Dating Advice From . . . Gay Mexicans by Meghan Pleticha Q: My girlfriend laughs a lot during sex. What's her deal? A: Sex is like an Adam Sandler movie. Some people laugh and some people walk out of the theater and ask for their money back.
But there was a palpable discomfort when I had the same conversation with men. For the guys I was dating, the idea of a vacuum-like apparatus being the last visitor in my vagina was more troubling than if it had been, say, Stalin's penis. Even die-hard liberals who would wax on about a woman's right to choose were downright uncomfortable when actually presented with a woman who chose.
Of course I knew that bringing up abortion was about as fascinating as listening to a nursing-home doctor detail Grandpa's incontinence problems. Medical procedures are decidedly not sexy. As far as dating went, I operated under a tit-for-tat divulgence basis: you talk ball cancer, I'll explain my thirty-day long period. If the dreary poet had never asked about surgery, he would have been none the wiser.
But even with platonic male friends, the conversation was awkward. The Monday after my Saturday abortion, my friend Mike and I were sitting outside during our lunch break, while he daintily picked at a homemade sandwich and boyishly enthused about an idea he had for a t-shirt. He asked me what I'd done over the weekend. I began: "So, uh, this is kinda crazy. . . "
Even die-hard liberals who would wax on about a woman's right to choose were downright uncomfortable when actually presented with a woman who chose.
Mike's mouth fell open, and he set his sandwich down on his lap so slowly it felt like the eternal second right before a nuclear explosion. "Oh. My. God," he said, "Oh my God." As I started laughing, he caressed my back, and looking me meaningfully in the eye proclaimed, "You are the strongest. Person. I know," wrapping me into a full hug as I made weak, half-hearted protests.
To be fair, his reaction wasn't malicious, or demeaning; it was a compliment, I suppose, but it was far removed from what I actually said or felt. In Mike's mind the act of abortion had such powerful connotations. It was already defined as a Big Deal, and I was a hero, a survivor, a wounded victim. I wanted to be none of those. I felt like none of those. Sure, I wasn't too happy about dropping an unexpected $400, and my vagina was still sore like it had been repeatedly pounded. But this was like getting a Purple Heart for a masturbation-related wrist sprain.
My friend Allie was warned. When she'd had an abortion a year before me, she was treated by a sweet, tattooed, hippie nurse practitioner who provided her with some advice: "Do you have a boyfriend? Maybe don't tell boys. Sometimes boys don't know how to deal with this."
Allie's brief pregnancy — the result of a job loss, a break-up and heavy drinking culminating in a one-night stand — is not a topic she feels compelled to discuss with new people she's dating. "In the same way you don't want to tell someone how many people you've slept with," she says, "you can never predict when a guy's going to become a jerk. Abortion is just one of those hot-button issues for a dude to randomly be a jerk about."
But with the recent popularity of slapstick pregnancy comedies like Knocked Up and Juno, you'd be surprised at how randomly "So have you ever been pregnant?" or "What would you do?" can invade a light conversation. And where anti-choice activists believe "confession" is a necessary step to absolve yourself of the "crime," and Christian sites like Care Net are full of essays about regretful women weeping about the mistakes of their youth to disapproving, divinely forgiving husbands, the pro-choice side isn't offering up any nifty guides titled So You're Eating a Cheeseburger With Your Man and Abortion Comes Up. That, at least for me, would've been more handy than all the safe-sex pamphlets stuffed in my hand when I exited the clinic. Between my desire to be honest and my fear of that honesty's ramifications, managing and packaging my abortion became more difficult than the act itself.
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