Sometime in the past week, the upper part of my left thigh has achieved an admirable state of tumescence. First a mere trace, then a deep, mottled violet and now a blushing lavender, the lump is obvious and tender, causing me to wince every time I accidentally brush against it. Such are the perils of fresh meat training – in an attempt to imitate some version of a vaguely athletic person, I’ve set my sights on being a roller derby girl.
No, I haven’t seen Whip It and yes, I do like the short shorts thank you very much. Wrapped up in those deliciously obscene little numbers with socks rising up my calves to meet the protective knee pads and swishy black and red ankle skates on, I feel powerful and Bodaecia like – even when I’m smacking down on the same left thigh spot for the fourth time that evening.
Everything I’ve ever heard from derby girls about their sport makes me want to be a part of it – the strong focus on feminist principles and athleticism coupled with a cheeky coquettishness makes it a sport I can really get behind. On the first night of training, Barrelhouse Bessie (from the Adelaide Roller Derby League) stood before all the freshies and in her great, booming voice told us in no uncertain terms that anyone caught saying anything negative or mean about another girl would be asked to leave immediately and never allowed back into the league. Preach it, sister!
100 nervous ladies competing against each other could so very easily lead to the kind of bitchy cliques that diminish women on the whole, but it’s amazing how simply being warned against it on threat of expulsion helped everyone to relax, get along and focus on the task at hand – namely, moulding ourselves into some semblance of a competent skater in order to pass muster at the first round of testing. Perhaps because of this, it suddenly became so much easier to approach virtual strangers to arrange casual skating outings – we’re all in the same boat, so we may as well sink or swim together. There’s a camaraderie about the sport (or at the least the way Adelaide practices it – I’ve heard it can be different elsewhere) that’s very appealing to me. I can see why some derby girls end up devoting their every waking hours to it.
And tangentially, I want to use this recent exposure to the derby culture to talk more broadly about the relationships women have with each other; specifically, the things we do to or for each other that create lasting impressions without our knowledge. Obviously it’s important to live your life in a way that is gracious and kind towards others – but often it’s the seemingly inconsequential actions or statements that can help or haunt people for years to come.
After my last post, I received an email from a lovely lady I knew at school. Until a couple of years ago, we hadn’t had any contact since we all gratefully left that panopticon of hormonal angst. I had always liked her, even though we moved in different circles. Sarah had been friends with that particular brand of school folk glibly christened The Beautiful People, while I ran with the kinds of untamed brumbies who devote their lives to debating and drama, and the dedicated pursuit of school prefectdom.
In the grand scheme of school politics, the former manage to irrationally hold onto absolute popularity despite being not well liked by pretty much anyone outside of their own strata – the latter are tolerated because they’re fairly inoffensive and can always be relied upon to bring cigarettes to parties and school camps out of some kind of secret desire to engage in a skerrick of rebellion. Mutually, they regard each other with a kind of respectful indifference, able to exchange pleasantries one hour and absolute disregard in another.
I liked a few of them though. Sarah ended up in my drama class and delivered a sterling performance of Abigail in one of the many annual performances of The Crucible that seems to be favoured by year 12 classes. I remember the night we found out Sarah had been given the highest mark by the moderator. To her face, I was supportive and congratulatory; but backstage, I wasted no time exchanging bitter and basically cruel words with another friend. How could Sarah have been given the best mark when she hadn’t even been doing drama that long? It was clearly ridiculous and she didn’t deserve it but everyone knows the moderators are corrupt anyway and besides, we do drama for the love not the grades, though it would be nice to be recognized for our clear and enviable talent.
Just as I was finishing twisting the knife in the back of this girl who, despite being completely entitled to ignore me based on social standing alone, had always been nice to me, I realized she had overheard everything. Obviously upset and betrayed, she ran to the bathroom to compose herself while I, caught up in a drama of my own making, proceeded to work myself into a wailing lather. My reaction then was borne out of a 17 year old girl’s desire to engage in meaningful activity (which, to a 17 year old girl, usually consists of crying, arguing, issuing forth lofty platitudes, and then crying some more).
But over the years, I thought more and more of that night and how deeply cruel and selfish my reaction was to Sarah’s success. She had clearly delivered a better performance than me and everyone else in the class – it was obvious. And why shouldn’t she enjoy the pleasure of that? How could I have participated – nay, led – something that tried to ruin that for her?
At more than one point in my life (countless, if I’m honest), I have said or done something to another person with the deliberate intention of hurting them; of chipping away at their self esteem and tarnishing their golden moments.
Strange, the things we choose to remember. I remember that night so clearly, and the shame of that behaviour has only grown with the years. But funnily enough, when I met with Sarah a few years ago for brunch and finally took the opportunity to apologise for it, she confessed she had no memory of it whatsoever. Instead, she told me that she hated high school; that despite what other people thought of those Beautiful Folk, she (and many others) had been miserable the whole time. Sarah especially was a sad person for a long time, and had little to no faith in herself. I’m talking serious depression – the kind of bone draining, black fog driven by a sadness so deep it can seemingly not be soothed.
More than my own mean actions towards her does it sadden me that such a nice, beautiful person spent so many years in hidden anguish. And here’s the thing – while I was remembering the one thing I did to betray a girl I genuinely liked and admired, Sarah remembered me as someone who always stood up for what she believed in and was nice to be around. Half of the incidents she’s thinking of are completely lost to me. We focus so much on the formation of our own memories. We forget that we have just as profound a role to play in the formation of other people’s.
We have all of us done things out of cruelty. If we’re lucky, we’re the only people who will remember these ill advised descents into jealousy or pettiness and we’ll use the shame of these memories to help us become better people.
But occasionally, we are the bearers of actions so pure and well meant that they don’t even register with us as being meaningful. A throwaway sentence here, a compliment to a stranger there or just a moment of comfortable silence in another’s person’s company – as the radiant Sofia would say, there are fairies in this here garden.
So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few people who have, in ways I imagine they have no recollection of, changed my life for the better.
When I was in year 11, I confessed to my sort of friend Jaci (I say sort of, because she was much cooler than I was, way more beautiful and definitely more worldly – at 16, I was still far too terrified to talk to a boy let alone kiss one or do anything else that teenagers enjoy) that the prospect of taking my clothes off with a fellow struck the fear of God into me. “Jaci,” I said, “all I can think of is that he’ll take one look at my thighs and be absolutely repulsed.”
With all the knowing confidence of a more experienced woman, Jaci turned to me and said, “Clementine, you shouldn’t worry about those things. Trust me, the last thing a guy’s going to be thinking of if he’s naked with you is how big your thighs are. He’s seen you with your clothes on – he knows how big or small they are.”
Less than a minute’s worth of conversation that I’m sure Jaci has completely forgotten, and yet I know it’s had a long lasting impression on me. Clothed, I fret about the size of everything – does my face look fat from this angle, is anyone looking at me and thinking I should be embarrassed to leave the house, does this skirt make my legs look like tree trunks? But since that conversation with Jaci, I have (without consciously recognizing it) never worried about what my body looks like when the clothes come off and the lights dim low. That kind of self confidence where it matters should be bottled and force fed to girls as soon as they hit puberty.
Then there’s Siobahn. What can I say about Siobahn except that she is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, and her entire way of being makes my heart retreat to innocent games of hopscotch and making daisy chains in the garden. Siobahn and I were both Wendy’s girls during high school. Perhaps it was enforced servitude to bright pink shorts that bonded us. I don’t know. We were never particularly close in high school. I liked her but didn’t trust her social ranking. Another of the Beautiful Folk, she seemed too blessed and pretty to actually be as nice as she seemed.
Then school finished and BAM! Siobahn became a different person. She shaved her head, moved to Darwin, traveled around Australia and the world, lived in South America and grew her hair back and knotted it into dreads. Last year I ran into her at a women’s film festival in Adelaide and was captivated. She is a treasure waiting to be discovered, shining bright but hidden within a map made not of geography but of time.
In January, I literally walked into her in a convenience store in Barcelona and was again bowled over by that luminescent creature before me. Together, we huddled over glasses of wine and crawled beneath the top layers of conversation to discuss everything blanketed beneath. We traipsed around Barcelona, taking silly photos in alleyways and getting lost in claustrophobic ghettos. I remember thinking that she was one of the most interesting and warm people I’d ever met, and that I was so lucky to have her skip briefly in and out of my life in a small corner of the world.
Now she’s returned to Adelaide with the beginnings of a small person inside her. She’s going to be the most wonderful mother. Some people do not appear often in our lives, but flutter around the edges. Occasionally they duck across our paths to give us the briefest of touches, pressing their palms against the wall of our memory to find a way in once more and settle in the comfy chair that will always belong to them.
And so finally to Sarah, the girl who started me on this line of questioning in the first place. She may not realize it, but she exists in my mind as a pillar, occupying the same clearly defined lines that mark out people of my daily acquaintance. There are few to whom I haven’t recounted the story of that brunch – the revelation that, despite what others may have believed, her so called easy life was laboured and painful and that what we choose to believe isn’t always fair or real.
Knowing what I now do, I treasure her smile even more. I remember that once upon a time I allowed jealousy to harm her, but that she turned out to be a better person than I by forgiving and ultimately forgetting; and that despite even all that, she still does me the honour of offering me her friendship and admiration. She may not believe it, but it’s people like her who make the world a nicer place to live in for people like me, who have so often bowed to the temptation to make it a meaner one.
Perhaps it’s true that those who cause us to make changes within ourselves are not those we see everyday but those who force us to turn inwards. The echoes that they leave behind reverberate on the vast landscape of our souls and only occasionally reach audible frequency. They are both memory and reminder that we were once held in the palm of a greater kind of beauty and that, if we follow their example, it’s possible to take others to that wondrous place too.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Wine wobbling widely
Good lord but it's been an age. Call it post holiday brain dysfunction, call it longing for warmer climes. Either way, it's been a good break. As Adelaide shuffles slowly towards something resembling spring, I can only hope I have a few deliciously coy love affairs heading my way. Spring flings are definitely the best way to celebrate the season.
Tonight I gave a speech at the SA Writers Centre for a poetry competition run by said Writers Centre and the Mental Health Coalition. I was asked to speak to the theme of challenging stigmas through writing. Unlike most of my speeches, I wrote it well in advance of the deadline - at least 5 hours before delivery. What can I say? It's not flippancy which makes me act thus but the constant inability to do anything outside of a pressure cooker.
Predictably, I spent the time leading up to proceedings loitering around the food table with a seemingly bottomless glass of wine in hand. It might surprise some to know I'm terribly shy, at least at first, and find it quite awkward to converse with strangers unless I'm two and a half sheets to the wind. This might explain why I make dreadful decisions concerning the pursuit of romance while half plastered and riding high on the good humour of Dylan Moran...but that's a story for another time...
With a bellyful of cheese and vino, I was introduced by SA's Channel Ten Sports Reporter Mark Aiston, who is quite simply one of the loveliest and most humble men you'll ever meet. Really and truly, I was blown away by his complete lack of pretension and sensitivity. What a guy!
And being unable to deliver witty, pithy speeches off the cuff, I proceeded to deliver said speech with my laptop balanced precariously on the lectern and one eye on the crowd. I reproduce said speech for anyone who may be interested. I cut out some of the proselytizing (which it turns out, I did seek to do after all) and some other bits here and there, but this was the original version. I shall be interested to know the thoughts of other writers out there. Part of me suspects it may be hopelessly self indulgent, but I suppose that's part and parcel of being a writer as well so perhaps it's prevalent in some way. This is possibly why I've signed myself up to a Fringe show that involves me reading out recreated diary entries from my early teenage years.
I say 'signed up' as if I'm being coerced when really there's no one involved in the production or decision making process except me. I'm such a douche sometimes, but luckily for you, a douche prepared to make a complete and utter humiliation of her formative years. And if recent events are anything to go by, pretty much every year that has fallen subsequently since then. I AM SUCH A DORK and should never be allowed near wine or men again.
Anyhoo, here she is:
****
For as long as I can remember, I’ve written things down – my teenage diaries are littered with embarrassing entries whose content all either invariably ended with the declaration that my life was OVER, or that I was in love with yet another impossibly attractive and unattainable boy who didn’t even know I was alive because I was FAT and UGLY and therefore my life was OVER.
I have sheets of song lyrics and poems I would be too humiliated to even show to my best friend – and she knows about the time I publicly molested a fellow outside the Crown and Anchor.
I could literally show you reams and reams of terrible things I’ve written over the years. As I said, I've always written things down.
But it wasn’t until I started writing things down for other people that I actually became a writer. And when you become a writer, you start to realize how your words can affect other people. A good writer can move people to laughter or tears or outrageous fury – a great writer can move them through all three stages in the one piece.
I don’t know if I’m a great writer, but one thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the first step one needs to take on this path is to become an honest one. You have to be willing to open yourself up completely regardless of what people may think of you. Much like falling in love, writing is less about telling someone something you think they ought to know and more about discovering hidden parts of yourself – confronting them head on and experiencing all the beauty and pain they have to offer you; staring your detractors square in the eye to say, “This is me, and nothing you say can shame me into being any different.”
So I find it difficult to wrap my head around the concept of challenging stigmas through writing. To challenge is in itself a deliberate act, and while I have made many deliberate decisions as a writer, I have never done so purely with the intention of challenging the status quo. When I wrote my column for the Sunday Mail, they were fond of couching me as the ‘controversial’ columnist. In turn (though not necessarily because of this), a large chunk of readers often responded to my pieces with the accusation that I was being consciously provocative to court outrage and page views.
I have to say that I find very few things more offensive than the suggestion that the urge to write, to share ideas (and yes, to additionally challenge opinions I believe to be incorrect or misguided) is somehow motivated by a desire to be contrary or supercilious. Such accusations are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to render you and everything you stand for as meaningless – to say that someone courts controversy is essentially to say that they believe in nothing other than that which will isolate them from the flock, regardless of what it might mean.
I have never written anything I don’t believe in 100%. On occasion, I have changed my viewpoint, such as following the Bill Henson affair. Part of being a great writer is also being willing to allow others to open your mind; to lift you from a place in which you thought you had laid down solid roots and instead transport you to unfamiliar territories – to lay you down on disconcerting lands whose beauty inherently lies in its promise to show you something you never previously would have thought possible.
My most ‘controversial’ column was written early on in my stint as a Sunday Mail columnist, and for the purpose of tonight I’ll use it as an example. Please understand that my intention is not to proselytize but merely to provide the most obvious example I can think of of challenging stigmas, whatever that might mean.
It was prompted the week prior because someone had sent me an outraged letter objecting to a comment I had made supporting reproductive rights and access to state funded, legal abortion. Frustrated by the modern day scarlet letter that all those who’ve had abortions seem destined to be forced to bear, I wrote an unapologetic piece detailing my own life – over a period of 18 months, I had not one but two abortions. I didn’t apologise for them then and I won’t apologise for them now.
But the point of my column at the time was not only that I wouldn’t apologise for them, but that women in general shouldn’t have to. That a large proportion of women who do speak of them in trembling, apologetic tones are merely responding to the general social expectation that they SHOULD wear their decisions like a scarlet letter, trumpeting familiar claims that it was the hardest choice they’ve ever had to make and so on and so forth.
As was to be expected, I was slammed widely from all quarters. People I’d never met took it upon themselves to call me, by turns, a slut, a whore, a bitch who should keep her legs closed, an abomination, an evil baby killing machine and (perhaps most amusingly) someone who was so repulsively unattractive that it was a wonder I’d found anyone willing to sleep with me at all let alone impregnate me. I even had someone write to inform me that the good Catholics of Rome were praying for my soul.
Most disappointingly, people who claimed to be pro-choice lambasted me for going through the procedure twice – after all, hadn’t I ever heard of contraception? Because as we all know, accidental pregnancies are like acquired immunity – once you’ve had one, it just can’t happen again! To whatever extent your pregnancy was 'accidental' or the result of contraceptive laziness is really irrelevant to me - if you agree with the right to choose abortion, it's none of your business how or why that decision comes to be. It frustrates me to this day that some people who claim to be pro-choice seem to treat abortions like get out of jail free cards – in their world, a woman is entitled to one (provided she demonstrates the requisite self flagellating regret, crawling on her belly to beg forgiveness from the court of public opinion).
The point of my column was not to shout from the rooftops that I’d had two abortions and refused to apologise for them (which is not the same thing, as some people argued, as being flippant about them) – it was to demonstrate to the public that, despite what we are led to believe, when it comes to such things I am but one woman in a sea of many. I wanted to stand up there and say that I will not be crippled by a sense of shame foisted on me by a society that forces me to qualify decisions made regarding my own body and mental capacity. That, more than anything, what I felt was sheer unbridled relief – and that I am by no means the only one who feels this way.
Despite that column and despite the work I continue to do today regarding abortion activism, I cannot change the minds of people who insist on seeing a person like me as some kind of hideous succubus intent on enacting genocide against the poor defenceless babies of this world who are unfortunate enough to be conceived in the bellies of the strident, man hating feminists who refuse to accept the god given truth that their bodies don’t belong to them but rather to those who are better placed to make decisions regarding said bodies – widely (and deeply) held convictions that are so outrageously extreme as to be laughable.
It’s true that there are none so blind as those will not see. The act of writing something meaningful, challenging or not, is wasted on those who are willfully incapable of empathizing with the words. Writing for an audience – great writing – is an invitation. A great writer asks her audience to consider something from a different perspective, to view the world through a lens that may not be palatable to the reader but is at least interesting in some way if only because the work is honest.
But one of the greatest strengths a writer can have is letting others know that they are not alone; that feelings they may have had which seem abhorrent or unacceptable are indeed not isolated to them alone. That their desires and dreams are not ridiculous; that their fears may be lessened simply through the knowledge that someone else has experienced them and come out the other side – scarred, perhaps, but intact.
Our society is entrenched in fear of the unknown, and of being different – for example, nobody talks about death in a way that is tangible or visceral. Nobody talks about what it’s like to want to die as a philosophical base for pondering. Nobody talks about what it’s like to want someone you love to die, sooner rather than later, because later means more pain and anguish for them.
Owning a fascination with death, sex, love, desire, good, evil and shades of grey in between, vengeance, hatred, compassion, selfishness – the most base emotions that add up to who we are as people... These are the things we don’t talk about, not really. We don’t talk about them because we’re afraid of seeming different, harsh, emotionless, damaged, wrong somehow.
The things we don’t talk about could fill a book.
I am not afraid to write about things that other people find uncomfortable, because writing is in and of itself a challenging medium. So perhaps it stands to reason that when I began writing this speech, I couldn’t really come to grips with the concept of what it meant to challenge stigmas – but the process of writing, examining my own thoughts and laying them bare on the page, has opened my mind to what it might mean.
Challenging stigmas is not only done for the benefit of an audience willing to engage and alter their viewpoint. It’s also done to provide others with a voice; a point of recognition in which they can see they aren’t quite so alone. I may have been called every name under the sun by people who couldn’t understand why a woman would not bow and scrape for forgiveness because she happened to fall pregnant twice and had the determination to deal with it in her own way – but I also received countless letters from women offering their thanks. Thank you for telling my story. Thank you for making me feel like the decision I made was okay. Thank you for letting me know that I have nothing to feel ashamed of.
This room is filled with writers, all of whom challenge stigmas in every piece they write not because they are deliberately provocative or seeking to change the world – but because they are honest and capable of speaking to the people who feel they are terribly alone. If we wait for social stigmas to be broken down by the people who are desperately holding on to them, we’ll be waiting forever.
We challenge the system and eventually rebuild it by giving a voice to the people oppressed by it. In writing for others, we are actively working to create and explore a new world – and that is the pursuit which has always been the fundamental purpose of reading.
***
I closed the night by eating more cheese than is humanly possible and flirting with some kind of short filmmaker wandering about the traps. LEARN YOUR LESSON ALREADY WOMAN.
Tonight I gave a speech at the SA Writers Centre for a poetry competition run by said Writers Centre and the Mental Health Coalition. I was asked to speak to the theme of challenging stigmas through writing. Unlike most of my speeches, I wrote it well in advance of the deadline - at least 5 hours before delivery. What can I say? It's not flippancy which makes me act thus but the constant inability to do anything outside of a pressure cooker.
Predictably, I spent the time leading up to proceedings loitering around the food table with a seemingly bottomless glass of wine in hand. It might surprise some to know I'm terribly shy, at least at first, and find it quite awkward to converse with strangers unless I'm two and a half sheets to the wind. This might explain why I make dreadful decisions concerning the pursuit of romance while half plastered and riding high on the good humour of Dylan Moran...but that's a story for another time...
With a bellyful of cheese and vino, I was introduced by SA's Channel Ten Sports Reporter Mark Aiston, who is quite simply one of the loveliest and most humble men you'll ever meet. Really and truly, I was blown away by his complete lack of pretension and sensitivity. What a guy!
And being unable to deliver witty, pithy speeches off the cuff, I proceeded to deliver said speech with my laptop balanced precariously on the lectern and one eye on the crowd. I reproduce said speech for anyone who may be interested. I cut out some of the proselytizing (which it turns out, I did seek to do after all) and some other bits here and there, but this was the original version. I shall be interested to know the thoughts of other writers out there. Part of me suspects it may be hopelessly self indulgent, but I suppose that's part and parcel of being a writer as well so perhaps it's prevalent in some way. This is possibly why I've signed myself up to a Fringe show that involves me reading out recreated diary entries from my early teenage years.
I say 'signed up' as if I'm being coerced when really there's no one involved in the production or decision making process except me. I'm such a douche sometimes, but luckily for you, a douche prepared to make a complete and utter humiliation of her formative years. And if recent events are anything to go by, pretty much every year that has fallen subsequently since then. I AM SUCH A DORK and should never be allowed near wine or men again.
Anyhoo, here she is:
****
For as long as I can remember, I’ve written things down – my teenage diaries are littered with embarrassing entries whose content all either invariably ended with the declaration that my life was OVER, or that I was in love with yet another impossibly attractive and unattainable boy who didn’t even know I was alive because I was FAT and UGLY and therefore my life was OVER.
I have sheets of song lyrics and poems I would be too humiliated to even show to my best friend – and she knows about the time I publicly molested a fellow outside the Crown and Anchor.
I could literally show you reams and reams of terrible things I’ve written over the years. As I said, I've always written things down.
But it wasn’t until I started writing things down for other people that I actually became a writer. And when you become a writer, you start to realize how your words can affect other people. A good writer can move people to laughter or tears or outrageous fury – a great writer can move them through all three stages in the one piece.
I don’t know if I’m a great writer, but one thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the first step one needs to take on this path is to become an honest one. You have to be willing to open yourself up completely regardless of what people may think of you. Much like falling in love, writing is less about telling someone something you think they ought to know and more about discovering hidden parts of yourself – confronting them head on and experiencing all the beauty and pain they have to offer you; staring your detractors square in the eye to say, “This is me, and nothing you say can shame me into being any different.”
So I find it difficult to wrap my head around the concept of challenging stigmas through writing. To challenge is in itself a deliberate act, and while I have made many deliberate decisions as a writer, I have never done so purely with the intention of challenging the status quo. When I wrote my column for the Sunday Mail, they were fond of couching me as the ‘controversial’ columnist. In turn (though not necessarily because of this), a large chunk of readers often responded to my pieces with the accusation that I was being consciously provocative to court outrage and page views.
I have to say that I find very few things more offensive than the suggestion that the urge to write, to share ideas (and yes, to additionally challenge opinions I believe to be incorrect or misguided) is somehow motivated by a desire to be contrary or supercilious. Such accusations are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to render you and everything you stand for as meaningless – to say that someone courts controversy is essentially to say that they believe in nothing other than that which will isolate them from the flock, regardless of what it might mean.
I have never written anything I don’t believe in 100%. On occasion, I have changed my viewpoint, such as following the Bill Henson affair. Part of being a great writer is also being willing to allow others to open your mind; to lift you from a place in which you thought you had laid down solid roots and instead transport you to unfamiliar territories – to lay you down on disconcerting lands whose beauty inherently lies in its promise to show you something you never previously would have thought possible.
My most ‘controversial’ column was written early on in my stint as a Sunday Mail columnist, and for the purpose of tonight I’ll use it as an example. Please understand that my intention is not to proselytize but merely to provide the most obvious example I can think of of challenging stigmas, whatever that might mean.
It was prompted the week prior because someone had sent me an outraged letter objecting to a comment I had made supporting reproductive rights and access to state funded, legal abortion. Frustrated by the modern day scarlet letter that all those who’ve had abortions seem destined to be forced to bear, I wrote an unapologetic piece detailing my own life – over a period of 18 months, I had not one but two abortions. I didn’t apologise for them then and I won’t apologise for them now.
But the point of my column at the time was not only that I wouldn’t apologise for them, but that women in general shouldn’t have to. That a large proportion of women who do speak of them in trembling, apologetic tones are merely responding to the general social expectation that they SHOULD wear their decisions like a scarlet letter, trumpeting familiar claims that it was the hardest choice they’ve ever had to make and so on and so forth.
As was to be expected, I was slammed widely from all quarters. People I’d never met took it upon themselves to call me, by turns, a slut, a whore, a bitch who should keep her legs closed, an abomination, an evil baby killing machine and (perhaps most amusingly) someone who was so repulsively unattractive that it was a wonder I’d found anyone willing to sleep with me at all let alone impregnate me. I even had someone write to inform me that the good Catholics of Rome were praying for my soul.
Most disappointingly, people who claimed to be pro-choice lambasted me for going through the procedure twice – after all, hadn’t I ever heard of contraception? Because as we all know, accidental pregnancies are like acquired immunity – once you’ve had one, it just can’t happen again! To whatever extent your pregnancy was 'accidental' or the result of contraceptive laziness is really irrelevant to me - if you agree with the right to choose abortion, it's none of your business how or why that decision comes to be. It frustrates me to this day that some people who claim to be pro-choice seem to treat abortions like get out of jail free cards – in their world, a woman is entitled to one (provided she demonstrates the requisite self flagellating regret, crawling on her belly to beg forgiveness from the court of public opinion).
The point of my column was not to shout from the rooftops that I’d had two abortions and refused to apologise for them (which is not the same thing, as some people argued, as being flippant about them) – it was to demonstrate to the public that, despite what we are led to believe, when it comes to such things I am but one woman in a sea of many. I wanted to stand up there and say that I will not be crippled by a sense of shame foisted on me by a society that forces me to qualify decisions made regarding my own body and mental capacity. That, more than anything, what I felt was sheer unbridled relief – and that I am by no means the only one who feels this way.
Despite that column and despite the work I continue to do today regarding abortion activism, I cannot change the minds of people who insist on seeing a person like me as some kind of hideous succubus intent on enacting genocide against the poor defenceless babies of this world who are unfortunate enough to be conceived in the bellies of the strident, man hating feminists who refuse to accept the god given truth that their bodies don’t belong to them but rather to those who are better placed to make decisions regarding said bodies – widely (and deeply) held convictions that are so outrageously extreme as to be laughable.
It’s true that there are none so blind as those will not see. The act of writing something meaningful, challenging or not, is wasted on those who are willfully incapable of empathizing with the words. Writing for an audience – great writing – is an invitation. A great writer asks her audience to consider something from a different perspective, to view the world through a lens that may not be palatable to the reader but is at least interesting in some way if only because the work is honest.
But one of the greatest strengths a writer can have is letting others know that they are not alone; that feelings they may have had which seem abhorrent or unacceptable are indeed not isolated to them alone. That their desires and dreams are not ridiculous; that their fears may be lessened simply through the knowledge that someone else has experienced them and come out the other side – scarred, perhaps, but intact.
Our society is entrenched in fear of the unknown, and of being different – for example, nobody talks about death in a way that is tangible or visceral. Nobody talks about what it’s like to want to die as a philosophical base for pondering. Nobody talks about what it’s like to want someone you love to die, sooner rather than later, because later means more pain and anguish for them.
Owning a fascination with death, sex, love, desire, good, evil and shades of grey in between, vengeance, hatred, compassion, selfishness – the most base emotions that add up to who we are as people... These are the things we don’t talk about, not really. We don’t talk about them because we’re afraid of seeming different, harsh, emotionless, damaged, wrong somehow.
The things we don’t talk about could fill a book.
I am not afraid to write about things that other people find uncomfortable, because writing is in and of itself a challenging medium. So perhaps it stands to reason that when I began writing this speech, I couldn’t really come to grips with the concept of what it meant to challenge stigmas – but the process of writing, examining my own thoughts and laying them bare on the page, has opened my mind to what it might mean.
Challenging stigmas is not only done for the benefit of an audience willing to engage and alter their viewpoint. It’s also done to provide others with a voice; a point of recognition in which they can see they aren’t quite so alone. I may have been called every name under the sun by people who couldn’t understand why a woman would not bow and scrape for forgiveness because she happened to fall pregnant twice and had the determination to deal with it in her own way – but I also received countless letters from women offering their thanks. Thank you for telling my story. Thank you for making me feel like the decision I made was okay. Thank you for letting me know that I have nothing to feel ashamed of.
This room is filled with writers, all of whom challenge stigmas in every piece they write not because they are deliberately provocative or seeking to change the world – but because they are honest and capable of speaking to the people who feel they are terribly alone. If we wait for social stigmas to be broken down by the people who are desperately holding on to them, we’ll be waiting forever.
We challenge the system and eventually rebuild it by giving a voice to the people oppressed by it. In writing for others, we are actively working to create and explore a new world – and that is the pursuit which has always been the fundamental purpose of reading.
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I closed the night by eating more cheese than is humanly possible and flirting with some kind of short filmmaker wandering about the traps. LEARN YOUR LESSON ALREADY WOMAN.
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