Won’t Someone Think of the Women?
BY AMY ESTES
Tyler James Bangkok, Object-tivi-tea, acrylic, recycled objects, collage, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.
Won’t Someone Think Of The Women?
AMY ESTES | MAY 2022 | ISSUE 16
One Sunday morning, the summer before I started seventh grade, I arrived at my girls Sunday School class to see piles of pink boxes on the table at the front of my classroom instead of the usual stack of musty brown Bibles, the fragrance of oily sugar dancing in the air. I involuntarily squealed. My classmates and I buzzed with curiosity, as this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in our Sunday School class, or maybe ever at church. As we took our seats, each of us were given a string of raffle tickets, neatly ripped from a hot pink spool.
“Today, we are going to have a donut auction,” my Sunday School teacher, an older, grumpy blonde woman said. “I’ll hold up each box, describe its weight, shake it, and after you’ve seen all the options, you’ll be allowed to bid on the boxes you want. You won’t be able to see what’s in the box until after you’ve bid on it though — no peeking until I say so!”
As the auction got under way, I waited until she described the box that was the fullest. After thorough examination, and strategizing, we began the bidding process. Once everyone had a box, we were told we could finally open them and eat what was inside. When I opened the box, there were a bunch of donut leftovers: inedible, stale and oily, bites and chunks removed.
“Some of you are disappointed,” my teacher said as she flounced around the table, clutching a stack of booklets to her chest. “Most of you believed that you were getting a lot of donuts, but when you opened the box, you found that they’d been half-eaten, or used. This is how some people’s husbands feel when they get married: they open the box, expecting a woman to have saved herself for marriage, but instead, they find a woman who has defiled herself, no better than a stale, half-eaten donut. Imagine the disappointment!”
“You are to give yourself as a perfect gift to your future husband,” she crowed. “A holy, perfect gift, just for him. Today, we are going to discuss how to prepare to give such a gift.”
She strode around the table, handing out packets with GOOD SEX written in pink script on the outside. The cover featured two angelic looking people outfitted in a wedding dress and tuxedo who appeared to be getting married in a forest, while a pasty-white Jesus looked on from the heavens above the trees, appearing pleased.
The pamphlet detailed abstinence, which was presented as the only option for proper, young, religious girls. One story detailed how a girl didn’t have sex, but she did allow her boyfriend to “cross a line” (I didn’t know what “cross a line” meant and sadly, this story lacked the salacious details I desperately wanted) and how she felt terrible when they broke up because she wasn’t whole and perfect for her future husband.
“As young Christian girls, you are responsible for behaving appropriately, and not making the young men in your life stumble in their faith,” my teacher emphasized.
If we made a bad choice, we were responsible. If a boy made a bad choice, we were responsible. We were in control of their virtue, as well as our own.
Our bodies were so powerful we could tear men away from God.
*
Before I learned about the donuts and the way my body could make a man stumble, I learned about babies. To hear the women around me tell it, becoming a wife and mother wasn’t a matter of if, but of when. Babies were regarded as blessings, as gifts from God. My body was bad because it could tear men from their relationship with God, but it was good because it could make a baby. Hopefully many babies.
I was taught to think of the babies. Always of the babies. Vote with the babies in mind. Wait eagerly until you could raise babies of your own. Give everything up to have babies. Won’t someone think of the babies?
I grew up with adults who frequently met to protest abortion clinics and form prayer chains to keep people from entering them. Abortion was murder, maybe the only thing worse than getting pregnant out of wedlock.
No one ever thought of the women. The complexity of our lives were compressed into tiny, bite-sized catchphrases: Save yourself for your future husband. Abortion is murder. Stay pure.
*
I am no longer 12 and sitting in a Sunday school class. I’m 39, and now, there are men voting to legislate bodies of people who can give birth, and I am lit up with rage, an anger so visceral that it feels as if it’s squirming through my body, clawing its way out from the inside.
*
Confession: I left the church when I was 19 years old, and I was married by 21. Even though I didn’t attend Sunday services, I held to my beliefs around purity. I didn’t have sex until my wedding night, which was a horrible, calamitous event of misinformation and fear of my own body. I was supposed to go from chaste virgin to sexual goddess ready to fulfill my husband’s needs in the span of a wedding. I felt unprepared and frightened, both of my own body and of what I was supposed to be feeling and doing. Almost immediately, I realized that the purity I’d been taught was unhelpful and incomplete. It’d set me up for a life of fearing my own body, its power, its wanting.
Confession: I wasn’t pro-choice for a long time. While I left the church and my beliefs behind when I was 19, I couldn’t let go of being that abortion was murder. I still thought of the babies. I knew women who had abortions, and while I tried to disguise it, I was horrified. I told myself that it wasn’t my place to judge, but I judged. I didn’t understand. Weren’t they thinking of the babies?
Confession: I was wrong. I was very wrong. I’m sorry.
Confession: I didn’t see the relationship between purity culture and abortion for years. I didn’t see that the push to remain a virgin was about control. When you’re taught that your worth as a human donut is dependent upon your purity, and then upon your ability to have children, how else are you supposed to feel?
Confession: I never wanted children. I watched as women I knew ached for children, played pretend with dolls, and prepared to be a mother. I watched and waited for my own desires to be a mother to kick in. They never have.
Confession: I feel like I don’t have a right to write anything about abortion. I have never needed an abortion, and I will never have need of one. At 30 years old, I finally came out as queer, and there’s no risk of my getting pregnant, not only because my partner is a woman, but because two years ago, I had a hysterectomy, meaning that I could truly, never, ever have a baby.
Confession: the night before the surgery, I stood in front of the mirror and wondered if I had fucked up God’s will for me.
*
In August of 2019, my wife and I went on vacation to Kentucky. In the hour it took for me to drive from a Waffle House to Mammoth Caves National Park, I bled through a super tampon, an overnight pad, and a pair of pants, and had I not thought to tuck a towel under my body, I would have ruined my rental car.
My wife helped clean me off and lent me her spare pair of yoga pants while I cried and prayed for Advil to kick in so I could stand up straight again. The photos from that day show me happy, my 5’1 body ducking under caves and smiling widely as we hiked in the cool underground. They don’t show me doubled over in pain from cramps or scraping thick dark-plum clots from between my legs.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I sobbed on the drive back to our Airbnb. “I can’t live this way.”
*
For as long as I can remember, my body has been my enemy, and not my ally.
I started my period before my friends did. My grandmother called me an early bloomer because I had buds of breasts and hips that expanded and fresh red blood. Even when I was young, my periods seemed to be hellish in ways others weren’t. I logged hours in the bathroom in middle school trying to deal with pads. In high school, I ruined a friend’s couch by bleeding all over it. In college, I had to skip classes when my periods started because I was in absolute agony all the time.
This is to say nothing of the mental health symptoms: the rage and the sadness and the self-hatred that crawled under my skin before, during, after I bled. For years, I documented my symptoms faithfully: when I bled, when I was sad, when I was sick, how long my periods lasted. I tried birth control, an IUD, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, supplements, yoga, and weight loss. And still, I bled.
“It just can’t be that bad,” one doctor said.
Finally, my doctor ordered an ultrasound and there they were: fat, huge fibroids, all over my uterus. Only then did anyone believe my pain.
When I asked my doctor about a hysterectomy, at first, he said no, it wasn’t possible. I was too young. I might change my mind about wanting children. I explained that I’d never wanted children. He told me that it wasn’t just about me, and what I wanted: what would my husband think?
“I don’t have a husband,” I said. “I have a wife.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well. That changes things.”
He referred me for surgery and left the room. As I got dressed, the nurse practitioner told me I was lucky.
“Lucky?”
“They usually won’t give women your age hysterectomies because their husband might want their name carried on. Or what if they get a divorce and their next husband wants kids?”
“But what if the woman doesn’t want kids? Like, I don’t want kids. I don’t need to be in pain for something I don’t want.”
The nurse practitioner shut the door without a word.
Rage blistered me from the inside out. Even outside of the beliefs I’d fought so hard to leave behind, people were still thinking of the men, of the babies. Who was thinking of me? Who was thinking of my body, of my pain, of what I wanted and didn’t want?
*
I am lucky, I guess. I have health insurance. I got the surgery I needed. I no longer live in pain most weeks of the month. I have a spouse who supported my hysterectomy instead of standing in my way in hopes of their name being carried or forcing me to have children. I have never been pregnant, and now, I will never, ever be pregnant.
I will never need an abortion. The fear and anger I feel right now at the possibility of losing Roe is tangential. It’s anger for twelve year-old me being taught to fear her body and learning that she was responsible for the actions of men, it’s anger for the way I was taught I wasn’t worthy if I wasn’t pure, it’s anger for the teenage me that was taught that we should stop others from making choices about their body with my prayers, it’s anger for thirty six year-old me bleeding in a cave in Kentucky because no one listened to years of pain.
It’s anger because even though it took time, I still had rights to choose what happened to my body. I needed choice, autonomy, freedom, the ability to care for my own body, the freedom to make a life that wasn’t dependent upon what a man wanted.
It’s anger because it’s 2022 and people with uteruses are still fighting for choices.
It’s anger for the teenagers I’ve spent my life teaching growing up in a world where they will have fewer rights than I did.
It’s anger because this archaic rhetoric is powerful and dangerous and bad.
Amy Estes is a writer, storyteller, and educator from Sacramento, CA. Amy’s humor writing has been featured on McSweeney's, Slackjaw, The Belladonna, Weekly Humorist, and others. Amy’s essay writing has been featured on the Huffington Post, Catapult, Evocations Review, The Financial Diet, PULP Mag, Livability, POPSUGAR, and others. Amy’s live storytelling has been featured in Mortified, Cliterary Salon, Greetings From Queer Mountain, and on SoulPancake. Currently, Amy teaches satire writing for the Second City and middle school English for a bunch of rad students. When she’s not writing or teaching others, you can find her drinking coffee with her wife and dogs, reading books, and watching her murder stories. Or napping, if we’re being real about it. Amy completed the first draft of her memoir, Let The Love Surprise You, in 2021 and is actively seeking literary representation and publication.
Tyler James Bangkok (TJB) is a queer, American artist who has lived and worked in Asia for ten years. Currently, based in Bangkok, where it lives with its Thai-Taiwanese boyfriend and their dogs while freelancing as an artist, producer, and doing community engagement. TJB was a founding member of Minneapolis Art on Wheels. Through creating video, painting, programming interactive video instruments, and performances, TJB seeks to explore its queer fantasy and the abstract world within and to affect and shape reality. With life experiences between male and female, Eastern and Western culture/ideologies, capitalism and socialism, and the developed and developing world, TJB finds the history and tradition of dada collage techniques useful in engaging people and mixing perspectives that different groups might have. TJB's “collage lifestyle" aims to create intersectional points of view. Thus, it always wants to use collage to bring various ideas or objects together to show their context, clash, or how they work together. As a queer kid growing up in rural Minnesota, it always felt suffocated and like there was something off-balance about the USA. TJB is also deeply inspired by the Situationist International and their constant critique of capitalism, control, and creative and social agency in society. Their concept of "detournement" or flipping pop culture images to show the reality behind the facade of what they represent is vital to TJB's practice. Also, TJB firmly believes in the powers of collage in manifesting and creating “chaos magic.”