The Column Time Forgot
Lying in bed but all day yesterday, stroking and cradling my favorite crack pipe and watching not just Sense & Sensibility but Grey’s Anatomy too (Sunday, yummy Sunday), I was startled at some point during my 9-hour bloatathon to see an ad for a hip new contraceptive. It featured not just the hip new contraceptive (which was actually sort of scary, some ring-like intra-vag contraption that apparently wards off sperm with a giant radioactive hula hoop around the lassies’ chassis, and which stays in your hoo-hoo for an entire month), but also images of pretty, sexy and sexually satisfied young women striding down the street like they were in charge or something. Also, they looked pretty single. And satisfied. And they were distinctly not in the kitchen whipping up a little something (with the invaluable aid of Hamburger Helper) for their man.
Seriously, they were sluts. There isn't anything I'd like in my cooter for a whole month straight. Not even if it came with a puppy!
Looking at these hard-charging young women (who spent an awful lot of time suspiciously smiling) I was actually shocked, which, as you might guess, takes a lot. Madison Avenue is still partying like it's 1999, when the mood in the country is more 1899 (not 1799, which was a fine time, or 1699, which was chock-full of syphilitic goodness). Women taking charge of their own reproductive systems? Women having NSA sex? Women with their faces, wrists and legs uncovered? Who the hell is zoomin' who?
(Please, no blog-snark about my pro-lifiness; there's a world of hurt between folks who don't like abortion and folks who think an HPV vaccine shouldn't be approved because saving young women from cervical cancer would encourage promiscuity. And I am too still a feminist! Twats!)
Just as Maureen Dowd likes to write about how she can't find any men who'll marry her because she's too smart and successful, I like to write about my uterus, my ovaries . . . I'm pretty sure even my Fallopes have gotten a shout-out or two. I just like to let everyone know how my plumbing's feeling, though it would probably save you all a lot of vomit if I just made myself a T-shirt. Squeamish? That's how we separate the men from the boys.
(Actually, I also like to write about how I can't find any men because I'm too smart and successful, now that I think about it.)
Now get in the kitchen and buy me some tampons!
For instance, right now I'm having my monthly “visit” from “Aunt Flo,” which is causing blood and bits of unimplanted human egg from my uterine walls to run out my vagina and into a Tampax Super, seeing as how I'm all woman, and which could conceivably have been the reason that I screamed at my son's dad, when he bitched about bringing him home early on Sunday for a birthday party, “Fine! Keep him! Keep him FOREVER!”
Which might have made his dad quickly rethink his opposition to the birthday party, but was still a pretty shitty thing to say.
So—funny story—I open my shiny new box of Tampax this morning and discover I've bought myself a variety pack, like I've picked up a box of instant oatmeal or something. Is there really anybody who needs Lights? Isn't that sort of the blueberry cream of tampons? If all you need is a Light, couldn't you just slap on a panty liner--one of the really adorably thin ones, like a whisper of a summer song--and call it a day?
There was actually a point to all this once. And it wasn't just Gloria Steinem's old chestnut that if men could menstruate, they'd be bragging about their two-pad flows. (But they would! As do I!)
It's so fucking much more than that. It's the pendulum swinging on a scary culture war against not just gays and blacks (of whose groups I'm sad to say I'm not a member, but give me a holler and I'll float you some dough!) but women too (and, see above all the grafs about my wombage, one of those I am!), where Senator Rick Santorum blame-games working women for all society's degeneration, where bizarre people on the internets truly believe it when they say a woman is transferred from her father's “possession” to her husband's and advocate against having given women the right to vote. It's a war in which not just Roe is under attack (about which, again, I'm not losing much sleep), but in which Griswold is as well. And Griswold—the Connecticut case that found the Constitutional right to privacy, saying you couldn't prosecute a married couple for using birth control—is something everyone in this country should care about deep and hard.
Sainted Margaret Sanger!
Let me repeat myself, again, to you assholes, because this is important! When four states have laws (and 11 more are considering them) specifically allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for The Pill both morning-after and morning-before if it's something of which they disapprove, when George W. Bush's first head of the FDA was a gynecologist who refused to prescribe birth control to unmarried women, when a Target pharmacist refuses to fill a morning-after prescription for a woman who's been raped, and last but not least when you're actually surprised to see a television advertisement with a healthy attitude toward female sex that depicts them as subjects, not objects, and is completely lacking in beer or Swedish blondes, there's a funky smell coming, and it's not the kind of funky smell that's perfectly natural and cyclical, you big whiny puss!
Seriously, they were sluts. There isn't anything I'd like in my cooter for a whole month straight. Not even if it came with a puppy!
Looking at these hard-charging young women (who spent an awful lot of time suspiciously smiling) I was actually shocked, which, as you might guess, takes a lot. Madison Avenue is still partying like it's 1999, when the mood in the country is more 1899 (not 1799, which was a fine time, or 1699, which was chock-full of syphilitic goodness). Women taking charge of their own reproductive systems? Women having NSA sex? Women with their faces, wrists and legs uncovered? Who the hell is zoomin' who?
(Please, no blog-snark about my pro-lifiness; there's a world of hurt between folks who don't like abortion and folks who think an HPV vaccine shouldn't be approved because saving young women from cervical cancer would encourage promiscuity. And I am too still a feminist! Twats!)
Just as Maureen Dowd likes to write about how she can't find any men who'll marry her because she's too smart and successful, I like to write about my uterus, my ovaries . . . I'm pretty sure even my Fallopes have gotten a shout-out or two. I just like to let everyone know how my plumbing's feeling, though it would probably save you all a lot of vomit if I just made myself a T-shirt. Squeamish? That's how we separate the men from the boys.
(Actually, I also like to write about how I can't find any men because I'm too smart and successful, now that I think about it.)
Now get in the kitchen and buy me some tampons!
For instance, right now I'm having my monthly “visit” from “Aunt Flo,” which is causing blood and bits of unimplanted human egg from my uterine walls to run out my vagina and into a Tampax Super, seeing as how I'm all woman, and which could conceivably have been the reason that I screamed at my son's dad, when he bitched about bringing him home early on Sunday for a birthday party, “Fine! Keep him! Keep him FOREVER!”
Which might have made his dad quickly rethink his opposition to the birthday party, but was still a pretty shitty thing to say.
So—funny story—I open my shiny new box of Tampax this morning and discover I've bought myself a variety pack, like I've picked up a box of instant oatmeal or something. Is there really anybody who needs Lights? Isn't that sort of the blueberry cream of tampons? If all you need is a Light, couldn't you just slap on a panty liner--one of the really adorably thin ones, like a whisper of a summer song--and call it a day?
There was actually a point to all this once. And it wasn't just Gloria Steinem's old chestnut that if men could menstruate, they'd be bragging about their two-pad flows. (But they would! As do I!)
It's so fucking much more than that. It's the pendulum swinging on a scary culture war against not just gays and blacks (of whose groups I'm sad to say I'm not a member, but give me a holler and I'll float you some dough!) but women too (and, see above all the grafs about my wombage, one of those I am!), where Senator Rick Santorum blame-games working women for all society's degeneration, where bizarre people on the internets truly believe it when they say a woman is transferred from her father's “possession” to her husband's and advocate against having given women the right to vote. It's a war in which not just Roe is under attack (about which, again, I'm not losing much sleep), but in which Griswold is as well. And Griswold—the Connecticut case that found the Constitutional right to privacy, saying you couldn't prosecute a married couple for using birth control—is something everyone in this country should care about deep and hard.
Sainted Margaret Sanger!
Let me repeat myself, again, to you assholes, because this is important! When four states have laws (and 11 more are considering them) specifically allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for The Pill both morning-after and morning-before if it's something of which they disapprove, when George W. Bush's first head of the FDA was a gynecologist who refused to prescribe birth control to unmarried women, when a Target pharmacist refuses to fill a morning-after prescription for a woman who's been raped, and last but not least when you're actually surprised to see a television advertisement with a healthy attitude toward female sex that depicts them as subjects, not objects, and is completely lacking in beer or Swedish blondes, there's a funky smell coming, and it's not the kind of funky smell that's perfectly natural and cyclical, you big whiny puss!
2 Comments:
So why was this column "lost"? Spiked because you're writing about your hoo-hoo/vag/cooter/wombage, yet again. It's just sex-sex-sex with you isn't it, Rebecca?
Just an observation -- not complaining.
Okay, I'm complaining ... although I'm happy that you're blogging again. I especially like the pictures. The last one is interesting because of the people in the background. They give a sense of just how tiny you are.
How can so much attitude come from such a little person one wonders?
Also, how come you don't have spaces between your paragraphs? It would help the reader follow your argument about your itsy-bitsy hoo-hoo.
And, what happened to your Yahoo! personal ad? That was funny. Now it's gone. And I feel sad. But hey, at least you've still got your hoo-hoo, even if it is ever so tiny.
Aren't tiny hoo-hoos good?
My wife just finished being on her period.
For.
Five.
Weeks.
Some kinda birth control misfire. Combined with the cramps and the crabbiness... Plus, we have ants and they apparently like the coppery taste and descend on the trashcan within an hour or so. Yum.
On the plus side, the forced sabbatical seems to have increased sensitivity. Bonus!
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