Pussy Politics

Want to grab my pussy? 

Is what I wanted to ask the President elect back in 2016 – or tweet I guess. But I wasn’t on Twitter. I wasn’t really up on social media much at all. I was busy living my life.  I was busy raising children and busy working.  Then I got sick and I was busy recovering from raising all those children and doing all that work.

My pussy was tired.  

I do have a Twitter account, because my son set it up for me.  And I am on Facebook -- I don’t live under a rock! But let’s be honest - my connections on Facebook amount to a handful of old friends from high school, and high school was a long time ago.  And, sure, I’m on Instagram. How else could I keep up with all the nieces and nephews? But I don’t think they wanted to hear about my pussy — pussies are a touchy subject. 

I don’t normally think of myself as a political writer, but the personal-is-political, and I can’t think of anything more personal than my pussy.

So here we are. 

My pussy has seen some things in its 60 years I can tell you -- survived what Sylvia Path called the long yawn of childhood to arrive at its glorious teen years. This is when I became a young lover, enjoying that kind of true love that is saved for the young, only possible when you’ve never experienced hurt or loss. ‘Twas heaven.

Then tragedy struck.

Like too many women, my pussy encountered terrifying and life-changing events as the victim of sexual abuse.  The fun was over for awhile. But I recovered — with vengeance.  

The empowered pussy! 

My pussy is New York State born and bred.  And did you know that in New York abortion is legal at all stages of pregnancy thanks to laws signed on my 6th birthday? The laws, enacted on April 10, 1964, (three whole years before Roe v. Wade), not only decriminalized abortion, but they also added a consent provision.  Consent means, I say what you can and cannot do to my pussy.

My pussy loves New York.

Now the medical term for a miscarriage is a “spontaneous abortion” and something like up to 40% of all pussies will experience one.   But almost nobody calls a miscarriage a “spontaneous abortion.”  When we say abortion, we are talking about the other medical abortion, the non-spontaneous or induced abortion.  This, I learned, is what we commonly call, “just an abortion”. Therefore, the abortions I had in the 1980s were “just abortions”.

Oh.

And then there’s this: When a woman experiences a spontaneous abortion, she is thought to have lost her baby and is expected to grieve. If she enjoys a close relationship with the other parent of her child, they may grieve together.  And if the pregnancy has been celebrated by family and friends, an entire community may grieve.  Not so for the woman who has “just an abortion”.  Though she may grieve with a partner, she often grieves alone.  And thanks to the 2024 Supreme Court Decision overturning Roe v Wade, that grieving woman may now have herself an outlaw pussy.  

It is stated that the most common reasons for “just an abortion” are age (too young) and family size (too big).  I had my “just abortions” for both these reasons.  I had my first at 18 (too young) and another because I already had a baby—all we could handle (according to my first husband). My current husband and I had a spontaneous abortion together some years ago.  That man cried longer and harder than I ever gave myself permission to, for any abortion I had.

My pussy thinks the world of him.  

It is common knowledge that when performed legally, and in industrialized societies, induced abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine as are self-managed medication abortions through the first semester.  Self-managed medications were unavailable to me in the 1980s. I wish they had been.

My pussy could have used all the help it could get back then.   

But let’s bring things up to speed, for as the saying goes, there’s no rest for the weary pussy.

Awhile ago I’d read that the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services “now requires consent for breast, pelvic, prostrate, and rectal exams for “educational and training purposes performed by medical students, nurse practitioners, or physician assistants.” You mean they didn’t need consent before? 

Well it seems that “doctors and medical students sometimes perform exams of sensitive areas for training purposes when a patient is under anesthesia.” So now, “Hospitals must obtain written informed consent from patients before subjugating them to pelvic exams and exams of other sensitive areas – especially if an exam will be done while the patient is unconscious, the federal government said. I’ve had 10 surgeries since 2007, not to mention numerous procedures where I have been fully anesthetized. 

Just when you think your pussy has had enough, right? 

I’m glad to know my mother isn’t alive to learn all this.  Come to think of it, I never heard my mother use the word “pussy” in her whole life.  Most likely she’d say something like, “Pussy is a private word for a private part”, and I’d agree.  And I’d add that the things a woman can do with it, chooses to do with it, or have done to it -- are also personal.

To be fair, I’m quite sure the President Elect didn’t mean my pussy back when he joked with Billy Bush telling him that being rich and famous meant he could “just grab their pussies whenever he wanted.”  Be sure I never would have given him consent to grab my pussy— ever.

But because he is the kind of man who thinks and says things like that, I did not want him to be our president and did not vote for him. 

It doesn’t get more political than that.