FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

Image taken from The Art of Romance: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs by Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien
Am I more than my body?
As a woman, of late, I feel as if I have had to defend the boundaries of my body in order to prove and preserve my personhood.
Forces abound that seek to […]

(This story is a collaboration with rstiene.)
It’s funny what we’re drawn to. I was terrified of cemeteries when I was a kid. In one of our many houses (we moved frequently when I was a kid), our backyard abutted a cemetery, and never once, ever, did I cross the fence line and venture inside.
The local […]

Please don’t ask me to write a history of violence against doctors and clinics who provide reproductive medical care to women.
If you are at all aware, if you have read a newspaper in the past 25 years, you know. You just know.
The Wichita Eagle has a full page of reaction to Dr. George Tiller’s murder […]

What an incredible amount of change since the last time I posted.  The things I’ve done, the people around me, and the circumstances I’ve been in that make me question my place in the world… again. I am so much more accepting of it all this time, though. With a relief, I have taken most of […]

I got that feeling again last night. It swelled again this morning, when I read Nicholas Kristof’s piece (about how rape is not treated as a priority crime) in the New York Times. It’s that “it’s not your turn,” feeling. That “don’t be so pushy,” feeling. That “you’re being selfish; don’t you realize that there […]

Maureen Dowd is mystified as to why Elizabeth Edwards felt it necessary to pen her memoir, Resilience.
John told her a little about Rielle a few days after he announced in 2006, and she told him to drop out to “protect our family from this woman, from his act,” she writes.
She said she cried, screamed and […]

This post could simply comprise links to work I’ve done in the past three years, in which I’ve documented, over and over again, that women matter less than men in the world. Not just in “Third World” countries, where women die at extraordinary rates in childbirth or as victims of “rape as tactic of war” […]

I was at the mall recently. I loathe the mall, and yet, I find myself there fairly frequently. It is the closest place to my apartment for basic necessities—the Target there has a food market, so I can pick up eggs, or milk, or my prescriptions without having to drive downtown.
As usual, I was people […]

Rob and I love a hard-fought game of Scrabble. We’ve become addicts—playing anywhere and everywhere—waiting to pick up Chinese food, at work, at the Laundromat. Those games are played on our iPhones; we can choose to pass an iPhone back and forth, or having bought the app, we can play on Facebook when we’re out […]

I’ve spent the morning editing student papers. Some of them are fantastic—they show such signs of promise and talent. Others feel as if they were written with a gun to someone’s head, something that had to be gotten out of the way to make someone (me) happy.
I’m tired. I’m tired of doing what I’m doing.
All […]

 I love turkeys not only because with their Crayola-box-of-eight-fat-crayons plumage and their plump brown bodies they’re just plain majestic, but, well, because turkeys are stupid. And they’ve proven their stupidity to me so many times that I anticipate the dumbness when I see them.
A flock has taken up residence in the field not too far […]

It happened again the other day. We were having our weekly editorial meetings, and one of my brightest female students—a young woman who has just gotten accepted into a prestigious journalism graduate program—was pitching her idea for next week’s story .
“I had this discussion with my dad over break,” she said. Her raven-black hair was […]

As is typical any morning, I woke up a couple of hours before anyone else, and I started reading papers on the Web. This morning, on the Guardian, one of the major stories is about a new wave of crime in South Africa that is being called “Corrective Rape.”  This abomination in terms is the […]

 In 2005, incensed that the FDA, which, at the time, was so under the thumb of the woman-hating, sex-hating, body-hating, science-hating Bush administration that it made a decision that Plan B contraception would not be available at pharmacies to those under the age of 18, AND, really pissed off that there were pharmacists who were […]

In November of 2005, I underwent a hysterectomy. I was 42, and I had suffered from a condition that weakened me. In the weeks leading up to the decision, I blogged about it. I needed to. I was frightened beyond measure that losing my uterus would somehow take away some essence of my femaleness. I […]