FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

It seems appropriate to resume writing on a double anniversary.  It has been a full year since my last post, and this week marked four years at my desk job.  Neither one of those things is exactly celebratory, but they do work as a backdrop for today’s ruminations.  I’d like to share with you what I wrote a few nights ago, attempting for the nth time to complete a blog post:

“I am a little ashamed to see that it has been a year since I last wrote.  I realized my absence long ago, but the little obligations that pepper life are numerous and demanding, and the longer I go without writing - whether it is a blog or a song or a thank-you note to a friend - the less momentum I have from my previous expulsions of internal dialogue, and the more self-aware I become of the entire process.

…But it’s funny, as soon as I typed the paragraph above, I got up from the computer and sat back down at the digital piano that sits next to it.  I played through a progression that has been spinning through my head for several months, playing until I was satisfied enough for the moment.  I got up, grabbed my charging cell phone which is being resurrected from a day of dead battery, and called a friend I haven’t spoken to in a few years.  I left her a message, then sat back down to type this paragraph.

…After I typed the second paragraph, I got up to do laundry and finally, close to a year after my new computer was built, began installing iTunes.”

I’m working three separate jobs - the full-time office job I’ve spoken of since my first post, teaching various voice students on weeknights, and acting as my church’s music director on the weekends.  The small windows of time I have in my home are a blur of cooking, cleaning binges, complaining about all the damn cat hair, and collapsing into a haze of video games or aimless internet browsing.  Social efforts wear me out, and so does glancing over the graveyard of my creative efforts - a coloring book, a sewing machine, recording software.  Owning these things is not the same as creativity, the same way that buying and shelving books doesn’t make me more knowledgeable.  But they’re stacked up in my room all the same. 

My reality is common, and I have to remind myself that I chose this.  I pay my rent, I buy my food, I buy something unnecessary that catches my eye, and I concede myself to perpetuate the cycle.  This is equated with responsibility, as enough.  But on its own, the process feels numb and programmed and…dehumanized.  And I realize that this is how most of us function.  Reading this article, I wonder again - at what cost?  (Do read it, it’s worth consideration.)  Earlier this week, a blogger known for traveling the world on a tiny budget and promoting a general exuberance for life wrote that one of her fears was “waking up one day to discover that I’ve fallen into a life of soul-killing disappointment and quiet desperation”.  I suppose it’s the Thoreau reference more than anything else, but my eyes widened as I thought to myself, “That!  I’m…that!”

You must believe me when I say that I know my life is one of extreme privilege and independence.  This is not lost on me, and it keeps me grateful, or at least consistent.  But more noticeably consistent has been the decline of my own vibrancy.  There are moments when I still feel like I could build something just for the sake of creation, because it’s beautiful.  Someone once told me, “Creativity is the highest act of reflecting God, who is the ultimate Creator.”  It strikes me as true.  It also strikes me as lofty in an age of disregarding art as superfluous, mere decoration.  I can understand how I’ve come to consign the majority of my awakeness to an illusion of control over my own provision.  I can understand how aberration from this well-worn pathway causes discomfort in well-meaning (or not) people, and it is almost as much for those people that I have embraced a “normal” and “steady” job as it is for myself.  Yet for every voice that has preached their message of prudence, there has been a disproportionately larger group who dissent, who recognize me, who don’t much care for the angled “we can’t all be astronauts” argument.  I have a harder time hearing them, or believing them.  But the longer I silence myself, the more I find I’ve disappeared.  And I have to evaluate whether pacifying my body with my most believable promises of rent, groceries, and shiny distractions to take the edge off is worth more than I am.

So, back to my earlier blog clip.  Despite exhaustion and an ever-lengthening mishmash task list with Sisyphian overtones, I began again, and that lurch set me in motion for all the little things I kept setting aside for the vague “later”, whether they were chores or connections or inspiration.  I hope, especially so in documenting it, that I will remember the curious feeling of unleashing, being set in motion, and that I will not be so enticed by familiarity and cowardice that I lull to a stop once more, at least not the same one.

I have a long list of other things I’m looking forward to sharing and discussing with you, but they can wait.  For now, just this, my little moment of movement.

            In my country, there is to the mentality that every family has to own the house where it’s living. That’s why, like a lot of other young families, after some years of living in rented flats, we couldn’t rest until we’ve bought a house.

            The “crises” arise during pregnancy. “We have to raise the baby in his home?” The feeling of not owning the house where we are raising our child, could lead to feeling like we did not ensure our child solid roots to develop properly. We are afraid that moving from one place to another (laws don’t protect the statute of tenant very much) could damage the child’s identity or something like that. So, like other families worldwide, we bought a house. But it’s a sweet illusion to be the “owner” because as long as we have a mortgage for 30 years, the bank is the owner. So we have to live with first contradiction; the ensure is in bank benefit. We are just administrators, until I’m 58 and my husband 64!

            I don’t know if it’s good to tie your life with possessions: for sure these material things won’t pass over. We make the mistake of putting pieces of our souls in these objects that keep us in one place; the garden, the trees we plant with our hands, the walls, fireplace, and so on. It is a nice, beautiful feeling to make long term plans regarding the design of your house or garden and all the investments, but isn’t this a trap to keep you stuck? We said, “At least my child won’t owe the bank, I’ll leave him this house”. But what if your child doesn’t want to live in his parent’s house? He will grow and he will move, maybe will leave the country, who knows? Another contradiction.

            Our case is like this. We moved outside Bucharest to a lake area with a half hour or forty minutes commute to work, it’s very nice. Everything is good, but sometimes we realize that we cannot adapt to locals habits. It’s much better to say that uneducated locals (there are a few families near us) cannot accept our “laws” of being quiet or not throwing garbage on the shore of the lake, common requests that could make all our lives nicer.

            After several conflicts and verbal threats from them, we understood that we couldn’t educate anyone here. The rural are too aggressive to keep up with. We thought, maybe before moving somewhere else, we could “check” the neighborhood much better. It’s a word in Romanian that says “boss, parents and neighbors are pre-assigned”. Besides, it’s difficult to move with this trail of mortgage behind us.

            We regret being owners. We try to build roots, and pay with our nerves. I think in economy of Time (with a capital T), to have a miserable life somewhere because of some stupid neighbors is pathetic and illogical. But we have to “thank” them for this cold shower of a situation we’re living in and the questions regarding the possibility of going to a completely different place, maybe another country, where we could find what we’re searching for and not be afraid to build again from almost nothing.

He will not look at me. Me, his wife. Nor her, his daughter. Me, I understand, for I have brought great shame on his honor, his household, his manhood. I know that he will never touch me again even if he chooses to stay. But each day, his visage will fade, the way the blood drained from his face when he walked into the house and saw what the Lord’s Resistance Army had wrought. Soon, my husband will be a ghost in this house. And then, one day, I know he will be gone. His shame will drive him away.His son–our son–is already gone. The men who burst into this house yesterday took him away. They will feed him drugs, teach him to use a gun, turn him into a soldier. He is a gentle boy, good with his hands and quick of mind. I had great hopes that we could send him to university. Now his will be another empty seat at the school. Many of the boys have scattered. Those families who could sent their boys into hiding, but where could I send my son? I have no family that is far enough away from the armies that have fought over this land for years now.They fight over our mines. Our gold. Our coltan. Useless stupid rocks in the ground. And what they leave behind are the dead and the near-dead.My husband had gone into the city to try to make a business deal with some men. I do not ask him what his business is. It is not my place to know.I have my own woman’s secrets. I know that he loves me, but he does not know the things that I am capable of.I did not know the things I was capable of until yesterday.There were six of them. Filthy, stinking men with machetes and guns. Outside, in the village, we could hear the screams coming from other houses. Next door, they made the husband watch them as they raped his wife, and then they made her watch as they hacked him with their knives.They killed all the men eventually. Some of them, they tortured and raped. We could hear them screaming and begging for mercy. I do not judge them. I know that I, too, cried out as those men took their turns with me.They marched all the boys off. Threw them in the back of the their trucks. We will not see them again, and if we do, would they recognize their own mothers? Will these monsters turn our babies into monsters, too?I am bleeding from the place where my babies emerged. It was not enough for them to stick their stinking cocks inside me, to slap me, to beat me with the butt of the rifle. They used that rifle butt as a cock, and now I am torn up inside. It hurts. It hurts to pee.There was a woman who lived in our village who had a terrible childbirth. The child was too large, and the midwife was young, inexperienced. The old midwife had just died, and she had no one to ask for help when the birth proved more than she could control. The woman who gave birth suffered a terrible injury. Something happened to her bladder, and she leaked pee all the time. She smelled of urine constantly, and she isolated herself from us. Embarrassed. Ashamed. One day, when her child was a toddler, she went down to the river and she drowned herself and the child.I am afraid. I am afraid that the soldiers have hurt me so that this, too, is my fate.I cannot talk about my daughter. I cannot talk about what they did to her. I have lain her on the bed, covered her with blankets, even though it is hot outside. The stench of death is everywhere. The women need to bury their dead, but many of them stare, zombie-like, from the doors of their houses. They, too, are bleeding.My daughter. It is breaking my heart. They made me watch. She was a virgin, and they held her down while they took their turns with me. While they were raping me, they kept telling me that they were saving themselves for the young beauty in the house. That I was old and loose, but that she would be a tight young thing, and that they would show her what real men could do.And so, two of them held me down as I watched what they did to her. I will not tell you. I cannot. If I repeat what I saw, I shall go mad. And if I go mad, I cannot help her. For they were not content to simply hurt her once with the rifle. I believe that they have destroyed parts of her insides. I fear that they have made it impossible for her to ever have children.I must get help for her. I will ask my husband, but I do not know if he is man enough to do this for me.There is a doctor. He is in Bukavu, the city where my husband went to make his deal. He runs a hospital for women like us, women whose bodies have been destroyed by rape. I have heard of this place because one of my neighbor’s sisters is a nurse there. I have even heard they are building a city there, a city filled with women like us.Women who are the dirt you sling at one another in your war. We are not your weapons. We are not the holes that you can rape, again and again, to prove that you are men.And this war can most certainly be stopped.Tomorrow, I will wrap my precious child in blankets and I will fashion a travois for her. Bukavu is 20 miles away, but I have walked those distances before. I will tie a rope around my waist, and I will, just as I carried her within me, bear her with me to find this man, this place, where we can be healed.It will take us days, I anticipate, for us to make this journey. But we will do it.I just wish there was someone–anyone–out there who would hear our stories and make it possible for this all to stop.I have written many times about the DRC. Below are links to previous posts. Within those posts are things you can do that can make a difference. I struggled with whether I could write this story. These women’s stories have gotten under my skin, and once again, I’m putting together a teach-in at my college on what’s going on in the DRC and what students can do to help–including educating students about the connections between coltan and cell phones–and how the DRC has the largest reserves of coltan in the world. So, just like blood diamonds, blood coltan is being used to finance this bloody, awful conflict. Okay. I’ve fixed the links below that were broken in peculiar ways. (I had copied them from an e-mail I had sent to someone who wanted more info on the Congo. Apparently, you can’t do that without taking someone into your e-mail account.) THANK YOU to the two people who immediately alerted me to what I had done.Men are being rapedWhat will it take for you to do somethingThe Congo is just a joke to you Now, isn’t itLove Women? Read ThisCan you spare a minute?An Open Letter to Michelle Obama

Yesterday, I went to the doctor’s office again to talk about my headaches again, but this is not a story about that. This is a story about what happened afterward.

Armed with a handful of prescriptions that would all supposedly do their parts to ameliorate pain that has plagued my life for three years, I went to my local Target, where they have been filling my prescriptions since they opened, where everyone knows my name, and where, frequently, as I come in for something “heavy duty” for the pain, someone will sympathetically say across the counter, “those headaches are bad again, huh?”

Yesterday, a few people milled about. I had dropped off my scripts, and wandered through the mall, incredulous that just a few days after Christmas, people still felt the need to buy themselves something. It’s funny how we can build up in our minds that Christmas, like our birthdays, or like losing 10 pounds, or like getting a new job, or like the “geographic cure, i.e., moving across the country” will solve the basic problem that lies at the heart of ourselves. Our inability to make peace with who we are, what we are. To simply be. And, so, as I walked through the mall, I was feeling attuned to a lot of frantic misery as people shopped feverishly, and a lot of overtired toddlers voiced their complaints in the only ways they know how–whining, crying, tantrums–while their parents screamed at them that they were being naughty.

I retreated back into Target. I figured it was better to sit and wait for my prescriptions rather than to observe the bile of human misery.

My prescriptions were almost ready, they assured me. The woman ahead of me–an older woman, who looked harried, and worried, and whose hands flew this way and that–as if this were her reaction to life that had not treated her all that well, was asked if she could be helped. “We have to wait until my daughter comes out of the restroom,” she said.

A few moments later, the daughter emerged. Despite the heat in the store, she was wrapped up in her coat. It didn’t look as if she had showered in a few days. The first thing I noticed, though, was that she had her hand protectively placed over her lower belly. “Bladder infection,” I thought to myself. “Damn, those hurt.”

The mother began waving as soon as her daughter approached. “She’s here!”

The pharmacy rep stepped forward. “How much are these drugs going to cost,” the young woman asked through gritted teeth.”

“The first is $14.97 and the second is $74.55.”

“Could you ask the pharmacist which one I really need to take?”

The young woman came back in a minute. The conversation took place in hushed tones, but there’s not a lot of privacy in the crowded area near the pharmacy stand. “She said this one will take care of the infection, and the other one will help with all the nausea and vomiting.”

Take them both, I was thinking. Even if you have to give something else up, you can’t get better without them. I’ve had friends whose bladder infections have turned into kidney infections and then you’re in the hospital. It’s nothing to mess around with.

The daughter was clearly angry. Her mother did nothing, just fluttered her hands around. It was clear that neither of them had the money to pay for either.

I started thinking about my checking account. I got paid last week, but it’s the first of the month coming up, and I’ve got rent, and a whole series of bills that are on automatic repayment. If I paid for her pills, I’d bounce something. I wanted to step forward, save the day, pay for her pills. She looked awful.

“I’m not going to take either of them,” she said, in a disgusted voice. Clearly she was mad at the pharmacist. Oh honey. It’s not the pharmacist’s fault. It’s the fucked up system we live in. The people who run this country don’t give a shit that you’re suffering. But this was not the time for political speeches.

I watched her and her mother walk down the aisle, the younger woman limping in pain. I had no idea how she was going to make it through the night.

I do have insurance. I stepped forward, to pick up my four new drugs. “That’ll be $16.27″ the clerk said. “Really? That’s all?”

I felt guilty, and mad, and thought, once again, about how fucking obscene this system is.

I wonder if that woman is in the hospital yet?

Gail Collins’ column today most likely gave Suffragettes, Sappho, and all of our Feminist Foremothers the vapors today.

Seriously.

How else to react to the following:

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate contains a provision known as the Bo-Tax — so called because it would levy a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery procedures. The idea is to tax those who indulge in medically unnecessary procedures in order to pay for medical necessities for everyone else.

This sounded like a refreshingly good idea to me, until I read that Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, is against it.

“Now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged?” she complained to The Times.

The tone of Collins’ column is incredulous, as is my reaction to it. So many things to be concerned about in the Healthcare bill, and the President of NOW is objecting to the five percent plastic surgery tax?

O’Neill argues that middle-aged women face so much discrimination in the job market that many of them must lie about their age. In order to do that, they must appear younger than their years; hence the need for Botox, tummy tucks, and all the other things women do to themselves to erase the signs that they are passing out of their reproductive years.

Collins’ column is worth reading. And her questioning the fear that drives someone like O’Neill–that all women secretly fear  they are going to wind up as bag ladies, despite their wealth–is perhaps dead-on in its accuracy.

But I find myself unable to feel sympathy for these women.

First of all, plastic surgery is expensive and is not covered by insurance. So, an extra five percent is hardly Draconian. I doubt it will keep the privileged few who can afford it from getting it. And, if it’s true that middle-aged women are terrified that they will lose their jobs or not be able to find jobs without it, we are talking about women who are looking for jobs in the upper strata of the working world.

In other words, this sounds suspiciously like a white, upper middle-class feminist complaint. I thought that feminists had realized that they needed to embrace class and race as issues within feminism? If defending white middle-class women’s access to the Botox deprives a poor, white woman of an opportunity to get an abortion (because, say, someone trades their vote on the Stupak amendment for this Stupid amendment), how does that help bring women together?

I thought that, as older women, we were to have been taught to embrace our wrinkles. Our laugh lines. Our worry lines. Our creases. These are our badges of honor, they show we have lived, loved, and watched a world that is often unfair to us all.

My sense is that as feminists, we need to be fighting for things that affect us all, and I can’t help but see this as a problem that affects primarily white, upper middle-class women. Am I wrong?

This week marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, in which 162 people were killed, and scores injured. I began a series of articles that mirrored Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to run a four-part long-form journalism piece that would be exclusively online.The articles, which all-told, totaled 19,000 words, told a stunning tale of chaos, terror, the deliberate infliction of suffering, and a response from Indian armed services and police that seemed to contribute to the death toll.

Jason Motlagh, the author of the article, spent months interviewing survivors and researching the details. The result is something stunning. And, I believe, ground-breaking. It heralds good things for what can be done online.

This type of journalism is usually saved for the pages of print. VQR’s decision to run it online was monumental, and I was curious, now that the series was complete, how its editor, Ted Genoways, felt the experiment had gone. He was gracious enough to allow me to interview him.

In our interview, we talk about the successes and limitations of writing long-form journalism for the Internet.

LB: What was the genesis of the idea for doing long-form journalism as a blog piece? Why not publish it in the print journal?

TG: Jason Motlagh had written an outstanding article for us about separatist groups in India and came by the VQR offices to discuss what he might work on next. I wondered if he thought it would be possible to undertake a long-form narrative of the Mumbai terror attacks. Jason has great contacts in Mumbai, especially with reporters there, so he agreed to give it a go. The original idea was to publish it in our Fall issue, but Jason was still working as the deadline approached–and the piece kept get longer and longer. But it wasn’t just getting bigger; it was getting better. We started talking about releasing it on the web as a way of letting it run as long as it needed to be and also timing its release closer to the anniversary.

LB:  Now that you’ve done it, what is your initial reaction to the response the piece(s) have received? Do you think it would have have attracted a larger audience in the journal? Or do you think that you’ve benefited from word of mouth (something that is hard to do with journals, I would think.)

Probably the most gratifying element of the response has been hearing from survivors of the attacks–words of praise and thanks but also additional information and refinements of the timeline. We’re working on a revised version of the article, something else that wouldn’t be possible with a print publication. It’s still too early to judge the full readership of the whole piece, but we’ve already had a strong response. The upside of the blogosphere is that it’s democratic nature allows a great piece like this, even if it’s from a small publication like ours, to circulate widely and swiftly. The real question is whether we can convince foundations or other funders to support this kind of journalism, because it’s expensive to produce and putting it up free on the web doesn’t do anything to offset those costs.

LB:  What is the future of this piece? Is it something that your writer is going to turn into a book?

That’s up to Jason–but he’s gotten a number of inquiries from agents and book editors. I think that it would make a great book, and Jason is the perfect writer to undertake that job.

LB: Having done this once, and really broken new ground, would you do it again?

That’s an interesting question. This piece was really a special opportunity, and I think that we should try experiments like this only when we feel like we have something as singular and important as this piece is. On top of that, this isn’t the kind of thing that we can afford to do often unless we can identify sources of support. So I think we’ve proven that we can undertake this kind of ambitious reporting successfully and shown that there’s an audience out there for it. Now the question is whether we can figure out a way to pay for it. The web is a cheap delivery mechanism, but multiple trips to Mumbai, months of research, and the staff time to edit the piece, prepare it for the web, and promote it, isn’t free. We’re lucky to have great support from the University of Virginia, but in tough economic times, we need to find a few altruistic supporters of journalism who see this kind of work as important, whether it’s profit-generating or not. I’m optimistic that such people are out there.

> As so many complain that the web is full of ‘bad journalism,’ this piece will become my touchstone for rebutting such nonsense.

That’s great–and you’re right: it’s untrue that the web is bankrupt of good journalism. And we’re actually very excited about the possibilities of mixing traditional media with new media. Indeed, one of our principal foundation supporters, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Journalism, underwrote an article that we published by Kwame Dawes about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Pulitzer funded a photographer, Joshua Cogan, and film crew to accompany Kwame. They developed that story into news segments for PBS and, with support from the MAC AIDS fund, into an incredible online project called “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica“, that recently won an Emmy for “new approaches to news and documentary programming.”

Kwame also wrote poems that he and Josh turned into audio slideshows. That approach inspired a project called In Verse that I created with radio producer Lu Olkowski. That project produced paired poems and photographs for the current issue of VQR (Susan B. A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally in Troy, New York, and Natasha Trethewey and Josh Cogan in Gulfport, Mississippi), but it also turned into several amazing radio segments for WNYC’s Studio 360 and some incredible audio slideshows that exist solely on the web. That project got off the ground because of a pilot program called Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

What I find hopeful about those projects is that they represent a convergence of nonprofit organizations–print, television, radio, and multimedia storytellers working with altruistic funders like MAC AIDS, Pulitzer, and CPB. At a time when journals are threatened and support for journalism is dwindling, these initiatives seem vital and exciting to me–evidence that great storytelling can be carried out on the web as easily as any other medium.

The Guardian reports that a new drug, originally tested as an antidepressant, has been shown to increase sexual desire in women.

Women who took the drug during the six-month trial reported more satisfying sexual encounters and higher libidos than those who were given a placebo.

Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be an effective treatment for low libido, a problem they estimate affects between 9% and 26% of women, depending on their age and whether they have been through the menopause.

The drug is flibanserin, and was tested in Germany as an antidepressant. Turns out, it was a lousy cure for depression, but women taking it reported a wonderful side-efffect: an increase in sexual desire.

The new drugs raises several questions for me.

1. How quickly will it be approved by the U.S. FDA?

2. Will insurance companies pay for this drug the same way they currently pay for male ED treatments?

But I have other questions, too. If both men and women go through periods of diminished sexual desire, (assuming that this is not a permanent condition), then can’t the decrease in sexual desire be seen as a natural rhythm in the life cycle? Are there times when nature simply doesn’t want us to have sex?

My most important question is this, however. We already have a horrible time in this culture accepting that women have sexual desires. We still categorize women by either the “girls-gone-wild” hook-up culture or the “Purity ring-wearing not-until-I’m-married” group. We think we’ve made progress on this, but evidence suggests otherwise. How quickly are women condemned for deviations from the sexual norm? How quick are we to label sexually active teens girls as somehow wrong in what they’re doing (even if they are being responsible and using birth control).

And what about the ultimate form of punishment: The withholding of contraceptive knowledge from sexually -active women as a form of social control. We insist on teaching abstinence-only education, try to limit young women’s access to contraceptives, and make it a crime to transport a woman under 18 across state lines to get an abortion. Given that there are few states left where one can get an abortion, we’ve de facto made it illegal to help young women get abortions unless it’s their parents who are directly involved. (And how come these same people who believe that these young women are too young to make the decision to have an abortion are therefore old enough to make the decision to bear a child?)

The same problems faced by young women are also faced by those women who do not have the financial means to travel interstate, or who do not have the money to pay for this medical procedure. And, if they do have the money to pay for the medical procedure, how much shit will they have to endure to get into see an ob-gyn who still performs abortions?

My point is that, once again, our culture will send mixed messages to women. Now, those whose libidos are going through a temporary cool phase will be told to get with the program and take a drug. Those who want to heighten their desire and take advantage of the drug will be seen as “loose” women for wanting to enjoy sex. And, while insurance companies may pay for women to have sex, they won’t pay for the consequences of sex.

What a mad world we live in.

Being fat in Japan is no longer a matter of shame or embarrassment: the size of your waist is now determined by law.

Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and 90 centimeters (35.4 inches) for women.

Under Japan’s health care coverage, companies administer check-ups to employees once a year. Those who fail to meet the waistline requirement must undergo counseling. If companies do not reduce the number of overweight employees by 10 percent by 2012 and 25 percent by 2015, they could be required to pay more money into a health care program for the elderly. An estimated 56 million Japanese will have their waists measured this year.

An American journalist, living in Japan writes:

“I am back in Japan, living in Tokyo for a year, and one of my Japanese co-worker recently stopped joining the other men for lunch at restaurants; instead, he began bringing a small bento box. When I asked why, he said his wife believed he was getting fat and required him to eat her pre-approved portions.”

Not surprisingly, there are unintended consequences. Eating disorders are prevalent, especially among young women. When Ralph Lauren was criticized by the U.S. media after digitally altering an image of already-slender supermodel Filippa Hamilton to make her appear even skinnier, I was not surprised that a company executive said the advertisement had only appeared in Japan.

Maybe you are thinking, “Good. Too many fat people in the world. Maybe this is the way to get people to quit being so obese.”

I guess I don’t see it this way.

For me, regulating someone’s waistline is akin to telling a woman what she can do with her body when she is pregnant. It’s called privacy. It’s a matter between a person and his/her doctor. Your doctor may tell you that you need to lose weight to maintain your health. But the government? Mandating your weight?

I keep thinking about Ceaucescu in Romania, who, determined to see birthrates rise in his country, outlawed abortion. Women underwent mandatory pregnancy tests at work. And the orphanages filled to capacity with abandoned children.

How can a government tell a member of its populace what the limits of its body is? How can the government tell any woman that she must stay pregnant?

If the idea that someone could come up to you in a restaurant and tell you not to eat dessert because your waistline exceeds the national standard, imagine how it must feel to have a total stranger tell you that you must carry a baby to term?

For me, there’s no difference.

Privacy is privacy.

Body sovereignty is body sovereignty.

I was on my way back home from Sandton yesterday.  We were coming from a Christmas party that the hospital organised for kids with cardiac failure.  We were in a taxi and everybody was tired from job interviews, so the taxi was very quiet except for the soothing music that the drive was playing.

When we reached the robots, a woman was standing there with her kids, one on her back the other on her hand.  She was askign for food or money.  I looked at her and the kids and you could see they haven’t had a decent meal, a bath, or washed and ironed clothes.  I took my left overs from the party and gave it to them.  I also gave them a ten rand note and the taxi took off.

Suddenly everyone was awake and talking.  They were saying all sorts of bad things about this woman:  How lazy she is and the fact that she was using the poor kids.  I didn’t believe it.  Deep down in my heart, I knew that something went terribly wrong and I know she tried to make it and stay strong for her kids.

But, hey life is tough.  It’s the jungle out there.  It’s a survival of the fittest.

I haven’t stopped thinking about her and praying for them to be safe.  I have also realised that I am so blessed to have a roof over my head and running water and clothes.  I can still afford to cook me and the kids a decent healthy meal.  I am also thankful that I can still afford to send my  kids to school and pack a lunch box for them.  Mostly that I have friends who care about me.  I pray that life works out for that lady.  Those kids don’t deserve this life.  They truly have to enjoy being kids, to be protected, loved cared for and to feel safe at all times.

And as for everyone in that taxi who thought all sort of rubbish about that woman, I have on thing to say to you.  Life is a game.  You win if you know how to play and if you are not a quitter.

I’ve gone back and forth between entertaining the idea of having children and shunning it completely ever since it first occurred to me that I might someday be a mother. Being the youngest of three whose ages span three separate decades, I’ve got next to zero experience handling kids. If I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t dive in. So raising children has never been too serious a consideration.

There are two sides to the coin, as I see it. On one, you’ve got an adorable, inquisitive, toddling creature who absorbs knowledge like a sponge and has all the potential in the world inside of them. A delicate treasure toting stuffed hippos. Cuddly. On the other side, you’ve got a screaming, stubborn, volatile creature who has a megaphone built into its throat and a propensity to make its mother and father gray-haired, exhausted, and sexless. Red-faced, fists clenched. Not cuddly.

But when I spend enough time admiring well-behaved and glowy-cheeked children in the supermarket as I shop for whichever variations on pasta I will make for that week, I start to say things like, “aw.” Or, “what a cute baby. Look at the baby!” Or, if it’s serious, “I want a son first.”

Now, this last one is a sentiment I’ve held for years. If, in fact, I can get over the idea of labor, epidurals, my maternal family’s multiple brushes with death during childbirth, and the very scarring things I will probably say to my future husband in that window of time between water breaking and infant wailing, not to mention the whole experience of having an alien life in your belly (okay, I know, not belly) for almost a whole year and all the special experiences I’ll have as a super-duper hormonal pregnant lady, and if my future husband can get over those things too…well, if all of those things align, the idea of carrying new life is miraculous. A journey I’ll be blessed to take in the distant future. And I do, in fact, want a son first. Why is that?

I realized it Sunday night while driving home from a friend’s house. We’d had a long discussion about our experiences as artists, our hopes and purposes. Earlier that day, I’d eaten grilled hamburgers with other friends from my church and went swimming. Earlier than that, I’d played djembe for a couple of hours at church, pounding into the congregational music. From the beginning, it was a good day.

But in between each event, I felt like a soda can shaken to the point of explosion. My boyfriend was busy with his own activities, and less communication than usual led to me filling in the blanks with all kinds of misconceptions that were not in my favor. The storm was brewing in my chest. Apparently you don’t need to be pregnant to be super hormonal.

Maybe it was because of this, or maybe my mind just wandered and the dots really aren’t connected. But I realized for the first time, indirectly, why I want a son.

I don’t know how to be a good woman.

I had the idea that I could shape a son into a good man. That I could explain life from a woman’s perspective, and that he would grow to be a defender of the more often marginalized and objectified gender. Or maybe, if I’m honest, that I want to fix everything about men that hurts and agitates me. Zing.

But what on earth would I teach a daughter? I thought through the many ways I feel inadequate, the negative ways that I perceive my body and my soul. The ways I react out of those skewed perceptions. I thought about the way women are told that their power lies in sexuality while advertising mocks us for unending insufficiencies; how those who no longer allure per our culture’s very narrow definitions are discarded. Do I really want to bring another woman into such a raw deal? I wondered about my daughter’s ability to believe in herself when I don’t believe in myself. Could she learn to reflexively fight for her dreams when I decided mine were unrealistic? Could I teach her to be whole and independent when I feel like shards of glass searching for someone or something to glue me back together? And now, on the familiar verge of reacting to imaginary threats and spreading misery, do I really think I can teach someone what love is?

I used to think the fear of a daughter came from my relationship with my own mother, the ways I resented her unfairly, and knowing that my daughter will resent me, too, whether fairly or not. It’s a defeating thought, but even more defeating is the idea that I don’t even know how to be my own person, or one in which I take pride. I’m twenty-four years old. I know there’s no time limit on these things, and life comes in stages, but it’s frustrating to look back and realize I had a better sense of self four years ago than I do now. Life’s parameters were different, sure, and I was in that hopeful and free-spirited period of assembling my future. I chose detours and deconstruction, gradually relinquishing my joy in exchange for empty promises. I still fixate on the idea of retrieving my old self, but besides the fact that my naïveté is overly romanticized, it is an impossibility. I have to rebuild the structure. With energy I don’t fully possess.

A couple of things propel me. First, the memory of how happy I felt one sunny afternoon in college after a dance class. Walking over to my bike, I felt strong and very present. I knew myself and I liked myself. Though I was already in the process of traveling a path I now recognize as a long detour, for one moment, away from addiction, I felt good in my skin.

The second motivation is my relationships. I cannot love people when I do not love myself. I’ve tried, only to watch myself burn bridges in frantic self-protection.

Perhaps someday I’ll be a good mother. Before that, the life I mold is my own. And when the time comes, I hope that my first months of expectancy are filled with the calm of solidly knowing I am a good, steady, and whole woman, even in my imperfection.

Bitter? Moi?

Mais, non! I live in the greatest country in the world. Everything we touch turns to gold! Why, just look at all the great things we’ve accomplished in Afghanistan!

In today’s Guardian, we learn that Three Cups of Tea and The Kite Runner be damned, things are NOT better for women in Afghanistan.

Afghan women protest at the proposed new family law Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

(For more of my writing on this subject in the past, see When Will Women Matter; Faces; Will Women Pay for Peace in Afghanistan; and How Can I Bear It?.)

According to reporter Janine di Giovani:

Eight years later I returned, but the Afghanistan I found was far from jubilant. Despite the money poured into reconstruction and development, it is one of the five poorest countries in the world. There is 40% unemployment – nearly 80% in some parts of the country. A third of children under five are malnourished. Life expectancy is 43 – and it is one of only three countries in the world where women die earlier than men.

Did you read that statistic? LIFE EXPECTANCY IS 43 and women die earlier than men. 

You would think, given those miserable statistics, that perhaps the United States and the Afghan government would be looking at ways to improve the lives of its people, especially its women.

Yeah, right. When things aren’t going right in a society, what’s the first thing that gets blamed? Lax morality. And who is responsible for lax morality? Yep. Us. Those daughters of Eve.

I arrived to meet women before the presidential elections next month and to talk about a new law, which if brought in, could have drastic repercussions for women. The Shia Family Planning law was signed last March by President Hamid Karzai in an attempt, many believe, to appease powerful mullahs. The Afghan constitution allows Shias to have a separate family law from the Sunni majority based on traditional Shia jurisprudence, and some think the law is linked to the August elections and the Shia electorate who would have to abide by it (they could form up to 20% of the electorate).

The proposed law led to furious protests from women’s groups. It sanctioned marital rape and brought back Taliban-era restrictions on women by outlining when a woman could leave her house and the circumstances in which she has to have sex with her husband; Shia woman would be allowed to leave home alone “for a legitimate purpose” only which the law does not define, and could refuse sex with their husbands only when ill or menstruating.

You see? The best thing for a woman who is not going to live very long anyway is to just have sex with her husband whether she wants to or not; to stay in her house; and to keep her fucking pie-hole shut.

Following international outrage, Karzai backtracked and said the law would be reviewed. This month it was amended and re-signed by the president, but has not yet been ratified by parliament. Human rights groups say it is unclear how much the amendments have done to improve the law. And the law has already achieved its aim – instilling fear and insecurity among an already traumatised female population.

Soraya Sobhrang, a human rights activist I met in her Kabul office, says, “The law will affect all women if it goes through. It opens the door for other repressive laws to be passed, for Sunni Muslims as well as Shia.” A young doctor friend, Najeeb Shawal, says he is seeing more female patients who were depressed since news of the law emerged. “They have the kind of hopelessness that comes with knowing your life is incredibly repressed. And might become more so.”

Congratulations. The law is already working. We love it when women are depressed. That means we don’t need to worry about them going outside and making a ruckus. Instead, they’ll just stay inside, and, if we’re really lucky, they’ll stick their heads in gas ovens or set their burqas on fire. Everybody wins!

By the way. Karzai’s original excuse for signing the law? He didn’t read it before he signed it. 

There are bright spots in Afghanistan:

Bamiyan is the home of the Shia Hazara, the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. I am surprised by the “city’s” remoteness because there has been a huge outcry here from the women over the law: demonstrations, protests on the radio, grass roots organisations very quickly coming together. I meet one of the protest leaders in a small restaurant overlooking the holes in the mountain left when the Taliban blew up the ancient Buddha statues there in 2001. Batool Mohammadi is 27, black-robed, and heavily pregnant. “The law does not fit with humanitarian law,” she says. Batool, a Hazara, comes from the generation of Afghan women born after the Soviet invasion and raised during the Taliban era. She has only known war, conflict and repression. The small window of triumph after the fall of the Taliban – who brutally repressed the Hazaras – has given her a taste of freedom and she is not ready to give it up. “In an area as traditional as Bamiyan, one of the major problems with this law is that it will stop the trend towards modernisation.” As Batool leaves, she says that when her baby is born in June, she wants him or her to enter a world moving towards equality, not repression.

The governor, Habiba Sarabi, is the former Minister of Women and as a Shia will have to obey the law if it is passed. She meets us in her sparse office, a grim, Soviet-style building set on a windswept plain. There are plates of nuts and fruits and the governor, looking exhausted, nibbles dried apricot. At 53, Sarabi is no-nonsense. She is a chemist by trade and speaks good English. The daughter of an illiterate mother who encouraged her daughter to read and write, she tells me when she was young she was mocked as she walked to school alone. Having struggled so hard it was particularly hard to see her own daughter, now 24, denied education under the Taliban. The family escaped to Pakistan and Sarabi worked on human rights and women’s projects.

On the new law, she tries to be diplomatic, but I can tell she is concerned: “Fortunately, women raised their voice.” She is confident (perhaps overly so) that the law will not go through. But later, at her residence, when she curls her stockinged feet under her, she admits the wider crisis. Bamiyan is one of the few success stories in Afghanistan: it is poppy-free, the government functions well, and as she points out, “It is the safest place in Afghanistan. The rule of law is important here.” She has improved the education and health services (instigating midwife programmes, for example, in a province that has one major hospital). But can this last? If, following elections, Karzai succumbs to the mullahs (who exercise huge political power in Bamiyan and the rest of the country), for how long will it be safe for women? Even Sarabi finally admitted that if the law is ratified, it would affect her too.

But those women who have been unaffected by these new laws are rare. And a lot of women are frightened: who wouldn’t be?

Women who have managed to cross gender boundaries seem in a state of shock over the law. Jamila Barekzai is a police officer whose female colleague was killed by the Taliban last year in Kandahar for daring to do a mans’ job. When I go to meet her at the Central Afghan Police Headquarters on the edge of Kabul, next to one of the biggest Shia mosques in the city, she is wearing her olive uniform and heavy black eyeliner. She was transferred from Kandahar last year to Kabul when she thought she would be killed too. She takes out her mobile phone and plays a recording of an unnamed Taliban telling her to stop working, “or you will be taught the lesson we taught your friend”. She says she was mainly frightened for her children and touches the gun at her hip.

President Obama has committed more troops to Afghanistan, ostensibly for finding that guy (what was his name? the one who blew up the towers?) and gettting the increasing threat of terrorism from the Swot Valley in Pakistan under control.

But are women on President Obama’s radar? Are we going to be willing to trade stability in the area for the lives of millions of Afghani women who will once again be confined to their homes, illiterate, ill-considered, depressed, and basic sperm receptacles for their husbands? Is this the legacy that Obama wants to leave in Afghanistan?

Or can we start, right from the beginning, by saying to Karzai that yes, we know you have us by the gas hose right now because you have access to that pipeline we want, but hey, women are people, too.

Please, President Obama. If we are to go to war in Afghanistan, make it mean something. I do not want to have to write in five years that we have subdued the terrorists, but once again, we have paid for it with women’s lives.

President Obama, First Lady Obama, Secretary of State Clinton–anyone–everyone–who will listen: do not turn your backs on the women of Afghanistan. They are not collateral damage. We are not collateral damage of war. We are human beings. We have feelings. And bodies. And we hurt. And we ache. And we grieve. And if, once again, we are told that it is more important that we are treated like pieces of shit so that some problem may be solved, it may be that some of us may not be able to take that anymore.

So please.

I beg you.

On my knees.

For the women of Afghanistan.
Don’t. Forget. Us.

When I leave, someone tells me the Taliban spring offensive has begun, American troops are pouring in, and President Karzai is beginning his political campaign. I keep thinking of Batool, the pregnant activist in Bamiyan, and her baby, and her life in 20 years’ time. If the law does not pass and women continue rolling on, she has a chance. If not, she might still be wearing a burka and never learn how to drive.

—–

Governor David A. Paterson has directed that flags on New York State government buildings be flown at half-staff on Thursday,  July 16, 2009,  in honor of  a Fort Drum Soldier  killed in Afghanistan on July 9, 2009.
Spec. Joshua R. Farris of La Grange, Texas, died in Wardak Pronvince of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.  Spec. Farris was a member to the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team of 10th Mountain Division.
” I speak for all New Yorkers when I say that we will forever honor the service this young soldier gave to our nation, ” said Governor Paterson.  “He was not a native New Yorker, but we consider all soldiers stationed at Fort Drum to be one of our own.  On behalf of the people of the State, I extend our deepest sympathy to the family, friends and fellow soldiers of Sepc. Farris.”
Governor Paterson has directed the flags on all State buildings to be lowered to half-staff in honor and tribute to our State’s service members who are killed in action.

And the beat goes on….

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

–Virginia Woolf

I was in the midst of printing out this article, on the poor mothers of Haiti, when I spotted the most recenty copy of The Week, a subscription I still don’t know how I got, and whose viewpoint and presentation of the week’s events, I generally disagree with. But they do run quotations down a little sidebar, and the Woolf quotation made me sit up and take notice, because, in fact, I had been preparing to try to blog about this important article in the SUMMER 2009  Virginia Quarterly Review

I was intending to do just what Woolf was talking about: to be the observant fellow pointing at the outskirts of an agony. But it gets stranger, for the the book I had bought today with the intention of re-reading is Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag, which talks about the fact that we are constantly looking at how others suffer–on television, through photography, internet, etc., and what does that do to us?

And here’s the part that’s a little mind-blowing. The first line of Sontag’s book is In June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war. Sontag argues that, as Woolf had done when confronted with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, many of us feel that if we simply show “you” or the reader or the outside world, what have you, that those photographs will move you to the same action that we want you to take. That you will feel the same thing.

And so when I show you the ravages of starvation and malnutrition on the faces of women and children in Port-au-Prince, that you will do  ….
What?

What is it that I want you to do?

And suddenly, my desire to blog about what’s going on in Haiti feels exploitative, or some feeding of some part of myself that really, really does want to point to suffering and to tell you to do something about it. If I had the money, I think, I would change the world, feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the illiterate, stop conflict.

And I feel guilty.

As if I am doing something wrong. Why am I writing about these things?

Sontag writes (pg. 18)

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists. Warns are now also living rooms sights and sounds. Information about what is happenening elsewhere, called “news,” features conflict and violence—”If it bleeds, it leads” runs the venerable guidelines of tabloids and twenty-four-hour headline news shows–to which the the response is compassion, or indignation, or titilation, or approval, as each misery heaves into view.

We are all surveyors of the violence, the misery, the suffering of the human condition. Some of us seem to have little trouble shutting it out, insisting, for example, that what the photos at Abu Ghraib show us are simply frat pranks gone amok. Whereas I not only see in them great cruelty toward other humans, it makes me so angry that I want to shake it in your face and ask you what are you going to do about it?

Sontag’s book is brilliant and dense and I find myself wanting to quote huge swathes of it so that we could discuss it. But she is arguing among a number of interconnected points: What does the constant exposure to images of suffering do to us? Does it  make us more compassionate or less so? Does it make evil more banal and everyday? Does it desensitize us, make us cynical, passive?

But what’s the alternative? Not to look?

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflincting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties to other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.

I have grown tired of hearing people who should know better say things such as “Americans don’t torture.” Even confronted with the photographs, they put it down to one or two bad apples. They do not accept that inflicting suffering upon other human beings is part of human nature.

Some of us believe ourselves to be incapable of deliberately inflicting such pain on others, and I believe this of myself, but I have not been in the place of those whose wickedness was provoked or whose suffering was recorded.

I know that when I decide to blog about the women of the Congo, or about PTSD, or the plight of children here or of Mother Earth, it feels like it’s coming from a place of a hard-earned determination to try to see the world as it is. And what’s more, to try to persuade you to see the world my way, too.

I want you to get angry that there are 300,000 child slaves on the island of Haiti. I want us to do something about it. I want us to do something about the traumatized bodies of the women of the Bakavu.

Okay, I’m beginning to breathe now, and I see where I am going with this. This afternoon, listening to NPR, someone said something about our collective desire to put what happened during the last administration behind us. But I’m not part of that collective desire.

I want the administration that ordered the illegal tortures, the war crimes, those people–even though they are Americans, and thus I should somehow believe that we, as Americans,  are better than that which we did–I want them to be punished.

I want to be absolved of any complicity in the invasion of Iraq. I want to be absolved of any feelings of guilt I have about what my fellow countrymen and women have done to the peoples of other lands. I am not willing to accept that we are all guilty because we let ourselves be fooled into going off to war against Iraq.

I was not fooled. I was never fooled. And I shouted and shouted, along with a lot of other people, and in the end, what did our shouting get us? An illegal war. Atrocities committed in our name. Torture.

I have this terrible feeling that I am beginning to understand what it was like to be an “ordinary German.” I didn’t vote for Bush; I didn’t support his policies; I wrote as much as I could against what he and his minions were doing. But it wasn’t enough. They still did it. And because we want so much to move on from this, to put it in the past, to move on to issues of health insurance and the economy, they will most likely get away with it.

And what, ultimately, did I do to stop them? Wrote a few letters? Participated in a few protests? Wrote and wrote? Cried? Argued?

Was there something else that I should have done?

That’s the question that I’m sitting here with at this late hour of the night for me. My talents are writing and teaching. But if all I did during the Iraq War was to write against it and teach ethical values, and the war still went on, and I did nothing more: I didn’t stop paying my taxes, I didn’t move to another country, I didn’t get myself arrested. I didn’t stop one single, solitary moment of the horror of what my nation perpetuated.

That’s fine. I’m one person. To think I could have changed the situation is too narcissism in the extreme; but to not have changed the situation is painful to me.

How do I make amends for what my country has done?

What more could I have done?

And thus I return to the blog post I was going to write about the women in Haiti. I suppose I would have quoted from the article, pulled more photos from it, and then, suggested you make a donation to the charities that are keeping those women alive. But if that’s all I did, would it have been enough?

Is being the observer on the outskirts of a calamity and pointing, enough?

Anyone?

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 on its front page. Last night, mourners turned out to hold a vigil for Dr. Tiller. As usual, those who like to dance on others’ graves also turned out, with their hateful signs. These signs were similar to the hateful twitter messages that ChangeAgent has so masterfully documented over at her blog.

When President Obama said that he wanted to meet in the middle on the abortion issue a few weeks ago, I wrote then that I felt as if he had just thrown women under the bus. There is no middle with anti-abortion extremists. They are not interested in meeting in the middle. They are only interested in one thing: eradicating all abortion, all access to abortion. In many cases, they want to eliminate access to certain forms of birth control, (some–all forms of birth control), and, if they can’t get what they want by legal means, they practice terrorism.

Thus, yesterday was inevitable.

The anti-abortion violence of the 1980’s and 1990’s, when clinics and OB-GYNs were slaughtered–some in their own homes, as Dr. Slepian was, were horrible times. They have left us now, with the experience of going to Planned Parenthood and having to pass through metal detectors and bullet proof glass. If you are going into a clinic where abortions are performed, you have to pass by people who feel it is their job to judge you, no matter why you might be going to the clinic.

These people have no compassion. You may be having to go in for a D&C because your fetus has died inside you–you’re still a babykiller in their eyes. You may be the victim of rape. Babykiller. You may simply be too young, or too poor, or not able to care for a child–you’re a babykiller.

Funny, but I don’t see those same people outside urologists’ offices screaming at men that getting a vasectomy constitutes being a sperm-killer or a potential baby killer.

I wish I could write something eloquent, something full of compassion for those who oppose abortion so violently and ask, “can’t we all get along?”

But I don’t have that in me today.

I am mourning Dr. Tiller. I am mourning the women who decided today that they are too frightened to take care of their medical needs. I am mourning the areas of the country that will lose access to adequate medical care for women. I am mourning the messages that are being sent out–once again–to women that their bodies don’t matter. The only thing that counts about a woman’s body is that she can produce babies. And if she wants to not produce babies, well, if we can’t stop you legally, we’ll close the clinics, kill the doctors, tighten the noose so that you will have to travel thousands of miles to find help.

I grieve. Please don’t ask me to be rational or make sense.

I grieve. And I’m angry.

I grieve, but I will not hurt someone in return.

I grieve, but you will not silence me.

I will grieve, and then I will do whatever I can to fight for reproductive rights.

I repeat the pledge I made a few weeks ago: I will purchase Plan B contraception for any woman who needs it.

To the hate-mongers on television who equate abortion with murder: you condoned this, you encourage those who are unhinged to carry out your dirty work. You should be held accountable. I will not hurt you with violence. But I will write to your advertisers, and I will encourage those who advertise with you, to withdraw their advertising or ask them why they support terrorist sympathizers.

For this is what this is. Terrorism. Plain and Simple. Not done by “foreigners.” But by “Americans.”

There is no excuse for it. None.

And we will fight you. Peacefully. But relentlessly. We will not go back to the days of coat hangers and illegal abortions. We will not sneak around to maintain sovereignty OVER OUR OWN BODIES.

We are here. We are not going away. And you will not frighten us.

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 are much more important things going on in the world than you?”

As a woman, I’ve heard that argument more times than there are members of Congress. I heard it first as a little girl, when it was made clear to me that I need to wait my turn, to not ask for too much, to stop thinking that everything is about me.

The question last night was to President Obama, who was asked about his campaign promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act in his first 100 days. FOCA has not been signed, and last night, listening closely made me uneasy. Yes. The Obama administration has lifted the international gag rule. And yes, the courts have ruled that the Bush administration used politics over science to decide who could have access to the Morning After pill.

But President Obama, when questioned about FOCA last night, sounded suddenly like a man who was brushing off a question he no longer found all that important. Here is the full transcript of the exchange between him and the reporter:

REPORTER: As a candidate, you vowed that one of the very things you wanted to do was sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which, as you know, would eliminate federal, state and local restrictions on abortion. And at one point in the campaign when asked about abortion and life, you said that it was above — quote, ‘above my pay grade.’

Now that you’ve been president for 100 days, obviously, your pay grade is a little higher than when you were a senator.

Do you still hope that Congress quickly sends you the Freedom of Choice Act so you can sign it?

OBAMA: You know, the — my view on — on abortion, I think, has been very consistent. I think abortion is a moral issue and an ethical issue.

I think that those who are pro-choice make a mistake when they — if they suggest — and I don’t want to create straw men here, but I think there are some who suggest that this is simply an issue about women’s freedom and that there’s no other considerations. I think, look, this is an issue that people have to wrestle with and families and individual women have to wrestle with.

OBAMA: The reason I’m pro-choice is because I don’t think women take that — that position casually. I think that they struggle with these decisions each and every day. And I think they are in a better position to make these decisions ultimately than members of Congress or a president of the United States, in consultation with their families, with their doctors, with their clergy.

So — so that has been my consistent position. The other thing that I said consistently during the campaign is I would like to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies, which has started to spike up again.

And so I’ve got a task force within the Domestic Policy Council in the West Wing of the White House that is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp, to see if we can arrive at some consensus on that.

Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that’s — that’s where I’m going to focus.

I’m sorry, Mr. President. I don’t care about the Right’s ANGER on this issue. I care about the fact that there are millions of women in this country who cannot get access to abortion because of the myriad restrictions that have been placed upon the medical procedure by legislators who have no business telling women what they can or cannot do with their reproductive capabilities.

I used to be a lot more moderate in my views. I used to be a lot more willing to listen to the other side’s arguments about what’s involved in abortion. But not anymore. Women die every day in childbirth. Women die every day from botched abortions. Women die every day in Africa from injuries, caused by rape, that are exacerbated by pregnancy. THIS IS NOT A MORAL ISSUE. THIS IS A PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE.

Mr. President, this is also an economic issue. If you do indeed care for the working class and middle class who are suddenly struggling to put food on the table, don’t you think you should be worried about the women out there who can’t put food in one more child’s mouth? And don’t tell me she should be using birth control. EVEN WITH INSURANCE, insurance companies manage to get away with charging outrageous co-pays for birth control pills and other devices. (One pack of pills is $25 a month co-pay. That’s a lot of money when you’re struggling.)

If we were talking about any other health issue out there, would we be having this argument? Why, when it comes to women’s bodies and their rights to control their fertility, do these issues suddenly become about morals? Why are you, President Obama, backing away from a promise that you made so that you might spend some time trying to appease those people who do not want women to have abortions at any time for any reason? They are not to be reasoned with.

You cannot make them happy. You cannot make them like you on this issue.

Please stop. Please just do what you said you were going to do. Lift the restrictions on a woman’s health options.

PLEASE.

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 threw up when she found out. But she ended up going along, helping sell the voters on her husband’s character as a truth teller and charm as a loving husband and father. She had put so many quarters in the shiny slot machine of their mutual ambition. It was hard to walk away.

Just as it’s hard to walk away from her desire to prosecute her husband and his former girlfriend now in public, while still taking the marriage “month by month.”

Ms. Edwards also mentions how frustrating it was to be married to a man who appeared much younger than she, and she blames his charming, good looks for the pass that was made at him by Rielle. If she hadn’t made the pass, Edwards would have been a good boy. Like Dowd, I call bullshit.

I don’t know John Edwards personally. (And as a point of disclosure, he was the person I supported early in the primaries, until he fired Amanda Marcotte as part of his staff because of the feminist stuff she wrote on her blog.) But I’ve known the John Edwards of the world. Young, handsome men who marry women who are ambitious, maternal, nurturing, smart as hell, and someone who, in another life, might have been their mother. In such a marriage, a man like Edwards gets to remain the child, always being taken care of by his wife.

In the case in my extended family, the man in question let his wife work menial jobs to put him through law school, and then a year later, after she should have been enjoying the good life with him, he impregnated his legal secretary, walked out on his family, and refused to accept responsibility for the children he had had with his first wife. And he’s still a charming, handsome man who has hit on me in the past. I just saw through him.

But, back to Maureen Dowd. I know she’s a smart woman. But I don’t understand why she doesn’t understand why someone needs to write about their pain. Maybe Ms. Edwards is trying to embarrass her husband–it’s not as if he doesn’t deserve it–but perhaps she’s trying to exorcise her own pain.

We’re writers here. Many of us deal with the most painful things you can imagine by writing about them. And we don’t just write them in our journals and forget about them. We post them, because we need someone, anyone, out there, to get why we’re hurting.

It’s part of being human. We don’t have the extended families and communities where such matters might have been resolved by many nights of tears and friends and their comfort. Now, what many of us have is this need to reach out to strangers. To say, “this happened to me.” And to know that someone will read the essay/book/poem who has been through the same thing, and somewhere in this universe, a connection will have been made.

Dowd is smart, but when she writes something like this:

Asked by Oprah in a taping for Thursday’s show whether she’s still in love with her husband, she replied, “You know, that’s a complicated question.”

The really complicated question is what she hopes to gain from this book.

I want to ask her the question. WHY do you write. Is it a purely intellectual exercise? Do you not hope to make a connection with someone out there?

The way to our hearts is not always through our brains. If Elizabeth Edwards needs to write out her pain, regardless of whether anyone buys the book, who am I–or Maureen Dowd–to tell her not to do it?

The only thing I wish for Ms. Edwards is peace. If the book helps her get there, than more power to her.