Anti-Choice and Me
Got an upset phone call from T-Dizzle today. She said that she saw something that she found very disturbing. There were anti-choice protesters out in front of her high school, dismembered fetus posters and all. She said that she screamed “PRO CHOICE!!!!!” at them as the car she was in drove past, but the sight was scarring enough that she felt she needed to call me for some soothing.
My feeling is that this proves that anti-choice fuckfaces don’t give a SHIT about actual children. My kids are in school to learn, to receive an education, not to be harassed by psychos who like to shock children with gruesome pictures.
I posted about this on my fartfacebook status. L-Dawg commented and said that she had kicked over their signs when they pulled the same shit at her college. (yay! my daughters rule!)
Most of the people who read and replied to my post “got” what I said. MY. KID. IS. A. HUMAN. BEING. WHO. HAS. THE. RIGHT. TO. AN. EDUCATION. FREE. FROM. HARASSMENT.
One exception–some right-wing cookoohead who tried to tell me that *MY* kid (lumped in with generic “teenagers”) doesn’t really understand the “birds and the bees” (she’s fucking 16, she’s an honor student, and bi-sexual. She totally understands the biomechanics of sexuality and reproduction.) and therefore needs to be “educated” that fetuses are human beings. So, we can’t call Sex “SEX”, we have to call it “birds and bees”, but we CAN display large posters of gruesome, dismembered fetuses outside a school as “education”? Birds and bees education? That takes precedence over, I dunno, the actual curriculum of the school, and, oh, maybe the rights of the students not to be traumatized…..
And then….oh man, this is funny, she said that Margaret Sanger started Planned Parenthood to bamboozle African Americans into self-genocide (via contraception).
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So, I removed her post, and asked her not to make blanket statements to me about African Americans, nor any other people of color, as she does not know my racial make-up, nor the racial make-up of my kid.
She blinked, of course, but tried to make it seem that “I” misunderstood her reply. And assumed that I’m African American, or that my kid is.
I did not misunderstand. I just chose not to engage in a bullshit conversation, and found a way to make her feel uncomfortable. Tee hee hee.
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But it got me to thinking about those posters, those protesters. And how you can’t “unsee” shit like that. I grew up in a very conservative town, and woman-hating Jesus-freaks with those awful signs would protest, uh, now that I think about it…why were they at the intersection where they were? There was a grocery store and a small shopping center, and it was across from the Junior High school, but, there wasn’t a Planned Parenthood or anything there.
Why were they there? So we kids would see them. And no matter how much WE screamed “PRO CHOICE” at them, or laughed at them, or possibly (not admitting to this myself) threw wire coat-hangers at them, we could not unsee those pictures. And the rhetoric that issues from that kind of behavior. “Hey those pics are gross and scary and offensive.” “Well, it’s my right to free speech to show them.” And no-one ever saying to me, a kid, “Those people–there’s something wrong with them. Kids, teenagers, like to be intentionally provocative. It’s age-appropriate. But adults who behave like that–there’s something wrong with them. They don’t want to educate people. They want to HURT people.”
And, it worked. To live in a conservative town, where every conversation about sexuality revolves around the shame of pregnancy–that’s what I learned. You get pregnant, it’s shameful. You have an abortion, it’s shameful. You have a kid, it’s shameful. Being a woman is shameful. Being a baby that hasn’t been born, that’s okay. You have a right to live. But. Not so much once you are born a woman. Then you have to look at gory pictures. Then you don’t have a brain, only a uterus. Which is good for housing unborn babies, but YOU are shameful because everyone knows the way unborn babies get in a uterus is because the woman got FUCKED. Being a woman is bad.
In that environment, where people don’t talk about “sex”, but only about “birds and bees”, and yet accept that intentionally shocking, scary pictures are “free speech”, there is NO conversation about the beauty of sexuality, in all its juicy, hot, stanky glory. There’s no sex act that doesn’t carry the fear of pregnancy along with it. Sex and fear and shame. Not sex and music and chocolate. So painful, so hateful, so hurtful. So narrow and restrictive. And dumb.
Took me a long time to learn to enjoy sex for the sake of sex. Took two kids, three abortions, one miscarriage and fucking premature menopause for me to begin to unlearn the “lessons” of those posters.
I’m bummed that my kids had to see pictures like that. I really am.
