Day: November 6, 2003

Someone told me the other day that I obviously hate my femininity. I loathe the fact that I’m female. It really made me stop a minute and think, because I’ve never thought about it. I’m a girl. Oh yeah. It reminded me. But, then, I think they’re wrong. I don’t hate that I’m a female, nor do I wish I were a male. Either thought seems repulsively outdated and fruedian to me. I don’t think of myself as either. Why is it something I should dwell on? Because I have breasts? Because I don’t like high-heels?

What I dis-like is the ideal of femme. The, oh-I-have-a-vagina-so-I’m-a-brainless-fashion-victim. Especially that whole victim thing. So of course I go EW, when I’m being girly. I also go EW at the male aspects of socialized behavior. Football watching masculinity with beer in hand. We all know our stereotypes. Why go into it? More importantly, why be one of them? Why buy into that? Women are no more mysterious than men, our naked bodies no more interesting. Nor are all men chauvinistic droolers after women who think in sports and cars.

I think I blame the generational thing for this. I can think of a few reasons – the internet; the way we were raised; the changes in interaction, in the world view of today.
We live in a world where you may never meet your closest friend except over the screen of your computer. So why would gender matter?
We weren’t raised by hippies, so there’s no ultra-feministic backlash in our childhood constantly informing us that we’re bad people because we don’t treat women right. We were raised by the generation after. By the people that grew up still with that sexist, “women are special creatures” thing and decided that they didn’t want to be their parents.
Importantly also – we have been raised with a death threat. We are the AIDS generation. Sex is death. Body fluids kill. And you might not even know that you have it.

It is more than likely now that you will cuddle under blankets with your friends when it’s cold. You will sleep in their bed when you stay the night. You will sit in their laps on a crowded bus, and you will huddle up with five other people to crash after a party. And your sexuality will not enter into it. Your sexuality doesn’t matter, nor affect the situation. Your gender is nulled, unimportant. It will not even be considered.

Course, a decade or two back, and if you were sitting in someones lap, cuddling whilst you talked, apparently that meant that later you were going to sneak off and have sex. Now? Ghods no! Why would you? Our social interaction doesn’t work like that. You don’t know that this person has bodily fluids that aren’t going to kill you.

We wander about thse days, not usually thinking about our gender, nor the boxes that they used to trap us in. Unless, of course, we believe in gay. Which I personally don’t see as relevant. Feminism and homosexuality both had wars to fight for equality, but to fight a war, there must be a united front. There must be rules as well as passion. You are either/or. You are for or against. All very black or white. All very not us.

We are gray. Neither black or white, we are not playing by the rules. Gay is dying, almost dead, being replaced by a lack of strictures. I am neither gay, nor straight. “I don’t think of myself as straight – I think of myself as bi. It’s just I haven’t met any guys yet who turn me on.” Sexuality is now an open field. Play where you want to, but we will wander everywhere.

They cannot take this away from us. Their jealousy doesn’t touch on the truth. Hate is just fear, little kiddies. Hate is getting old, and weak. I will hold hands with my friends, and they with me. I am glad to have friends who love eachother, who aren’t afraid of themselves.

On November 5, President Bush signed into law the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003,” the first federal abortion ban in U.S. history. Proponents of this law contend it is designed to ban a particular procedure. Opponents argue it will subject doctors to jail time and fines for utilizing a range of procedures that might be the safest and most appropriate for a particular woman in a particular situation.

The new federal ban is nearly identical to a 2000 Nebraska ban that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down three years ago because it covered an overly broad category of procedures and failed to include an exception to protect a woman’s health.

There is no accurate information available on how many women obtain “partial-birth abortions” because there is no accepted medical definition for that term. The medical procedure that comes closest to the one supporters of the bill say they are trying to ban is the dilation and extraction (D&X) procedure. Data from The Alan Guttmacher Institute indicate that fewer than two-tenths of one percent of all abortions were performed using this procedure in 2000. However, the overly broad language of the bill could also encompass dilation and extraction (D&E), the most common second-trimester procedure.

Three groups have immediate plans to challenge the ban:

–The American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the National Abortion Federation, a membership organization for abortion providers;
–The Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of Dr. LeRoy Carhart, the Nebraska doctor who won the Supreme Court case mentioned above; and
–Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA).

In addition, PPFA has launched a website, http://www.protectwomenshealth.com , focusing on the potential effect of the ban.

For an overview of induced abortion in the United States click http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html

For more information on the threats to women’s access to abortion see: The Antiabortion Campaign To Personify the Fetus: Looking Back to the Future http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/gr020603.html or The Campaign Against ‘Partial-Birth’ Abortion: Status and Fallout http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/gr010606.html

For more information on the 2000 Nebraska case, see
High Court Strikes Down ‘Partial-Birth’ Ban, Upholds Protections for Clinic Clients < http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/gr030412.html For information on state bans on "partial-birth abortion" click here http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/spib_BPBA.pdf All current and archived articles can be downloaded from The Alan Guttmacher Institute's Web site, http://www.guttmacher.org