Cunt (8 page)

Eight days passed from when I started inducing miscarriage to the morning my embryo
plopped onto the bathroom floor.

Judy’s daily massages and my continuous imaging of the lining of my uterus shedding
away at every moment of my days, I feel, were
the most crucial
elements of my success story. I was absolutely focused on miscarrying and I
felt
Judy’s gentle, yet firm massages prodding things along quite nicely.

It was an incantation.

Me and my women friends did magic.

Esther’s love made magic. She supported me and stayed with me every day. Bridget’s
thoughtfulness made magic. She brought me flowers. Possibly most magical was the fact
that, after the first coupla days, I possessed not one filament of self-doubt. With
that core of supportive women surrounding me and with my mind made up, I was pretty
much invincible.

I stress this because in America, we tend to hold that popping medicine in our mouths
and swallowing is the extent of our involvement in the healing process. We believe
that if we get better, it’s because the
medicine
worked magic, not the
person.
Many women I know have tried to induce miscarriage and failed because they took certain
herbal potions and went about their lives as if everything were normal, waiting for
the herbs to work their wonders. To successfully induce miscarriage, one must devote
One’s Entire Life to the attainment of this goal.
I place an enormous amount of emphasis on this point.
When I induced miscarriage, I breathed, ate, shat and slept thinking of nothing else
but the lining of my uterus shedding.

The herbal teas and other oral and topical applications I prescribed to myself were
little helpers.
They served to further direct
my own focus
and
aid
me in achieving my goal. Herbs are
particularly
good little helpers because plants easily and synergistically jive with one’s own
magic and are quite willing to work with you if you respect them.

The herbs I chose were blue cohosh root and pennyroyal leaves. The information I am
providing is to illustrate how I,
one specific individual,
induced a miscarriage. There are hundreds of emmenagogues and abortifacients that
grow on the planet. The two I decided to use were chosen after a lot of dicussion
and reading.

After a week of non-stop imaging, massages, tea drinking, talking and concentrating,
I was brushing my teeth at the sink and felt a very peculiar mmmmbloommmp-like feeling.
I looked at the bathroom floor and there, between my feet, was some blood and a little
round thing. It was clear but felt like one of them unshiny superballs. It was the
neatest thing I ever did see.

An orb of life and energy, in my hand.

And Jesus H., wasn’t I the happiest clam? It hardly hurt at all, just some mild contractions.
I bled very little, felt fine in two days. I wore black for a week and had a little
funeral in my head.

Organically inducing a miscarriage was definitely one of the top ten learning experiences
in my life thus far.

You know, it’s like when Germany invaded Poland. I once read how in the ghettos of
Warsaw, the people fighting the Nazis were real amazed at first that a Nazi soldier
would die if you shot him. They
suspected
that Nazis could die, but
felt
like they were somehow superhuman.

That’s how I felt after I miscarried a child without paying a visit to the beef cow
clinic and that sickening vacuum cleaner. I felt the way I imagine any oppressed individual
feels when they see that they have power and nobody—not men and not their machines—can
take that away.

Terminating a pregnancy in any manner is a harrowing, traumatic experience. At the
time, my emotions were an odd juxtaposition of untold grief and profound exhilaration.
When the sadness settled quietly into my heart, I felt
so happy
to be a woman. I looked at all my women friends with such an intense, burning rush
of joy. My cuntlovin’ friends and I did something
amazing
to
affect my destiny
in the most conducive possible way.

I learned that the fight for human rights does not take place on some bureaucratic
battleground with a bevy of lawyers running from congressional suite to congressional
suite, sapping resources into laws. The war for peace and love and other nice things
like that is not waged in protests on the street. These forms of fighting are a reaction
to oppression, giving destructive power that much more energy. The real fight for
human rights is inside each and every individual on this earth.

While traversing along this particular train of thought, I realize I just might sound
like a woman who has never experienced the unspeakable horror of back-alley abortions,
and I am. I also realize that it might seem as if I’m ungrateful to all the cuntlovin’
women who fought their hearts raw for legal abortions, which I am not. The fact that
there now exists a generation of women who can actually consider clinical abortion
to be an oppressive diversion from our own power is
based wholly upon
the foundation that our mothers and sisters built for us. I sincerely thank the individuals
who fought so hard that I may have the luxury of the belief I now hold. Evolutionarily
speaking, it is quite natural for this fight to progress into a new arena, for the
fight is not over, it has not ended. The squabble between pro-lifers and pro-choicers
serves only to keep our eyes off the target, and nothing more.

Without the women in my life, both living and dead, I would have been roadkill simply
ages ago. All women benefit from concentrating our energy on the power within our
own circle of friends, creating informal health collectives where we discuss things
like our bodies and our selves.

Abortion clinics, in their present incarnation, will be completely unnecessary when
we believe in our own power, and the power of our immediate communities. The abortion
issue can become a personal, intimate thing amongst cuntlovin’ women friends.

Can you say Amen.

Nobody here is saying abortion is a form of birth control.

It isn’t.

Having an abortion totally sucks. Practicing a birth control lifestyle is a fabulous
all expenses paid, carte blanche vacation in Tahiti compared to terminating a pregnancy.

Birth control is preventative medicine (referring, of course, to the nurturing, woman-centered
definitions of “medicine”). It is actively sustaining a lifestyle that grosses and
nets the fewest possibilities of conceiving a child. Having an abortion, on the other
hand, is terminating the progress of something that is already quite under way.

However, since the morning-after pill has been cleared by the American Food and Drug
Association, abortion and birth control have kinda merged a bit.

The morning-after pill was not available to me the three times I was pregnant. If
it had been, I do not know if I would have taken it, because I am deathly fearful
of pills, and am unclear on the long-term side effects we’re talkin’ here. There is
definitely an allure in a pill one can take “just to be safe.” Absolute knowledge
of conception is a non-issue. Take the pill, have your period, and if it’s a little
heavy and clotty, figure ya mighta been, but then again maybe not.

Kinda preventative, kinda terminator style.

Yeah, the morning-after pill runs ’long a misty boundary.

One thing I’m pretty certain about, though. Featuring this pill as a fabulous star
in one’s birth control lifestyle would rend untold—quite possibly irreparable—damage
to the lining of one’s uterus. Since it’s now accessible, I am concerned that women
could start relying on it too heavily.

My opinion of the morning-after pill also runs along a misty boundary. It’s damn important
for a lot of reasons. But to the day I keel over, I’ll be a diehard, furrow-browed
skeptic whenever male-run industries are involved with us womenfolk’s business.

That said, I know of three birth control lifestyles that are 100 percent safe and
infallible.

The first—abstinence—is no fun and extremely unhealthy, so forget that one.

Masturbation is fun. Lordisa, is masturbation fun. It’s also liberating, empowering
and a superlative form of safe sex. You cannot get pregnant or become HIV positive
even if you are in a circle jerk with everyone and her sister. Besides all of these
outstanding qualities, masturbation is an
absolutely peerless
cure for the hiccups.

Masturbation is a high art. I have a cuntlovin’ friend who masturbates without touching
herself. She ornately concentrates on an erotic adventure until she comes her brains
out. She’s rolled her eyes and moaned on public transportation and in long lines at
the grocery store. Comin’ her brains out. Another friend of mine goes the manual route,
but has specialized her timing and precision in elevators.

For those of us less mentally talented and/or dexterous, there are vibrators, dildos,
Ben Wa balls, butt plugs and massage wands shaped like everything from dill pickles
to elephants with trunks raised clit high. Also, of course, the five holy and munificent
fingers on each hand.

Sex exclusively with girls is also fun. Unless pregnancy is on the agenda, or something
immaculate occurs, lesbians do not usually conceive. Women do not have sperm. Thus,
women cannot accidentally get each other pregnant. HIV, though, is another scenario.
Women are able to pass HIV to each other. The research done thus far on the possibility
of acquiring HIV woman to woman is inconclusive, but the risk should be taken seriously.
Trust no one but yourself, and always practice the safest possible sex.

In conclusion, the only 100 percent safe and infallible birth control lifestyles worth
considering are: masturbation and/or sex exclusively with women. When neither of these
lifestyles coincides with a cuntlovin’ woman’s reality, the prevention of unplanned
pregnancy is often an issue.

There are ways for cuntlovin’ women to deal with this issue without the pill, barriers
against the cervix, hormone implants or whatever other “choices” male-centered medicine’s
birth control industry has palmed off on us.

What, exactly, is the lifecycle of a
woman’s
body
doing
under the jurisdiction of a medical science established, defined and implemented
by people who
do not have cunts?

It’s like suddenly, one day in the Middle Ages, people figured men should be in charge
of women’s bodies since they were in charge of pretty much everything else.

In context, at the time, perhaps it made sense.

It does not make sense anymore.

Maybe we lost contact with our archives somewhere along the way. Maybe we kinda went
ahead and played along like we were dumb. Maybe we got beaten and raped and tortured
and enslaved into submission.

That is the past.

It’s something to reckon with, but also: it’s gone.

Face it, forget it.

Focus on the present: the age of communication.

We gots us the Internet.

You can e-mail government officials in Pakistan and plead mercy for the fifteen-year-old
girl sentenced to death for killing the man who raped her. You can find the chemical
compound for Depo-Provera and see how that chemical compound affects the human body.
You can hop on Diamanda Galás’s website and find out what in good Lordisa’s name she’s
up to now. You can download all the recipes for chocolate chip cookies on the planet
earth and follow a different one each month when you and your friends are PMSing.

And that’s just the Internet.

Living as we do in an age of communication, it is pretty much acceptable to go, “Hey
Gramma, what’d you use for birth control, how did you bleed, what was sex like back
then, how many lovers did you have, how many abortions, when, where, how, why?”

Bam
, connection with history.

Our communication environment fosters vast, far-reaching and intricate networks of
women who utilize fanzines, small presses, schools, record companies, magazines, television
shows and movies. Women from all socioeconomic stratas communicate in mediums that
in the past were either not accessible or not invented.

It is
perfectly socially acceptable
for you to write down every thought you’ve ever had about
anything
—from your gorgeous prize wisteria, to the insane relationship you have with your
hair, to your all-consuming love for the clitoris—then slap the words together with
some cool pictures, make five hundred copies, staple each and sell them to every woman
you do and don’t know for a buck a pop.

Bam
, everybody profits.

All these situations are now in context and they now make sense.

We are able to share knowledge, history, experiences, recipes and remedies like our
motherkin could not. As more and more women communicate, a new language and sense
of community evolves. Equipped with language, a means of communication and the desire
to talk to one another, our voices, histories and dreams whirling dervish into regenerative
cuntpower.