Discussing RU-486 with Kimi Faxon Hemingway, abstinence and anorexia, the business of being born and women that are made of cardboard. Also: Is Nellie McKay flirting with you?

Links in this episode:
Nellie McKay
Obligatory Villagers
Documentary hits Australia
The Business of Being Born
Choice
Courtney Martin vs. Laura Ingraham
Abstinence-only doesn't work
Fetus boxes?
Fetus boxes?!

Transcript:
On this week's episode, I'll be covering the possible connection between abstinence education and eating disorders, and the business of being born. Also, a reading and an interview about RU-486 with writer Kimi Faxon Hemingway and the question of whether or not women are made of cardboard.

All the bloggers are raving about this new song by girl genius Nellie McKay called "Mother of Pearl". It's well-written and has this strange, almost cabaret feel to it, but as a self-avowed feminist, I have to take issue with all the people out there saying it's so funny. After all, as McKay points out, feminists have no sense of humor.

*insert mother of pearl one*

This ending is also funny, if you're into that laughing nonsense.

*insert mother of pearl two*

The song is off her upcoming album Obligatory Villagers. She's also released a single about zombies off it.

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From the blogger and writer Jennifer Block comes the news that the Ricki Lake-produced documentary "The Business of Being Born" is taking off in Australia, in part because it's being promoted by the What Women Want party, which supports widespread maternity care reform. The movie indicts the U.S. system of giving birth that relies heavily on medical intervention, even when it's not really necessary. I haven't seen it yet, but here's a sample from the trailer.

*insert business of being born trailer*

It seems reasonable to suggest that the American for-profit health care system would have an institutionalized preference for more expensive medical births over the cost-efficient midwife system. It's not that it's a conspiracy against women so much as just an institutional preference for the more profitable methods over the less profitable methods.

*insert business two*

This is always a touchy subject, because once you start talking about it, it seems like you're criticizing women who have medical births, when that's not it at all. Most everyone accepts that a hefty percentage of births need to be in a hospital setting because they're risky births, but the issue is why are so many perfectly normal births being medicalized? How much does the need for hospitals to make money off childbirth feed the beast? It seems like an interesting documentary, worth checking out at least.

Part of the issue for me, and I suspect this is true for a lot of women, is that the advocates for midwifery often seem like another flavor of New Age-y hippies who are dedicated to healing through herbs and crystals instead of more scientific and effective methods. And they sell natural childbirth as a mandatory earth mother experience, which is a powerful argument for a minority of women. But let's face it; the rest of us hear about how natural womanhood is so much better and we imagine a life without Midol, birth control pills, and having to make our own tampons out of twigs and we wisely reject the notion that natural is always better.

But I think there's non-crunchy, reality-based arguments for why women with normal, non-troublesome pregnancies should look to midwifery instead of a more medicalized childbirth, and expense is the big one. And this documentary looks like it will focus on this aspect; hospitals have to make money and more intervention makes more money over less intervention. Money alone seems to be enough of an argument for me, but some people like to rise above such petty concerns, so the other questions that need addressing are whether or not it's bad for baby health and maternal health to induce and perform C-sections as often as we do in this country, and whether pain interventions might have unintended negative effects.

Then again, the emphasis on making women go through pain to make it seem more "natural" has always struck me as problematic. Usually when I hear people, barring Carol King, talking about a "natural woman", I hang on to my wallet, because usually what's coming next is a story about why women shouldn't have contraception or a right to their own income. But natural childbirth proponents often agree that medicalized birth helps save many lives, but is just overused, which is a much better argument than appeals to nature.

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I'd like to welcome Kimi Faxon Hemingway to the program. Kimi was a founding editor of the literary journal, Ecotone, and received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she currently teaches memoir writing and English Composition. She's with us today to read an excerpt from her story "Personal Belongings", about her harrowing complications after taking the drug RU-486. The story is available in the anthology "Choice".

*insert reading/interview*

Thanks for coming onto Reality Cast, Kimi. If you'd like to read her story and others like it, please check out the book Choice: True Stories of Birth, Contraception, Infertility, Adoption, Single Parenthood and Abortion.

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Kudos to Courtney Martin, author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, who went head to head with Laura Ingraham on her Fox News TV show. Ingraham, of course, was engaging in some misleading anti-sex rhetoric and Martin gave her the smackdown.

*insert laura one*

The good news is that at least the wingnuts are really giving up the entire lie about how abstinence is supposed to be an equality opportunity thing, and just admitting up front that all this squealing about the importance of virginity until you're married is meant for girls only. Gays, of course, are to get busy exactly never in this model, as well. But what really burns me up is the way Ingraham says, "Getting girls to abstain," which implies that abstinence-only education works, and there's no real reason to think that. On the contrary, research repeatedly demonstrates that while telling kids not to have sex might lessen the chances they'll use protection when they do, it doesn't do much for convincing kids not to have sex. Taking the entire American population into consideration, the finger-wagging about waiting until you're married has a 95% failure rate. In other words, Ingraham is too full of it to affect this skeptical pose towards any one else's claims.

Courtney Martin came on and explained the theory in perfectly rational terms, apparently too rational, because Ingraham wouldn't let her finish.

*insert laura two*

Considering that Ingraham is one of the blonde, mini-skirted conservababes who makes a living off the tension between looking like members of the sexual revolution while spouting retrograde, sex-hating rhetoric, hearing someone denounce these mixed messages is probably pretty upsetting for her.

From my point of view, Martin's got a really intriguing theory here. Teenage girls *do* get mixed messages, being told all the time both that girls that aren't sexually available are, for lack of a better term, inferior product but also that girls that do have sex are sluts and, like Ingraham says later in the show, bound for drugs, being used by men, misery and probably suicide. For the record, the straight road from humping to killing yourself has exactly zero evidence behind it. These two views of what good women are supposed to be, both sexually available and sexually unavailable, don't have much in common. Except one thing: In both models, women are supposed to have an attitude of self-deprivation. Even the sexually available woman is supposed to having a head-shaking nervous breakdown when confronted with a plateful of cookies with all the lurking calories that could damage her value as a sex object. It's no wonder so many women latch onto the idea of control through depriving yourself of food as the common thread between these contradictory ideals.

Of course, the theory doesn't have much in the way of scientific evidence behind it. But it is an intriguing hypothesis, and I could see future research examining whether or not Martin's hunch is right.

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, from an Inside Catholic ad found by the Trailer Park Feminist. This ad opens with an animation of a factory producing cardboard boxes.

*insert fetus boxes*

And if you thought women could be compared to inanimate cardboard objects with no rights, no feelings, and no reason for existing other than to be containers, isn't best to treat them that way? Jeez, at least if you're going to claim that women are basically non-human containers, you could do us the favor and compare us to something sturdier than a frigging cardboard box.

Then again, maybe the choice of the word "box" to describe woman-shaped containers was not an accident. As Zuzu at Feministe said, though, "Someone needs an anatomy lesson. Your box is just the entry and exit point for the baybeeee, not the storage container."