Monday, January 22, 2007

(Mostly) The Abortions I Didn’t Have


filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Lux Nightmare | Leave a Comment

Blog for Choice Day - January 22, 2007 I was thirteen and I heard them talking about Plant Parenthood.

Or maybe Planet Parenthood: I wasn’t sure.

Half of me thought it might be a giant gardening store: a sort of Home Depot for green thumbs. The other half assumed that it was a store for new parents: Babies ‘R’ Us, with a futuristic theme.

It took me several years to realize they were saying Planned Parenthood.

It took me several years to realize that they were scheduling her abortion.

I have never had an abortion: this is half because I am smart, and half because I am lucky.

Smart, in that I’ve (mostly) been good about being on a birth control method while sexually active, in that I’ve (mostly) been good about using condoms, in that I’ve (mostly) chosen my partners wisely.

Lucky, in that the few times when I haven’t been smart, when I’ve lapsed and done something stupid (like the few weeks, at age seventeen, when – half convinced I was infertile – I relied on the withdrawal method) it hasn’t come back to bite me in the ass. I’ve never had to deal with the mess of an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy.

I have never had an abortion, but many of the women in my life have.

It’s easy to talk about abortion as an abstract concept: to form opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s acceptable, when you’re debating the issue in a classroom, far removed from the reality of what it is.

It’s different when your best friend calls you up to tell you that a condom has broken, and now she’s expecting: your best friend who can barely take care of herself, let alone a baby – who doesn’t even like babies, at that.

It’s different when the teenage girl with borderline personality disorder – the one you’ve been trying to get on birth control – finally self destructs just enough and winds up pregnant, in the custody of the city, and completely unable to function.

It’s different when you’re thirteen, and she’s seventeen, and she’s going to Plant Parenthood to have an operation.

It’s different when the faceless statistic of unplanned pregnancy has a face.

I have never had an abortion, and I sincerely hope I never do. But should my luck run out – should I wind up in the same place that some of the women in my life have, should I be faced with that decision – I want to know that my right to choose what happens to my body will remain intact, untouched by the lawmakers, untouched by the courts.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Happy Birthday, Roe v. Wade (and Me)


filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Blog for Choice Day - January 22, 2007 Today’s my birthday, too. I’m five years Roe v. Wade’s junior, and, in a moment of teenage brazen behavior, I informed my mother that this must have meant that I was a wanted child. My mother, a reasonably devout Catholic, was understandably taken way, way aback.

My mother didn’t directly raise me to have any beliefs about abortion, though she did send me to a Catholic after-school program where we were shown graphic slideshows of fetuses in utero. My one other queer friend bought into the whole nine, even going to “pro-life” rallies, but later it was found out she only did this to gain brownie points towards her Catholic Youth Group’s trip to Ireland where a girl named (I swear) Brigit took her lesbian virginity.

My mother, while not knowing how intensely Dark Ages my Catholic school lessons around the dangers of sex would get (read: hold this plastic fetus in your hand, and could you kill this, girl, you very bad girl?), did me good by hooking me up at fifteen with a pediatric gynecologist. My mother did me good when she drove me to the pharmacist to pick up birth control pills. My mother did me good when, after listening to my complaints about the fetus slideshow and fetus dolls and fetus fetishization, let me leave Catholic education, skip out on my Confirmation, and reject the Church.

I am pro-choice because my mother had a choice, and she chose to raise me, and trusted me to make, when the time came, my own choices. She gave me the tools to control my own body, my own sexuality, my own pleasure, and ultimately, my own power. She may still be with the Church herself, and may still not understand my sexual values, but she understands that they are mine. My values, really, are her values: independence, sure, but above all, integrity to one’s own truth even as it bucks what’s comfortable, what’s easy.

Thanks, mom.

And happy birthday, baby. You’ve made my generation and all that follow so proud.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Because We All Know ‘Sex Offenders’ Only Get One Username


filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

In a truly ‘bad design for sex’ story out of Virginia, a 41-member task force investigating child pornography has released its findings and suggestions for how to combat “the dangers of the Internet.” Virginia State Attorney General Bob McDonnell, speaking with the usual smarts of politicians trying to make sense of the… what did he call it?

“The Internet represents a new frontier of the last 10 years or so for criminals,” McDonnell said during an afternoon news conference. “The big challenge is, How do we take those good old warnings we heard as kids into the cyber age?”

Oh, cyber. I was wondering where that prefix went.

In addition to proposing an educational campaign aimed at parents, the task force has discovered a peculiarity of user interface specific to those who have been convicted of sex crimes:

Last week, McDonnell announced he would seek a law requiring sex offenders to report their e-mail and instant-messenger addresses to the state so they could be blocked from the popular Web site MySpace.

That’s right. Of all the people who sexually abuse people, the tiny percentage who are actually caught and then convicted, plus all those people who find themselves labeled sex offenders for life for being queer in the wrong place at the wrong time (cruising at a truck stop, or in a tea room, for example)… once any of those folks crosses the line into registered ’sex offender’ territory, they automatically lose the ability to sign up for a new gmail account or a secondary iChat login.

If ever there were a reason that teenagers needed to be able to run for government, not just be protected by it, this is it — or maybe we just need some late-term politicians who manage their own Top 8.

Bonus polisex sleuth points to someone who can track down former Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s IM screennames (and I am so going to a special place in Google hell for just searching the pornalicious string, ‘republican foley IM teen’) so we can start adding to that upcoming database like the good citizens we are.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Steve Jobs Hates Sex People?


filed under: Strange Bedfellows, Design for Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

iBuzz, the makers of an iPod vibrator attachment, have been all over the media lately, first trying to go viral with their video demo (you know, in time for the holidays), and now, you can only picture the happy dances going down at the their (presumably, from the URL) UK HQ, as they join the ranks of those threatened by Apple over copyright infringement only to ride the controversy to profit.

Regina Lynn of Wired promises to file a user-test report. Gizmodo wonders if, they, too, can get in on the C&D orgy, by posting an iBuzz ad. In the meantime, get your gossip in CrunchGear’s comment section, which has turned into a debate over whether or not Steve Jobs hates sex.

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