by Laurie Penny
If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on Earth. No man would be expected to justify his decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. It would be enough for him to say, ‘I don’t want to have this baby.’
If men got pregnant, then pregnancy, labour and childcare would immediately be recognised as work and compensated as such. The entire economic basis of global capitalism would be upended overnight. After the ensuing bloodless revolution, the phrase ‘work–life balance’ would disappear from the lexicon, along with the line, ‘I don’t do condoms, babe.’
If men got pregnant, ‘pro-life activists’ would be called ‘forced-birth extremists’, and reviled as such by liberals, libertarians and every political movement with a claim on human freedom.
If men got pregnant, they would be considered not mere vessels for potential human life, but human beings whose agency ought to be inviolable. Men would not stand for having their basic rights to sexual freedom and personal autonomy confiscated, even if in some people’s opinion they might be committing murder. Men are often prepared to commit murder for reasons far less egregious than the occupation of their bodies by a foreign invader. There is a sizeable lobby in the United States right now that believes that people should have the right to slaughter anyone who breaks into their home, or looks the wrong way at a police officer, or does almost anything that might conceivably be considered suspicious while also being black.
If men got pregnant, they would never be told that if they did not want to conceive, they should not have sex. Major world religions would rush to reinterpret their scripture; any verses appearing to condemn abortion or contraception would be considered in the same light as those dooming wearers of mixed fabrics to fiery damnation eternal.
If men got pregnant, nobody would consider a man’s choice to have or not have children the defining feature of his adult life. There would be no shame in seeking sterilisation, just as there is no shame today for a man seeking a vasectomy. When a man made a decision about when and whether to have children, he would be able to count on having that decision respected, rather than being called selfish, lazy and slutty, or warned that he would ‘regret it some day’.
If men got pregnant, somebody would have already invented a breast pump that was fit for purpose.
If men got pregnant, they would not be forcibly penetrated with cameras and obliged to look at an ultrasound of the foetus before getting an abortion. Instead, Wi-Fi would be available in the procedure room, plus a free beer with every procedure.
If men got pregnant, pregnancy and childbirth would not be dismissed as ‘natural’, but treated as heroic acts of sacrifice. Forcing a man to go through either against his will would be considered the equivalent of the military draft and protested as such.
If men got pregnant, having a ‘baby belly’ would not be a source of shame. Men would show off their stretch marks and Caesarean scars like battle wounds.
In point of fact, some men do get pregnant. Transsexual men have borne children, but their experience is not part of the popular understanding of reproductive rights – because people don’t get pregnant, women get pregnant, and when you get down to it, women aren’t really people. The structure of modern misogyny is still grounded on the fear that women might one day regain control of the means of reproduction and actually get to make their own decisions about the future of the human race – but you cannot force a person to give birth against their will and consider them fully human.
If men got pregnant, we would not be having this conversation. The fact that we still are shows how far we’ve got to go before equality becomes reality.
NO MORE TEARS
What does a good abortion look like? In 2014, Emily Letts, a twenty-five-year-old American clinic worker, filmed her surgical abortion and posted the video on the Internet. In the clip, Letts smiles and hums throughout the procedure, which she chose to have simply because she did not want to bear a child. ‘I feel good,’ she remarks when it’s over, shattering generations of anxiety and fear-mongering around reproductive choice with three simple words.
The idea that abortion might be a positive choice is still taboo. For some, the only way it can be countenanced is if the pregnancy is an immediate threat to life or the result of rape – meaning that the woman involved didn’t want to have sex and as such does not deserve to be punished for the crime of acting on desire as a female. Even then, the person having the abortion is expected to be sorry for ever, to weep and agonise over the decision. In Britain, the Abortion Act 1967 obliges anyone seeking a termination to justify why continuing with a pregnancy poses a threat to her health and well-being or that of her existing offspring. ‘Because I don’t want to be pregnant’ simply isn’t enough.
Hence the furore over the glamour model Josie Cunningham’s announcement, through the eyebrow-raising medium of the British tabloid press, that she was planning to terminate her pregnancy in order to have a shot at appearing on reality television. The national and international gossip media scrambled to excoriate Cunningham: this was the epitome of selfishness, a woman who would boast of having an abortion to further her career. We live in a society that fetishises ‘choice’ while denying half the population the most fundamental choice of all: the choice over the autonomy of one’s body.
Women in Northern Ireland, where the Abortion Act 1967 does not apply, have just learned that – despite paying towards the NHS through their taxes – they will continue to be denied an abortion unless they can travel to England and fund it themselves. As a result of a high court ruling, hundreds of women each year will still find themselves having to take cheap red-eye flights to Heathrow and Manchester, scared and alone, to have procedures they may have gone into debt to afford.
In Northern Ireland, as in the rest of the world, the prospect of women having full control over their reproductive potential – the notion that we might be able to decide, without shame or censure, when and if we have children or not – provokes fear among the powerful. When abortion is discussed in public, it is almost always in terms of individual morality or, more usually, of moral lapses on the part of whatever selfish, slutty women are demanding basic human rights this week. It is rarely discussed in terms of structural and economic inequality. Yet reproductive inequality remains the material basis for women’s second-class status in society. It affects every aspect of our future.
Consider, as an example, the controversy over the rise of ‘social surrogacies’ – rich women paying poor women to go through pregnancy and childbirth on their behalf. The horrified response to this idea belies how men do the same thing: arrange for women to bear, carry and, indeed, raise children on their behalf so that they can get on with their careers uninterrupted. That’s the material basis of gender inequality and it must be discussed honestly as a matter of structural injustice, not individual morality.
Abortion, motherhood and reproductive health care remain fraught issues, as women’s demand for basic control over our bodies and destinies pulls ever further away from official public policy. In countries such as Ireland, Spain and the US, women’s bodies remain the territory on which the patriarchal right wing fights its battle for moral dominance.
Abortion can be a difficult, painful decision – if, for example, you would quite like to have a baby but are in no position to support one because ‘single mother’ is still a synonym for ‘poor and shunned’ and pregnancy discrimination is rampant in this treacherous post-crash job market. But abortion can also be a simple decision. It does not have to involve years of regret or, as Emily Letts bravely demonstrated, any regret at all.
So here, in case it wasn’t clear, is my position. Abortion should be available on demand, without restrictions, for everyone who needs it. I believe that while society still places limits on what a woman may or may not do with her own body, while women’s sexuality and reproduction are still in effect controlled by the state, any discussion of equality or empowerment is
a joke. Nobody should have to play the frightened victim to make basic choices about her future. It should be enough to turn up at a clinic and say, ‘I don’t want this’, or, ‘I’ve changed my mind’.
And there’s more. If there were real choice, real equality, pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood would not come with enormous socio-economic penalties for all but the richest women. Society should provide support for all parents, single and partnered, in and out of work, rather than forcing them to live on a pittance, under constant threat of eviction, and shaming them as ‘scroungers’.
That’s what real choice would look like. And the thing about giving people choices is that inevitably a few of them will make poor choices, choices we might not approve of. Many people have religious or personal reasons for disapproving of abortion and they are free, as they always have been, not to have one themselves. Yet it’s time to change the terms of the debate. It’s time to demand reproductive rights for everyone – without apology.
THIS BITTER PILL
Heard about the new ‘female Viagra’? Of course you have. Whatever the new wonder drug lacks in efficiency – coming as it does with a serious health warning if taken along with alcohol – it more than makes up for in branding. The campaign that finally got the drug approved by US regulators gave the impression of being an organic, grass-roots movement . . . but it’s the little things that let it down.
When PR companies try to run activist campaigns (a process known as astroturfing, because of the ‘fake grass roots’ involved) there is one mistake they always make. They’re too good at it. Their websites are too slick, their videos too viral, their connections too convenient, and there’s a curious lack of infighting and sniping over what the slogans should be and whose turn it is to do the biscuit run. So it is with ‘Even the Score’, which describes itself as a feminist movement fighting for women’s right to ‘orgasm equality’.
Thousands of women were persuaded to lobby Congress with one aim and one aim only – to get Addyi (flibanserin), also known as ‘female Viagra’, approved by the US drug regulator, after it had been rejected twice on safety grounds. Feminists around the world were mobilised by the ‘coalition’ running Even the Score, a coalition that includes some big drug companies, notably Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the firm that makes Addyi.
As a D-list digital feminist nanocelebrity, I’ve been inundated with requests to eulogise the product on TV and radio. When I questioned an Even the Score spokesperson on radio about its associations with Sprout, she admitted that the company had bought table seats at a fundraising dinner, but otherwise the group keeps its financial operations largely hidden.
Say what you like about Big Pharma hijacking feminist energy – and I’m about to – but it shows how far we’ve come. That feminism is now an approved marketing strategy shows us how powerful and culturally important the movement is. All the same, this is nothing to celebrate.
There are enormous problems with the female Viagra campaign, and the first one is this: feminism must not be co-opted by companies whose ultimate agenda is not women’s welfare but their own bottom line. Feminism is about putting more power in the hands of women, not putting more profit in the pockets of drug and cosmetics companies. Feminist liberation is not, ultimately, something you can buy. It has to be taken, sometimes by force.
I’ve nothing against better living through chemistry. If there truly were a magic pill that made it possible to shag all night with the urgent stamina of an endangered rhinoceros, I’d be tempted. But what Addyi is offering is less hedonistic, working as it does on the brain rather than the genitals. More worryingly, the disease it claims to be treating, ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’ or HSDD, is equally suspect. As Rachel Hills, the author of The Sex Myth, told me: ‘Pharmaceutical companies didn’t start talking about female sexual dysfunction because women were turning up to their doctors in droves complaining about their sex lives. They started talking about it because Viagra was such a gigantic commercial success.’
Technological and medical advances such as the Pill and access to abortion have undoubtedly been central to feminism. So, the one thing that makes Even the Score convincing is that the basic point is unarguable: sexual liberation is a crucial part of women’s liberation. But most of the things that stop women from pursuing and achieving sexual pleasure are not physiological. They are social. They are political. Rape culture. Slut-shaming. Abuse. Homophobia. Religious repression. A culture that clings to the idea that sex is something men do to women, rather than something people do together.
All of this, and more, is what prevents women from ‘orgasm equality’ or, as some of us prefer to call it, sexual freedom. Yes, there are physical ailments that can stifle a woman’s sexuality. ‘Some of these are unequivocal medical issues,’ Hills says, ‘like vaginismus or vulvodynia, which make it painful for women to have penetrative sex. It’s interesting to me that of all the sexual problems that can affect women, the one they’ve decided to create a drug for is “not wanting to have sex enough”.’ The definition of HSDD is persistent lack of interest in sex that causes distress to women – or their partners.
Or their partners. And there’s the rub. This drug doesn’t give you more orgasms. What it does – expensively, inefficiently and with side effects – is make women more likely to consent to sex. The typical patient, once you dig into the literature, is supposed to be a woman in middle age who is upset because her partner is upset because she doesn’t want to have sex with him. And isn’t that the age-old quandary? With all the shame and stigma, all the stress and worry, all the work we make them do endlessly and for free, in and out of relationships, how do we get women to keep on saying yes to sex? Well, we can always drug them.
For me, feminism is all the Viagra I’ve ever needed. Feminism is what gave me, slowly and over years of growing and learning, the confidence to claim ownership over my own body and my own desires, as well as the strength to say no whenever I was more in the mood for a cup of tea and a cuddle. I believe that women deserve the right to pursue pleasure. Women deserve the right to say yes to sex without shame or self-censorship. But those rights are nothing without the right to say no, to refuse sex when we don’t want it, and not be humiliated or punished or made to feel unnatural.
It’s not women who are sick. It’s society, with its structural misogyny and crazy, contradictory expectations of women, that is sick as hell. And that’s a much harder pill to swallow.
ARE YOU PRE-PREGNANT?
For several weeks, YouTube has been reminding me to hurry up and have a baby. In a moment of guilt over all the newspapers I read online for free, I turned off my ad-blocking software and now I can’t play a simple death metal album without having to sit through thirty seconds of sensible women with long, soft hair trying to sell me pregnancy tests. I half expect one of them to tap her watch and remind me that I shouldn’t be wasting my best fertile years writing about socialism on the Internet.
My partner, meanwhile, gets shown advertisements for useful software; my male housemate is offered tomato sauce, which forms 90 per cent of his diet. At first, I wondered if the gods of Google knew something I didn’t. But I suspect that the algorithm is less imaginative than I have been giving it credit for – indeed, I suspect that what Google thinks it knows about me is that I’m a woman in my late twenties, so, whatever my other interests might be, I ought to be getting myself knocked up some time soon.
The technology is new but the assumptions are ancient. Women are meant to make babies, regardless of the alternative plans we might have. In the twenty-first century, governments and world health authorities are similarly unimaginative about women’s lives and choices. The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published guidelines suggesting that any woman who ‘could get pregnant’ should refrain from drinking alcohol. The phrase implies that this includes any woman who menstruates and is not on the Pill – which is, in effect, everyone, as the Pill is not a foolproof method of contraception. So
all females capable of conceiving should treat themselves and be treated by the health system as ‘pre-pregnant’ – regardless of whether they plan to get pregnant any time soon, or whether they have sex with men in the first place. Boys will be boys, after all, so women ought to take precautions: think of it as rape insurance.
The medical evidence for moderate drinking as a clear threat to pregnancy is not solidly proven, but the CDC claims that it just wants to provide the best information for women ‘and their partners’. That’s a chilling little addition. Shouldn’t it be enough for women to decide whether they have that second gin? Are their partners supposed to exercise control over what they do and do not drink? How? By ordering them not to go to the pub? By confiscating their money and keeping tabs on where they go?
This is the logic of domestic abuse. With more than 18,000 women murdered by their intimate partners between 2003 and 2015, domestic violence is a greater threat to life and health in the US than foetal alcohol poisoning – but that appears not to matter to the CDC.
Most people with a working uterus can get pregnant and some of them don’t self-define as women. But the advice being delivered at the highest levels is clearly aimed at women and that, in itself, tells us a great deal about the reasoning behind this sort of social control. It’s all about controlling women’s bodies before, during and after pregnancy. Almost every ideological facet of our societies is geared towards that end – from product placement and public health advice to explicit laws forcing women to carry pregnancies to term and jailing them if they fail to deliver the healthy babies the state requires of them.
Men’s sexual and reproductive health is never subject to this sort of policing. In South America, where the zika virus is suspected of having caused thousands of birth defects, women are being advised not to ‘get pregnant’. This is couched in language that gives women all of the blame and none of the control. Just like in the US, reproductive warnings are not aimed at men – even though Brazil, El Salvador and the US are extremely religious countries, so you would think that the number of miraculous virgin births would surely have been noticed.
