Eat the Damn Cake

This is a guest post from Rachel. You might recognize her from her comments on this blog. She’s often the one calling me out on something or not letting me get away with anything. When I mentioned the pill, I felt like I had a lot more to say about it, but I sort of wimped out. And then Rachel suggested that she send me this post, which adds something important to the discussion.

This is Rachel: She’s a feminist thinker in an English PhD program. She teaches college writing. I met her in college, in a class called “Women and Public Policy.” She raised her hand even more than me. This is what she has to say (today):

Remember that ubiquitous joke in sit-coms/movies/teen fiction:

The virile alpha-male makes a pass at the innocent, but sexy woman.

She responds, “I’m more than just a pair of breasts, you know.”

“Of course you are! How could I forget that great ass?”

*Laugh track*

How about this: I am not my breasts; I am not my genitals; I am not my body.

Nor am I its slave. Recently Kate blogged about the pill’s 50 year anniversary. When you hear someone say that the pill liberated women, know that they mean the pill liberated you from your own body. If anything, the pill liberated women from men. (That’s right, this is a feminist piece. I may even start talking about patriarchy and phallocentricism.)

Women have always known ways to prevent pregnancy, including:

The rhythm method

Condoms

Chemical douching

Diaphragms

“Pulling Out”

Breastfeeding

Some of these methods are more reliable than others, but what they all require is that women are able to decide if, when and how they want to have sex. When the pill was first introduced, there was no legal statute for marital rape (unmarried victims were routinely disbelieved anyway).

I’m skeptical of claims that the pill allowed women to have sex like men – read doing anything like a man is better – because the women it must have helped the most probably didn’t want to have sex in the first place (as often as they were forced/coerced to).[i] The one great advantage of the pill to other methods is that it is convenient: women can take it without their partners knowing, we can buy it at the pharmacy without other patrons knowing what it is (most of the time).

Menstruation is not slavery, but it’s not womanhood either. The article Kate cited also flouts the idea that the real liberation was not from pregnancy but irregular blood flow. The idea that being unsure when a period is coming is slavery is just ridiculous. (I don’t mean to discount the relief that hormonal contraception can provide to women with endometriosis or to girls who are for the first time in history experiencing menses before the teenage years.)

I got my period regularly and consistently for seven years. Carrying around a spare tampon in case of an unexpected visitor was no burden. Then I went on the pill: like most women, I thought it was the most reliable form of birth control. With my insurance it was also cheaper than condoms – at 18, I expected to be having lots of sex.

When I started the pill, I choose Seasonale, the four period a year pill. It never occurred to me to think that having a monthly period meant I was a woman. Do women really believe that? New York Magazine would have us believe so. Maybe the real reason women might want a monthly period is so their partners won’t suspect they were using the pill. Because you know, planning to have sex is something only men (and sluts) do.

I am not my body. Last year I switched from 4 periods to no periods. One side effect of being on Seasonale was that my “fake periods” started to come with week long migraines because, my body, being so used to a consistent level of hormones, couldn’t make up the loss fast enough when I took the inactive pills. The choice was to either have a monthly period, with a more “natural” fluctuation in hormone levels, or have none at all with a low estrogen pill. (Incidentally, I forgot to reorder in time a few months ago, and menstruated without the migraine.)

Women are women whether or not blood flows (as many post-menopausal women know personally), whether or not they have uteruses , whether or not they have breasts (as mastectomy survivors know) and even whether or not they have female genitals (as my transwomen sisters know). Being in touch with our bodies is important for many reasons, but it doesn’t help us “know ourselves”[ii]. We are embodied, but we are not our bodies.

Thinking about the birth control pill sparked what I’ve said here, but it applies to many other experiences of and pressures on femininity. There is a centuries old history of women being discussed only in terms of their bodies. Throughout the centuries a certain formula developed: Women can’t control their bodies, so they will be lured by the devil; wouldn’t have the patience for school; need men to protect them; need doctors to fix them.

I worry sometimes that in our zeal to take back our bodies we confuse obsession for ownership. When you own something, you don’t have to fear losing it, don’t have to prove that you deserve it, by the way you dress or by your fertility decisions.

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Unroast: I love that I’m cerebral. I know that this makes me stereotypically unfeminine, and I love that only by being myself I subvert gender norms.

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[i] This topic is necessarily speculative. If there was no such thing as marital rape, who would have talked publicly about it or about the advantages of being on the pill? Who would have written down a conversation like that?

[ii] Women who attended consciousness-raising meetings in the 60s and 70s may disagree with me on this one. I’d love your insight.