FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

“It does not profit a man to marry. For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?”

St. John Chrysostom

Sensible, decent Jimmy Carter got it right again. “This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. It is widespread. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a higher authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights across the world for centuries. The male interpretations of religious texts and the way they interact with and reinforce traditional practices justify some of the most pervasive, persistent, flagrant, and damaging examples of human-rights abuses.”‘

Francine Prose has once again turned her attention to the status of women (did I just see you yawn? Go ahead. Click away if you wish.)  in various cultures world-wide.

While it has become fashionable to bash Muslims as being the most severe in their treatment of women; after all, the most strict enforcement of sharia sees women being whipped for showing an ankle or their face, or being stoned to death for adultery, we continue to overlook the “death by a thousand papercuts” that both Christian and Jewish women are subjected to, even in this country, where, to hear some tell it, women have got no cause to be bitching about inequality.

But, you know, when Jimmy Carter makes the painful decision to quit the church to which he has belonged his entire life because of its insistence on the inferiority of women, we need to be paying attention.

The right wing in this country comprises not only teabaggers who think all taxes are the devil’s handiwork and that Obama is a socialist, it is also full of folks who believe that women need to be at home, making babies, and keeping their mouths shut.

And yes, I know. I’ve written about this before. I’ve written both as an angry woman reclaiming my body and as a scholar attempting to understand why we do not take the suffering of the body seriously.

As I wrote upon the death of Terri Schiavo:Terri Schiavo’s death has affected me, not because I knew the woman, but because I know about the thing that drove her to her collapse in the first place. Eating disorders. Hatred of the body. The desire to hurt the thing that will not be controlled-the body, the female body.

So much of what I write about comes back to the body. It is the topic I cannot stay away from. It is the source of my politics. It is the source of my art. It cannot be separated from my brain. I am not a Cartesian. It’s not just that I think; it’s that I feel, and I touch, taste, smell. It’s that I have orgasms, that I know the touch of flesh on flesh. It is that I have felt a baby pass through my birth canal, have felt the stirring of life within me. It is that I have been penetrated by another human being. It is that I have experienced pain. It is that I have looked at my body and seen a reflection of imperfection that I wanted to fix, and in seeing that, I have starved it, purged it, wished it different. And so, having been so much an inhabitant of my body, that I declare that bodies are the site of resistance. It is that I think the government has no right to tell me which of my senses I should privilege, and which of my senses I should discipline.

But because I am also a thinker, I think often of the sources of body hatred in this culture. They are myriad. We all know them. Today, I focus on one. This is inspired by a number of things, too many to go into here. But I picked up the Bible again recently, and concomitantly, I re-read Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. It has made me want to write the following.

Let’s start with Genesis. With the creation of man and woman. Did you know there are two creation tales? The one that we usually remember is the one that says that woman was made from the rib of Adam, that he came first. But that’s not the first one.

Chapter 1, Verse 27. ”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

In this version of the story, God is both male and female. Both male and female are expressions of God’s essence. And yet, that’s not the story we are told in Sunday school. Frequently, if we are told of Eve at all, we are told of her being the source of original sin. And what was original sin, exactly?

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

Eve didn’t give humanity sin. She gave humanity knowledge And God’s punishment for that had been like something handed out by an angry father. “How dare you speak back to me. How dare you question my authority. I will make you sorry that you were ever born.”

Not only that, Eve becomes aware that she has a body, and in that awareness, a whole other world of sensory experience is opened up to her. Think about it: What does the term “to know someone biblically” mean?

As Scarry writes:

Part of the knowledge that comes with eating of the tree of good and evil is that they stand, without protest, as creatures with bodies in the presence of one who has no body. It is crucial that these two be said together: the problematic knowledge is not that man has a body; the problematic knowledge is not that God has no body; the problematic knowledge is that man has a body and God has no body-that is, that the unfathomable difference in power between them in part depends on this difference in embodiness … their awareness of the body will soon be correspondingly be heightened: the body is made a permanently preoccupying category in the pain of childbirth, the pain of work required to bring forth food…

And so, God places a curse on Eve and Adam’s bodies. He makes it that they will die. He curses women to bring forth children in pain. He makes their bodies the source of suffering. He makes the fact that God has an urepresentable body and humans have a body the source of suffering, of separation, of pain.

And I think that we’ve been laboring under that ever since. Do I believe the Genesis story? No. Not personally. But it doesn’t matter. Because so many people do, and for them, the body is the thing that got us into trouble with God. And other people’s bodies are still getting us into trouble with God. Unruly women, gays and lesbians, teenagers having sex, people insisting that they have the right to determine how and when they die. It’s all, according to some, designed to piss God off. And we know what happens when God gets pissed off. Look through the Old Testament. There’s plenty there. You want something that will really set you back on your heels? Look at the Book of Lamentations.

Elaine Scarry has an entire section of her book devoted to God’s lack of body. Yes, of course, in the New Testament, God does have a body in the form of Jesus Christ. And there’s a hell of a lot of suffering that gets inflicted on that body. But in the Old Testament, God does not have a body. And what’s more, the Fourth Commandment specifically commands that humans not dare to imagine what that body might look like-at least not by making graven images of it.

What does it mean that God does not have a body? To quote Scarry:

But to have no body is to have no limits on one’s extension out into the world; conversely, to have a body, a body made emphatic by being continually altered through various forms of creation, instruction (e.g., bodily cleansing), and wounding, is to have one’s sphere of extension contracted down to the small circle of one’s immediate physical presence. Consequently, to be intensely embodied is the equivalent of being unrepresented and (here as in many secular contexts) is almost always the condition of those without power.

In other words, to be represented by a body is to be finite, to be less powerful, to be controllable. It is not the suffering of Christ that is offered by the right wing as the source of their politics. If it were, their politics would be more compassionate, would recognize the body as the source of pleasure but also of pain. Instead, they make references to the Old Testament, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to Leviticus, to all the parts of the Bible where God seems to punish humans for simply being human.

So, I’ve been thinking about all of this as the drama of Terri Schiavo has played out. I’ve been thinking of a young woman who believed her body was the enemy. Who set out to control it in the only way she knew how. By purging it, and in purging it, destroyed it.

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Francine Prose returns to many of these same themes. She, too, sees women’s bodies as the sticking point for male-centered religion. Let’s face it, women’s bodies are so damn messy.

Ranke-Heinemann tracks much of this back to the body-hating, pleasure-despising strain introduced into the early church by the Essenes and Gnostics. Later, the early and medieval saints and theologians would show little interest in concealing their horror of sex and the body. According to one thought often attributed to Thomas Aquinas, any variation on the so-called missionary position was as sinful as having intercourse with one’s own mother.

The debate over sex with the beautiful versus sex with the ugly had its twisted roots in the belief that there was an almost mathematical ratio between pleasure and sin. The greater the pleasure, the worse the evil. Apparently, too, there also was considerable worry about ejaculation as something that drains and weakens the male, a dangerous process in general and particularly in the presence of the predatory woman who, unlike her mate, doesn’t lose in sex a life-sustaining fluid. The rabbinic admonition to think of a woman as “a pitcher of filth with its mouth full of blood” was echoed in the work of the twelfth-century theologian Petrus Cantor. “Consider that the most lovely woman has come into being from a foul-smelling drop of semen; then consider her midpoint, how she is a container of filth; and after that consider her end, when she will be food for worms.”

Julia Kristeva, the French feminist, has argued that the “abject,” literally, that which we throw away from us, includes all of our bodily fluids. And women simply have more fluids than men. No wonder, then, that religion, which strives to have a spiritual relationship with God, is disgusted by those things that keep it earthbound.

Women cannot help but be aware of her relationship to the earth. She bleeds each month, most often in tune with the moon. When she gives birth, it is in a rush of fluid, and blood, and shit, that firmly anchors the process of becoming human to the things about our bodies that we claim disgust us.

Theologians debated for years whether Jesus shat or pissed. They could not accept that a perfect being would produce waste products. What to do then, with a creature, that produces waste products constantly–and does not die as a result?

Increasingly, I find the body phobia of each of the three monotheistic religions to be pathological, and that pathology turned into holiness.

I think I’d rather stay a woman. Grounded. Of the earth. Messy. Real.

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?

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.

 It was Monday morning and I woke up to prepare my kids for school, when I noticed that Busi was still sleeping.  So I went outside to Bongiwe’s room to wake her up.  To my surprise and disgust, Busi had slept in the same room with Bongi- her boyfriend- and Lugelo, Bongi’s daughter.

The thing about Bongi’s boyfriend is that he is a convicted rapist.  He was just released from a 15 year jail sentence, for gang raping a girl from our neighbourhood years ago.  And I was against the affair, but also knew that I can’t tell her how to lead her life.  But, again I thought it was not fair that Lerato has to see the guy all over again.

I humbly asked my sister to go meet with her lover some place not at home, and we had a fight.  After sometime I asked her not to sleep in the same room with her daugther and the guy, and we had a fight again.  Then I decided to take a back seat.  After all it’s her life and her daughters.

Oh my god!  I really lost it when I walked in the room to find Busi and the boyfriend.  I couldn’t even control my anger.  We had a heated argument that turned physical.  Truly speaking, I hate the fact that I was born into this family.

My mom and gran believe that I am wrong and Bongi is right.  They think this guy learned his lesson and he won’t do it again.  But I say a leopard wont change it’s spot.  As for Bongi, what is she teaching her young sister?  How can she sleep in the same room with her boyfriend and Busi? As for my parents, why cant they separate wrong from right?  In our culture it’s wrong, immoral and disrespecting for a boy to sleep in a girl’s home.  I don’t understand how a woman can date a man who has no regard for another woman’s feelings.  A man who violated, humiliated another woman’s rights.  A man who took away something special and unique from this girl, something that he can’t take back.  Not even a jail sentence can erase that awful day.

How can my sister fall in love with this animal?  How does she really feel when she makes love to an ex-rapist?  How can she bring this man in our lives for god’s sake?  We also have baby girls.  Isn’t there a chance that one day the devil can start whispering to him?  I don’t want to be there when something like that happens.

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.

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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….

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 put me in my place–violently, if need be. (Paul Krugman’s column this morning is masterful. Please read it.)

I see at work in our culture. I have written before about laying claim to my own body and rejecting government control over what I do with it. I have written my own privacy manifesta, declaring that my privacy is sacrosanct, and not subject to invasion by either the government or the moral scolds in our culture. And, in the past, disgusted with the Democratic leadership over issues such as confirming John Roberts and Samuel Alito without so much as a peep of protest, I considered leaving the party.

You know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of continually having to defend my right to my body. I’m tired of having to say that I’m not your brood mare, that I decide what enters my body, what I carry within my body. I’m tired of this fight. But I have daughters, so I’ll continue this fight as long as I need to.

But I want to say something else. Even as I defend and protect the boundaries of my flesh,  I am more than my body. Women are more than their bodies. Sometimes, I don’t think that everyone thinks so. I’ve read some of the recent posts to OS, and quite frankly, I’ve been sickened. Some of the things that have been written about women make us into nothing but cunts and asses; reduce us to our parts. Our mouths become only good for blow jobs. Our cunts and asses are only good for penetration. Our bodies are broken, bent, spread-eagled, impregnated and harvested for pleasure.

You all know that I’m not anti-sex. I write erotica. Multiple orgasms are … well … you know. And you all know how much I love the man who is my partner.

So, I don’t hate sex or men.

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I do feel as if we are going backwards as a culture. If, at one point, we were moving toward a sense that women could control their own fertility, women were entitled to equal rights, women’s minds were as fine as men’s and we could compete with them in all intellectual fields, these days, I feel as if we’re having to re-establish that a woman is more than her uterus.

The right wing spews hate against gynecologists who perform abortions, and then refuses to accept responsibility for inciting hate crimes. In fact, to hear some tell it, it’s the pro-choice insistence on a woman’s right to abortion that caused the murder of Dr. George Tiller, not the hateful shit spewed by the right-wing talking wingnuts.

A Latina woman is nominated for the Supreme Court, and suddenly, we have discussions about whether menstruation will affect her ability to make decisions (or whether the pronunciation of her last name is unAmerican, or whether her eating of spicy food is unAmerican, or whether “empathy” makes her unqualified). Never mind that she went to some of the finest universities in the country. She’s a woman, and her body will prevent her from being able to think “rationally.”

I could go on and on.

But I want to get back to the point that I am more than my body. This is not the 15th century, for fuck’s sake. We are not debating the four humors that make up the human body and how women cannot be as smart as men because she’s composed of the wrong essences. We shouldn’t be talking about “hysteria” or “wandering wombs.”

We should not be continuing the old canard, the oldest piece of bullshit, that male is normal and female is “other.”

We should be talking about who is the most qualified to be in the various positions that will help this country get out of the mess it’s in. We should be focusing on the contributions that both men and women can make to improving the world. We should be celebrating the fact that we all bring to the various tables different talents, and we should not immediately eschew one set of talents because the person who possesses them also happens to possess a vagina.

I really didn’t think that I would be 46 and having to argue that a woman can be as good as a man. I didn’t think I would be 46 and having to read defenses of being a misogynist asshole. I thought, mistakenly, that we were going to be past this. I thought that men, women–and the genders in-between–could treat each other with respect, could revel in each other’s brains and hearts, could celebrate difference, instead of either apologizing for it or denigrating it.

I guess I was wrong.

And so, here I am. It’s 2009, I’m 46 years old, and I have to say, I am more than my tits and ass and cunt. I have a brain and a spirit. I am a human being.

I am a human being.

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.

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 watching. The mall seemed full of locals, and I started noticing something. Virtually everyone was carrying around extra weight. Lots of belly fat. Some of them were so slowed up by the extra weight that they lumbered. I started looking for lean people. There were a few, but as a percentage, it was less than 20 percent.

I know that we’re engaged in a national crisis over American obsesity. We blame television, and our sedentary lifestyles, and the availability of cheap, high-fat food. We drink too much soda. We eat too much candy and potato chips and fast food. We don’t exercise. It’s all our fault. We’re the richest nation on earth and we’re a bunch of slobs. Blah Blah Blah.

I’d like to offer some thoughts.

I have been re-reading Caroline Knapp’s brilliant book: Appetites: Why Women Want.   In it, Knapp (who died way too young at 42 of cancer) wrote of women’s appetites: for food, for sex, for material goods. She did not condemn desire. Rather, in a complex argument that I’m treating schematically here, she looked at how desire is twisted in our culture. For white, middle-class women especially, (and Knapp admits that her observations/experiences are based on her own position as white and middle class) thwarted desire lies at the heart of many of our cultural maladies.

It is the illusion of choice that thwarts the desire. It is the illusion that a well-educated, intelligent white woman is going to have access to real power in this culture that ultimately turns desire in on itself, twists it, cripples it, so that the thwarted desire becomes the source of suffering. In a way, it’s the Noble Truths of Buddhism. In another way, it’s what it’s like to be told you have power in America when you do not.

And Knapp argues that for women, who despite the seeming accommodations made for women’s liberation by the powers that be, are especially affected by this thwarted desire. As I said, she’s writing as a white, middle-class woman, and how this thwarted desire manifests itself in other groups of people is not in her expertise.

But her argument spoke to me.

Knapp was an anorexic. In a way, this provokes a “ho hum” reaction in me. After all, just how many more books do we need to read about white anorexia? But this book spoke to me because I also have an eating disorder. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’ve dealt with bulimia for the last several years. I thought it was a thing of the past. Occasionally, (but not for the past ten days, thank god) bulimia called to me. And sometimes, I answered that call.

It’s embarrassing to admit. What sane, dignified, intelligent person wants to admit that sometimes, after eating a meal, or a bar of chocolate, or an ice cream sundae, she would stick her finger down the back of her throat and vomit? Especially one who is the mother of two daughters and who is desperate for them to not emulate that kind of behaviour? I found ways of being secretive about it, including going outside and vomiting in the backyard, away from the house. In the dark. Alone. So no one could see. It wasn’t a full-scale relapse. But it happened often enough that I could smell relapse in the miasma of my own vomitus.

My bulimia is fueled by a few things. Basic brain chemistry, for one. My genetic line on both sides of my family condemn me to craziness of various stripes. I am beyond grateful that my brain chemistry can be treated with drugs, and I no longer worry about the fact that I have to take antidepressants. Illness is illness. Despite the fact that I am in the happiest relationship of my life, that I am in love, that I am loved, that my children are doing well, and that nothing, at this moment, seeks to harm me, I feel powerlessness and a need to run. It’s a potent combination, and there have been  days in the past where that combination has knocked me on my ass. Or, knocked me to my knees, bending over a toilet.

I will tell you one more thing before I get back to those folks at the mall. Every time I threw up in the past, I was entirely conscious of what I was doing. The conversation went something like this: “Throwing up is not going to solve your problems.” And the response in my head was always something like, “Fuck you. It’s going to make me feel better.” In a situation where I cannot seem to move myself out of the position I’m currently in, the fact that I could manipulate my body endorphins, exercise control over my food intake, hurt myself, was moving myself. It was power. False power. But power nonetheless.

I am starting to take my power back. I am working my ass off on some writing projects that I hope will get me somewhere I want to be. I am reaching out to people who I love. I am running, or biking, or hiking, and loving the world in which spring tentatively claims the frozen earth.

But,  I look around and I see a lot of folks who are obese. And I found myself wondering why there has been such a growth of obesity in the past couple of decades. And all the reasons in the third paragraph still apply.

But I think obesity is a metaphor. I could just as easily be focusing on the need to shop. Or the need to drink. To take pills. To obsess. But, just for now, I want to talk about food, because food, for me, is an issue.

I think that my problem with food is reflective of a larger problem in our culture. We, as a nation, do not know how to make ourselves feel better. We do not know how to move ourselves out of the positions that the vast majority of us find ourselves in. We have been gradually stripped of our power. We cannot afford to buy the toys that we could that distracted us. When I was a kid, many, many people had RVs, and boats, and a new car every year. Middle class folks. But the middle class is drowning, and the poor, well, the poor are long underwater.

So, what do we have? We have food. Cheap, fattening, sweet food. And our televisions. The solace of food is what many of us give ourselves because we have nothing else. We can see what we want: it’s there on our television sets every night. Taunting us. But we cannot have it. We send our children off to fight in an unjust war. We work our barely-getting-by jobs. We struggle to make ends meet. And we eat. It doesn’t change anything. But for those moments when that sweetness is on our tongues, we feel better in our powerlessness.

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 of each other’s sight. But the best games by far are just the two of us, bent over the Scrabble board, fingering our tiles, our toes touching underneath the table, attempting to outsmart the other one. For two people who are linguaphiles, love the way words feel on our tongues, translating those words into wooden tiles that we lay down on a board as an offering brings with it tension. Frequently erotic.

These days, a game of Scrabble is almost like foreplay. And, like foreplay, we approach it differently each time. Sometimes, I am brazen, playing words like “cunt” and “suck” and “sexy” and “turgid,” to see if the words on the board can get a rise out of him. We joke that I should have all the letters “c” and “q” taken away from me, because if I’m not playing “cunt,” I play “quim” or “quiver.” I want to make sure that he knows where my mind is. It’s on his beautiful brain, of course, and that kind, lovely face that I have memorized. The blue eyes, the silver hair, the sweet mouth that has found so many different ways to bring me to orgasm that sometimes, just looking at his lips makes me wet.

Other times, we play it as a subtle dance. We trade off our 15-point words, matching each other word for word. Rob has taught me to play defensively, and I’ve have learned not to play the clever six-letter word that will net me 11 points when I can play the three-letter word that cuts off all access to a triple word score for him. Kills me sometimes, when I want to show how clever I can be, but sometimes I luck out. Last week, I placed joyful on a triple word score, right after I had placed quest on a double letter for the q and a double word score for the whole thing. I managed to catch up to him after trailing him for 80 points most of the game.

Last night though, he whipped me. We had played a quiet game, and both of us had average about 20 points a word. And then, he did it. There was an “s” on the board and he managed to play the word “christens.” 7-letters for 50 point bonus, plus he was on a double word score. I called him a name then. A multi-syllabic multi-use of the word “fuck” phrase. I didn’t mean it, of course. Just feeling a little competitive. He had left a triple word space open, but none of the letters I had would fit into that space. I played some 11-point word and sulked.

Then, as if to scrape me against the coral until I bled, he played ‘zins’ through the triple word. “That’s an abbreviation,” I said. “It’s in the Scrabble dictionary,” he said. “Yeah, the same one that has the bullshit word “za” and “qi.” We have long arguments about how the Scrabble dictionary is dumbing down the game, making it easier for people with small vocabularies to use their “q’s: and “z”s” The point total for that word came to something like 66. He had jumped over a hundred points in front of me in two moves.

I wasn’t crushed. After all, I’ve beaten him several games in a row, a streak he puts down to the fact that he’s taught me to play the game as it should be played. With strategy, and distraction, and staring at letters until your forehead drops blood onto the tiles from the effort.

I started to say something. “You just hush now,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re done.”

The game finished. 299 to 235. We put the tiles away, our fingers touching as one of us folded the board into a funnel and the other held open the bag.

We’re in the process of moving. Boxes are everywhere, and we went into a spare room that doesn’t get used much. It contains a futon, a desk, and a closet full of clothes. Rob wanted my assistance choosing which clothes should finally be packed off to Goodwill, and so for half an hour, I watched him change in and out of shirts and pants. I could feel myself growing restless.

I’m always restless around Rob. We’ve been together 15 months, and yet, it’s not unusual for us to make love, fuck, screw, roll around like teenagers several times a day. Still can’t keep our hands off each other. Still pass each other and reach out a hand to touch flesh, reconnect.

When he was done changing clothes, he pinned me to the bed. Began with my lips and neck, and worked his way down my body with his tongue. My body responded the way it always does: multiple orgasms that fall on top of one another. I’m vocal when I come. I grunt, and moan, and scream, and plead, and come close to tears. When Rob is inside me, the world comes to an end. It’s just him and me. Nobody else is in the room. Nobody else matters. It’s just flesh and fluid and the sounds of love.

Sometimes, I try to compose love poems to him while he’s touching me, but he always tells me to be quiet. He says it in a commanding voice that makes me even more hot. For someone who thinks too much, who speaks too much, having to experience sex quietly, take it in in the moment that it’s happening, changes the experience.

I am not passive during sex; suffice it to say that a woman who makes her living by producing words is quite adept at using her mouth to express her sexual love.

Rob has sent me a note that he has started yet another Scrabble game via.  Silly game, but oh such serious stakes.

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 belief that if a lesbian is gang-raped by men, the lesbian part of herself will be driven out, and she will emerge from the violence as a heterosexual.

I thought that I would devote an entire diary to this topic, but I found, this morning, that I just could not go there. Rape is epidemic: not only is rape a tactic of war in most of central Africa, I have read recently that rape is being used in Haiti to enforce social discipline, and now, in South Africa, to enforce heterosexual norms.

Not to mention the huge numbers of rapes that take place in the United States each and every day.

Instead, I went searching through things I’ve written before. I hoped to find something that would explain to me why, why, hatred of homosexuals and women continue to persist in this world. Why, for example, the fact that Obama is even considering not overturning the bigoted “Defense of Marriage” Act–a legal abomination if ever there was one.

So, what follows is my wrestling with what it is about homosexuality (and by that same logic–women’s bodies) that frightens fundamentalists so. (And I mean fundamentalists of the three major religions–all of whom have strictures on the female body and against homosexuality.)

This diary is not intended to offend anyone, and yet, I have a feeling it will. It’s not intended as a criticism of Christianity; it’s an attempt to understand why theocrats hate and fear homosexuality so much. If we lived in an Islamic country, I’d be making similar arguments, but the majority of the theocrats in this country are Christian. Therefore, I ask these questions of the relationship between Christ and those men.

The theocrats’ hatred of the body is a particular fascination of mine. It’s a topic that haunts me, and, as things get increasingly worse in the United States in terms of the attacks on privacy, and as I feel the water getting hotter and the frogs still not jumping out of the pot, I search for answers, for words, for a way to understand them, extend compassion to them, and change their minds. Yes. I want to be the queen of the universe and make these people see the light. I really want to release them from their fears, because I think they are a people driven by fear. Fear is the basis of addiction. And fundies act like addicts in ways that I’ve articulated before.

And so, I feel obliged to try to feel my way through the relationship between the erotic and the spiritual. The sacred and the profane. Here’s my thinking.

Attempting to find the connections between the sacred and the erotic seems a fool’s enterprise. Immediately, my own intellect begins to mock me, presenting images of lascivious priests, porn shop editions of the Kama Sutra, or jokes about the ResERECTION or the Second Coming.

But, when I can release myself from the shackles of my rational self, I can admit some things. I don’t know if god exists. But I do know that my understanding of the sacred, those moments when awe replaces fear, is linked to my understanding of the erotic-those moments when the distance between two bodies is breached by contact. The hum of flesh against flesh.

I recognize this aspect of myself, this desire, need, to find my connection to spiritual bliss in genital contact. After all, so many of the feelings used by mystics to describe their encounters with the divine have always sounded to my ear like descriptions of orgasm or its afterglow. When scholars make this argument, that religious ecstasy is sexual ecstasy sublimated, they are accused of reductionism. But what of persons such as me, who feel in ways that we are not always able to articulate, that sexual intimacy is as close as we’ll ever come to feeling the fire of the divine? Am I the only one who feels this way?

To speak about sex as if it is capable of elevating us is to risk being accused of not being spiritual enough, of living only on an earthly plain, of privileging the body over the soul. But why? There are few religions that celebrate the body as the gateway to the divine. Mostly, we are advised to subjugate the body to the spirit, to discipline it, to control it, to prevent it from carrying us into excess. And this has never made sense to me.

It has on an intellectual level. I understand the notion of dualities: sacred and profane, suffering and pleasure, good and evil, man and woman. As someone who has studied gender in historical context, I could riff for hours on the association of women with the body, men with spirit, and how both women and the body became the gateways through which evil, the Devil, sin found ways to enter the world.

I look at the scriptural justifications for the ways that Fundies behave in the world, and most frequently, they cite Leviticus, or other books from the Old Testament. Or they quote Paul, who was not Jesus. Or, as I read in an issue of Harper’s, they cite the kick-ass Jesus from Revelations. That kick-ass Jesus scares the bejesus out of me, but perhaps he is easier for certain men to relate to.

When I was in Florida a few months ago, I saw a plethora of bumper stickers that read “Real Men Love Jesus.” I’ve been thinking about that bumper sticker ever since. What it means. Real men don’t love the faggy Jesus; you know, the one who had feelings, who wept, who felt suffering on the cross, who urged us to love our neighbors as ourselves, who commanded us to love one another. Love one another. Not to throw stones, missiles, drop bombs. That Jesus may well qualify as a sensitive new-age guy, a metrosexual, a wimp. How can a real man love that Jesus? Loving that Jesus means loving that part of themselves, and well, real men don’t seem to do that.

I cannot speak for other women, but I can speak from my position as a heterosexual woman. When I have read many accounts of male experiences of interaction with the divine, the most frequent image is that of a piercing or penetration by the divine spirit. The metaphor is important for several reasons. I would argue that one of the reasons that there has been such an insistence on separating sex from the sacred is the fear that describing sex and the penetration of the soul homoeroticizes the relationship between men and their gods. I have never seen an instance where a male mystic refers to being engulfed by the divine.

In many hagiographies or confessions about the coming to the divine, there is a sort of negotiation that goes on. A negotiation in which the stubborn soul refuses the love of God, and then at some point, there is surrender.

The negotiations between men and women are similar. And what is the point of the negotiation?  The point of the negotiation is surrender. What is it for a man to surrender to a woman? Is it to imagine what it is to be the glove, rather than the hand? To be the sheath. That is what vagina means, you know. Sheath. From the Latin. I find it fascinating that a part of the female body, the canal through which women bring forth new life, the first journey we experience as human beings-sliding through a fleshy tunnel into the light and cold-that the name for that conduit is not related to its function in birth, but rather, bears the name of a holder of a weapon. A scabbard-the covering in which you insert your sword.

Is this what men think of their penises as? Weapons? Swords? But a sheath is where you keep your knife to keep it safe, to keep it when you’re not using it for violence. It’s a place for it to rest until the next time it’s needed. When you place your sword inside its sheath, you’ve put down your weapon, you’ve disarmed yourself, you’ve made yourself vulnerable. You’ve surrendered.

In many of these hagiographies, men lay down the life of the sword for the life of the spirit. In many of the images of the warrior Christ, he bears the sword of justice. Perhaps I’m being oversensitive to phallic imagery, but I am speculating as to why the most fundamentalist of religious extremists hate and fear homosexuality so much.

What is the experience of spiritual surrender? In the accounts I’ve read, it’s the sense of penetration, of becoming whole, of feeling a divine presence move into your body. It’s not unlike the experience for women of heterosexual sex. I’m not a gay man. I don’t know if penetrative gay sex inspires the same feelings.

But I come back to the fear again. I come back to the fear of homosexuality. If your deity is male, and you want to be infused with his spirit, what is involved in that process? How can you maintain a distance between your experience of the sacred and more bodily experiences?

 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 claiming that their morals didn’t allow them to dispense the drugs,  I wrote the following, in which I offered to serve as a drug mule for underage girls:

The FDA got it half-right this morning. Plan B contraception has been cleared for over the counter dispensation, but only if you are over the age of 18. Younger than 18? You’re shit outta luck, unless you’re willing to go to the doctor’s office and get a prescription yourself. How you’re supposed to do that without your parent’s knowledge, since I’m assuming they’ll get the insurance bills, is beyond me. If you’re lucky, there will be a Planned Parenthood office in your town. But again, that will require luck.

So, here’s the deal. I am making a pledge, which I fully intend to keep. If you need Plan B contraception, and you contact me, I will go to my local pharmacy and get it for you. Your parents don’t have to know.  The CWFA will likely lobby Congress for a bill that will make my activities illegal, but I do not give a rat’s ass for what the CWFA thinks of me.

This is an act of civil disobedience.

I am a whore. Or at least, that’s what I think I’m supposed to accept these days. You see, I’ve used Plan B contraception–twice–because, for various reasons, I didn’t use birth control while I was having sex, and because, at 41, I do not want to get pregnant again, I resorted to Plan B. Pharmacists who want to dispense shame would think of me as a whore.

The pharmacists who refuse to dispense the medication, even with a doctor’s prescription, claim to be doing so because it’s against their morals to do so. They claim they’re saving fetuses. But really? I think they’re punishing women who have sex. Again.

Rather than fight them on this, allow them to cast shame on me for being sexually active and single, I’m just going to come out and say it. I am a whore. I don’t want to get pregnant. I have the wherewithall to fight you, but many, many women–those who feel shame about having sex in this culture don’t have the resources to fight you. And so I’m fighting this on their behalf.

Acquiring Plan B contraception is not as easy as it is made out to be. Several months ago, I started dating a man, things progressed quickly one hot, lazy summer afternoon, and we had sex. The next morning, I woke up, counted days, felt the familiar twinge in my side, and realized I was ovulating. Plan B seemed like a damned good idea. I called my doctor’s office. I asked the receptionist to have one of the docs phone in a prescription for Plan B. “We don’t do that,” she said, in an extremely tight voice. I could hear the disapproval dripping from her voice. I called Planned Parenthood, got an appointment for that morning. I had to pay a full appointment fee and then pay for medication. Not cheap. But I did it. And, I’m delighted to say, did not get pregnant that month.

A few weeks later, I was in to see my doctor for my regular check-up. I asked her why they wouldn’t phone in Plan B contraception prescriptions. “But we do,” she said. I told her what happened. It seems the receptionist had taken it upon herself to deny me Plan B. I have a feeling that said receptionist was going to be in big trouble after I left.

A few months after that, I had cause to use Plan B again. This time, my doctor’s office called the prescription in to my local pharmacy and I picked it up later that day. The pharmacist, who dispenses all of my pills, handed me the drugs with no hassles or lectures, simply asked me if I had any questions. What a relief.

Why am I telling you all of this? For several reasons.

First. Even for me, acquiring Plan B contraception the first time turned out to be a hassle and fairly expensive. If I had been in different circumstances, I may have given up before I got the medication, and then, voila, a few weeks later, may have found myself facing an unwanted pregnancy.

Second. It doesn’t really matter how many pharmacists are, in fact, refusing to dispense the medication. The fact that the ones who are refusing are garnering so much attention means that any woman who gets Plan B is going to have to worry that she’s going to get the pharmacist who’s going to refuse.

In the late 19th century, the Comstock laws made it a federal offense for certain information to cross state lines. In other words, magazines and mail that contained information about birth control was not allowed to circulate. Even though many of the methods of birth control we have now–condoms, diaphragms, and others–were available, the information that they existed could not circulate freely in the culture. Women often didn’t know that they had options.

Increasingly, it’s not that birth control is not available, it’s that the knowledge that it’s available is being repressed. If you live in a small town and need Plan B, are you going to know where you can go if your local pharmacist decides not to dispense your prescription? How can we help these women?

Finally, the pharmacist’s job is not to dispense shame. I don’t know what the figures are for men who’ve attempted to have their Viagra prescriptions filled and been denied. I can’t imagine that there’s been a lot of these cases. Because, when it all comes down to it, it’s still okay for men to have sex. But, because I have sex, and I want access to birth control after the fact, I’m a whore.

I think I’m going to have that embroidered on a pillow.

Needless to say, even among my liberal posters, my plan to start a Plan B underground was seen as usurping a parent’s right to be involved in their child’s sexual health decisions. But you know what? After your child becomes sexually active, you don’t get to be a part of that unless your child asks you to. I’m sorry to say, but that’s the way it works. Either your kid trusts you enough to talk to you about sex, or they don’t. And if they don’t, well tough shit for you.

Today, a judge finally declared that, at least in terms of 17-year olds, the decision to limit Plan B contraception to those over 18 was a “political decision.”

“These political considerations, delays, and implausible justifications for decision-making are not the only evidence of a lack of good faith and reasoned decision-making,” Korman said. “Indeed, the record is clear that the FDA’s course of conduct regarding Plan B departed in significant ways from the agency’s normal procedures regarding similar applications to switch a drug product from prescription to non-prescription use.”

See? This is why some of us are so damned pissed off about the way women are treated. You can buy cold medicine that may screw up your heartbeat, you can buy Tylenol and Ibuprofen, which in overdoses can be fatal, but be a 17-year old who just had sex and thinks, “I don’t want to get pregnant,” and the Bush administration decided you should remain screwed.

So, the question is, will the drug now be available over the counter to younger women?

You know the social conservatives “decried” the decision. Do you want to know why? The social conservatives argue that girls under the age of 18 could be forced to take Plan B contraception by those who are sexually abusing them.

I want you to think about that for a moment. They want to deny 14-year old incest victims from obtaining Plan B because it might be coerced, but, should a 14-year old find herself pregnant because she’s been raped, well, that’s just dandy. Go ahead and have the baby. That’s what God would want.

So, I’m repeating my promise of 2005. If you are under the age of 17, and you need Plan B contraception, send me a PM, and I will make sure that you get it.

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 was terrified that I would never know sexual pleasure again. I was especially scared because I had been told when I was younger that women who had hysterectomies did so because they were too sexual, and this was their punishment. It was a lot of crap to work through.

I’m combining two blog posts I wrote. The first was written just before my surgery. It goes like this:

Karen Novak, one of the most brilliant people I know, frequently says the kinds of things that wind up staying in my head, tucked away in some back room, and then, sometime later, re-emerges when that piece of wisdom crashes into some life experience I’m in the midst of.

In this case, we were talking about time. About whether it was possible that men and women had different conceptions of time. She argued that men see time as linear; women see time cyclically. “We can’t help it,” she said. “Every month, we are reminded that we are part of a big cycle. We bleed. We stop bleeding. We ovulate. We bleed again.” Time gets broken up and its repetitive nature is literally written onto our bodies. Men, as far as I know, have no regular reminder that time is cyclical. I imagine that it moves forward for them.

Okay. I know that this reeks of essentialism, the kind of essentialism that makes me crazy. But, I also think there’s some validity to what she said. And while all women do not currently menstruate, or no longer menstruate, the cultural reminders of women as monthly, cyclical creatures is there all around us.

On November 18, I will no longer be among the women who bleed. I’ve alluded to health problems before in this forum. For reasons that may elude a lot of you, I want to talk about the fact that I’ve chosen to have a hysterectomy in just over three weeks.  And I use the word “choice” deliberately. My uterus is a sick organ. It is making me sick, to the point where I have been in the hospital recently, so anemic that I could barely stand. I’m experiencing chronic pain. Two weeks out of the month, I feel like an overripe kumquat—squishy and swollen—and, if kumquats had feelings, my guess is that being overripe would make them as cranky as I’ve been. Cranky, and sad, and angry as hell that I’m a hostage to my body.

And yet. It’s my uterus. The organ within which I carried three pregnancies and from which I delivered two healthy children. The organ that, every month since I was 13, has made its presence known. It’s not like my liver or my spleen or my heart. I mean, I know they’re there, doing their jobs, but it’s not like those organs send out an all points bulletin to the rest of my body that special attention must be paid to it.

And my uterus is such a political organ. Our culture is engaged in an all-out war about what women may do with their uteri. Whether my uterus belongs to me, or as some would argue, it belongs to the government or my neighbor or anyone else who is anti-choice. And, truth be told, hysterectomies get a lot of bad press. Once upon a time, doctors removed uteri like they took out tonsils—if you were done with it, what the hell did you need it for?

I admit. As women I’ve known have chosen to have hysterectomies in the face of health problems, the thoughts that have gone through my head have been uncharitable. They were downright arrogant. They went something like this: “You are a victim of the male medical establishment. If a man had a small problem with his prostate, would we advise castrating him?” I really wanted to believe that most hysterectomies are unnecessary, that women have them because it’s more convenient to take out a uterus rather than work to fix a problem, that women’s reproductive organs are only valuable if they’re producing babies.

And then this happened to me. And so, I’ve avoided this surgery. I’ve tried alternative treatments. I’ve been determined that I should hold on to this part of me. And then, some other voice started speaking to me. The one that asked me questions like, “If this was your spleen causing you this many problems and pain, would you even be having this conversation? Wouldn’t you have gotten the damn thing taken out immediately?”

My uterus is not the essence of my being. I’m not a “womb-an.” I have a disease that is going to get progressively worse. Its symptoms can be treated—in my case, unsuccessfully—but its cause cannot be eradicated without removing the organ where the disease is.

And so, I’m making this choice. To be healthy. To make a decision in which I choose not to suffer any more.

So, that was the first blog post. I underwent surgery on November 18, 2005, and then spent about a week convalescing. I had lost a lot of blood during surgery, and I was weaker than I expected. I was also a bad patient.

A friend of mine, a nurse, who had offered to take care of me while I was laid up, got so tired of listening to me whine about how much I wanted to get out of the house and go to Target that, three days post-surgery, she took me to Target. Within five minutes in the store, I had passed out. She got to say “I told you so,” and I got to learn that my body is not superwoman’s. 

We still laugh about this incident now. My stubbornness. Her exasperation. My being wheeled out of Target in a wheelchair.

I wrote my next blog post about the experience about six months later. I had kept to myself that right before my surgery, an anonymous e-mail had shown up in my inbox. A woman was furious with me, claimed that I was making it okay for women to subject themselves to mutilation, and that I would suffer dire consequences as a result.

I wanted to tell her that I had tried everything: an IUD, hormones, iron supplements, but the reality was that my uterus had become the focus of my existence, because on any given day, the amount of blood that pouring from it could affect even my ability to stand.

I remember when I got the letter, I showed it to my best friend. I also called my gynecologist, Heidi, whom I would trust with my life, and I had her read the letter. They were both angry on my behalf. And I was angry, too.

           How dare this woman send me a letter bomb a few days before surgery that I was already terrified of having? How could another woman (calling herself a feminist) be so cruel?

Anyway, this is the blog post I wrote later, to show people that I had come through with flying colours.

Shortly before I underwent a hysterectomy in November, I received an anonymous letter via e-mail. I had not been shy about my need for surgery. I am more than aware that my uterus is a political organ. I fear that just as SCOTUS has recently ruled that there’s no need for a “knock-knock” before violating civil rights, so too, it will soon be permissible to enter a woman’s vagina without her consent. Or, as the case is more likely to be, to tell a woman that she can’t make decisions about what may or may not enter and lodge inside her uterus.

And so, knowing that the personal is political, to quote what was once a revolutionary statement but which seems to have lost its meaning, I chose to write about my decision, and my fear, in undergoing this procedure.

Thus, someone out in the blogosphere decided to send me a letter, under a pseudonym, in which they denounced my decision to be public about what I was about to undergo. In the letter, the person described to me how I’d been duped by the male medical establishment, how six months after my surgery I would begin to suffer the horrible effects of various blood vessels dying in my pelvic region, how I would feel like shit. And worse, this person pointed out, I would be responsible for the positive push I may have given other women to have the same operation done. That by talking positively about my decision to have my uterus removed, I was contributing to the ruin of other women.

All of this vitriol arrived just a few days before my surgery.

And so, given that it is now over seven months since my operation, I feel that I should check in with the world, and let other women know what the effects have been of having my political organ removed.

I feel fantastic. The condition that necessitated surgery was adenomyosis, a condition in which I bled profusely throughout the month. It was unpredictable, and frequently, in the middle of sexual intercourse, I would start hemorrhaging. I have never been squeamish about sex during menses, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had partners who were also not turned off by blood. So, the blood was not the issue. The issue was the constant pain, and the weakness caused by anemia. I felt sick all the time. My uterus was approximately the size of a 13-week pregnancy, and for someone who is tiny like me, it meant that my stomach bulged. Again, no big deal. But I felt permanently bloated.

We tried other therapies to alleviate the problem. They didn’t work, and in fact, made things worse. One night, after having hemorrhaged for the entire day, and now, too weak to stand, a friend took me to the emergency room. My gynecologist came in to see me, and we decided then that there was no point in putting off the surgery. It was time to overcome my fears and do what was best for me.

My biggest fear about hysterectomy was about sex. And so, I want to talk frankly about that here.

I was deathly afraid that I would no longer be able to have orgasms, or if I did have them, that they would be pale shadows of their former selves. For me, orgasms build, and when they reach their crescendo, I feel contractions deep inside of me–intense, starbursts of pleasure that I had always assumed was the result of my uterus responding to the electricity racing across my flesh. How would I experience that level of pleasure if there was no uterus to contract?

I was haunted by the idea that I would lose a sensation that is of paramount importance to me. Perhaps it makes me shallow, this desire to feast at the full banquet of sex. But I believe that there are few things that are freely available to us, and for me, sex–both the connection I feel to another human being and the loss of boundaries I experience during orgasm–is an integral part of who I am.

I was terrified of losing that.

After surgery, one is advised not to have intercourse for six weeks. For the first couple of weeks after surgery, I felt awful. I lost a lot of blood during the procedure, and my iron level was down to 27 (normal is 42). So, I wasn’t thinking a lot about sex. But, things started to wake up, and I decided to take matters into my own hands, so to speak. When the orgasm came–complete with the deep sensations of contraction and vibration–I wept. I wept. I called my closest friends. I shared my joy. I felt no shame in doing so. And, when I was able to resume intercourse, it was to discover that everything still worked. In fact, it worked better, as I now did not feel this sluggish, clogged-up sensation in my pelvis.

And life without periods has been interesting. I don’t bleed, of course, but since I still have my tubes and my ovaries, I experience a normal cycle, complete with bloating, crankiness, and breast tenderness. Woohoo!

I realize that for many, this may be too much information. But I was open about having the procedure before I had it done, and I feel an obligation to let those who reached out to me prior to surgery know that I’m well. I’m fabulous.

It’s three years later. Sex is better than it has ever been before. Multiple orgasms. No periods. No cramps. No worry about getting pregnant. I’m 45 now, and menopause is setting in. (Heidi told me that on Monday, when I was telling her about my mysterious hot and cold flashes. I had been pretending they were something else. )

I know that hysterectomy is not the choice for everyone. But I feel as if I need to de-mystify this operation that so many of us fear.

I still believe that there are some doctors out there who perform unnecessary hysterectomies. And Heidi took only what she needed to take out, so I still have my ovaries and my Fallopian tubes.

But I don’t feel any different than other women out there. My sexual desire level is high—but I expect that’s normal for being in my 40s. (It is true what they say: being in your 40s is awesome!) My lover and I take every opportunity that we can to touch and snuggle and caress, lick, penetrate and come.

In an odd sort of way, I feel as if my hysterectomy freed me to be even more sexual.

And I refuse to say that that’s a bad thing.

On several occasions, in some form or another, I believe that I have begun the very composition that I hope to complete now. I’ve been somewhat introspective recently, and writing can sometimes help me to further explore topics upon which I am already reflecting. More often than not, however, writing leads me to ramble and to talk in circles and I am left with no conclusion at the end of a sentence, paragraph, or composition.

Sometimes, I realize that the subject matter is much bigger than I, that it could not possibly be figured out in during one hundred brain storming or free write sessions (let alone one) and I am left with no answers. At times, I end even more bewildered than when I began.

All that being said, I am thinking quite a bit currently about the nature of relationships and the way that we as people allow human interactions to shape us, our identities…

I cook quite a bit. Once upon a time, I even entertained misguided dreams that I might one day become a chef. Since, I have come to the more realistic realization that I am not organized enough to work in a kitchen as a professional. Besides, if I were to do that, perhaps I’d not enjoy cooking any longer.

I did not begin cooking because of any expectations associated with gender roles, nor would that have any bearing upon why I still do it.  I cook simply because I enjoy it, because it allows me to create. Just as when I write I experiment with different combinations of words, while I cook I experiment with different combinations of flavors and seasonings until I come up with something that suits my tastes (and hopefully the tastes of those for whom I cook). Chances are, the combinations of flavors that I am “creating” have been attempted in the past - just as with the words that I choose to manipulate.

Cooking is as well, I have decided, one of the ways in which I try to get people to like me. Maybe, just maybe, if they like food that I have prepared, they will see something worthwhile within me. Since I realize this, I suppose I am doing this on at least a semi-conscious level.

I also noticed (or at least I thought that I did) that people used to tend to like me more when I was drinking. So, I used to imbibe spirits and feed others in order to lift theirs and to feel as though I was liked. I am certain that I still do this now, I just try to do it a lot less.

Close to a year ago now, I spent a weekend in Las Vegas for a friend’s wedding and I was nervous about going without my husband. I knew that I would most likely drink too much and I worried that I might do something stupid. I know that I have never told him that and I don’t think I divulged my fear to anyone else, either. Aside from drinking too much; however, I avoided doing anything else that I would have considered stupid. I have faith that my husband would agree.

I don’t know that I am happy about that. I don’t know that I am happy about my decision to put myself in a situation which, in the past, has led me or influenced me to make some poor decisions. At the time, it was a struggle for me to be comfortable with my husband’s trust in me. In general, I sometimes struggle with the the amount of trust that my husband places in me (a lot). I’d like to think that I have the same trust and faith in him. However, the situation has yet to be reversed.

I like to think that I am honest to a fault with my husband, but this is probably not the case. I often do not let him know of my intentions even when I am aware of them ahead of time. Often times, I am honest with him about things that occurred in the past. This kind of honesty feels to me the way that I imagine going to confession would feel.

I sometimes attempt to tell him things that he seems to have no interest in hearing or it is not an opportune time to bring up certain things with him (while we have a pretty honest relationship, I don’t know that I would continue to be so truthful, if I would want to, or if he would want me to, were I to share particular things in front of an audience) and so by the time I actually do end up sharing such things with my husband, he feels as though I’ve hidden something from him or that I felt I could not tell him before. I suppose this is true, but only to an extent.

I have, at times, suggested to my husband that we have an open relationship. I have noticed this trend in the other open relationships I of which I have been aware - that it seems one party feels as though they owe it to the other to have such an arrangement - it seems as though they feel their partner has had to “settle” for them, so rather than lose them, they allow their partner to explore whatever other options may be available to him or her. I imagine fear is part of it - a fear that one of us may not always measure up to the others expectations or meet their needs. It is as much of a fear that I will succumb to having my “needs met” by another as it is that I will face rejection of some sort because my partner has needs that I cannot meet.

So, what is the point of marriage if two people are to have an open relationship? I am not certain that I have a definitive answer. I struggle with this myself on occasion. I do not think that the act of sex should be the be all end all of a relationship. That seems quite silly to me. Besides, when people date or when one is not seeing someone exclusively, do they not often utilize several different people to meet their needs? Is there not someone to feed them, someone to entertain them, and someone to hold them? Why should we limit ourselves to just one person to be everything to us? Is such an expectation realistic or natural? Do relationships entitle us to have expectations of others?

I am not certain what is reasonable to believe or to have or to strive for. On the one hand, I believe that what I said above is true - many people occupy different places and play different roles to us at different times all throughout our lives. However, doesn’t more than just the act of sex exist between a couple? If what they share between them is “more than sex” why would either of them seek anything less outside of their relationship? Why go elsewhere just for sex? If it is more than just sex that one seeks with someone outside of his or her relationship with another person, will they have enough love or energy or desire to still share with their partner? What if the desire or focus shifts? Is it fair to their significant other(s)?

Do not get me wrong, if two people can find everything that they need only in one another, more power to them. I am willing to admit that such a possibility exists. To me, however, the prospect of soul mates is a myth, likely manufactured to encourage monogamy (at least on the part of women who were and may still be considered property - but that is, perhaps, to be explored in a later blog.)

I am not certain that I believe in romantic love. I have thought about it logically and the conclusion to which I come is this - romantic love is the same as the compassion that we feel for each of the people about whom we care, there is just more weight or a different weight placed on it because it is combined with a passion or lust or desire that we do not possess for the others about whom we care. I definitely do not think that”romantic” love can exist without jealousy.

For a very long time, I did not consider myself a jealous person. I have insecurities though that I definitely allow myself to project onto others in the form of envy. I have a friend who seems to logically understand jealousy and who states that she does not suffer from it. I am envious of her ability… I have another friend who states that he does not hold peoples’ faults against them and I’d like to have a better understanding of that ability as well.

Since arriving at the conclusion that I am actually capable of suffering from jealousy and behaving in a jealous manner and realizing that I do, in fact,  do so from time to time, I have noticed myself feeling envious less often. However, now I find myself envious of the simplicity with with some people seem capable of loving & living - people who are content just to be whether themselves or with someone else.

I have a friend who has been in a relationship with his girlfriend for ten years. He says, almost as though it is a justification, that it has been off and on. I think that most people would think that being in a ten year relationship is commendable and not in need of justification. Together, he and his significant other have two children. He refers to her simply as “his girlfriend” (which apparently annoys her to no end). He seems to justify the situation further by saying that he is “not an easy person to be with.”

Upon hearing this the first time, I thought to myself, “Who is easy  to be with?”

However, upon further introspection, I think that if we were to simply “be” together, regardless of the kind of relationship, to focus on the enjoyment of one another’s company and nothing more, to not place place too much unnecessary or irrelevant attention on “commitment,”  or to place too much weight or emphasis on our own insecurities or failures or too much on our own needs, then perhaps it would be easy simply to “be” ourselves and to “be” with one another…

…(if you’d like to read a far more eloquent post about this topic and you’ve not yet done so, you should read L’Dawn’s most recent blog posting, “Choosing Love”)…

It was almost twelve years ago as I sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, listening to my husband of twenty years wash his hands, face and feet in the bathroom after a long day at the office.

How many times in all those years we had been together had I watched him at the end of his workday while sitting on the toilet lid, admiring the muscles of his sprinter’s legs as we chatted effortlessly like childhood friends or as we simply enjoyed silence in each other’s company?

But this day was different as the faucet running full force drowned out all other Manhattan sounds beyond our seventh-story bedroom window. A dry rag twisting in the middle of my stomach, I was not sure how I was going to say it. To tell the man I deeply loved, I was not sexually fulfilled. Not only wondering whether I had a right…but also sad and terrified as if in my speaking something I valued greatly was in jeopardy.

Lifting my knees to my chin, I hugged my legs and looked at the veneer of soot on the outside window, recalling other times I had tried to speak about this burden of heart. Using a language that attempted to preserve feelings—his feelings. I felt I had to. I felt it was my responsibility to make sure there was no hurt when I said in a low kindly whisper: “Let’s try this?” “Could you do this?” “I like it when…”

This lesson of protecting the feelings of the other, especially if those feelings were a man’s, began when I was a little girl. I learned somehow it was my job to make my dad, brothers and grandfather happy. I was to be their darling girl who in my delight turned their misery to light as I twirled my skirt, giggled and danced. As I spoke in dimpled faced lisps, and they laughed.

This little girl as a woman of eighteen and this same lesson came forward in sex. Remembering the first time, I gasped when he entered me as my insides stung to make room for him. Instantly shutting my eyes against what did not feel good as a familiar voice, the voice of the good-girl now a good-woman blurted out inside me, “Be polite. Don’t make him feel bad. Don’t let him know you are hurting.”

In this moment of full womanhood, all the women who were and had ever been were present. Connecting me to them in a vast web—comforting in our collective silent wound. Aware in this womanly pact, we were not to speak the truth about our sexuality. As women, we loved. And loved deeply. Part of this loving was to forget. Forget the sorrow of our bodies that were designed to hold the pleasures of another.

And so I did forget. Tried to anyway by substituting passion, orgasms and sexual satisfaction as fulfillment. But the authentic woman inside me hurting would not forget as meals ended up in the bottom of the toilet, days passed where I couldn’t get out of bed, and thoughts filled my head hissing my name.

Realizing, I was dying in my voiceless hurt. The source of hurt poised directly upon my sexuality as a woman, I had to tell my husband.

As I knew by then, the lack of my sexual fulfillment was in direct relationship to my absence as an authentically powerful woman. I had to become present—full-filled—in the creative space of my sexuality in order to be fully present in all other spaces in my life.

This was when I turned toward my husband as he came barefoot out of the bathroom.  His feet, not quite dry, were marking the wood floor like footprints in the sand. Standing at the end of the bed in a fresh white tee shirt and boxers with tiny red and blue diamonds, he looked at me, concerned. In one movement, fluid and gentle like the transition from one eastern meditative posture into another, he sat on the edge of the bed, lifted and crossed his legs. He asked tenderly, “What’s up?”

I looked into his lovely face. A face like those chiseled in stone long ago in Italy, classical with strong nose, brow and chin, I took a deep breath. I scooted closer to him and rested my hand on his inner thigh. How many times had I touched the thin skin there as a love for him filled every fiber of my being just as it did then? His soft brown eyes focused on mine, waiting. “I am unfulfilled,” I said. “I need more, sexually.”

There was a shiny mist in his eyes that said he understood. He looked directly into my face. His focus, deep with meaning if just a little distant. His face, caring if just a little wounded? Or angry? No, not anger. Understanding? Yes, understanding—that was what I was certain I had seen. He saying, he understood the importance of my need to be fulfilled.

My chest glowed with exuberance towards him. I loved him in a way that went deeper and wider than I did just ten minutes before. This new-love had a generosity born from my gratitude of knowing how compassionate and forgiving the man I married was. He was huge in stature to me as I looked into his face, and said in my heart, thank you, thank you, over and over again.

Six months later he left me to be with another woman. Telling me, “What did you expect me to do when you told me I was a horrible lover.” My punishment for not obeying the lesson learned as a good-little-girl.