My Kink is Karma: Wishing You The Best in The Worst Way
It's been a week.
But when was the last time it wasn't a week?
Obviously by that I mean when was the last time I didn't spend the work day grinding my teeth and wondering what is the point if there's always a life-changing disaster looming? Years are days and days are years of frantic dread. And anger. Blood boiling anger. I want to boil my enemies in pools of their own blood.
Starting small: how are companies still asking for 3-5+ years of experience for every fucking position? Can we not all get over ourselves, please? Everyone knows their office is 50% people who are completely incompetent, and if you don't think so it's probably because you're one of those 50% No shade. People who are not good at things deserve to survive. And a lot of them are. A lot of really stupid unqualified white men are thriving. So let's just chill out with our fucking skills and experience required sections, can we?
It's also already way too fucking hot and I'm already seeing articles about the Texas power grid. Levels on levels of discomfort. Of course as local news outlets prepare us for our inevitable future of baking in our homes and on the streets the state is trying to boycott companies who want to go green. Pointless on both ends because a lot of companies are just green-washing anyway, but whatever.
I don't know if there's any medium sized concerns. I think even the small things are just a few steps from the edge of the pool of existential crises most reasonable people seem to find themselves drowning in.
I guess there was one minor inconvenience: I learned in my efforts to fake-it-till-you-make-it myself into body positivity I have built a wardrobe of mostly crop-tops. Crop-tops and sweatpants, because I want to be as comfortable and simultaneously uncomfortable as possible at all times. This made trying to get dressed to see Collin's parents again for the first time since the winter a bit of a struggle.
Of course the big one this week was the leak of the completely unsurprising opinion of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. I'm so sick of the phrase "law of the land"
I'm also sick of hearing anti-abortion activists and politicians tell their side in the media. I don't want to hear them say they're excited but being cautious because the opinion hasn't become a ruling. I don't want to hear about their prayers being answered or how hard they fought. It feels very similar to what happened after the election and after the January 6th Insurrection in that maybe you don't need to hear from both sides all the time. Maybe sometimes you don't need to uplift the voices of tyrants, oppressors and violent extremists in the name of impartiality. Or maybe someone needs to push back? The only interview I heard that felt appropriate was on the 1A where Jen White spoke to an Oklahoma representative and asked about whether after passing anti-abortion legislation he would support expanding access to birth control and social services. Of course, the representative said that contraceptives were widely available and people should think about whether they are ready to have a child before getting into bed together. He also went as far as to say, when asked about not allowing exemptions in the cases of rape or incest, that "the child should not be punished for the sins of the father" then noted that rapists can get the death penalty in Oklahoma. Oklahoma: a pro-life state. This was perhaps the one safe interview I heard all week. The rest felt complicit. Letting people just go on and talk about all their feelings about when life starts and fetal personhood. Conversations that went on forever about claims not based in any medical knowledge. Again, it felt like the many phases in the pandemic where people were allowed to talk about how they didn't believe in COVID-19, or didn't believe in masking, or didn't believe in vaccines. People can be so cruel and shameless.
I hate all of it. I. Hate. All. Of. It. I HATE ALL OF IT
My initial reaction, after the sinking feeling of defeat, was a long internal groan over all the different ways people would try to justify abortion. Like anyone should have to be justifying abortion. Like any point on the long lists of reason women could pull together would make the people against abortion understand. Like they had not been told these things a thousand times before. In conversation. In debate. Pleading. Shouting. A screaming chorus. It feels very much like these are conversations for ourselves. I'm fine with that. If it does push the people who have not been active in fighting abortion rights into the fight. I definitely have not been as active as I could have been. I know that needs to change. A lot of things need to change.
The second thought I had was that in the long list of reasons someone would have to get an abortion the small, but not insignificant, failure rate of birth control would be present. And that would be an incomplete picture. "Birth control fails" does not address all the failures in the system around people who are able to become pregnant who are trying to avoid getting pregnant. Simply starting with the argument that contraceptives are widely available- they're not. It is only because of the ACA that birth control is supposed to be covered at 100% but there are still cases in which insurance providers will find a way to get around that. As all insurance providers strive to get around paying for people's medical care. This also completely ignores all the people who remain uninsured because a lot of people still cannot afford insurance when insurance is considered a perk tied to certain types of labor and not a human right as it should be. There are young people who are capable of becoming pregnant but unable to get contraceptives without the consent of their guardians. If you want to claim that all those vulnerable people could be covered then by buying condoms, sure, maybe, but then they'd have to trust that their partner would not stealth the condom, or poke a hole in the condom, or that it would not just break or be used incorrectly. Men will say and do a lot of things to get out of wearing condoms. This is also pretty much the only way society tries to kick the ball of shared responsibility over to men and it is one they consistently kick back or try to dodge. Which means that the people who are trying to avoid being pregnant are going to absorb the cost. The cost, the focus, the emotional labor. Society is relying on people with uteruses while simultaneously trying to police them. This is compounded stress on transmen and non-binary people who often face medical discrimination.
Even if you are able to get contraceptives whether through insurance or private pay (which, in case you need this, is available through Planned Parenthood on a sliding scale sometimes) there are still several tolls it takes on a woman's body. Hormonal contraceptives can cause depression, weight gain, headaches, decreased sex drive, nausea, breast tenderness, and blood clots! Birth control also has interactions with other medications. I have definitely mentioned before that I am on mood stabilizers for bipolar disorder. The super fun interaction there is that my birth control actually lowers the effectiveness of my mental health medications! Yay! Another fun fact: antibiotics can lower the efficacy of your birth control! One of the few fun side-effects someone could experience is missing periods, but this obviously would make trying to catch a pregnancy early enough to terminate it very complicated.
I know I'm going a little bit all over the place- but it should also be noted that birth control is absolutely not designed to help all women. Birth control is less effective for women over a certain weight! And for some reason IUDs are not one size fits all! I know this from experience because I tried getting an IUD three times and it floated out of its place and caused heavy months long bleeding each time. Apparently my cervix is too big? Idk. Something is wrong with my insides, but that is not surprising. I tried this with the copper IUD which is apparently the largest IUD you can get, so it was automatically ruled out that I could try the hormonal IUDs. So what are the other long-term options for birth control for people who can become pregnant but do not want to? I'm talking about things you have to think of less often than trying to take the pill daily because missing or mistiming a dose increases the chances you could become pregnant and it is fairly unreasonable to expect someone to never miss or mistime a dose? Think about the last time you had to take a round of antibiotics (that remember- will mess with the efficacy of birth control!) over several days several times a day. You want to lie to me and say you never took a pill an hour or more late? That you never forgot despite setting alarms?? It's not fucking realistic. So- the other options: sticking a ring up your vagina for a week at a time and hoping that doesn't migrate around and get stuck up there; putting a patch on various parts of your body, dealing with the itchiness of the wet bandaid situation it becomes because you cannot take it off while you shower or swim, so it will get wet and will get a weird sticky ring around it just like a bandaid you've worn too long, and also hope it doesn't shift around and come loose or fall off; you can get shots every three months which are widely regarded as the option most likely to make someone gain weight and become moody; or, you can do what I did, and get a little rod implanted in your arm that's releasing hormones to keep you baby free. The little rod is also something you have to monitor to make sure it doesn't move and start to embed itself into your muscle. It only lasts 3 years and you have to get it cut out of you. The most desired, longest lasting forms of birth control are all kind of invasive going in and coming out. It's what a lot of my friends are rushing to get or get replaced to make sure they are protected if judges and lawmakers come for birthcontrol next. Which they almost certainly will.
A long term option people who are absolutely certain they do not want to get pregnant is not, in reality, an option. Most physicians do not want to allow people who are able to become pregnant to elect to get their tubes tied. Mostly for patriarchal reasons. Doctors will question whether you truly won't want a child. They'll bring up that it would be unfair to your partner or whatever. It doesn't matter how certain you are. It doesn't matter if it would actually be really harmful for you to experience a pregnancy. It doesn't matter if you know you just want to stop at one or two. It's unlikely to be considered medically necessary and so unlikely to be covered by your insurance. If, by chance, you are able to get this done, it is also a much bigger and more invasive procedure than a man getting a vasectomy.
Finally, most efforts to develop birth control for men have stagnated because men are not willing to deal with the side effects. Lol.
So, it's important to remember that being in control of your reproductive health as a person with a uterus is not set up in your favor to begin with. It's something law makers should take into account. It's definitely one reason that abortion will never go away.
Another meme I've been seeing go around is that if you don't like abortion you should support access to contraceptives, comprehensive sex education, maternal healthcare and paid maternity leave, and expansion of social service to help people care for the lives being brought into the world. This is all definitely things that should happen regardless of their impact on the number of abortions had in this country. It won't eliminate abortions. Nothing will eliminate abortions. There will always be abortions that are medically necessary because of a miscarriage, a fetus that is non-viable, or for the health of the mother. But even trying to eliminate all other abortions through legislation, which, lets be honest, most legislatures do not want to stop short of eliminating abortion to make exceptions for these cases, will not work. Women will get abortions. They know what is best for them, their families, and the stage of their life they are in. They will get abortions the need. They will get abortions they want. They will get them easily if they are affluent or white. They may die trying to get them if they are not. These moves may make anti-abortion activists feel like they have won, but they are only succeeding in punishing people with uteruses, they know they are not going to stop abortion. They're happy to let the people who try die for their "sins."
I think I'm running out of steam here. It's a lot to cover. My main point TLDR: telling people to "just not get pregnant" is a fucking joke.
Again, for the record, I AM PRO-ABORTION.
This week was tiring. I went out to protest with Ryan and scream "FUCK GREG ABBOTT" which is pretty cathartic. Ryan has been doing so much better about finding ways to cause havoc through protest. She is convinced we are past the point of "peaceful" protests. The rest of the coven agrees. I agree, but I don't think I'm ready to get an arrest record. I'm very proud of the action she's taking. I'm trying to get myself together to protest next weekend when Donald Trump will be in town. I should probably try to make a sign.
I say their names every night: Greg Abbott, Bill Paxton. Donald Trump, Bret Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn, Joe Manchin, Mitch McConnell. There's probably more I'm missing.
And somethings I have been pulled out of the darkness for:
The Staircase on HBO: I can only recommend for a scene in episode 3 where Colin Firth eats out Toni Collette's ass.
And a song for you- my hope that things will get better despite all signs to the contrary:
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