I Being Born a Woman and Distressed
Monday was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s birthday. (I learned this from my friend Rachel Perrone’s fabulous substack newsletter, Bomboniera, which gives you a daily list of reproductive health headlines and some great this-day-in-history tidbits. You should all subscribe.) I don’t read a lot of poetry, but I’ve always loved Millay. I wrote a paper during my senior year of high school in which I compared her poem, “I Being Born a Woman and Distressed,” to two other poems about love. This one stood out because it was really about sex. I can still recite the text from memory, thank you very much. It basically comes down to “sure, I’ll have sex with you now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to talk to you the next time we bump into each other.”
A similar theme is repeated in my other favorite Millay poem, “Thursday.”
Millay wrote these poems in the early 1920s, when a young woman was supposed to be waiting for a man to make her whole and still had to wait for a man to be allowed to open a checking account. They were meant to be looking for love not admitting to liking or, gasp, actively wanting sex. Lots of women still get in trouble for that today (see the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke story below), and men still want to control our behaviors (see the Tennessee abortion law story below). Edna was way ahead of her time. She was an openly bisexual, outspoken feminist, who admitted to all of her love affairs. I would have liked to see Rush Limbaugh try to take her on.
Sandra Fluke is Nicer than Me
By now we all know that schlock radio host Rush Limbaugh died last week. Limbaugh made a name for himself by being an asshole. There’s really no better way to put it. His greatest hits are well known—feminism was created by ugly women, gay men deserved to die of AIDS, and white people should not feel guilty for slavery.
He was racist: “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
He was sexist: “I'm a huge supporter of women. What I'm not is a supporter of liberalism. Feminism is what I oppose. Feminism has led women astray. I love the women's movement -- especially when walking behind it.”
And, he was hugely homophobic: "When a gay person turns his back on you, it is anything but an insult; it’s an invitation."
In 2012, a law student named Sandra Fluke testified in front of Congress in favor of access to free contraception. Limbaugh attacked her for days.
He started by saying: “Can you imagine, if you’re her parents, how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope.”
Then added: “What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and says that she must be paid to have sex. What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception.”
And: “Why go before a congressional committee and demand that all of us — because they want to have sex any time, as many times and as often as they want, with as many partners as they want — should pay for it? Whatever, no limits on this. I mean, they’re going broke having to buy contraception.”
I would have liked to tell him that “that’s not how it f**cking works.” Fluke was talking about the birth control pill. If you want it to work, you take the same amount—and pay the same amount—whether you have sex once, twice, thirteen times, or not at all that month. But he wouldn’t have cared. He just kept doubling down.
Until he got to this gem: “So, if we’re gonna sit here, and if we’re gonna have a part in this, then we want something in return, Ms. Fluke: And that would be the videos of all this sex posted online so we can see what we are getting for our money.”
He called her a slut and then said he wanted to watch. And yet, when he died last week, Sandra Fluke, who is now a practicing lawyer in California and ran for state Senate, told reporters: “My immediate thought was honestly to send my sympathies and my condolences to his family.”
This is proof that she’s a nicer person than me as my immediate thoughts were of a different nature entirely.
Tennessee Wants to Give Men Veto Power Over Abortion
I rarely write about the efforts by conservative states to curtail abortion rights. It would take up a lot of space in the newsletter—the bills are coming fast and furious in hopes that the newly conservative majority of the Supreme Court will bless as many restrictions as possible before outlawing abortion entirely. And, I have a number of colleagues who follow these laws more closely than I do and provide expert analysis. But, this week, Tennessee advanced one that I can’t not mention.
Matching bills in the state’s house and senate would give a man the right to request an injunction preventing a woman from obtaining an abortion. Representative Mark Pody, the bill’s sponsor, explained that this isn’t about the state getting involved in a woman’s decision, it’s about the baby’s father having rights. He told reporters: “I believe life starts at conception, and I believe both the mother and father were equally involved in bringing this life to being, and we believe that they both have a say of keeping that baby alive.”
As I’ve said before, I won’t argue anyone about when life begins because that’s a philosophical and theological debate. But from a scientific and practical point of view, the mother and father are nowhere near equal in bringing this life to being. One deposits genetic material, the other shares their body for 40 weeks and often makes countless physical and mental (not to mention social and career) sacrifices to do it. Babies have parents (though not always two and not always a mother and a father, of course) but zygotes and fetuses have a host. And until viability that host is the one who gets to make decisions.
The Tennessee law makes no exemption for rape or incest and operates on a bit of an honor system when it comes to asserting paternity. There are no backsies. If a man comes forward to claim paternity in order to stop an abortion, he can’t take it back which means that he will owe child support and could, theoretically, be assisting in his own rape conviction. Pody thinks this is enough to protect women from rapists or other ne’er-do-wells: “If somebody comes up and says, ‘Yes, I raped her and I'm the father,’ he should immediately go to jail. I just do not believe that somebody is gonna come in and say, ‘I committed this crime, I'm guilty of this crime. Put me in jail.’” (Of course, they’re not going to say that, they’re going to say the sex was consensual and men like Rep. Pody are going to believe them, but that’s a whole other story albeit with similar themes.)
Tennessee already has some of the strictest abortion provisions in the country though it is still arguing over many of them in court. It has a fetal heartbeat law that would prohibit abortion once a heartbeat can be detected (an early marker of fetal development that can happen before a person even knows they are pregnant). It has a mandatory ultrasound law (because seeing an ultra-magnified image will clearly change a woman’s poorly-made-up mind). It has a ban on abortion over a child’s sex, race, or diagnosed Down syndrome. And, it makes it a Class C felony for any physician to perform an abortion.
I suppose there’s something almost refreshingly honest about this new father-knows-best provision. Abortion laws may be sold as protecting the rights of unborn babies, but they have always really been about controlling women. Oddly enough, a quote I read from Rush Limbaugh for the last piece helps clarify this point for me. He said, “Militant feminists are pro-choice because it's their ultimate avenue of power over men. And believe me, to them it is a question of power. It is their attempt to impose their will on the rest of society, particularly on men.”
Rush and his ilk don’t like when women have control of anything. Especially not something as fundamental as procreation and as potentially emasculating as sex. Abortion laws have always been about wresting that control back. Tennessee is just being more transparent about it than other states.