1) »

Last week I was terribly unproductive. (This week has been much better: next week best be better still.)

Having my father here was just amazing. Per usual (sparing my annoyance at the television constantly being on, especially since I’m barely used to it being in my house, period), we got into a routine almost right away, shifted right into our usual comfortable dynamic, talked a lot, walked a lot, watched movies… and I tried not to cry too much.

It’s very rare when I wish I’d made different choices in my life. I generally feel very good about the ones I have made, and the sacrifices that entails — primarily financial — are ones I can live with.

But when it comes to my Dad, I find myself wishing I had found some way to have a livelihood that involved me having money. I HATE that I had to send my Dad back to the SRO in the ghetto-hell he lives in. I hate that while he was here, it was a luxury for him to be able to walk around feeling some measure of safety; to be able to sit on a porch outside at night feeling confident he wouldn’t be shot in the head. I hate that I can’t just fix that: it should be so easy.

Sending him back home last Wednesday night was just so hard. Both because I’ll just really miss him, and because I want him to have a better life than he has, and I feel like a rotten daughter to be able to help so little. (This is about the only reason I have any investment and hope in the book selling millions of copies from a monetary perspective: wishes to the universe it does if for no other reason than it giving me the ability to move my Dad here and into someplace safe. That, and I really, really need a part-time assistant: I just get further and further behind with everything with every passing month.)

It’s reruns for anyone who has read me for a long time, but my father and I have an incredibly unique relationship. He brought a copy of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” with him for me to watch, because, while in many respects it is a highly bizarre movie, and not representative of us, he felt the dynamic and tone of the relationship between father and daughter in that film was us to a T (and was so excited about it, he wouldn’t be quiet through the film), and he was spot-on. Strange mirror to look in, really.

I was trying to explain to Mark that in many respects, our relationship is both more sibling-like, and more spousal than parent-child. Before you get the creeps (Mark was all, “Yuck!” until I explained what I meant by that), understand that what I mean by the latter is that we’ve always shared responsibilities; it’s always been presumed I was an equal partner in our relationship and the shared aspects of our lives. In some ways, that wasn’t so great, but for an exceptionally independent child, I’m not sure what else would have really worked, and I’d say that for the most part, that approach was and has always been ideal for me.

(Save that as a small child, at one point my father insisted he’d prefer I call him Dave, rather than Dad. I became quite confused, and asked if he wasn’t my Dad. He assured me he was, but would prefer I didn’t call him that because he didn’t want to be my capital-F Father. It’s cool to give your child credit for being a smartypants, but this concept was a bit evolved for a four-year-old, especially one who once tried calling her mother by her first name in front of friends and getting a VERY negative reaction to this, which she was NOT about to risk again. Suffice it to say, after seeing me terribly tangled in his sticky web of grownup logic, he accepted that he was getting called Dad.)

Unfortunately, in the middle of my Dad’s trip, my mother also sent an email that was pretty clearly an attempt at sabotaging or sullying my Dad’s visit. I’m 36 years old, and given all the other issues my mother and I have to resolve and ever grapple with, I really, really wish that she’d find a way to let go of the negativity about my Dad. They haven’t been together for 30 years now, after all, and while it was her first relationship, and sure wasn’t easy, she’s more negative about my Dad than she was about the abusive bastard she married afterwards who nearly turned her eldest child into a total vegetable.

The time before this that I saw my Dad in Chicago — when he was doing TERRIBLY, he’s been doing much better now, he looks in far better health, he’s not as close to being on-street again — I went back to my mother’s afterward, and we ended up getting in a terrible row about him. She’d asked if I was tempted to try and care for him, and I’d explained that of COURSE I was. I explained that even given the terribleness I’d weathered with her (which I have not with him) I’d feel the same way about wanting to care for her were she in the same position. I took the time to try and talk a bit even about how hard it was to have my two parents in such radically different positions financially and per their quality of life. And she started in with the sort of thing she’d say to me when I was a child, about how she knew him so much better than I did, blah blah blah. I was angry enough that I found the chutzpah to explain that at that point, I had spent DECADES close to my father… and she had not, so it was really ludicrous at that point to tell me she knew someone better she’d been with for a handful of years who I had spent far, far more time with in my life.

That, for whatever reason, seemed to sink in that time, to my amazement. So, I expressed that henceforth, I just could NOT listen to any more strife about my father, whom she hasn’t had to deal with at all, in any respect, since I left home in my teens, and that I really expected her to respect that, especially since I felt it was just really out of order to keep putting me in the middle of a one-sided battle (my father has never talked shit about my mother to me, ever, not even when it would have been totally valid) for the whole of my life, over someone I cared very deeply for.

I thought we had an understanding on that, but the passive-aggressive email I got belied that. It’s a tough spot to be in, because pretty much since birth, my father and I have had this Heather-and-Dad-against-the-world relationship that didn’t leave room for anyone else. Even before the awfulness in my mother’s house started, our relationship was very exclusive, and I think for my mother, it meant that she didn’t get the love she wanted or expected from EITHER of us. I can imagine that all dysfunction aside, and the fact that she very much really screwed me in ways she shouldn’t have back when, we made her feel very lonely. I can imagine that it probably hurts to see how much closer I am to him than I have ever been to her, but in the same vein, the opposite is true for my sister, so it isn’t as if she doesn’t have a close relationship with a child. And lord knows, if I had NOT had the relationship I had with my father I would have been a complete basket case, and someone unable to have any kind of relationship with anyone at all, let alone my mother. Of course, too, it’s not as if as children we choose which family we connect with and who connects best with us: that I’m more like my father than I am my mother, and always have been, is in large part, hardly something I could have controlled.

Barghblehgah. Family crap. Never easy to navigate, especially in any kind of public forum, but it’s not that much easier in my head, either. I still, two weeks later, haven’t figured out how to even respond to that letter. “For the love of Pete, knock it the fuck OFF already,” is about all I’ve come up with, and I don’t see that exactly netting the best results.

In any event, the visit was wonderful. I’m so, so grateful my father was finally able to get disability, because being able to see him having gained a little bit of weight, in clean clothes, knowing that however shitty the roof, he’s got one over his head makes all the difference. It was a real treat being able to make him beautiful dinners, share some good wine, take walks, watch him play with the dog, have us both smoke too much, talk too much, and watch Mark’s amusement at our doppleganger-like mannerisms and behaviors. That I got to also have Briana and The Baby Liam here in the middle of his visit just made it all the better, especially since my Dad has always had that awesome baby and kid magnetism that just makes kids happy to be near him. It was cool to watch him with a wee one: it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. All in all, the whole works was cool: even when it’s tough, even when we’re at some kind of odds, my Dad is someone I just never get tired of being around.

Thus, though, my lack of productivity in the days immediately following. It’s hard to have the people you care for so close to you and then so far away again.

I have to get started on some backlogged photo editing today. Among what needs to be edited, I was really pleased that my father let me take some portraits of him. He doesn’t really like having his photo taken, never really has, and he wasn’t the most cooperative subject, but it seemed like such a tragedy to do so much portrait work, yet have nothing (save one of the first photo portraits I ever did, actually) of the person who is likely the most important person I’ve had with me throughout my life. I didn’t get many, but the few I did just make me really happy.

* * *

I don’t believe it’s about concern for young women’s ability to follow the instructions for EC, as I said in a comment here to one of the AGA bloggers posts about EC:

Two years earlier in age, young women have, and are given, the ability to follow the directions for driving a CAR, on the road, with other cars. It’s also an easy okay that married women under 18 have the ability to REAR A CHILD. Our culture has ZERO problem with putting young teens on antidepressants or Ritalin, and no trouble entertaining the idea they can use those ably. Our culture has women under the age of 18 graduating high school, passing the SAT, readying to begin military service, college, job training. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that all of these young women could not possibly handle the complexity of the following instructions on the package of levonorgestrel: Take 1 white pill within 120 hours after unprotected sex and 1 more white pill 12 hours later.

And I can’t fathom that anyone in charge believes any of us are so stupid not to see the conflict in that.

* * *

* * *

P.P.S. Found a helper (thanks, William!) to help me shift the journal over to Wordpress, so hopefully, sometime soon, that’ll come together and make updating a fuck of a lot easier. This once-a-month stuff is just ridiculous.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, Mr. Price, family | permalink | comments (0) »