| Saturday, June 10, 2006 |
| the problem that has no name |
philomela's last word
 Betty Friedan died last week. When I call myself a feminist, it is at least in part because of the Feminine Mystique and what I found there, and so I take my title from her first chapter there, for another problem.
I cannot tell you when I developed the conviction that control over my reproductive capacity and my sexuality was essential to my freedom as a person. I know that I already believed this at 12, but I couldn't have articulated it in this way. By the time I was having sex some years later, I had already decided that I would have an abortion should I become pregnant, and despite my strict Catholic upbringing I had a very deep moral conviction in a woman's right to choose where and when and if we should have a child.
But this is only tangentially a story about that. It is partly about reproductive freedom, and the right to dispose of one's body only where and how one wishes. This is a story about something that happened to me when I was 17, the closest thing I have experienced to a rape or a sexual assault although I do not call it either of those things.
This is a story about a problem that has no name.
At 17 I was living with friends and supporting myself, and I was pregnant by my 16 year old boyfriend.
My boyfriend and I fucked, and I knew--knew--I knew beyond doubt as he came that he had impregnated me.
I do not believe in women's special ways of knowing, nor in anything like that. There was no rational reason I could give to explain this seemingly irrational conviction, no missed pill, no broken condom. It irritates me that this should be part of the story, but it is so.
I felt my body's rhythm suspended, all of my feeling self, the body, caught up and waiting. The inner pendulum slowed, stopped.
I waited too. I the thinking self, as if a thing apart. I watched the calendar.
My period did not come.
I took one of those at home tests as soon as I could after the date passed and my period didn't arrive. It told me again what the thinking self feared, what the body already knew.
I went to the free clinic. I was tested there, and it reconfirmed what I knew.
At this point in my life I was living with some much older friends. My female housemate and her sister insisted that I needed another test, a "proper doctor." This doctor was much older, had delivered my friends, had been their gyno.
At this expensive doctor's office I could not afford, I lay naked under the paper sheet, my feet in the stirrups, splayed wide, and I waited.
I am not someone who hates going to the gyno. No one likes it, of course. But I had been having sex since I was 15 and so I had been having checkups. When I was 12 I'd brought my best friend to the free clinic so she could get the Pill. When the Pill made her sick, I stole money to bring her there again and be fitted for a diaphram. Although sex for me was years away, I'd researched birth control back then at 12 because my best friend was already having sex and I was afraid for her. I can be accused of being hyper-rational, and I am very aware that my approach to even the carnal involves the cerebral.
The doctor came in, and I was immediately disturbed that the nurse left the room, smiling at me as she closed the door. I knew that this was illegal yet I did not question it; I did not ask for her to come back.
Surely this kind, grandfatherly man in this posh private practice was to be trusted; he came well-recommended by my friends.
The code of conduct for women dictates that we be amiable, friendly, acquiescent, above all polite and 'nice'. It is one of the hardest things to escape: that prohibition against forthright speech.
He began examining me, and started with my breasts.
With both his hands on them, he remarked to me, These are the best breasts I have felt all day.
Imagine yourself naked and on your back, The stirrups hold your feet,and your legs are spread. You are 17 and pregnant, and afraid.
I already felt uneasy. The absence of the nurse.
Now his hands on my breasts, one on each, not like any other breast exam I had ever had.
I looked up at him. I didn't have the courage to sit up. I didn't have the courage to demand--as was my right--that a female nurse be present. But I looked up at him, I waited for him to look me in the face. I met his eyes with my own, and I spoke to him. As coldly as I could, as formally as possible, and when I look back at my 17 year old self, although I blame her for not demanding the nurse, still I am amazed that I found somewhere the strength within me to speak like this. When I was naked and splayed and pinned back just like the frog I refused to dissect in biology class on ethical grounds. I looked at him, I met his eyes, and I said,
"I assume you mean that they're healthy."
I don't know what he saw in my face or heard in my voice. I do know that I saw shock in his face and guilt. I saw that he was taken aback; I saw him then recover.
Yes, that's what I mean, he said, shifting his eyes away from mine.
He moved between my legs, he kept up this glib patter.
Now, lets see what we have here, he said.
The cold speculum entering me made me gasp and bite my lip. Every other exam I had, this moment was presaged by the doctor saying, now I will insert the speculum, it's cold so I will put it here first, and she would touch it to my inner thigh, holding it there until the heat of my skin warmed it, and then warning me again before it was inserted.
He kept talking to me. A cheerful doctor sort of conversation.
Eventually he said, this isn't working.
I felt another one enter me. Larger.
This one opened, split me, my hands curled into fists. My nails bit my palm, and tears leaked out of my eyes. I bit my lip. My nails digging into my palms, so tightly that I would have difficulty unclenching my hands after. I hurt myself there deliberately, because concentrating on that small pain distracted me from what was happening.
--and still I was not sure, I did not know. Maybe this was an accident? He was a doctor, he was a man, he was so much older than I. I bit my lip and concentrated on my nails biting into my hands.
After an interminable time the speculum withdrew. He washed his hands; he left me.
The pain was so intense that I couldn't move at all for five minutes or so. I lay on my back and took shallow breaths, and when at last I could uncurl my fingers I found there in my palms the marks left by my nails, a morsecode line of four bloody dashes in each.
I washed them, wincing, in that same sink. I got dressed; I had to move so slowly. I could hardly walk.
I met him later in his office. Leather chairs, his medical books on the shelves, his diplomas on the wall. So unlike the cold and poor free clinic, but so much more dangerous.
As I sat there, some half hour after his exam of me, I still felt pain. I could barely sit. I had been examined before, and never, never, had it hurt me to sit afterwards. Not even my first exam, when I was still a virgin.
I sat there in his patient's chair just the way we were made to sit in my Catholic school. My wounded hands were folded demurely in my lap, my knees pressed together and my back straight, and yet with this searing and intense pain at the core of my being. I couldn't move or shift once I sat, because to do so would make me cry out or wince, and I would not give him the satisfaction.
He looked at my file. Then he looked up at me. He looked at my face and smiled, and he looked at the rest of me, my body. He looked in my eyes again and smiled, and there was no mistaking the satisfaction in his voice when he said
Well congratulations! you're pregnant!
His talk flowed along, about the prenatal visits I would need. About the vitamins I should take, foods I should eat. This man held my file, which said I was 17, unmarried, uneducated, employed for very low wages, and he smiled at me while he congratulated me on my pregnancy, and talked of how best to have a healthy baby, and of the further appointments he would need. He looked smug. I stopped listening to his words, and only listened to his tone, and I watched his face.
He looked at me with shining and eager eyes as he talked, and this was when I felt that shock of certainty. This man, this face, this here was the face of sadism: this man hated me deeply and hated my sex, hated my sexuality, as deeply as it was possible for anyone to hate anything. Not a kind of hatred I had ever encountered before and of a kind I barely knew existed; it was implacable, cold, utterly impersonal, utterly relentless.
I knew then that he knew very well that I was in physical pain. I knew then for certain what the good girl in me had not wanted to believe. I knew that he had hurt me during that exam deliberately, and I knew that this talk of the baby I could not and would not have was designed to further hurt and humiliate me.
I knew that what he wanted was for me to break, to weep.
I imagined that he had had this conversation before, scared and guilty suburban rich girls that he had delivered, who broke down and wept, and confessed their sins, and accepted his humiliating false consolation, his false and lying advice. I could see his pretended shock when they confessed, weeping, to wanting an abortion, and pleaded with him for help, pleaded most of all for him to keep silence and not tell their parents. Begged him.
But that wasn't my story. I wasn't one of those girls.
I made a conscious decision then not to be a good girl, to break years of training and habit. The sort of social training that tells us to smile, to be nice, to be polite.
It's a decision we must consciously continue to make, but this was the first time I ever made it.
I stood up in the middle of his talk. Thanks, I said abruptly and rudely, interrupting him. But I won't need those appointments. I smiled at him.
Because I'm aborting this baby.
I walked out and left, shutting the door carefully and deliberately on him.
I did not think of my condition as a baby. I chose that word because he had chosen it, and for maximum shock impact. To hit back as hard as I could, and to show him that his attempts to hurt me that way did not succeed.
I couldn't do anything about the physical pain. No one can; it is only to be endured, and words do not avail us there. A lesson I already knew.
I went to the front desk, and the receptionist smiled at me, said, so, your first appointment is in 2 weeks, how is Friday the 14th at 12?
I don't need another appointment, I told her. I was conscious of the pregnant matrons in the waiting room behind me, the expectant mothers, good suburban wives, but I would not lower my voice for them when I said, I'm getting an abortion.
I paid and left, and it was 3 days or so before the physical pain of that speculum stopped inside me.
This is about a problem with no name. It's about the kind of hatred of women and of their sex that drove that man. It's not a story about why men should not be gynos; I don't believe that. I've had one since who was very good.
It's also about another problem: the problem of how our voices begin to be robbed from us before we even begin to speak; the challenge of learning how to speak when we've been trained to be silent.
This problem has no name--- but we must always name it when it happens.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
--The world would split open.
Muriel Rukeyser
Repost; old comments are here |
posted by O @ 19:22   |
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| 2 Comments: |
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O,
Thanks so much for writing this. There is so little documentation about assault by doctors, and gynecologists in particular; so it is so important that those of us who have experienced it put it out there so others can name their own experiences.
Everyone has to come to their own definition as to what happened to them, but I wanted to point out that by the Department of Justice's definition (obtained via RAINN's site), you were most definitely sexually assaulted ("unwanted sexual contact that includes sexual touching and fondling"). And, if you consider that the speculum was used in a manner NOT appropriate for responsible medical practice, you were most definitely raped by this doctor ("forced...vaginal, anal or oral penetration. Penetration may be by a body part or an object.")
This is one of the most confusing things about assault by a gynecologist...in a *legitimate* exam, a doctor *would* touch one's breasts and use a speculum. So to the victim, it can often become hazy where the line is between appropriate and abuse. This man obviously preyed on that confusion and blurring of boundaries with young women.
I hope he got exactly what he was due eventually, the miserable prick.
And thanks again for posting this story. It's brave and so important on so many levels.
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I am finding myself finding so much insight, emotion and connection in your writings. I just read your abortion sadness and am just too awash in emotion right now to comment. But this too resonates with me. I was assaulted when giving birth to my third child, yes, THIRD - and up to that child had had NO issues with birth or pregnancy or anything else at all. The experience was medieval in context, unbelievable in this day and age - and traumatized me terribly. So, much so that when I found myself unexpectedly with my fourth child, for the FIRST time I was terrified .. and throughout the entire pregnancy was terrified ... I will have to write about the assault some day - in fact I may blog about soon - if you can be so brave, so too can I.
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![Your writing in the other hand [sic] is pure filth and disgusting.](http://www.gotbears.com/gund/sesamestreet/75985.jpg){kind=link}
O,
Thanks so much for writing this. There is so little documentation about assault by doctors, and gynecologists in particular; so it is so important that those of us who have experienced it put it out there so others can name their own experiences.
Everyone has to come to their own definition as to what happened to them, but I wanted to point out that by the Department of Justice's definition (obtained via RAINN's site), you were most definitely sexually assaulted ("unwanted sexual contact that includes sexual touching and fondling"). And, if you consider that the speculum was used in a manner NOT appropriate for responsible medical practice, you were most definitely raped by this doctor ("forced...vaginal, anal or oral penetration. Penetration may be by a body part or an object.")
This is one of the most confusing things about assault by a gynecologist...in a *legitimate* exam, a doctor *would* touch one's breasts and use a speculum. So to the victim, it can often become hazy where the line is between appropriate and abuse. This man obviously preyed on that confusion and blurring of boundaries with young women.
I hope he got exactly what he was due eventually, the miserable prick.
And thanks again for posting this story. It's brave and so important on so many levels.