simone de beauvoir, sandra fluke, saint omer

very unedited

Today I got my intrauterine device (IUD) removed, because it was nearing its 5-year expiration date, and a new 5-year one placed. This sentence obscures the mess of it: the cramp that seized my whole body, making me clench up like one taut fist, the uterine sound — a metal rod they use to measure the depth of the uterus — pushed up me, more waves of pain. I studied the light on the cinderblock ceiling and tried to be somewhere else. 1 — 2 — 3 — I counted numbers because I couldn’t remember enough lines of poetry (“Invictus” came to mind, ridiculously — you’re really not the captain of your ship when you’re ass out on a gyno table.) A minute or two later and it was done. It’s very quick. 

Then I felt so nauseous I threw up in a grocery store parking lot. I hadn’t eaten — the procedure was at 8:30 in the morning — and so my vomit was almost transparent, all water and ibuprofen. There’s something really comical about puking on asphalt in daylight. Comical because sometimes when I’m like, Wow, it can’t possibly be worse than this, my brain doesn’t really know what to do but laugh, it short-circuits that way. The other night a man hollered at me while I was walking to the falafel place, You’re too pretty not to smile, won’t you smile for me? And you know what I did. (After crossing the street.) Our bodies betray us like that.

The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir writes in her 1949 book The Second Sex about the inferior position of women in society. She says men are granted transcendence (active, future-oriented, the realm of ideas) while women are consigned to immanence (passive, repetitious, the world of material). Men get to decide in gleaming, glass-walled boardrooms how to run the world and women have to vacuum their houses and tend to messy bodies. Depressingly, Beauvoir’s writing still feels salient today. (I return to her section on abjection in heterosexual romance, “The Woman in Love,” quite frequently.) One day maybe I’ll hear more women described as brilliant and men described as beautiful — or both words will more commonly be applied in tandem, and people won’t be surprised when they are. We might deconstruct the categories of “men” and “women” so much it no longer makes sense to speak of them at all. Maybe, maybe.

In the meantime I go jealously grasping for transcendence — isn’t that the point of all these years of school? Against my best attempts I remain immanent. I told R. that it’s been hard to write because I don’t want to write about my body but all I could think about this morning was my body. The pain and vomiting and cramps, then sleep. All I could think about last week was a urinary tract infection. Where’s the room for philosophizing? 

The Australian memoirist Jessica Friedmann writes in her book Things That Helped: On Postpartum Depression of experiencing aphasia after her pregnancy that caused her to be a slow conversationalist who often said the wrong word. A lifelong writer, she felt exiled from the world of language that had been her home. When I read this I felt terrified, because sometimes it feels like words are all I have. One day, I would also like to have a baby. I would like to do this without feeling as though I was losing a crucial part of myself: people talk about “mommy brain,” and the NYTimes assures readers it’s real.

In 2012 a then-Georgetown Law student named Sandra Fluke testified in front of Congress to support contraceptive mandates, stating that her university’s refusal to pay for birth control put an onerous financial burden on students. The late conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, who I hope is being turned on a rotisserie in hell right now, referred to her as a “college co-ed”  and described her testimony as saying she “must be paid to have sex.” He continued, “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. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.” 

I was remembering 2012 and Limbaugh’s comments on Sandra Fluke because although there was widespread condemnation of his vitriol at the time I see a lot of his underlying beliefs reflected in fairly mainstream messaging about sex. The implicit beliefs are that having sex that is safe and healthy is an individual rather than collective concern; that if you bear disproportionate risk from sexual intercourse (e.g., if you have a female reproductive tract and the capability to become pregnant) you should take on greater responsibility for mitigating risk; and that if you are a woman and you want to have sex you are morally suspect.

How many of us can say we received the opposite messages? That people having safe and healthy sex should be something we care about as a collective — and pay for accordingly; that contraceptive responsibility should be shared in better ways (as Arianne Shahvisi writes in “Towards responsible ejaculations: the moral imperative for male contraceptive responsibility); and that wanting to have sex is fine, lovely, great?

I (probably) got a UTI and (definitely) got an IUD because I’m a woman who has sex, and there are for sure people who would say, Just don’t have sex. There are doctors who tell people who experience pain during intercourse to just have a glass of wine beforehand, and there are doctors who tell people encountering unexplained recurrent yeast infections to simply have sex less often. These are all very bad responses. I am frustrated by the way that immanence gets in the way of transcendence in my own life but I am even more frustrated by the artificial division between the two (sorry, Simone). Is sex really extraneous to the life of the mind? 

The final thing I’ll say in this maelstrom of loosely connected ideas is that I watched the movie Saint Omer recently. It’s based on the true story of an infanticide and the trial of the mother, which filmmaker Alice Diop witnessed. There is a beautiful monologue about maternity delivered by a lawyer in this film, which I won’t quote because that feels like a spoiler, but suffice it to say that it felt, in some ways, like a claim to innocence via immanence. That we are trapped in our bodies becomes a way to absolve what those bodies do. I’m not sure it was right, but I’m not sure it was wrong, either.

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Image credit: Judy Chicago’s Birth Tear (1982)

book rec:

I recently finished the book Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography. It’s a little bit of a slog at times because they go through and debunk basically every single shitty psychology study. Probably everything you know about testosterone is wrong. TL;DR: It turns out scientists do very bad science when they assume that testosterone is the “male” sex hormone and estrogen is the “female” sex hormone because everyone has both and they do important things in all kinds of bodies!