Reaction to Shvarts: "Outrage, shock, disgust"

Pictured: Four Yale students gather to reassure me that I made the right choice by not applying to Yale.

Alternate Title: Yale Student Uses Privately-Owned Uterus for Her Own Reasons; Nation Flips Its Shit

So the story is that a Yale student, for her senior art project, claimed to self-inseminate, take herbal abortifacients, and collect the ensuing menstrual blood, once a month, for nine months.*

And people are completely losing their shit over it. Noted patriarchy-enthusiast and forced-pregnancy advocate John Behan said of the contumacious woman-creature,

"“We believe that Yale students, regardless of their views of abortion, will be deeply disturbed by this trivialization of the agony of women who face crisis pregnancies and endure miscarriages."

Note that it doesn't trivialize the famed agony of women with unwanted uterine growths to force them to give birth.

And bringing up the irrelevant end of the spectrum of reactions to this project, Yale freshman Elle Ramel bemoaned the hypothetical seventeen year olds who would defect to other Ivy Leagues: “What if you are a pre-frosh and this is your last impression before you decide what school to go to?”

Quelle horreur!

As a brief digression, I feel compelled to comment on the name of Behan's organization: Choose Life at Yale, or CLAY. This is presumably a throwback to Genesis, where Art to Grow On shows up at God's fourth grade classroom and gives him the chance to form the first human being (a dude, of course - women are the Divine Afterthought) out of that most organic class of molecules, the phyllosilicates.

So I thought I'd come on livejournal and give my $0.02 about whence the hoopla has come:

What makes her art powerful is that she’s forcing people to address the contradiction of, on the one hand, seeing menstrual blood (and women, by extension) as this dirty, gross, contaminating, quasi-sinful insult to human decency, and on the other hand, claiming to believe all the sentimental crap that posits that embryos are these sacrosanct snowflakes from conception onward, whose personhood is inarguable and whose beauty and symbolic value can be read as an extension of the presumptively extant father’s virility.

The reason people are pissed about this, then, is because of the cognitive dissonance inherent in facing the fact that no, there’s no magic line between miscarriage, abortion, and menstruation - that it’s all fundamentally the same uterus expelling the same damn tissue, sperm magic notwithstanding. I would argue that this is the primary reason, and that it beats out, however slightly, the competing anger about a woman (1)attempting to impregnate herself (and thereby co-opting that sacred male prerogative) and then (2) attempting to abort (further emasculating the male prerogative) while (3) thinking she had the right to go and talk about it. And trailing all those reasons is the concomitant squickiness at seeing what could very well be The Curse on public display.

This dynamic shows up other parts of, to use Twisty’s terminology, the megatheocorporatocracy. Think of the archetypal fundie squawking about depictions of sexuality that do not conform to the man and woman in obvious heteronormative marriage "ideal." It’s not that there’s something obviously different about unmarried or even (gasp) queer boinking that makes it intolerable. Indeed, the undeniable similarity between the actual acts of a married heterocouple’s sexing, and any other kind of sexing under the sun, has forced patriarchy enthusiasts such as our dear John Behan to invent the whole goddamn sex-gender system itself in order to carve out these bullshit value-laden distinctions where previously there were none. Give these asswipes a few millennia, and - oh wait, they’ve already done that for we members of the temporarily functional uterati!

The fact that anyone cares at all whether she did what she said she did makes this art (or rather, makes this a patriarchy, to which she is responding with art). In a sane world, no one would give a rat’s ass about what’s going on in anyone else’s reproductive tract, and she would have had to do something else for her senior project.


*I should say, for the benefit of those among you that may not be familiar with women's bodies, that it's impossible to actually do this and know you are doing this. She's "self-aborting" before she could possibly know she is pregnant. So she may be miscarrying. She may be making embryos that don't implant (most, by the way, don't, regardless of artistic intent). She may actually be inducing some sort of early miscarriage. She may just be having her damn period. Or any combination thereof! But the mere suggestion that a woman could opt for a period instead of a pregnancy like she was a human being with rights makes people lose their freaking minds.

(Crossposted on my personal journal)