Newsletters!

Dear lovelies,

This is a quick note to let you know that my writing has, for the time being, jumped over to Substack for reasons of ease.

I’d be honored if you joined me over there.

XO

How To Help: a roundup of counsel and requests for abortion access activism.

This is something I wrote for a pro-choice group I am on the admin team for, because folks are in a panic and it needed saying again. Posting here because it’s instantly being flagged and removed by FB robots.

Dearests.

If you’ve landed here out of panic at the state of the world and a sincere desire to help right what is wrong, this is for you.

The post-Roe world is a hot mess, but it may not be the kind of mess you think it is, and those of us who have been on the ground working in a focused way on abortion access for the long haul have some counsel and some serious, immediate requests for folks who are newer to this conversation. 

Please do consider reading this post as your prerequisite for being helpful. 

There is really and truly no disrespect meant toward anybody’s good intentions or capacity.

If you’re here to do something good, we really, really need you. We WANT you. 

And: there’s a learning curve here, and we need your attention.

We are seeing a lot of enthusiasm, new orgs, new projects, and heroic public gestures, on social media and all over the internet.

In all of that, we are witnessing a whole lot of false assumptions, really terrible misinformation, ignorance of best practices, arrogance, defensiveness, overt and covert racism and transphobia, and emotionally-driven kneejerk reactivity. 

So this is a really sincere, ardent call-in of You, whoever and wherever You are, who want to help move the needle on access for everyone. 

Again: we need you. If you want to be useful, we need you to understand that the circumstances at hand - the criminalization of abortion access - aren’t actually new for a whole lot of people, both in the US and elsewhere in the world. 

The Roe verdict wasn’t a magic spell that made it all ok. 

Its disappearance, while horrendous, does not undo the good work that is already happening. 

And there are people in your community, activists and educators and lawyers and providers, who have been trying to ensure safe, legal, equitable access to abortion upon request for longer than you, some for literal decades. 

Below is a roundup of requests, recommendations and heartfelt counsel from the experienced activists in your life. Please listen up.

Here are some things we want you to do:

1) Make yourself trustworthy. Begin by listening to people who probably know more about this than you. 

Find those people locally and online, offer your time and attention, learn everything you can from them and then show up and be awesome. The world of abortion access support is built upon vetted, trusted relationships, and building such relationships, as you likely well know, takes time and tending. So please proceed as though courtesy matters, because it deeply, deeply does. 

2) Learn about internet privacy and encryption, and use best practices at all times. 

This is the MOST BASIC shit, and anybody who doesn’t know and isn’t interested in learning should not be involved in activism, period. I said what I said.

Because if you are sloppy under these circumstances, you put yourself and others at enormous risk for no goddamn reason at all other than willful ignorance. The information you need in order to proceed safely is available, free, and honestly not all that complicated.

Unencrypted information can be hacked, stolen, subpoenaed. Do not think this isn’t happening, because it is, and it will continue to be as long as abortion is criminalized. 

Most activists simply will not communicate with anyone who isn’t already using current privacy protocols. Please let a person’s willingness to communicate or receive sensitive information over social media, unencrypted email, text or phone be a big ol red flag to you.

Where to start: 

www.digitaldefensefund.org/ddf-guides/abortion-privacy

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self Defense: www.ssd.eff.org

3) Learn about the orgs who are already doing this work and support them. Look on their websites to find out what kind of help they need - they need your help! - and form relationships (see #1: make yourself trustworthy.) This is especially necessary at a local/community level, because folks who actually know each other irl may have the capacity to assess and meet needs more quickly and appropriately than someone known only over the internet may be able to. i.e. it is easier to read the room when you are also in the room. 

Some places to start: 

www.aafront.org/operation-save-abortion

https://abortionfunds.org/

4) Learn about the movement for Reproductive Justice, the current and historical abortion underground, and the ongoing worldwide struggle for abortion access and autonomy. A LOT of people have gone down this road before you and there is a lot of amazing, unbelievably courageous precedent to lean into (as well as plenty of fuckery to know not to repeat :)) Know what you’re getting into. 

5) Remember that this is not about you AT ALL. This is about solidarity. 

For many of us, that is a tough pill to swallow under capitalism, where we are conditioned to competitive individualism as the basis of personal worth. But solidarity is where it’s at. This is not an arena for being a star or a boss or in any way accruing power under the banner of virtue. 

So get your head into it and become a great collaborator, because that is how you can be most useful to your immediate and greater community. 

Here are some things we do NOT need or want anyone to do:

6) Reinvent the wheel.

There are dozens of already-existing, already-experienced, thoroughly vetted and trustworthy public-facing organizations active in all aspects of education, resourcing, and providing support to ppl in need of abortions. If there is a need for something else to happen, the people involved in those orgs are the ones best placed to know what that is. 

Starting new orgs and projects, especially by people who are inexperienced with current best practices, interferes with and creates competition for the stream of funding and attention that those orgs require in order to provide services to the people who already depend upon them.

So please don’t do that. 

7) Aggrandize and center our own positions, virtue, or “work.” Please see #5: remember that this is not about you. And this goes x100000 more if you are white. 

8) Draw parallels with the Underground Railroad. The conditions of criminalized abortion is NOT comparable to chattel slavery, no matter how dire it is, and that shit is appropriative and insulting, so please knock it off, especially, again, if you are white. 

9) Refer to abortion access and pro-choice as a women’s issue. There are plenty of people directly affected by the lack of abortion access who are not women. Abortion is a human right and a human issue. Please update your words and your head on this. Thank you.

10) Use coat hanger and other outdated imagery suggesting that all self-managed and extraclinical abortion is desperate and dangerous. That is no longer the world we are living in - over half of all abortions in the US are self-managed as of 2020, according to preliminary data from the Guttmacher Institute - and using those images and that language perpetuates misinformation designed to provoke and manipulate extreme emotions in order to control the narrative around abortion. SMA is statistically safe and effective, and moreover, in a world where clinical abortions may or may not be available on demand, it is a necessary part of care. Please, don’t participate in this kind of fearmongering, and don’t fall for it. 

11) Post publicly about criminalized activity on social media. By which I mean things like invitations to people in red states who want to “go camping.” SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT PRIVATE, EVER, INCLUDING DMs. 

Here is a great thread about why not to do that: https://twitter.com/BlackPnwLady/status/1540859268114501632

12) Share ANY sensitive information over ANY unencrypted channel, to ANYONE who cannot be vouched for. This includes all social media including DMs, all regular email, all unencrypted texting, all unencrypted phone calls and video chats. Google Docs, no. ANYTHING over Google, no. Browser search histories can be subpoenaed as evidence as well. Please see #2: learn about internet privacy.

13) Invite others to share sensitive information (including name, location, email, phone number, etc) over any unencrypted channels whatsoever, ever, at all. Do no underestimate the risk. Whatever else we may think of them, anti-choice activists are not stupid, tech-illiterate, unprepared or lacking in strategy. And in many states, the law is now on their side to do insane, previously-illegal things including surveillance, theft and hacking in order to obstruct abortion access. GIVE THEM NOTHING. 

I hope that all makes good sense, honeys.

XO

A note on bodily autonomy & the fall of Roe.

Tomorrow morning, I'm facilitating the first Take Back the Speculum so far this spring. I'm simultaneously so glad to be doing something that feels useful and deeply angry that we are required to focus, again, on defending ourselves from the same tired ass threat.

We're now 2+ weeks out from the leak of the SCOTUS draft outlining the conservative majority arguments for overturning Roe vs Wade, collapsing the established federal judicial precedent protecting abortion access and leaving a person's right to decide whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy to be determined by the legal and political machinations regarding abortion access in their state.

These weeks have been harrowing, to say the least, for all of us who are clear that abortion is and has always been an essential aspect of healthcare and therefore a basic human right. In an already overwhelming period of time, there is a lot of work to do.

It’s somehow incredibly shocking and entirely predictable at the same time.

For me, the moment of clarity was when Trump chose Mike Pence as his VP in order to align himself with evangelicals and more broadly with the Christian right vote, following a strategy that has been successful since Reagan's first campaign. My friend and mentor Carol, who is pushing 90 and has been actively fighting this shit since the late sixties, has been expecting this particular shoe to drop for much, much longer than that.

The day of the leak, I had been leaping around in a mountain stream with my kid in a canyon without cell reception, and emerged with her, damp and giggling and thinking about dinner, to a phone exploding with text messages from friends and colleagues all saying something along the lines of FUCKITY FUCK FUCK and linking to the Politico piece that had broken the leaked SCOTUS draft. I read it with my heart in my mouth by the side of the road and immediately called Carol.

"Well," she said. "This is very bad. A lot of people are going to suffer. That's absolutely real. But I know what it was like before Roe, and life will go on after it falls. We knew all along this was likely, and we're as ready for it as we can be."

She is, of course, absolutely right.

Consider the overwhelming number of places in this country where, for all practical purposes, it’s as if the Roe decision never happened - most of them the same places where abortion is imminently expected to become illegal. Where there is maybe one clinic in the entire state. Where visiting a clinic as a patient requires running a gauntlet of violent anti-abortion protestors. Where clinic workers have been assaulted and killed by anti-abortion protestors. Where people have unknowingly gone to "crisis pregnancy centers" and wasted valuable time or been terrified by the propaganda foisted upon them there. Where people trying to end a pregnancy have to jump through the hoops of waiting periods, parental approval, or other time-consuming obstructions to access, or who can't afford the procedure, or who are simply unable to trust the medical system for any number of completely logical reasons.

There are and have always been plenty of people here in the US who can't ever assume that the state, or the licensed clinicians who answer to it, would protect them or care for them because of their ethnicity, gender, background, body size, disability or income level.

In order to support those folks, national and local networks of community care, organized channels of funding and mutual aid groups have evolved over time, some of which have been in place for decades. And those are the organizations and networks that deserve our attention right now. Because for them, it isn't suddenly a "post-Roe world". It's a world untouched by Roe.

There are a few key things to take note of here:

1) We need to take a big collective breath and regulate ourselves in the ways we know work best for us. The opposition wants us exhausted, confused, scared, fighting amongst ourselves, unable to organize or act effectively, overly reactive and impulsive. We can't make good decisions when we're in the full-blown urgency of fight/flight/freeze. So we need to handle ourselves and care for each other in basic ways: hug our loved ones and hydrate and pet our beasts and get enough sleep and get outside and self-regulate around our neurologically understandable but unhelpful tendency to doom-scroll and linger over the news.

It's spring. It's beautiful. And that is also important and true.

Despite all of this chaos, our joy is right here. And we must collect ourselves where we are and have our wits about us in order to do what needs doing together.

2) Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.

The existing frameworks for help, support, and care are based on years of organization, vetting and relationship-building. If you feel compelled to get involved in this fight, there are a LOT of really solid ways to do that without starting something new - and if you're new to all of this, you're far more likely to actually be able to help if you show up *with courtesy* to the party that's already happening rather than dissipating energy and trying to start from scratch. There is incredible education and activism around all aspects of abortion access, and I recommend connecting with those offering that to learn more about what's needed before deciding unilaterally that Something Must Be Done and scrambling into unpredecented action. If something new is actually needed in your area, far better to do it with the guidance and support and solidarity of people who already know the ropes.

Some of the relevant things to read up on and find out more about re activism in this space are: abortion funds, reproductive rights and those who defend them, abortion or full spectrum doula trainings, local clinic escorting, and how best to support the campaigns of people who are running against GOP candidates or anybody running on an anti-abortion platform in key places throughout the US and most especially where you are. If you're on FB, my colleague Mychal is at the helm of a large group called Pro-Choice Health Workers, Allies & Activists, and it's a good place to start connecting with other people to whom these issues are important. There is a place for everybody in this fight and WE NEED YOU.

3) Consider the narrative and the language being used.

First: please don't refer to anti-abortion opiners as "pro-life". Don't give them that. "Pro-life" is a very specific marketing strategy attempting to seize the moral high ground (please see here for more details on that) and the antis have proven themselves to be wholly unconcerned with lives, given their willingness to sacrifice the bodies of birthing people to uphold overtly religious belief systems at the expense of their fundamental human rights. Let's call them what they are: anti-abortion and anti-choice. I don't personally feel that "forced birth" is inaccurate or too strong in most contexts.

More subtly, the dominant storyline in this country, thanks to the ubiquitous PR of organizations like Planned Parenthood, is that it's either the clinic or the coathanger. It's used to create a boogeyman around self-managed abortions (SMA) or any care outside of the purview of a licensed and therefore state-controlled medical provider. And it is a major untruth by omission.

The reality is that people had safe abortions outside of clinics before Roe, and during Roe, and will continue to have them long after Roe is gone.

I say this not to diminish the importance of clinical abortion access - it will always be a necessary part of the mosaic of care for many, and essential to fight for - or deny that people without access or options have done dangerous things when taking matters into their own hands, but rather to urge all of us to examine the narrative at work and how it is meant to affect us in a world where the greater danger by far is not the actual risks and consequences of SMA, which are statistically predictable and easily managed, but the legal and community consequences should one get caught or reported to law enforcement in the wrong place.

To understand this better and arm yourself with clear and actionable knowledge, I really recommend looking up self-managed abortion and getting familiar with what that has meant historically and what it means in 2022.

This is also an excellent article about the landscape of abortion care in a post-Roe scenario focused on SMA.

4) Learn about digital security and internet privacy.

The most basic things help a whole lot to keep your calls and correspondence private, and this is a very, very big deal in the current climate. It’s fundamental to your freedom in the most classic American sense of that word. Nor is it hard to do.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a course on this which I strongly recommend.

At the very least, switch over texting to Signal (set a timer if your communications require privacy) and email to Protonmail - both are end to end encrypted. Don’t be a sitting duck.

Facebook and all social media *are not* a safe place to communicate about anything beyond making connections and sharing information, including DMs.

5) Educate yourself about your body as a direct means of amplifying and informing your bodily autonomy.

Seriously. Learn your body.

This is the place closest to home, and it’s where we begin.

Get shoulder to shoulder with others & learn together.

Normalize it.

Learn your own anatomy, your options around fertility and contraception, your resources for support for all outcomes. Take charge of this aspect of your life.

Quit outsourcing authority over your body to other people whose licensure and conditioning has taught them to gatekeep rather than to educate and empower you, and whose capacity to first do no harm is being obstructed by things like trigger laws.

Your body belongs to you, and the more you know about it, the less anybody can tell you what to do. The more power you hold. The less enthralled you are by scare tactics. The more you understand what needs doing and how to do it.

There are MANY extraordinary resources for reproductive & sexual health education that I recommend wholeheartedly: Autonomous Pelvic Care, Holistic Abortions, Carol Downer, Molly Dutton-Kenny, Sister Song, Mychal Shifrah, Samantha Zipporah, The Red Door Collective, Sister Zeus, and Vienna Farlow are a handful of my faves.

And me :)) I am one of my faves.

Which brings me to Take Back the Speculum.

If you have had enough of waiting on others to determine your fate and feel ready to start getting a handle on this for yourself, please consider yourself invited to class this Saturday morning. TBTS will blow your mind and settle your system and equip you for a more informed conversation about your body, your options, and your authority to do the thing that is right for you.

Over the course of 3 hours, we will cover:

- an empowered, gender inclusive overview of the full spectrum of healthy sexual anatomy (& the demolition of the misogynist, racist bs materials most commonly used to educate us - and our providers)

- an invitation to participate in the Gallery that Destroys All Shame

- a demonstration of a easy, simple DIY cervical self exam
- an opportunity for all participants to examine themselves with guidance (and, if desired and permitted, observe others)

TBTS is open to & appropriate for all human beings with internal sexual anatomy. This is a 10000000% queer and trans-inclusive joint.

Donation based. NO ONE EVER TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS.

All $ this month goes straight to red state abortion funds.

Bring your people.

That's it. I love you.

Take heart. We can do this. We were *made* to do this.

Remember: this world can be a paradise. IT ALREADY IS A PARADISE.

Keep your sights set on joy, connection, laughter, feasting, and centering the fullness & truth of yourself - it's your birthright and what the world truly needs most. I need you by my side, exactly as you are.

Please write back with any questions or if you just want to say hi.

XOXOXOXOXOXO

pcws

How The Kids Get Free.

I’ve been mentoring some queer kids.

They reached out because the sex ed they got in school completely flubbed it and failed to address them, their bodies and relationships and the sex they wanted to have or were already having. The teachers blanched when they asked questions and looked away and got squirrelly with them.

These kids are forthright, articulate, intelligent, self aware, charming as fuck. They are cis and trans and nonbinary. They sometimes say things that shock the hell out of me, even though I know full well how low the bar for sex ed curriculum is. Like when one of them stopped me to ask: what is a vulva? and I was so surprised I couldn’t control my reaction.

They also say lots of things that are wholly unsurprising but catastrophically sad to me. Like: why won’t any of the people teaching us about sex talk about how lesbians do it? Why does our sex ed class ignore trans people? Why won’t anyone acknowledge that people fuck for reasons other than reproduction? Is asexuality real? Am I broken forever because I had a bad experience and don’t want anyone to touch me? Is the G spot even a thing? Why is consent so complicated? Why don’t they talk about orgasms - that’s the point, right?

So we talk. I answer their questions and send them to resources written by people who respect kids. I’m so grateful those resources exist. I’m so glad to be available to catch the questions.

I’m painfully aware that it’s not enough.

I’m just one among the many tender-hearted, committed, solid educators who get to show up for the baby queers - who, it must be said, are thankfully, gorgeously coming out in record numbers and in many more places than ever before, because it’s safe to show yourself when you know you’re not alone. Queer kids are resourced right now in ways that have no historical precedent and lives are being saved on so many levels and thank heavens for all of it.

And still: the fact that these conversations are such a far cry from what’s offered to kids as the baseline of standardized sex ed EVEN IN A PROGRESSIVE STATE makes me want to set things on fire.

Because really: What the fuck is sex ed for? WHO is it for?

What are we accomplishing here if we don’t speak to the needs of the young people in front of us?

What are we so damn scared of?

This is true for everybody else too, by the bye - especially the cis girls, for whom standardized sex ed is further entrainment to the unstated and omnipresent cultural assumption that they owe hetero sex to cis boys, that their own pleasure is secondary at best, and that their sexual fate is to tolerate discomfort and then take all the responsibility.

(That thing I want to set on fire? Found it.)

Then I turn around and work with adult women who are still operating on those assumptions and are still continuously wounded by them, and who don’t understand “what’s wrong with them” when they don’t enjoy sex the way they’re supposed to.

It is a complex thing to get with a person who has lived for so long within a belief system that diminishes and gaslights them constantly and then ask them to imagine that their suffering isn’t their fault, and that nothing is wrong with them or ever was, and furthermore that they’re eating crumbs from their own feast table. There’s a lot of grief and rage and recognition and repair ahead of us as grown women.

And it’s ok. We will got to get with it if we’re ever to make it into what we desire, and we are, and we will. We are completely capable of this. It’s our curse to undo, too.

But we must do better by our kids. We have to do better for them than just defaulting to the inadequate, terrifying, covertly or overtly shame-filled version of it we most likely received, surrendering to whatever they’re learning at school.

It’s not either/or. It can’t be.

Real sex ed is including the kids in our lives in the open acknowledgement across all contexts that sexuality is an innate, normal, vital, delightful aspect of human life.

Read that again.

You know how some of us - mostly white people, often in gendered groups - lament the lack of heroic initiatory processes in our society, and then imitate or steal the rituals of other cultures to try to regain some semblance of intact humanity, colonizer-style?

The conversations of sexual education is one fundamental initiation of our young people into their adulthood, their growing bodies, their power. There is a transition that is fucking begging us to step in and create language and offer counsel and support to our children and we are MISSING IT. We’re outsourcing it to schools and to the internet because it’s cringey for us, and then we just miss the entire thing.

So they do their best to set themselves free without us, and they initiate themselves. Despite all the incoherence surrounding them, they do it. The kids are undoing the long curse, and nowhere is that miracle more plainly visible than in the baby queers, who are some free ass motherfuckers if ever I saw any.

But let’s not saddle them with our baggage, hey? The fact that they’re able to survive our crap isn’t a reason to make them survive it. So let’s stop weighing them down with horrid, fantastically gender-skewed, cisheteronormative, ableist and frankly racist “information”, shall we?

Let’s get our shit together so that we can tell them the truth. The whole truth. Including the parts where we admit we don’t know and have to ask around. Because COMMUNITY! Imagine that.

It takes effort to take something normal and ubiquitous and screw it up this badly, so -

What might happen if we just relaxed, suddenly? Answered the questions being asked? Admitted to our own feelings of lack? Planted the seeds of an exquisite world of pleasure and agency and deep, robust selfhood and relational equity?

That world is already here. It really is. These kids are proof of it.

We just have to let it touch us.

Be A Good Girl.

My reflexive reaction upon seeing these words tagged on a wall in my neighborhood.

How does your body respond, seeing them?

If you were assigned female at birth, chances are this shit has followed you around in one form or another your entire life.

It is bone deep to the world we inherit, that command to be a good girl, so omnipresent as to give the appearance of immutability, as structural as any fact of nature.

It is fundamental to the church and to the state, to our education and our finances, our rituals and our artifacts, our relationships, our transmissions to our children. If that phrase was an arrow, you could shoot it in any direction with your eyes closed and know you’d hit the target every single fuckin time. 

We enter this world already pinned by the violent expectations that are part & parcel of what it is to perform as a good girl, overlaid upon the reality of actual, visceral, real-time life in a body. A body with a nervous system that responds to social exclusion as a direct survival threat. Which is to say: the stakes are very high. And we see that play out in all directions as well, in the guarantees of safety inherent to a good and successful performance, and the dire repercussions of a failed one. What happens to “bad” girls? Or to “failed” girls? Girls who don’t perform femininity well enough?

Combine that with any number of other marginalized identities, and the repercussions intensify. If those intersecting identities are visible, they become an immediate axis of danger that must constantly be navigated. We invent our own way amidst all the risks, or we submit to the grinding wheel, or we oscillate and compartmentalize in an attempt to fulfill ourselves inwardly while meeting the expectations of others outwardly.

At the tip of the iceberg: to the extent that we choose, what compels us, still, to follow these tired-ass, unresponsive scripts?

And, deep to that, the rest of the iceberg: how do we emerge from the trauma of this? The wounds of the ages, of our people, of our culture? How do we heal ourselves and each other? How do we transform the culture?

Everyone I know has their own version of this story. 

Mine is a story of reclaiming what belongs to me in pieces, one by one, until what I knew for myself and of myself formed a dynamic and unpredictable whole, a whole composed of multitudes that continues to surprise me. Turns out I am not here to serve up the shallow-ass, disconnected performance art of the good girl. 

The role of the good girl is not a fact of nature. 

My body is a fact of nature, and my body tells me a different story. 

A story of a fast, expansive, discerning consciousness. Of hair that grows wildly, everywhere, and of strong teeth. A particular love of big spoons for taking greedy bites. Of wanting lots of sex with lots of different people. Of a lot of noise, ugly and beautiful noise, when grieving or joyful or enraged. Of delights and triggers and reflexes and balms. Of climbing like a monkey, and disdaining high heels and makeup and uncomfortable clothing except for the rare occasion when my contempt for discomfort is outweighed momentarily by the opportunity to peacock in a fun costume. Of knowing and loving the feeling of taking a knee to an assailant’s balls, hard enough to drive a body back several feet in space. The surges of adrenaline that are more and more familiar to me, that move through me and metabolize quickly these days, as a mother and a fighter and a person who gravitates toward the edges. Of deep, quivering pleasure, and rest, and the cracked-open, resilient capacity for endurance and creativity that parenting has shown me.

This palace of a body, that belongs to me, in freedom. Mine.

I haven’t been anybody’s good girl for a long time, but I still feel the compulsion of it. And I no longer reject the places in me that stir to meet those expectations, because that very desire in me to avoid and cast out arises, sneakily, from that same root of violence, the cruelty of self-improvement, the same compulsion to perform perfection and purity that causes the exile of inconvenient aspects of self, when the reality is of course a far more rich, complex, conflicted and ambiguous living truth song than that. 

Everyone in me has a seat at the table these days. There is no out to cast to. Not really.

And it’s an ongoing process, applying antidote to such a banal and ubiquitous poison.

If the poison is the constant threat of disconnection or annihilation unless roles are convincingly performed, the antidote is the exalted voice of my body over time, and the deep kindness and generosity of kinship with other humans and with the living world of other-than-humans. The capacity to hear the voices of desire and refusal, and the decision to honor them over and over again. If I can honor my own, I can honor yours too.

In the flux and flow of my own power, I can see and hold your power as fact, your agency as magnificent, your voice as essential. In my recognition of our kinship, there is no part of you that is unwelcome. You don’t exist for my convenience. You exist for your own joy, and that is more than enough for me.

In that quality of presence, the spectre of the good girl loses its power to compel. Slowly, if we’re fortunate, we make our homes elsewhere, in landscapes that are more honest, more forgiving.

Like all urban people, I am a scavenger, and moreover a multidimensional scavenger who delights in making art out of trash. Born to this, it is my right to pick and choose from the shreds of the destroyed good girl as I wish, the powerful visuals of the femme, like a kid with a costume chest. This boa, yes. These heels, no.

When I’m complete, I am unrecognizable to the algorithms who demand my compliance and try to sell me shit. We no longer speak the same language. I’m busy making beauty to delight other gods.

I am blessed to sit at the feet of elders who were busting the algorithms long before I took my first breath, because this all requires a thorough rewriting of many aspects of learning and doing.

The sexual body is one of them. Arguably the most intimate and hotly-contested territory of all. (Although our dealings with money run a very close second.)

This weekend, I’ll be holding two pieces of this puzzle, and I invite you to join me if they’re useful to you.

On Saturday, I’m teaching Take Back The Speculum, the sex ed that everyone should have gotten at the onset of puberty and virtually no one did.  The version that centers the agency and wholeness and innate brilliance of all of our bodies. The version that champions the entirety of the clitoris as the true center of a pelvis with three holes - a version of anatomy that was erased from medical literature, and that no current provider ever learned in medical school. The version in which we divest from the body-shame to which we have been conditioned, such that upon any encounter thereafter that requires the performance of good-girlness - with a lover, with a friend, with a boss, on the street, with a doctor, etc. - we will find ourselves responding differently, because we are different people when we remember our own agency.

And on Sunday, we gather for Tending The Well, a strongly-held ritual space for each of us to tend to our own bodies and to re-establish connection with our own pelvic space when the signal has been lost or obscured by trauma, shame, or other destructive conditioning. Where Take Back the Speculum is primarily focused on information and visual learning, Tending The Well centers the exploration of sensation as a gentle, guided hands-on, hands-in embodied meditation in which your experience and choice is held as the compass. Because lasting transformation doesn’t happen just by thinking it, but happens in the body as a deeply felt movement toward something new.

If either of those sound right for you at this time, join us. 

Come as you are. All of you is welcome here.

XO

Some thoughts on scar tissue.

In my 22 years of touching more bodies than I can possibly count, one of the things I have loved most is working with the wild miracle of scar tissue. 

Our physical bodies respond to a traumatic injury at a cellular level with what’s commonly called a “healing cascade” - inflammation at the site of the injury felt as swelling, flushing, bruising, other changes in texture & color, and the spectrum of don’t-touch/stop-moving sensations, all signaling an urgent movement in the tissues toward repair. 

One significant element of that response is the fairly rapid formation of a beautiful, protective fibrous collagen network in the connective tissue, also called fascia, that holds the hurt place, giving it structure, knitting it together and limiting movement to allow that place to properly heal in its own sweet time. The body forms a quiet, still place, a sanctuary, to hold the necessary space for the repair to happen.

And that’s what we call a scar. 

Scars are incredible: they are a signature worn on the body, visible or invisible, indicating where we have been through something profoundly transformative. A place where we have known violence, and also where we have known what it is to heal in the languid, unhurried field of body-time, where clocks and calendars shimmer and dissolve into the horizon like some Dali fantasy. Scars are places of deep body memory, a kind of instant-access, time-transcendent portal into both our mortality and everything in us that wants to jump up and live again after being marked by pain. And that desire to live shows us our own malleability in the most primal, direct way - not just what we think we want for and from our bodies, but what our bodies want for and from us. How free our asses actually can be, if we tend to our scars, integrate them, and allow them to reach their completion.

The formation of a scar is only the first part of its cycle. The sustained strength of its shape while all other tissues heal beneath and around is the second. And last is its resolution, the process of letting go of protective structures as they become unnecessary, and the melting of its fibers into the matrix of tissue and fluid that defines the body’s free, current, constantly evolving pattern of movement. 

That cycle of scarring and resolving mirrors something our bodies do on another level in the moment of sustaining a trauma: one immediate, global nervous system response to an overwhelmingly painful experience is, among other things, to limit the depth of our breath, which in turn limits our sensation and mitigates the impact. We feel less when we breathe more shallowly, and that impulse to limit feeling is a deeply wise response that helps us to survive something that feels like it could kill us. 

After that moment has passed and the threat is gone, it’s extremely common to have trouble moving past the experience - our nervous system response has changed (this, to me, is what defines trauma) and our bodies continue to reflect that change, holding the posture in which we are quite literally holding our breath. We can see for ourselves and recognize cognitively that the threat has passed, but it takes something different to convince the body, and without that, we can circle indefinitely, stuck in a protective loop formed in an amazing internal gesture of self-salvation that may or may not be relevant over time. We know those loops by the feelings of stuckness or “frozenness” as well as by the somatic symptoms that can arise, and by the repeat reactions and behaviors that we know aren’t an accurate response to the thing happening in front of us - the effects at all levels of having a part of us dis-integrated, splintered-off and lodged in time. If the experience affected us deeply enough, the whole world can seem to revolve around the axis of it.  And this can continue until something persuasively demonstrates to the body, in its own language, that the coast is clear.

There are many different ways to communicate effectively in body-language in order to offer new possibilities and open the loop - this is the exact crossroads where those of us who practice somatics in all its myriad forms hang out. Suffice to say: completing these survival-level nervous system cycles require showing the body that unclenching and metabolizing whatever is bound up there isn’t going to destroy it. That blowing on the house isn’t going to knock it down. It takes a depth of listening and gentleness and firmness and stalwart optimism to make a new gesture and establish a new possibility of movement after a trauma. And it cannot be forced or rushed, but must be offered at the level of an invitation. Because the body is a wild animal, and therefore must be respected, and courted in its own time.

The way we approach physical scars is no different. 

Most often, after the healing of a wound is complete and the incidence of injury is past, the scars remain, binding us in the posture we adopted to protect ourselves, which over time becomes something to work around, an unconscious avoidance. It has been very common in my experience to work with people who came in with injuries from decades past, still avoiding them, saying that they had never felt the same there and never expected to again. There are many people who are frankly terrified to touch their own scars and injured places, and for good reason: it can be scary as hell to feel ourselves and remember the feelings we have shut out, to challenge the place that was hurt for fear of being hurt again. It’s been my role to hold all of that with them, to explore sensation slowly with them, to witness the arc of memory that arises, and to be with them as they reestablish presence and possession of themselves in the place that was sundered and scarred. Slowly, gently, at the body’s own pace. The pace of trust.

The completion of a scar is the act of integrating the entire arc of the experience that created it, even experimentally. It’s the possibility that we can open up to something else as we test the healed place and discover for ourselves that the protective postures are no longer needed. It’s an unbinding that brings us into present time without agenda or expectation for what that will look like. And it takes the same spacious listening and patient invitation to accomplish at the cellular level as it does to dance with the entire dragon of the nervous system. 

Tomorrow, 2/27, Mo Washburn and I will be teaching Antlers of the Heart, a workshop on breast and chest care as an act of radical self love. It’s a delectable layercake of an offering, and we’ll be talking about all sorts of things that are relevant to anybody alive in a body at this time. And, if you would benefit from an introduction, in community, to the beautiful work of unwinding and unbinding your scars, we will be focused on offering tools and practices specific to that. 

It will be gentle, and we will do it together. 

If you, beloved human reading these words, could use some loving touch, some sweet guidance, and feel ready to enter into a time of possibly unimaginable present-time freedom, please join us.

We would love to have you. 

when the light streams in: a letter of courage, offerings & resources for plague times

Beloved people.

I’m thinking of you all. Sending big blessings of courage and calm to all of you in this whirlwind.

What a wild time this is to be alive. 

I hope very much that you and all of yours are feeling strong, clear, and resourcing yourselves in this sudden crazy shift of gravity in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

Although I’m certainly fielding moments of total overwhelm, I am mostly feeling grounded, lit up, and marvelously optimistic. Weird, no?

There are incredible transformations available to us right now. The deck is being so thoroughly reshuffled. And in this liminal time when nothing is quite locked into place, there’s an unprecedented (for me, anyways) scope to the kinds of choices we can each make about what the world will look like when we emerge from this. 

I feel peculiarly made for these times, and I’m so damn grateful for all that I’ve learned and tended and cultivated over my life that is serving to keep me clear headed right now. This is obviously not a test, and the anxiety, the lack of rhythm, the big waves of panic and rage and grief and loss are all super real, and I’m very relieved to find that some of the tools and skills I’ve got are relevant enough to keep me tethered to myself and available to others. 

Parenting under these conditions is fucking intense - perhaps for you, too? - andbut we are slowly figuring it out, and it's full of gold. Being together in this way is bringing about the resolution of certain patterns within my family that have caused me a tremendous amount of worry, and our home is changing in beautiful ways in the crucible of these days.

Other good is taking root, literally and figuratively. I’m beginning the process of planting and tending a substantial edibles and medicinals garden for the first time in my life, geeking out on cultivating different plants from seed. My family is doing a daily online storytime for all the kids in our lives who are at home. I’m in a prayerful state much of the time.

And the information has been streaming in like light. Waking and sleeping. 

In general, this first couple of weeks of quarantine has been about pacing myself, being with the people in my home and strategizing for time alone, acting in my capacity as a connector to get people what they need, and considering how I can be of service in the midst of this crisis.

I’m finding that my trust in the intelligent wellspring of nature is absolute. I trust us when we move and act in our rightness as part of a complex ecology. And this virus is a part of that ecology, too. It has been part of my meditations over the past couple of days to tune in with COVID-19 as well as with the earth itself, to establish some connection and communication with this presence which is causing such havoc and destruction to human beings and such relief to other aspects of the global ecosystem.

On a more rational-linear front, I’ve been deep in research on COVID-19, SARS and  coronaviruses, and on plant medicines that reliably address both the viral infections themselves and their varied symptom presentations, and am in nearly daily contact with other healers who are bringing their lifetimes of learning to support the community during this epidemic. 

There are some specific resources I’d recommend to anyone wanting a similar handle on what this is and how to work with it, which I’ll include at the end of this letter. In the meantime, if you need referrals to herbalists, acupuncturists, and other skilled practitioners who are capable of meeting this illness with tools beyond the scope of standard medical care, please reach out to me and I will do my best to connect you. 

As of twelve days ago, I have stopped doing any hands-on work out of necessity for the time being. Not least because I flew on airplanes twice 2 weeks ago and waited out the necessary 14-day quarantine as a possible asymptomatic carrier (today is day 15 and I’m still blessedly symptom free), but also because I cannot in good conscience ask people to come to my office, which, as many of you know, is a cozy, windowless cave that I share with other people whose decisions I cannot control. We are staying the fuck home. 

I feel insanely fortunate to be skilled and able to offer things other than direct hands-on work, and have been dreaming and mulling over what that might look like during these days of rapid transformation. 

For now, what that dreaming/mulling has brought me to is the following:

- I am available to meet with people for one-on-one sessions over Zoom, for connection, emotional and energetic support, instruction and education on self-care and somatic wellness, guidance in essential healing movement and self-touch, and to continue to cheerlead and support your embodiment, especially in a time when many of us are responding to our emotional overwhelm by disassociating. This comprises a LOT of what I was doing in person with many clients - as someone who is all about fostering the agency and sovereignty of all of my clients and students, offering guidance in radical self-care, supporting your full presence and the claiming of your authority over your body is inextricable from supporting your healing. This time is going to just make that very, very obvious. 

A client coming to me with pelvic pain, for example, will receive the same intake, strategizing and attention from me remotely as they would in person, except that I will be guiding each person in doing the hands-on portion of the necessary work on themselves. Offering remote instruction and supervision for hands-on pelvic and abdominal bodywork is particularly exciting to me, as these are skills I can help anyone to cultivate that will, I believe, be of greater long-term help in some cases more than receiving work from me or another person would. Being fully capable of working with your own body is a skill that everybody should have, and I would love to facilitate that for you in every way possible. 

Because the things that bring my clients to me haven’t evaporated with the coming of COVID-19, and in some cases are certainly being exacerbated by the sharp anxiety of these times, I’m available to meet with people and to continue the work in the ways that are available to us.

Sessions will, I imagine, be 60-90 minutes, and will be offered at a sliding scale, because the financial hardship of the moment is real, and everyone must have access to the care they need. My rate for an hour long session has been $150, and my sliding scale is for now going to be $75-150. If that is beyond your means, please just reach out to me and we’ll work it out. I am committed to everybody getting what they need right now.

I have now had two video chat sessions which were extremely different, both amazing, and have a handful more scheduled for the coming week which I’m greatly looking forward to. Please get in touch if this is interesting to you.

I’m reminded at this time of something my teacher Martin has said more than once in my presence, which is that when he’s in a bad state about something, he makes himself a new jacket. (This is a man who shows up to teach in the most opulent, gorgeous handmade cowboy gear you’ve ever seen, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him wear the same thing twice.) As he says: I may or may not feel better by the time I’m done, but either way, I have a new jacket!

There is much we can do to stay engaged and in love during this time. Not “productive” or “busy” in the typical capitalist-protestant-work-ethic-go-go-go sense, which I for one am hoping this time causes to permanently shift out of vogue, but rather engaged with loving work, with loving play, in skillful craft, in learning and in creation, to make beauty and be useful, as we wish, as we can. If we are gentle with ourselves, and respond appropriately to the shifting needs of the moment, especially in this initial rollercoaster phase, my sense is that we can - as slowly as we need to! - begin to adjust our rhythm, move into and inhabit this strange new world we have with our eyes open. This is, in part, a suddenly-different and quite shocking adjustment to our experience of time, and that is something we can work with, without rushing. 

And it’s good to have a new jacket, whether the making of it changes our mood or not. It’s good to have done something beautiful with the time, whether or not it solved the problem. Whatever we can do to regulate, root down, work on behalf of those who need help, create beauty where there wasn’t beauty before, is a realization of purpose on earth that transcends whatever “normal” currently looks like. Humans have lived through times that are unimaginable to me - hell, my MOM lived through times that are unimaginable to me - and all that they learned, all the ways people have kept not just their bodies but their imagination and love and soul purpose alive, are present and accessible in our own bodies, right now. 

It also must be acknowledged that this time may, depending on what we were each carrying when we entered it, register in our bodies as a straight up trauma - an event that changes the way our nervous systems respond to the totality of our experience. If you are watching or reading a lot of news (as I was) or are obsessively referring to social media (hi), that trauma will be corroborated and reinforced by the panicked tone of much of what you’re seeing. 

And, without dismissing that aspects of living through a global pandemic have enormous potential to be traumatic to anyone, because duh, there are some things we can do to shift ourselves into feeling safe enough in our bodies and working with our somatic resilience. 

Many of us are already doing these things instinctively, but they can be difficult to remember when we’re depressed or overwhelmed, so this is a quick note to remind us all:

- Drinking enough water is important. Full stop. Bodies and their feelings do not function without proper hydration. 

- Pooping well at least once every day is important. Your immune response depends upon it, not to mention your sanity. If your digestion is slow or irritated - if you’re freaked out, this is pretty likely - what are the ways you know to encourage your body in this direction? (For me, the solution is a morning smoothie and even the thought of yoga.)

- Getting enough sleep is important. Your adrenals and your sanity require it. If you need assistance with this, consider setting a schedule with a set wake up time in the morning, a time limit on screen use after an hour of your choosing, a set time to turn out the lights at night. Quarantine days are very time-bendy, and having a relationship with the clock may be extremely helpful in finding some solid ground emotionally and energetically. It’s a good way to get traction.

And if you need herbal support for sleep, please do hit me or another herbalist up for some suggestions.

- Getting enough sun is important. In every way. Please, friend: get your ass outside. In Los Angeles, and in many other places, there are wide-open, uncrowded places to go, and the daytime skies have been exquisite. Take a picnic blanket and snacks and a book. Take a nap. It’s so good. 

- Love is important. The hot pink web, as my beloved Willa calls it, is alive and well. The past 2 weeks have been a period of reconnection with many, many people dear to me with whom communication had lapsed because we were too busy or some shit. This is a great time to reach out for video chats with folks you love. Please proceed with care on the internet, as it is - as always - both a tremendously helpful weaving-together and an insane rabbit hole. Use your spidey senses when it comes to clickbait and other potential time-suck content.

- Movement is important. Any kind of movement. There is an explosion of free online guidance in every damn thing you can imagine. None of it is strictly necessary, as you have a body and you likely know exactly what to do with it. But it’s really lovely if you feel like it. I’ll list some of my favorites so far below.

- Gentleness is important. These are among the most intense conditions anyone living has ever experienced. If you are a person whose nervous system wiring was already tightly-wound from past experiences, give yourself a break. Twenty breaks. If you need to stay in bed all day, do it. If you need to self-soothe, do it. Don’t keep it up for too terribly long, but allow yourself a good grace period of being off the hook. If you are on the wagon in some way, please do set agreements with someone who can support you during this time. Please find every conceivable way of being kind to yourself.

- I don’t know that it’s for everybody, but getting my hands into the earth is, for me, the truest remedy for the spin-out potential of this moment. If you have access, it’s a great time to begin tending the earth in really simple ways. I’ve gone full tilt nerd with it but that’s by no means necessary - plants in pots are excellent, and there are plenty of fruit-bearing friends who are happy to be by a window or on a balcony. And it feels good to be hand in hand with the process of growth and care.

- If you feel capable of it, there has never been a richer time for diving into (or back into) to a meditation practice. Sitting meditation has been the spine of my sanity since I was 14 years old, and I cannot overstate how much it has informed and bolstered my emotional health and energetic resilience. Many of the teachers and communities I love most are offering resources during this time, and I will list some of them below. Mindfulness practices are often NOT an appropriate response to being very triggered - trauma responses, in my experience, don’t respond to top-down tools as well as to body-based tools - but it is a very helpful structure to build some experience with in other states and other moments, and to be able to lean into when the shit hits the fan. 

SOME RESOURCES. 

Plant medicine information on COVID-19: info to help us not freak out:

- The best information I have yet come across regarding plant medicine remedies specific to SARS and coronaviruses is from a genius herbalist named Stephen Harrod Buhner, who wrote an extremely comprehensive book called Herbal Antivirals that was published 7 years ago. The entire first chapter is on the flu, SARS and CV, and is absolutely worth reading. Here is a link to a free PDF. 

An article he wrote about COVID-19: Part One and Part Two

Note: there are several articles, largely clickbait, rolling around about disaster capitalists selling fraudulent CV “cures” with Buhner’s name attached to them because of some woman in Idaho who was selling herbs based on his protocols. I have seen nothing in any article that impugns his integrity or the efficacy of what he recommends, at all. 

- I cannot strongly enough recommend asking your acupuncturist, if you have one, about herbal and other preventatives. If you would like a rec for someone solid in Los Angeles, please let me know.

- BotanicWise did a free Herbalist's Perspective video seminar on COVID-19 with Guido Mase and Tammi Sweet, both of whom are great.

- Julie James of Green Wisdom is offering lots of helpful support over FB Live.

- If you or a loved one is pregnant right now, Evidence Based Birth has released a bunch of information about COVID-19. I find their work to be grounded in facts, solidly calm and accessible. Kindred Space is offering online childbirth prep support, lactation support and more. And if you are in need of recommendations for excellent midwives and doulas for homebirth support, please reach out to me. I’m here to help.

Some marvelous community offerings amidst all the noise online:

- The wonderful Rebecca Altman is offering a free 5 day course called Surrender & Magic - she offers work that is difficult to put into words but that I think could be best described as superbly-held experiential earth magic, and it’s particularly poignant at this time. If you do it and find you want to dive deeper, this is an affiliate link to her 2 year course called The Wonder Sessions, which I have seen loved ones go through and have their lives profoundly and dramatically changed for the better. She is offering tons of scholarship for that right now as well. I believe it opens for registration tomorrow.

- Ryan Heffington is doing a legit dance class/party a la Sweat Spot styles T/W/Th at 10 am on IG Live. There are TONS more amazing at-home dance classes happening. These times are made for those of us who kiiiinda want to go to class but feel too shy to do it in a room full of people. Plug #danceclass into Instagram and see what comes up. It’s pretty wild.

- I am, with various combinations of people in my family, doing an online Staycation Storytime every weekday at 11:30 on FB live. Come see our faces reading our favorite children’s books in various wild headdresses.

- I am also pulling together a schedule of online Crystal Camp offerings, teaching the skills and tools of practical magic for people of all ages - please stay tuned for that. Liz and I will be offering community meditations over FB and/or IG at some point in the foreseeable future as well. 

- This is a dear friend’s spreadsheet of great stuff for parents.

- This is that same dear friend’s other spreadsheet of a ton of incredible stuff available for free right now online. SO MUCH FREE. 

- Everybody and their mother is doing free online concerts and it is fabulous and overwhelming. If you can: support the folks who need the support. My partner Willa Mamet just hosted an outstanding 12 hour online music festival called I Need Space last weekend, and is consistently offering stalwart support and good jokes to fellow independent musicians here.

- The angelic Stephen Beitler’s Free Yoga TV is, as always, a wonderful resource.

- Ada Lusardi, who I have been trying to study yoga with for several years every time I go visit my honey in the Bay, is now live streaming classes. Rejoice!

- Pascal Baudar is going to be offering online fermentation & foraging classes in the near future and I am very fucking excited about that.

- My partner Adam Yasmin is hosting IG live conversations with various people as part of the Wabi Sabi podcast, as well as offering to guide folks in beginning their own gong fu cha practice. 

- If you are a person who watches the stars or has curiosity about the relationship of astrological transits and the current chaos, I recommend the work of Olivia Pepper, who is an incisive poet in deep conversation with the stars as well as the cards, and who will be holding a weekly astrological discussion group on Thursdays at 6pm pst as well as an apocalypse-times mythic journaling group that will be cohosted with Nick Jaina. Journaling will happen on wednesdays pst.

- Ken McLeod’s Unfettered Mind has been a primarily online offering for years now, and remains a gold standard for how dharma & mediation guidance can be transmitted perfectly in that medium. 

- The Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation has an entire menu of amazing, amazing COVID-19 resources.

- Angel Kyodo Williams is a jewel of humanity, and has some deeply helpful offerings at this time. 

- Martin Prechtel’s talk on grief and praise is something I have listened to over and over for some years now, and am listening to again now, and it is something so prayerful and courageous and truthful that I can’t recommend it enough to you. Especially now. I would also strongly recommend reading all of his books, if you feel thusly inclined, beginning with the first one which is entitled Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, which I first read in one sitting and which completely changed the course of my life.

I’m going to stop there and send this missive out to you.

I hope you are breathing deeply, enjoying the emerging spring, feeling your body, feeling all the love that holds you, and the longing too.

Please let me know how I can love and support you best during this time.

We are in every way in this together.

XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO

PCWS

I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe. I do, I do, I do.

I'll tell you
We're not gonna prove nothing nothing
Sittin’ around watching each other starve
What we need is action/strategy
I want, I want, I want
I want it now
I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe
I do, I do, I do

• Bikini Kill

How many of us allow penetration before we are really ready?
Not just able to tolerate it, which most of us are familiar with, but ready as in WANTING IT. Deeply hungry for it. So aroused we can’t wait a single second longer.
How many of us have ever waited for that feeling?
How many of us know what fucking is like when we’re that kind of turned on?

My personal and professional observation is that very few of us do, and I’m curious about why that is.

Looking around, it seems evident that people with vaginas have been trained to center the experiences of people with penises. With very few exceptions anywhere on this planet, we are born and raised into a cock-centric culture. And, as gender roles constantly impose and enact themselves onto our bodies, this dynamic translates across a gendered reality in all sorts of ways.

Consider for a moment that it wasn’t terribly long ago that women were the legal property of men, and that despite the relative changes in women’s legal and social status - such as it is: the Equal Rights Amendment still has not passed as of this update in November of 2019, although hope springs eternal - where we’re at is in many ways a direct carryover from many, many generations of servitude. Even if we weren’t constantly being reminded by church/state/school/porn/media/parents/peers/the lame gesture that passes for most sex ed, our bodies forget nothing. 

And then take in how fantastically radical and brave and utterly marvelous it actually is, given all of that, that so many of us are standing for our own pleasure, our desires, and our entirely subjective experiences of sexuality. That we are valuing ourselves first. That we are claiming full ownership of ourselves.

This is the most intimate and fundamental of all possible revolutions. Right here in your pants. 

Imagine a world in which the word foreplay has no meaning - ‘fore what, exactly, babe? - and porn has incredibly varied sexual scripts besides penis-in-vagina intercourse, and our most common word for internal sexual anatomy is a word meaning ‘place of power’ or ‘gates of glory’ or ‘that which grasps’ or ‘miraculous voluptuousness’ or some such thing, rather than a word whose root means ‘sheath for a sword’. 

A world in which heterosexual women statistically describe ‘good sex’ as an experience of pleasure and turn-on and orgasm, rather than describing sex that isn’t too memorably painful. 

A world in which the language of ‘losing one’s virginity’ has finally given way to the language of “sexual debuts’ with all of its suggestion of confidence and choice, and the metric that defines what first sex is, as Jessica Valenti suggested long ago, is about a partner giving you an orgasm for the first time - or simply about you’ve decided that you have now had sex according to your own definitions.

A world where no one thinks the presence or condition of anybody’s hymen means anything, because, as it happens, it actually really fucking doesn’t.

Imagine a world with state-funded sex ed that not only includes in-depth discussions of comparative methods of freely-available birth control for people of all genders AND some compassionate framing around abortion - but also includes frank discussions of pleasure for everyone.

Imagine!

I think it would help us out - the majority of humans on earth who have vulvas - simply to make clear to everyone that bodies with vulvas do not get turned on in the same way as bodies with penises. 

Our arc of arousal is substantially different. And there isn’t a damn thing wrong with that.

For example:

The vast majority of bodies with vulvas do not come from penetration alone. Certainly not the way most of us have learned to do it from watching porn (which is largely, again, made by and for for men, and is a particularly powerful cock-centric tool of education that forms long-lasting expectations and habits.) That sequence - brief foreplay followed by hard fucking - works great in the linear boner-stimulation-ejaculation arc most penis-bodies are accustomed to, and have limited themselves to.

But that is not how most of us with vulvas do the thing. It simply isn’t how we’re built.

And it’s not pathological. It’s not a problem to be solved or something broken that needs fixing.

It’s completely normal.

And yet women frequently show up in my practice convinced they’re somehow broken because they aren’t having vaginal orgasms on cue.

What IS pathological is the ease with which we pathologize the female sexual body for doing what it naturally does. We fail to recognize our epic capacity for earth-shaking pleasure because we are working with a script that doesn’t suit us - and then buying into the gaslighting that would have us believe that it’s all our fault for not coming the “right” way. If you think I’m exaggerating, I strongly recommend reading some Freud, and then observing the sheer scope of his impact upon nearly every area of discourse about human identity and health. Even if feminists have been laughing his theories out the door since the sixties, his imprint is undeniable - and very, very mainstream.

We, folks with vulvas, have internalized this crap, and as a result we do not know our own superpowers.
The sexual script we are all handed upon coming of age is absurd, sad, and unbelievably damaging.  Absurd because it has no bearing on the reality of our truly amazing evolutionary potential for pleasure and connection and variety and power. And sad because, despite the damage it does, we keep doing it anyways.

If the people we’re sleeping with lack curiosity about this, that is reason enough to stop sleeping with them. And the fact that we do this shit to ourselves is reason enough to take a LONG pause and consider why we keep ourselves in this particular corner.
 
Dig it: Our sex is FOR US. 

We owe no one our sexual servitude. Those days are gone and they are never coming back.

You are free.

Free to learn your body’s desires & pleasures. To advocate for them. To be brave and ask for what you truly want. And to seek out partners who are interested in you as you are, not you playing some character they would prefer. You get to choose a partner who is nothing short of genuinely awestruck by your body.

Your yes and your no have meaning and power in this world, and all the more so when you explore how your yes lives in your body over time. 

What does it feel like to want? To demand? To receive?

What does your yes feel like to you?

If our pleasure is our truest compass - and I believe with my whole heart that it is - then it’s our great work of reclaiming it that restores our sovereignty, our dignity, and our power from within. 

So I put it to you:

If you’re ready to discover who you are and what you’re made of, and what you’re meant for:

Wait for penetration until you’re really, really ready. 

#sexedforgrownasspeople #therevolutionwilltakeplaceinyourpants #radicalpleasure #powerofthepussy #feministsexed #newparadigm #pleasureispolitical #bikinikill #embodywork

an interview with the amazing Rebecca Altman of Thorn and Wonder.

"4. What made you want to start working with sexuality and reproductive health? 

Sex is the central fascination, no? Certainly is for me, and once I burned through the terrible shameful reluctance that kept me from fully exploring it as a personal and professional interest, it was incredibly obvious. I feel as though I was circling closer and closer to what I do now for years.

On one hand, this work is an expression of a compelling desire to freely share my excitement about the profound, life-giving joy and power that I find is possible in contact with my full, connected sexual presence. And on the other it’s borne of the feminism that has become formidable in me in response to simply recognizing the shitty behaviors that are institutionalized all around us, and tracing them to their origins. Once I started pulling the thread of it, terrible behavior toward women is apparent everywhere: advertising, street harassment, rape on campuses, the legal system, in education, in the institution of marriage, in the culture of parenthood, in every facet of the economy, and, most poignantly for me, in medicine."

Read on: http://thornandwonder.com/blog/2017/10/an-interview-pamela-samuelson

4 Things Men Can Do After #MeToo.

I am a feminist, and I’m surrounded by good men.

And, since last fall, I have been watching every single one of them react to #metoo.

Some have spent these months in self-reflection, and realized that somewhere in their past they have been selfish, conveniently ignored signals and/or words they should’ve paid attention to, and possibly hurt someone, or several someones. They are becoming aware that they have fucked up.

The men telling me these things are overcome with regret, fear, shame. They are afraid of punishment, but more than that, they are uncomfortable upon recognizing in themselves, for the first time ever, behaviors they already recognize in others as despicable. They are not making excuses for it, and they cannot change the past, and they do not know what to do about it.

I’m glad about this. It’s a view over the wall from where the rest of us have been, participating in the surge of revelations, reviewing the mental tally we have long kept privately of the shitty events that have forever affected the way we see men, and sex, and ourselves. So, I’m heartened that people I care about who have been born and socialized as men are paying attention and having their own reckoning. It’s proper that everybody is cleaning house right now.

Some men have asked me what I think they can and should do. And I do have some thoughts on that.

So, for whatever it’s worth, if you are a man in this world and you are unclear about what to do in these precarious times, or ever, when you have potentially fucked up and hurt someone by sexually dominating them against their will, I offer my two cents. Take it or leave it.

1. First, and probably against any legal advice you’d ever get:

Apologize. Find the person you hurt and apologize.

And don’t apologize to clear your conscience and restore your sense of yourself as a nice guy. You may have noticed that everybody always thinks they’re the hero, even when they’re acting like the villain. Humans have an astounding capacity for willful inattention and self-deception when it suits us. Your good-guy identity is meaningless here, and your apology is likewise meaningless if it’s all about you. As is true of all communication, no? You aren’t talking to yourself here. So please take a breath, and take in that you have injured a precious, intelligent, loveable human being, and apologize from your heart.

They may want none of it. Try anyways.

2. Listen to them.

Ask: would you be willing to tell me about your experience of this? And if they are generous enough to talk to you, shut up and listen. Get an education about the effect you’ve had on another person. This is not an opportunity for you to justify anything or take over the narrative. Again, if you’re a good guy, this sure as hell isn’t the moment to try to go about proving it. Stop yourself. Let yourself be affected by what you did. You have until now escaped most of the consequences of this, and it is to your great credit that you are willing to share that burden with the person who’s been doing all the work for you until now.

3. Back up your apology with some reality.

Ask the person you hurt if there is any way you can help them. Do they need anything from you? Let them consider it, and let them tell you if they do.

This is risky, and it is also the act of an honorable person. They may need things that are truly and directly related to having been injured by you.

To give an extreme example: a beloved colleague of mine who was drugged and raped by two men as a teenager has been beset by health problems, major relationship challenges, and other fallout from the deep-wired PTSD she has endured ever since. That single event, which those men may well have forgotten by now, completely altered the course of her life. If they showed up and asked her what she needed, and she allowed them to help her get herself back together with the paid help of a skilled, experienced sexual trauma therapist, you bet your ass that’d be justice.

Asking what is needed isn’t some slippery slope leading to women crying victim in order to rob innocent, well-intentioned men of their hard earned money. It is at this point that you, male reader, have to get your head around the notion of restorative justice, as opposed to the vengeful punishment model to which we are all so accustomed. While there is, perhaps, a place and a time for that sort of action — indeed, it’s the action upon which our entire justice system is founded — I, personally, have found punishment to bring out the absolute worst in every single person involved. Perhaps you have found that too.

Restorative justice, alternatively, is predicated upon the idea that genuine healing and repair is possible.

Imagine that.

To briefly quote the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation:

“The foundational principles of restorative justice have been summarized as follows:

Crime causes harm, and justice should focus on repairing that harm.

The people most affected by the crime should be able to participate in its resolution.

The responsibility…of the community [is] to build peace.”

This framing is, of course, not solely relevant to crime. It applies to all destructive behaviors.

If the woman you have injured wants help from you, RJ provides a framework for involving appropriate people in your community (which alone can go a long way toward healing many instances of sexual misconduct, as secrecy and invisibility are often such a central part of the injury), asking for mediation, and creating a process in which both or all parties participate in deciding how to address and repair the damage that was done.

Find out about restorative justice. You know how to use Google.

And then ask how you can help.

4. Put your money where your mouth is.

Donate to a cause or a place that takes care of people dealing with the effects of systemic male violence. Do it quietly. Tell nobody. You get no fanfare for this one. You alone get to know that you are doing something concrete to heal the world that made you, the world you are continuously making, and that you’re doing it because you are a responsible adult trying to even the playing field as best you can. That’s it.

If you feel resistant to any of this, particularly the last two, please thoroughly examine your heart, and consider that if you are unwilling to take responsibility for your actions and the damage you feel you have caused, you are quite possibly full of shit, and not worth forgiving.

The way things have been up until now have allowed you, and countless men like you, to act like assholes with total impunity. It was the way the world was.

It sure as hell isn’t how the world is now. And we are NEVER GOING BACK. The world, in the excellent words of Tony Kushner, only spins forwards.

Culture does not change without this kind of action. I believe it is necessary. And, if you have things in your past that wake you up at night, consider yourself as one of the ones chosen to do it. I bow to you for having a conscience. It makes you fit to be a part of the human race in a time when all people are becoming free. Give up the ground you know you have no right to, and take your rightful place as someone who is working to restore what is good and just and honest, in yourself and in the world.

In advance, I thank you for it. And I’m surely not alone.

An Invocation.

To be spoken aloud boldly and with panache, as She prefers.

O fierce and tender Goddess, known fondly as She Who Gives No Fucks!

I call upon You, dauntless Queen - You whose lust trembles the earth, whose cries of passion roll through the sky as thunder, whose pleasure holds the power to heal all the wounds of the world!

You, who ride many wild beasts! You, for whom the withered trees burst into bloom! 

I make of my heart and body a sincere offering to You, that I may become the seat of Your power on earth. Bless me with Your wisdom, Your courage and Your clarity, O Radiant One.

Forgive me my fronting, my fakery, my self-denial, and any other injustice I may have done You. Free me from the fearful delusions I have harbored that my body is any less than perfect, and that pleasure is any less than my praise of You in all your glory. Liberate me from the shame that binds my body and my mind. 

May my desires please You, and my beauty delight You, and my fulfillment nourish You.

May my understanding and self-knowledge bring me close to You, that I may know myself as Yours. May I know my pleasures as Your pleasures. May the balm of Your exquisite passion bring renewed life to all that lives. 

May I realize the seeds of freedom You have sown in me, and bring them forth whole-heartedly for the benefit of all beings. 

Thunderclap: A Question in Three Parts.

I received a phone call a few days ago from a potential client, a young woman who had been referred by a friend. She told me she could feel something in her vagina and didn’t know what it was. She said it felt wrong. She used the words polyp and node and tumor, and told me she was afraid it was cancer. 
I asked her if she had been to a doctor to check it out, and she said that she had, months before, and that she didn’t want to go back. The last MD she had seen, an older man, had said to her during the appointment: “Why would you ever touch yourself there?” and that had made her feel bad, and she was disinclined to be put in that position again.
Upon hearing this, I wanted to rip through the ceiling of that particular MD’s office, snatch him up into the sky in my fist and tell him, in no particular order:
#1 Go fuck yourself forever, you misogynist douchebag;
#2 How DARE you ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, question any human being’s right to touch their own body or shame them for doing so (see #1: go fuck yourself); and
#3 Could you be ANY MORE UNPROFESSIONAL? You are a fucking DOCTOR, right? One who has made a career, specifically, out of tending to women’s sexual and reproductive health, right?
And your most relevant question to a young, scared, uninformed female patient who has come in complaining of an abnormality in her vagina and who regards you (and, it must be said, is paying you) as the person who can help her is WHY WOULD YOU EVER TOUCH YOURSELF THERE? Even if you could be forgiven, as a provider of health care, for whatever shitty belief system gave rise to the kernel of that thought (and you can’t), HOW is the filter on your highly educated mouth so backwards that any part of that whatsoever came out of your face and imposed itself onto your PATIENT? 

Needless to say. I was pretty pissed off.

I spend a lot of my working hours hearing about and helping women deal with the aftermath of ignorant, careless gynecological care of one sort or another, and I am frankly tired of hearing new examples of doctors abusing their power in obviously sexist ways.

And/but: I don’t know this woman and she doesn’t know me, so I mostly kept my torrent of expletives to myself. I referred her to an excellent women’s clinic nearby where she could see a female nurse practitioner and handle whatever lab work she might need to get a proper diagnosis. Once we know that she’s been cleared to receive pelvic contact, she will, I hope, come in for vaginal mapping and I will happily answer all of the questions, and any remaining bad feeling around whether she needs any fucking reason to touch her own vagina will, I hope, be immediately and thoroughly dispelled.

Sitting with that conversation, I remembered what was said to me when I went to my doctor in my mid-twenties to get fitted for a cervical cap. 
I had come across the amazing revelation that is the book A New View of A Woman’s Body, read it cover to cover, and decided that I wanted to get a cap, which has a great many advantages for anyone having hetero sex with a reliably tested partner/partners: you can leave them in much longer than a diaphragm with no ill effects, they’re female-controlled, there are no side effects, they don’t interfere with the sensations of penetrative sex like condoms can, and, most importantly to me, they are not a hormonal method. I had been administered hormonal birth control in the form of a single shot of Depo-Provera by my doctor once before, at age 19, and it had screwed up my cycle for a solid year. I later learned that that a friend of mine had had to drop out of school that year because the same shot had made her incredibly ill. Both of our doctors had been very casual about giving us the shot. Neither of them had said anything about the long and already well-known list of side effects.

(Side note: at that time, cervical caps were made by a company called Prentif which is no longer in existence, and the cap they made, which was wonderful, hasn’t been manufactured in years. The only kind of cervical cap on the market at the time of this writing is called a FemCap. I haven’t tried it yet and so can’t comment on it firsthand, but have now ordered one out of sheer curiosity and will report back.) 

So I asked my doctor - the man who had caught me at birth, who had a picture of me moments later on the wall of his office, who had been my provider since I’d hit puberty, and who I loved like family despite his having knowingly or unknowingly derailed my body some years before - to fit me for a cervical cap. 
His response was to argue with me: “You really don’t want one of those. The statistics on them are terrible. But there’s this new plastic IUD that just puts out a tiny amount of hormone that stays local to the uterus, it doesn’t affect the rest of the body at all, and the numbers on it are great. Let me give you that.”
And back and forth we went. I told him I had done my research and the cap really was exactly what I wanted, and he tried to convince me otherwise. I told him I would never take hormones again and that I didn’t believe that hormones at any amount would stay local to anything, because that isn't how the endocrine system actually works. He asked me when I had become a doctor, saying things like that. Because other humans can’t read, obviously. 
I finally raised my voice and asked him to just please fucking fit me for a cervical cap. He became huffy, fitted me quickly, watched as I put the cap in for the first time, checked the seal (cervical caps function by forming a vacuum seal all the way around the cervix), watched me take it out, and pronounced me good to go. 
“Give my love to your mother,” he said, and left the room.
No wonder the numbers on these are terrible, I thought as I dressed - is anybody taught how to use them until they actually feel familiar with it? The country is full of people in junior high classrooms putting condoms on bananas year after year, but doctors don’t show patients how to use these more than once? 

Before I left, I stopped in his office. “Why do you think the prevention numbers on caps are so low?” 
“Because women don’t want to touch themselves.”
“I'm sorry - what? WOMEN DON’T WANT TO TOUCH THEMSELVES?”
“Nope. That's why everyone wants the pill. Ask anybody.”
I left the office feeling like I’d been struck by lightning. More the kind that splits you down the middle like a tree than the cartoon lightbulb epiphany. 
My mind was on fire:
Is that true? 
Do women not want to touch themselves? (If so: by what mercy did I dodge that bullet?)
Is the cervical cap, which requires that women put their fingers inside their own bodies and master the simple, always-accessible skill of becoming familiar with their cervix, such a genuine challenge to women’s resistance to touching their own genitals that it’s really not a viable form of contraception in this day and age? 
And if that’s so: WHY IS THAT HAPPENING? What the fuck is that about?

Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex is breaking my heart. I am barely a hundred pages in. It is astounding. I have become obsessed and watched the TED talk twice in a row. 
Both book and talk focus on her seventy or so interviews with young women between the ages of 15 and 20 about their sexual lives. Her perspective is that of a feminist with a deep, genuine curiosity about what the sexual frontier of adolescence is like these days, and her interest is both frankly personal, as the mom of a young and quickly growing daughter having a very different experience than she herself had, and also is the latest aspect of her professional arc as an incisive, insightful journalist and thinker exploring what it means to be a girl in modern America. She is clear and up front about her bias, and her questions are excellent. 
She asks the girls about their experiences - how did that feel to you? - and notes that they respond, in large part, with their feelings about their partner’s experience rather than their own, consistently devaluing what is happening to and for them. She notes that girls feel entitled to have sex, but not to enjoy it.
In the TED talk, she discusses at some length that the reason girls don’t explore their own sexual responses, or invite or even allow the attention of their sexual partners, is that they are deeply ashamed of their bodies and don’t want to be seen or touched. They regard their own genitals as simultaneously disgusting and holy. And to drive that point home, she cites the statistical fact that labiaplasty - plastic surgery to alter the appearance of the vulva - is the fastest growing kind of surgery among young women. Girls are having their genitals surgically altered in significant numbers to resemble Barbie - and yes, that’s for real: the most popular “look” being requested in labiaplasty is one in which the outer labia appear fused together, and it is called the Barbie - which, Orenstein observes, is designed to make a living vulva of a human being resemble the plastic crotch of a doll which famously has no genitals.
And here we are again.
These are some facts. This is at least one clear reply, years later, to my doctor telling me to “ask anybody.” 

Which leads me to write this, here and now. May it act as a thunderclap of the Real.
There is nothing wrong with our bodies.
Nothing. 
To be specific: there is nothing wrong with our genitals.
Not a goddamn thing is wrong with your pussy. Nary a thing. Zero things are wrong.
More specific: there is nothing the matter with your pubic hair, whatever you do or don’t do with it. There is nothing wrong with your labia, inner and outer. There is nothing wrong with the size of your clit, the color of your skin, the smell and the taste of you. Everyone’s is different. The range of normal is vast and marvelous in its variation. 
These qualities are, like your face and your hands and the rest of you, singular to you. And therefore they are loveable. Because they are yours. 

You never need any reason to touch yourself. Now now. Not ever. IT'S. YOUR. BODY.

And anybody who has opinions about what you should and should not be doing with your own body can rightly be asked: 

Why WOULDN’T I touch myself there? And why the fuck is that ANY of your business? 

It is yours. No one else’s. Just yours, to share or not share, to do with as you wish. 

If we imagine that we are both the products of culture (we are) and the creators of culture (we are), and if culture is unfolding in a way that is recognizably harming us, making us feel awful about ourselves, blinding us to the simple, immediate beauty and pleasure to which we are born, and into which we continuously grow; 
If you, like me, have no use for the concept of original sin, and yet still find yourself feeling like something is forever inexplicably wrong with you, leaving you vulnerable to the thrall of advertising concepts designed to get women to spend money on ‘bettering ourselves” by endlessly shaving and douching and waxing and plucking and offering ourselves up to surgery; 
If you have been shamed for how you look, or shamed for how you feel;
And if that, rationally, seems fucked up and unjustifiable to you - 
I ask you:

What needs to happen for this to all go down differently?

What do you need to see and hear in order to have a friendlier relationship with your own body? 

What would have made a difference to you as a child? As a young woman? As a younger adult?

What would make a difference to you right now? 

I want to know. Please write to me if you want to. 

embodyworkla@gmail.com

By the power vested in me.

I recently had a client come in requesting pelvic work because of injuries from her first birth.

In her words, she had torn significantly, and had been stitched badly - she described something I've heard about from several other clients, the 'husband stitch', in which a doctor stitches the vaginal opening too tightly closed in order to supposedly make future sex with the birthing woman more pleasurable to an imaginary future male sex partner.

Which, alone, makes me want to punch these particular doctors in the nads. Hard.

Because - does this really need to be said? Sure seems like it does:

WOMEN'S BODIES DO NOT EXIST TO PLEASE MEN.

Ever. Under any circumstances.

This practice, like so many others, is a vestige of a dark age in which women were the property of men.

Please observe, dear reader: we do not fucking live in those dark ages anymore. Not here. Not now. And any doctor acting as though we do should lose his or her license to practice medicine IMMEDIATELY. 

Birthing women are generally not asked about this: 'Would you like this dodgy procedure?' It is just done to them - in a supremely vulnerable moment, I might add. Sometimes with a grody wink to the male partner in the room. Or so I am told.

But back to the story.

This client tore again with baby #2, and was attended to by a different doctor, who was shocked by the terrible work of the first doctor, and stitched her properly. 

She had been in pain for several years with the husband stitch, and then was no longer in pain. But she felt that the tone of her pelvic floor had suffered, and she wanted to work on her 'tightness'. 

Upon actually meeting this woman, she further revealed that her husband had been cheating on her, that she was fairly sure they would be separated within the year, and that her desire for a tighter vagina had to do with being able to keep a future male partner. She attributed the cheating to her vagina not being tight enough to please him.

This made me turn some colors. The room is thankfully dim enough that I had some cover. 

Once I had recovered my wits, I told her quite precisely the following three things. Mark them well, women of my heart. 

1) Your vagina is not a sheath for anybody's cock. 

It is the core of your body, the powerhouse of your pleasure, the holy portal through which you have, like a god, pushed two human beings into the world. It is not a fucking sheath for a DICK. So please, take the checkout magazine stands full of 1980s Cosmos that apparently line the aisles of your mind, and set them on fire, because that is a bunch of fucking nonsense.

2) If your husband is cheating on you, I GUARANTEE YOU that it has fuck all to do with the tone of your pussy. If he is cheating, it's because he is a cheater. Let's give credit where credit is due. If the sex you have been having with him has suffered since your first birth, perhaps that is because you were in excruciating pain whenever you did it, seeing as some idiot with diplomas on his wall gave you an unconscionable injury by stitching you badly and playing into this 1980s Cosmo complex you're harboring. But please understand: cheating is not about vaginal tone. Cheating - sleeping with someone else and lying about it - is about being an asshole.

3) You do not want a tight vagina.

That is a myth.

When we use tight as a descriptor, we are discussing the pussy as a sheath. We are centering our entire experience in the pleasure of a male partner. And while we, of course, care very much about the experiences of our lovers, their perspectives are not more important than our own, and we do not take responsibility for anybody else's good time. Please keep your eye on the proverbial ball here.

What you want is a strong vagina. 

A vagina that can grip, control, pulsate, and fully release a penetrating object at will - a cock, or otherwise - with a full range of sensation. A muscular vagina. A free vagina. 

If you do not have this experience, it is very likely because you - like many many many of the other women who come to me for pelvic bodywork - are, in fact, too tight. Your pelvic floor is hypertonic - it is in a perpetual state of spasm, and doesn't remember how to release. 

Much like a hand, a vagina has to be able to both grasp and let go in order to do much for you. 

If it is hypotonic, it is like a hand that is floppy and cannot grasp. If it is hypertonic, it is like a perpetually clenched fist. 

Far more of the women I meet under these circumstances come to me in the latter category than the former. 

A tight vagina is a PROBLEM. As a physical reality, and as a concept. 

Get with me on this. Strength is the key. Across the board. Change your language and change your life. Please. Inhabit your body like you are the boss of it, like your experience is important, like you are the one steering your world, like your pleasure matters. Because it FUCKING DOES. Female pleasure is raucously, explosively powerful. It is what brings women of all ages and races and sizes and abilities and orientations home into our own blessed bodies. It is the lever which moves the world. Its power is such a treasure that billion dollar industries have arisen to manipulate women, throwing a glamour around us that divorces us from our own sensations, focusing our sense of worth on our looks and throwing our lived physical reality under the bus. 

It is up to us to STOP FALLING FOR IT. 

We are not owned. We are not beholden. And our bodies are utterly magnificent, exactly as they are.

Please start fucking acting like it.

Love,

PCWS

Birth: Part Three.

Birthing.

My water broke nearly 2 weeks early, waking me up at 1:30 in the morning on a Monday. I woke Adam and called the midwives, who told me to go back to bed and sleep as much as possible. I didn't manage to sleep at all, but went into a very deep and restful trance, felt the location and intensity of the first contractions introducing themselves, which were like nothing I'd ever felt before, and had heroic preparatory dreams. 

The following morning we drove out to the midwives' office, where Catherine, Leslie’s partner, checked some of the fluid under a microscope to make sure that it was actually of amniotic origin. Upon confirming that it was, she told me that because my water had broken and because of the positive GBS results, they needed me to be in hard labor by nighttime - as I said earlier, a hospital would have given me 18 hours from my water breaking to deliver because of the GBS results, and the midwives didn't need to push that hard, but they did need me to get things moving. 

We came home, our beloved Willa came over and helped us to Mary Poppins our house into a place fit to birth in, and I started drinking castor oil cocktails by late afternoon. Castor oil is a trip: it's a bowel irritant (most hospitals will tell you not to drink it because it can cause diarrhea, which, apart from potentially causing dehydration, creates a mess for them to deal with - they would rather administer a pitocin drip they can control) and is a classic way to intensify contractions which doesn't in any way affect the flow and receptivity of the nervous system to oxytocin, as pitocin does. My former doc's PA had told us an incredible story about using it to bring on labor with her 2nd kid. In her own words: "My first kid was born at 42 weeks and was so big that he gave me a completely new ass, and I didn't want to deal with that again, so I made myself a castor oil and tequila sunrise at 41 weeks, and he was born 45 minutes later. No time for anyone else to even get there, so it was just me and the dog.”

Heartened by all of that, we made the cocktails with top shelf tequila and orange juice. That plus liberal nipple stimulation did the trick: contractions steadily intensified and grew closer together. At some point in the thick of it all, I attempted to use a vibrator to steer the sensations towards pleasure, but it just intensified what was already well on its way to overwhelming rather than making it more fun. It seems possible that if I had tried stimulation earlier it might have been possible to take the labor in a more orgasmic direction, but I honestly have no idea. Needless to say: if you try it, gentle reader, please do let me know how it goes :)

We were graced with the presence of three deeply trusted friends as our doulas through the night: Willa, Liz, and Cynthia, all of whom had attended births before, and the latter of whom is a L&D nurse who's seen a zillion births in hospital but for whom we were the first experience of homebirth. Because there were enough loving hands, whoever needed to could nap or eat or take time and there was always still someone with me, and frequently two or three people. I vividly remember the entire night, the faces and the words, dancing to Whitney Houston with Adam, the beautiful hands on my body, the unendingly generous support of my loved ones: Liz's care and levity, Cynthia's excitement and total confidence in directing me, Willa's unshakeable calm and loving encouragement, Adam's comfort and solid support. There was a lot of giggling and a lot of affection and absolutely no stress on anyone's part.

In the middle of the night, I got into the tub (they had set up a kiddie pool on a tarp in the middle of the living room) and realized that it was wonderful to be in the water because it was slowing contractions down and letting me rest. Cynthia was with me, and I told her that I was starting to consider a transfer because I had no idea whether or not the intensity I was experiencing was actually progressing my labor - this was the crux of the births I had seen rushed into C-sections - and I was fucking exhausted and didn't know how much more I could manage. Cynthia reminded me that I had said to her before going into labor that I didn't want an out, and that if I started talking about a transfer to please remind me that if I had an epidural I wouldn't be able to walk or feel my legs. (She also had been the person in touch with the midwives all night, and was aware that if I wasn't dilated enough to start pushing come morning when the midwives arrived that I would very possibly be transferred - it was Now or Never.) She told me that she would let me stay in the tub a little bit longer, but then we were going to get in bed and we were going to work the baby down, and that it was time to marshal all of my energies into making this shit happen.

And then she revealed herself as my Jedi master. It was fucking incredible. What followed was among the most painful experiences of my life, and it was without question the furthest my nervous system had ever been pushed, and I have no idea how it would ever have happened if I hadn't had this profoundly capable woman ordering me around like a cosmic drill sergeant. Everyone got into bed with me, and Cynthia had me turn one way on my side and focus on the eyes of the person in front of me, and I howled my way through several contractions, and then had me turn onto my other side and repeat the howling with someone else, and back and forth for what felt like thirty years until the midwives arrived at 6:30 in the morning. I looked up and saw Catherine smile at the ruckus I was making, was aware of her slipping on a glove to check my dilation, and felt an utter jubilation erupt in the room upon her finding that I was at about 9 cm. She pulled the lip of my cervix that remained out of the way and brought me to 10, and told me it was time to start pushing. 

I pushed in the tub for a while, but it was a huge and slippery contraption that made it difficult for anyone to support my body without actually getting in with me, so I moved to the floor, where I realized what exactly the quality of an effective push was, which was more or less that the hand of God was doing the work. Catherine suggested that we move to the bathroom, because the toilet is an ideal place to push, both because of its birthing stool shape and because it’s a place where the body is well accustomed to letting go. Pushing took on a lightninglike quality once I was on the pot, which scared the hell out of me, and I asked to move to the bed. 

Once on the bed, I had the central realization of the entire experience: namely that as mammals we are wired to flee from pain, but that the only way to move the baby out of me was by diving directly into the pain, into the lightning. Upon understanding that, I committed myself fully to riding through it without hesitation, and asked to move back to the toilet. I felt the baby move down and crown, and felt her head with my hand (there is no crazier sensation) and at the point that her head was emerging, Adam came and sat under me and held me while I pushed Kora out. At some point I felt my tailbone snap, and simply made a mental note that I would deal with it later. The hardest part of the entire labor was pushing out her body after her head had emerged - I scraped the bottom of the barrel of my energies, and tapped out the last of myself moving her all the way out. As soon as she was in my arms, she cleared her own nose and throat, let out a single yowl, and opened her eyes to see. 

After it stopped pulsing, Adam cut the umbilical cord. I watched that, saw all the blood on the floor, and because my nervous system had reached its limit (but probably also because I'm a fainter when it comes to blood) I passed out. Becky, Catherine's marvelous assistant, took the baby and passed her out to Cynthia and Willa (where Willa held her skin on skin), and lay me down on the floor, where I delivered the placenta. I’m told that everyone slapped me, Catherine gave me two shots of pitocin in the thigh to stop the bleeding, and finally after I passed out a couple more times she jerry-rigged an IV and gave me half a bag of fluid. It took about an hour and the threat of calling an ambulance for me to get it together enough to crawl out of the bathroom and into bed. Willa gave Kora to me to hold and I gave her the nipple for the first time. We missed the golden hour for breastfeeding because I was out cold, but we caught up without any issues.

Nursing.

I didn't know it, but milk doesn't come in for three to four days, and the baby is fine just having colostrum during that time - please call bullshit on anyone who tells you differently. Kora and I began to figure out nursing, and I realized that what is a strange and gorgeous and crazy process at the best of times has the potential to be downright nervewracking to a new mom who is utterly exhausted and has inaccurate judgement. So I made a lot of phone calls and asked everyone who had offered for help. I was advised by a family friend who is a lactation consultant to use Vitamin E on my nipples to prevent problems, which it absolutely did. When my milk started coming in 3 nights later, I became unbelievably engorged and used cold cabbage leaves in my bra to soothe the hot spots and hard places in my breasts while the tissues adjusted to the flow of milk. I asked for a lot of counsel until we got the hang of it. Once we did, and ever since, breastfeeding has been a deep pleasure.

Recovery.

The postpartum body takes time to heal. Time as in weeks and months. The landscape of the body is significantly changed by birth. There are huge amounts of ill-conceived pressure and shame, private and public, on postpartum women to pull themselves together and get back to whatever they was doing before all that, and it is frankly a fucking tragedy. There is nowhere near enough space created for the healing and rest and brand new life-giving intimacy that begins the moment a baby is born, and that, more clearly than nearly anything else I’ve ever come across, reflects the cultural demonization of the female body. There is little regard for the recovery of women after the fundamental act is complete, and little thought given to what we need to return to an active life with our health intact and our experiences integrated. 

I’m extremely lucky in that I have the kind of support that allowed me to carve out for myself what wasn’t given to me - but which is, for example, freely provided in a country such as France, which seems to have an entirely different model of medicine than we’ve created in the US - and I had enough of an education to know what to seek out. 

Briefly, these are the circumstances of my postpartum recovery, and the details of the care that were the most indispensable:

My entire pelvic floor was sore for about a month in ways that are difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it: the entire structure of my pelvis had shifted in the most extreme fashion and I felt terribly bruised and torn. I didn’t want to be touched at all for about 6 weeks. The snapped tailbone took longer to heal, and I was in wincing discomfort, sitting and standing slowly and with extreme caution, for perhaps 3 months. At the point that I felt healed enough that I could tolerate deep touch, I began to work with my own hands into the scar tissue at my perineum where I had torn and been stitched, soaking with hot water to warm the tissue and then massaging myself intravaginally and externally around the scar as firmly as I could manage with castor oil using my fingers and thumbs, whenever I was in a bath or shower. This was something I had studied as a sexological bodyworker and thought about within the context of the protocols of Holistic Pelvic Care, and it helped a lot with the general discomfort and especially with the pinchy, sharp discomfort I would experience with any penetration. I also began to practice the Arvigo self-care protocols, which are delicious and simple and incredibly restorative, and the Holistic Pelvic Care exercises detailed by Tami Kent in her amazing book Wild Feminine.

It’s worth writing a little bit about castor oil packs here, because they are so wondrous. 

The topical action of the oil of the castor bean is a goddamn miracle. There has been precious little study in scientific quarters about why it does what it does, but its primary action seems to come from a component called ricinoleic acid, which has been shown in clinical studies to reduce pain and inflammation. It’s thought that castor oil helps to flush lymph, clearing toxins and excessive waste from the area where it is applied. What I do know firsthand is that castor packing has consistently reduced my recovery time from sprained ankles from a month to less than a week, that it does beautiful things to my digestion, that it visibly reduces inflammation in surface tissues, and that it makes deep tissue and myofascial bodywork much less painful when it is used. It’s a recommendation in the annals of Arvigo, and it has nearly unbelievable results with internal scarring in mucous membranes - Ellen Heed and Kimberly Ann Johnson, with whom I studied scar tissue remediation, reported having felt intravaginal scar tissue dissolve from a single application of castor oil. And it was hugely helpful to me in doing internal work on myself. 

After a while, I had two internal scar tissue sessions with Ellen, who brings a beautiful combination of laserlike, merciless focus and exquisite attention to her work, and found that receiving internal work was a major key to recovery. I believe this is true for all births - a significant amount of scar tissue is created by the act of birth, whether it’s a vaginal delivery or a caesarean, and scar tissue has to be addressed to maintain fluid and energy flow through the abdomen and pelvic floor. 

Another common postpartum situation is diastasis recti, in which the abdominal muscles separate. This can be a minor separation, a finger’s width across, or a major one, four or five fingers across. It’s not a thing to ignore, and it’s a strange and amazing road back to a normal abdomen - DRs don’t knit back together from crunches or any of the usual abdomen-building exercises, and in fact are made worse by most normal exercise. The best things I found to resolve mine were binding my belly with a splint from the Tummy Team and doing the one kind of abdominal exercise that works to resolve DRs in which one engages the deepest layer of abdominal muscle, the transversus abdominus. Katy Bowman talks about it quite a bit on her excellent blog.

The return of a body that feels like mine is ongoing - when I’m back in aerial training, I feel sore in all the right places, flexibility returns, and my core bounces back to what I know it to be. And: the time to train is dear right now, because making time for myself is a whole new equation with a baby. I end up doing yoga at home as often as I’m able. 

Also, kegels are real. They aren’t a thing to overdo in general - their effectiveness has everything to do with whether or not the pussy in question is lacking in strength from lack of engagement or over-engagement, too little tone or too much tone - but as a postpartum exploratory exercise, they’re pretty essential for beginning to feel like oneself again. I prefer the exercises associated with the use of jade eggs, as having something inside the vagina to provide some interoceptive feedback is wonderful, and the practices develop sensation and control involving both engaging and letting go, rather than just repetitions. 

The open portal.

I understand that this isn’t the case for everyone, but birth blew me open in a way I had never experienced and didn’t anticipate. My sensitivity to sounds and energies was on hyperalert for weeks, and as a result I became extremely private, still, quiet, and slow in the first weeks with the baby. The midwives had left a sign on our door when they left which asked that guests wash their hands upon entry, make themselves useful while visiting, and limit their visits to 15 minutes, and although that sounds unnecessarily draconian from a normal state of being, those rules actually saved my sanity. It was absolutely exhausting being with anyone but Adam and Kora. We rested, took a lot of space from the world, stayed in bed, watched Orange is the New Black, moved very slowly, read books, shnookled, and rested some more. Going outside for the first time 8 days after the birth was unbelievably overstimulating and brief - I could hear everything for several blocks around, and felt like a wild animal suddenly released into the middle of the city.

From that perspective, the care I’d recommend for new families is this:

Respect their space, and help them defend it if necessary from people like guilt trippy relatives, as best you can. Move slowly and with sensitivity. Speak quietly and gently. Ask them what kind of food they would like, rather than bringing food that you want to bring them, as digestive distress will affect both the nursing mom and the breastfeeding baby. Offer foods that support nursing: raw, clean fats like avocado and salmon, bone broth (if the mom is a carnivore) and coconut water are all incredible support to the recovering body. 

And, if you REALLY want to help, friends: offer to clean. Wash 4 dishes. Do a load of laundry. Get in there and clean. It is, in fact, the greatest and most intimate kindness. 

Resources.

These are some of the books I found to be especially wonderful.

Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin

Heart and Hands by Elizabeth Davis

Birthing From Within by Pam England

The Birth Partner (Adam found this one absolutely invaluable - it’s also a required text in many doula trainings) by Penny Simkin

Orgasmic Birth by Debra Pascali-Bonaro and Elizabeth Davis

The Gentle Birth Method by Gowri Motha

The Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth by Henci Goer

The website that was far and away the most useful in preparing for the birth was www.evidencebasedbirth.com

In learning about breastfeeding, both www.kellymom.com and www.lalecheleague.org were awesome.

I STRONGLY recommend taking a birthing class, if you can, with a partner if you have one or with another loved one if you don’t. Ask around, go online, find out who’s really wonderful who is teaching in your area. The one we went to in LA was at a birthing center called Gracefull, taught by Elizabeth Bachner and J.J Brake, and it was tremendously helpful for both of us.

Your best resource, full stop, is your local community. Face to face as well as online. Ask around about midwives, hospitals, birthing centers, doulas, books. Talk to friends. Ask for support from people who have comparable priorities to yours and who you respect. I stopped speaking to people who I suspected would freak out about my plan to birth at home, because pregnancy really does render one more permeable than usual, and I was clear that internalizing other people’s terrors on any level held no benefit for me. Instead, I surrounded myself with people who could get with my program and support me in planning a fierce, unmedicated birth - and, better yet, with women who had already had such births. Talking to educated moms who are ahead on the curve is the single best medicine there is. 

Similarly, going into online forums can quickly become overwhelming - everybody on earth has a strong opinion and will want you to benefit from their wisdom, which cascades rapidly into oversharing and storytelling, not necessarily the most useful for a pregnant person just trying to do a little research. Set your filters properly when venturing into the jungle of the internet. 

And that, my loves, is all I have to say about that for now.

Thank you for reading. Please reach out with any questions or if I can support you in any way.

May you experience all phenomena as fodder for your growing awareness and deep, amazing joy.

GYNEPUNK IS THE FUTURE.

THESE WOMEN ARE MY HEROES. 

STRAIGHT UP.

"The Catalan collective GynePunk wants to decolonize the female body. To this end, it is developing first aid gynecological tools, for socially disadvantaged women, refugees, sex workers. But also for themselves."

READ ON & TAKE HEART:

http://www.makery.info/en/2015/06/30/gynepunk-les-sorcieres-cyborg-de-la-gynecologie-diy/

Birth: Part Two

On Hospitals, Hellraising & Homebirth

As a low-risk pregnant woman myself, I personally wanted nothing to do with hospitals, and plotted my birth to avoid them unless absolutely necessary. I wanted to optimize my chances of having a simple vaginal delivery, which meant starting in the place where that was the most likely. Beyond that, based on all that I'd seen in hospitals, it was clear to me that they are an inappropriate place for me to labor and birth unless I had an actual medical need for intervention, because hospitals are where I feel the LEAST safe - I wanted to know that any interventions that came down the pipe were truly an issue of safety, and had seen enough weirdness by then that I had very little faith in that being strictly true in a hospital setting. It's my nature to fight hard to be in charge of my experience and my body, and I’m capable of being a noisy and potentially violent asshole to defend my space if I feel like I'm being dominated or threatened - or, much worse, to submit in fear and then feel deeply injured. I wanted total autonomy, control over who was in the space and who my caregivers were, and was willing to endure a completely unmedicated process in order to ensure that.

So I decided to birth at home. Which, I found out, is rare - barely 1% of births in the United States happen outside of hospitals, including both birthing centers and homebirths. In choosing a homebirth, I let go of any possibility of pain medication during labor and delivery, and began to do a lot of research on other forms of pain management, planned transfers, the potential for needing an emergency transfer, and on what I could expect with regards to the safety of birthing in my apartment. 

I was lucky to know moms I greatly admire who had birthed at home in LA, and two of them recommended their midwives to me, as well as others they had liked but not chosen, and advised me to interview a bunch of different people, to check out birthing centers and to do some research on what I might want and who was a good fit for me. I went to three different birthing centers and interviewed 4 homebirth midwives: 7 midwives in all, all extraordinary people. While on the fence deciding between two of them, my partner and I were blessed to have a very frank conversation with the physician's assistant in my doctor's office, a knowledgeable, clever woman who has been a birthworker and educator for 25 years and knows everyone in town, and she essentially made the decision for us, saying that all of our choices were excellent but that one in particular was, in her opinion, the best she'd ever seen, by far the most experienced and the most deft in extreme circumstances. 

At our next meeting with that one, Leslie (the aforementioned gangstress who's been catching since the mid 70s), she described delivering a 12 lb baby in a bed with no tearing. And that was that, because for fuck's sake. Sold. 

Preparations.

Early in pregnancy, I started to receive acupuncture from a genius DoM who specializes in women's health and fertility, and got fantastic advice from her, which I now humbly & gratefully pass along to you:

The cure for nausea is PROTEIN. Which is a weird switch from normal nausea, and goes against most of what I'd ever been told I should eat and drink when nauseous (I heard a lot about saltines and ginger ale, and my usual go to when nauseous would be something like bread.) If nauseous while pregnant, have a couple of bites of something protein-dense: cheese, chicken, a boiled egg. Better yet, don't ever let my body be without enough protein already in my belly, and I won't get nauseous to begin with. I found this to be 100% true, and the only 2 or 3 times I felt sick enough to puke during the entire pregnancy were when I didn't eat protein in time. And I'm a delicate flower generally, prone to horrific motion sickness and emotional nausea. 

I do eat meat, and eating animal was a big deal while pregnant - I would recommend to anyone who is vegan and set on remaining so while pregnant to work with a nutritionist, even briefly, in the beginning of pregnancy (or better yet while planning their pregnancy) to figure out how to get the proteins and fats one needs to give a growing fetus everything good it needs for optimal health. 

I also saw my acupuncturist twice for something called Golden Needle sessions, also called Happy Baby or Beautiful Baby treatments in the traditional literature. In her words, these are energetic treatments to help differentiate the baby's stream of karma from the mother's. They're given at the transition from 1st into 2nd trimester and 2nd into 3rd. I hugely appreciated the concept, and in reality found both sessions deeply transformative. 

I learned a great deal from studying British OB and Ayurvedic doctor Gowri Motha's Gentle Birth Method - she has very specific things to say about how to eat to support pregnancy and prepare the body for birth which made a lot of sense to me. The main points that stuck with me are:

a) Contrary to the stereotypical pickles and chocolate cravings narrative, pregnancy is exactly NOT the time to eat whatever crap you might want whenever you want it.

b) Sugar and refined flour and other sticky foods create an inflamed body, pelvic congestion, and babies whose size is disproportionate to the pelvic size of their mothers. 

From her I absorbed the notion that a pregnant woman should gain between 25 and 35 lbs total over the 40 weeks of pregnancy, should stop eating refined sugars and flours and other mucus-producing, inflammatory foods altogether, for sure by the third trimester, and FOR SURE in the final month, and that pregnancy is, actually, the time to change one's diet for real, as everything that goes into a pregnant woman's mouth is an offering of raw materials for their baby for build a perfectly healthy body. 

The supplements I took throughout pregnancy, which additionally had the effect of clearing up minor chronic things like skin infections and making my digestion fabulous, were a food-based prenatal vitamin, a lot of probiotics, and fermented butter and cod liver oil pills. I ate a ton of butter and other oils, drank a lot of bone broth and whole milk, and in general stuck as much as possible to the Nourishing Traditions recommendations for pregnancy, which served me really well and supported a generally simple, super healthy pregnancy. 

Another piece of good advice I got from a wonderful midwife was to walk 3-5 miles a day: "Stop doing aerial, because you don't want to be building your core right now, but if you walk 3 to 5 miles a day, that baby will fall right out." Which I did, and while it would be downright absurd to tell you that my baby fell out or anything like it, my labor was of a totally reasonable length, tearing was very minimal & recovery was pretty damn fast, all told. I also read a lot of Katy Bowman's blog, which has a lot of great recommendations on what particular forms of exercise best prepare the body for birth - she's a big proponent of squats, which I did a lot of. I have never had such a commitment to regular yoga, but continued to do a brief practice as often as possible, and found that it strengthened and stretched my hips better than anything else. 

Perineal massage is a great idea and a lovely thing to do as birth prep. Ask your loved one or hire a sexological bodyworker or a women's health PT. There is also a device for perineal stretching that we can't yet get here in the US called an Epi-No - you can get it in Canada, but not here, stupidly - which is a hand-inflatable bulb doodad that I've heard is pretty wonderful. I have been advised by a more experienced kink player than I that it is essentially a glorified kink toy, so it's probably findable here in that form. Because the internet is simply amazing. 

What Went Awry

My particular issues during pregnancy were mostly incredibly annoying recurring vaginal infections, primarily yeast infections, which is very common: the body's pH goes bonkers during pregnancy, and all the normal flora goes wild right along with it. Then, late in the game, I tested positive for BV, yeast AND Group B Strep (more commonly referred to as GBS.) I took antibiotics for the BV, as it could have caused pre-term labor, and took Candex for the yeast, and took a shitload of supplements to help my body process all of that. But the one that was truly unfortunate was the GBS. 

GBS is a normal part of healthy vaginal flora for a third of women. If you ever wear a thong, chances are that you are among them. The bacteria comes and goes - a person will test positive and then negative 2 weeks later without having done anything differently. No one cares unless you are pregnant, at which point it becomes an issue for anyone who delivers a baby vaginally: the baby can be colonized in his or her passage through the vagina and vulva (it's a bacteria that resides primarily on external tissues), and a colonized baby can then develop an infection, which in a tiny percentage of babies can lead to serious problems requiring antibiotics and hospitalization. An extremely tiny percentage of infected babies die. 

The way United States medicine handles this is to give birthing women who have tested positive preemptive IV antibiotics. Had I gone to a hospital, that would have happened, and I would have let it - the alternative being that the baby is whisked away for observation after the birth. A hospital will insist upon prophylactic IV antibiotics if you have EVER had a positive GBS result on your record (even if a more recent test is negative), including one with a previous baby. No hospital will let a GBS-positive birthing woman sit in water, which is sad for anyone desiring a water birth. Also, if the event that begins labor is the water breaking (as opposed to contractions starting or the mucus plug coming out), hospitals will put a birthing woman on a clock for delivery - I believe they will give you 18 hours from water breaking to have the baby out - and this will frequently be the reason given for inducing with Pitocin. The wisdom of that timing is subject to quite a lot of debate, and 18 hours is on the short side in the spectrum of care worldwide. The threat of infection spreading up the birth canal and into the uterus is real, and can certainly happen if caregivers are penetrating the vagina with instruments or fingers to check for cervical dilation, or for any other reason - meaning that no one should check until they absolutely have to, as late in the labor as possible - but there are many things about an 18 hour deadline that make very little sense, particularly when there are already antibiotics involved which should, if they are working, make infection a non-issue. 

At a home birth, I had the option of refusing IV antibiotics and treating it instead in the way that is common in Europe, which is to do frequent peribottle rinses with a dilute solution of an antibacterial wash called Hibiclens, which you can get at any drugstore for a couple of dollars. (Note: NOT a douche, which rinses internal tissues. Peribottles are basically squirt bottles which are used to give a focused rinse to the external tissues of the vulva and perineum.)

I did a lot of research on this, and found a ton on the internet, most notably an AMAZING website called Evidence Based Birth. Out of everything I read, the statistic that jumped out was that 61% of infected babies are born to mothers who tested negative - as in, the birthing women who tested negative at 34 or 36 weeks developed the infection thereafter but weren't tested again, and then passed it on to their babies unknowingly. If no one was properly observing those babies, infections went untreated and became complicated and potentially fatal. That number clinched it for me, and luckily I had still had time to prove to myself the Hibiclens washes worked by retesting well before I was due.

So, at 8 months pregnant, I stopped having any sort of penetrative sex or touch (i.e. no perineal massage) to avoid spreading the bacteria into my vaginal canal, took antibiotics and a ton of probiotics for the BV, and crossed my fingers that they would also work on the GBS (there are various strains of GBS that respond to different antibiotics, but we were unclear which I had). I then started the peribottle washes, and when I was tested again I came up negative. I kept doing the washes on a daily basis until labor began with my water breaking, and then did them every 4-6 hours during labor. I refused IV antibiotics during labor because I wanted both my colostrum and the baby's gut flora to be intact, and I had concluded from all that I'd read that the local washes were every bit as effective statistically as systemic antibiotics. 

And we have been 100% fine. 

For which I am massively grateful.

Switching Horses Midstream, or: The Clusterfuck and How It Resolved.

A particularly steep learning curve began at 4 months, when a friend delivered her baby with the same OBGYN I had been seeing, and I was less than happy with the combination of neglect and swift, reactionary overmanagement with which she was handled in labor and birth. 

I remained with that doctor for a long while afterwards - I loved everyone else in her office, and I'd only even seen her once or twice, as her extremely wonderful physician's assistant saw most patients for office visits, and so I kept going with the idea that it would be fine for this woman to be my backup doctor, which all midwives require in the event that there's a transfer. The PA, who knew and greatly respected my midwives, said that she'd strongly recommend backing them up to the doc, and that it should be no problem. And I was optimistic. I knew myself to be more informed and less reticent about my desires than my friend had been, and told myself the story that the doc would be different with me. 

Then, between 7 and 8 months, I began having the tiniest bit of spotting. My midwives thought it was unlikely to be a big deal but wanted me to be tested for a UTI just in case, and I called my doc's office to arrange a test. I was told by the front desk that the doc wanted me to go immediately to the labor and delivery ward to be monitored for preterm labor. I assured them that I wasn't in preterm labor and that the spotting was negligible, and refused to go in - I had a bad feeling about going in for reasons ranging from unnecessary hospital bills (I had recently accompanied my loved one to the ER, where fuck all was done for her and she accrued a bill to the tune of several thousand dollars) to my distrust of the wobbliness of patient consent in hospital settings. I was again pressured to go, and, reasonably or unreasonably, got a very bad feeling. My midwives told me that they legally couldn't tell me not to go once I had been told to by my doc, but recommended that I go to be tested and monitored to another L&D ward at a different hospital known for being very laid back. I told them that I intended to switch doctors, and they agreed that this kind of reaction was a conveniently timed preview of what would happen in labor if I kept this doctor as my backup. 

I went for testing and monitoring at UCLA, where the young doctor let me insert my own speculum (she had apparently never been asked for that by a patient before) and gave me an ultrasound gently enough that the baby didn't squiggle and turn away from the wand, giving us a clear view of her magically familiar profile. I was prescribed 2 different antibiotics and an antifungal before even getting test results back. Upon calling in for results, I was told I had BV and that I should start a 10 day course of Flagyl (a broad-spectrum semiautomatic weapon of an antibiotic), and to call back for the results of urinalysis. 5 days of daily calls later, I was told by a random doctor reading me my chart verbatim that I had, in fact, tested negative for everything (and was therefore taking heavyweight antibiotics because the original doctor, for reasons unknown, had lied about my test results) and that no urinalysis had ever been ordered. 

Mystified, pissed off and disheartened, I got a referral from the midwives for their preferred backup doctor, a guy with privileges at Cedars named Dr. Chin, and went to see him for the one visit he required in order to get me in his system and agree to be my backup. He sat me down in his office and said some marvelously direct things: if all went well, we would meet this once and then not again until I wanted him to act as the backup for my next homebirthed kid; this visit was primarily for me to see that he's not super weird and for him to see that I'm not super weird (that is a direct quote); and, most importantly, he needed to say to me that my birth might not go the way I wanted. He wanted to drive home the point that I could end up in the hospital and under his care with a planned transfer for any number of reasons. That it would be the midwives' call if that was to happen, not his, and that he trusted them 100% to know if and when that should happen, as should I. And that if this should happen, he needed me to NOT FREAK OUT, to remain calm and to trust that he and everyone working with and under him would do everything in their considerable power to make sure that I had a safe and connected birth as close to my wishes as possible. OK? OK, i said. 

He then gave me an ultrasound, and within seconds caught what not a single other doctor or nurse or PA giving me an ultrasound anywhere had: "I bet you're spotting, huh?" he said. "It's because your placenta is low." Once I recovered my cool, I told him that the spotting had caused me to be misdiagnosed with infections and unnecessarily prescribed a lot of antibiotics, and that I fervently wished I had come to see him earlier, at which he clucked like a disapproving grandma. And upon making sure that I didn't have placenta previa (the placenta has to have a minimum of 2 cm clearance from the cervix in order to safely have a vaginal delivery - any closer than that can cause a lot of bleeding), he said "Yup, you'll bleed a little bit more than most women, and it's nothing to worry about." And he shook my hand, and vanished.

Hypnosis.

In the midst of all of this, I realized that I wasn't just dealing with a reasonable desire to not birth in a hospital, but had in actuality become terrified of the prospect, and upon reflection on Dr. Chin's fantastically rational perspective and the very real possibility that I would, for one reason or another, need to go to a hospital during labor, I decided to enlist the help of a hypnotherapist.

I saw Jim George for one session, and, despite my being a stubborn ass of a person who has never been susceptible to hypnosis or 'going under' or really any sort of suggestion, I cannot recommend him and the practice of hypnotherapy enough in this context. The man is an extraordinary wizard. I have never sat with a more completely present human being. 

Many things were said during that session, but most notable to me was his utterly convincing assurance that I was going to give birth at home, and that I knew exactly what to do. He said it, and it was so. I emerged from that session unafraid of birth, sure that I wasn't going into hospital, and knowing I would be calm regardless. 

Part Three forthcoming, famiglia! 

xoxo

Birth: Part One.

Dearest Loves.

I'm writing this note to offer whatever useful information I can to any of you who will ever give birth, or help facilitate someone else's birth, and to anyone who is interested in a very personal take on the ins and outs of homebirth in the modern world.

I had an amazing, well-supported pregnancy and the most ideal birth I could have imagined this past July, followed by easy breastfeeding and a relatively quick postpartum recovery. Some portion of that is certainly luck, but the rest is the result of several years of research, planning, and sticking to my guns. If there's any part of my experience that could help anyone else make the necessary choices to have their version of the same, I want to provide the straight story of the things that worked: good advice I received, my understanding of choices, preparations and outcomes, things to consider, and things to avoid. I discovered a lot during the months of pregnancy that I never found in any book. (There was also a ton of great information in particular books and websites, & I'll name those here as well, as there are countless forums with wildly conflicting opinions and books claiming to be The Book and it can be a loaded and confusing rabbit hole to navigate, so I can at least recommend the ones I found especially great.)

Again: I'm aware of what role good fortune played in my outcomes and certainly don't take any of this for granted, and also must champion the role of preparation to meet and elicit good fortune as much as possible.

Please take this for what it is, which is one person's highly subjective perceptions and opinions. It goes without saying that every birthing person is completely different, and what worked for me may have nothing to do with what will work for you. My intention is for anyone reading this to please take anything that feels right, and to let go of the rest. Nothing to fight about here.

Also, this contains a lot of information. Among other things, I'm going to be talking about my VAGINA. Because that is where babies - at the time of this writing, the majority of babies - come out, and it is where my baby made her grand exit from my body and into the open air. Dig? If that is TMI for you, don’t read this. You have been warned.

I went into my pregnancy having trained years before as a doula and then having assisted a handful of the births of close friends, all first births, all in hospitals in Los Angeles. Out of those handful, 3 went to an unplanned caesarian section (meaning that those women had not intended and scheduled it, as many do - they had wanted vaginal deliveries), and I think it's fair to say that those women were traumatized to one extent or another by the way they were handled. The 4th went beautifully until a resident (a doctor in training doing his clinical rounds) decided, without the attending midwives' knowledge, to try to dislodge the placenta: he pulled the umbilical cord and prolapsed my friend's uterus (which resulted in her needing to have her second baby as a scheduled caesarian some years later to avoid the risk of another prolapse.) The 5th was the best possible outcome, a beautiful experience with only relatively minor hassling and rushing on the part of the hospital staff: she was given a slowly elevating steady dose of pitocin to move things faster, asked for and got an epidural when the many hours of intensifying labor became overwhelming, and managed to get some sleep; we went through 3 or 4 shifts of nurses during the 24 hours we were there, and most were helpful and sensitive and kind; upon being checked in the morning after some hours of rest, her cervix had dilated beautifully; the doctor showed up in time to suit up and catch the baby. Everyone was healthy. 

I learned a great deal from doctor #5 about waiting during pushing, and saw that my friend barely tore at all as a result of not rushing, giving her tissues ample time in between contractions to stretch around her emerging baby. From nearly every other primary caregiver, I learned a great deal about what NOT to do: how not to scare a birthing woman or her family, how not to abruptly deliver bad news to the birthing person, how not to rush the placenta delivery, how not to lie, how not to refuse to pass a birth on to one's partner despite exhaustion after several deliveries in a row, how not to look at one's watch and push for things to hurry along based on one's own desire to make it to a date that night (yes, that really happened.)

I saw that the culture of each shift of nurses is distinct from the shifts that preceded and followed it, and that the nurses, unless challenged directly by another caregiver, will often make somewhat arbitrary decisions based on what they believe is the best care. Some will lie and be assholes to defend their decisions. My job as a doula with those nurses, who I've found to be a consistent minority, was to run interference and defend the space and agency of the birthing woman. With caregivers who were genuinely supportive of the birthing woman's own process, I helped, watched, and learned a lot as an ally and another set of capable hands. There are plenty of both kinds in the hospitals, as there are good and bad practitioners in any profession. The difference in a hospital setting is that it is completely unpredictable who will show up and when - and when someone unsympathetic to your needs shows up as your nurse in a hospital, it’s can be a hell of a lot of work to move the necessary pieces around to not have to deal with that person, or with those who are invested in them and their authority.

My conclusion is that, as a doula, I want to support everyone I love who chooses to birth in a hospital. For many of us, it really is the place where we feel safest, especially in as wild a state as one is in going through labor for the first time - it's great to be somewhere that feels so utterly capable of determining normalcy and handling problems. And for those of us with high risk pregnancies and predictably complicated births, those of us who encounter emergencies, and those of us who just want to schedule a caesarian, hospitals are a godsend. 

So. I would recommend to anyone reading this who DOES feel the safest in a hospital to BY ALL MEANS PLAN ON A HOSPITAL BIRTH. 100%.

Feeling safe is necessary for feeling relaxed, and relaxing as much as is humanly possible - not having to vigilantly ensure your own safety while trying to birth a baby - is the best way to have an uncomplicated and successful birth. Feeling in control and well taken care of, whatever that means to you, is the golden key to the best possible birth experience.

In no particular order of importance, I passionately recommend the following to anyone who wants a hospital birth:

1) Do proper research into the policies and outcomes at the different hospitals in your area - they vary enormously. 

Unless you're planning a caesarian, where do they really work their asses off to ensure vaginal delivery whenever possible? Where do they offer walking epidurals, in which the anaesthesiologists will scale down the intensity of the numbing to let the birthing woman feel her legs and control her own movement, which is essential for moving the baby's head into an engaged position in the pelvis and dilating the cervix? Where do they train their nurses to help position a laboring woman with an epidural to effectively move the baby down into that engaged position in the pelvis? What is their position on routine episiotomy, which should be that they do not perform them unless absolutely necessary? What are their recent statistics on C section outcomes? Will they allow you to eat and drink as much as you wish during labor to keep up your calories and energy, as they should?

Be very thorough with your questions, even if you feel like you're being a pain in the ass - please remember that you are considering who to employ to assist you with one of the biggest events of your life. You are beholden to no one. 

2) It must be said: births, especially first births, can be scary as fuck. Birth is beyond psychedelics. It is beyond extreme sports. It is the great leveler. So intense is it that, having now done it unmedicated, I have great respect for all of the reasons that that is a rare decision. It is a tectonic rupture in time and space, unprecedented in scope and depth, heralding an entirely new reality, comparable to a one way ride to another planet. 

That said, it is COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE that most of us, raised as we are in a medicalized culture - raised to accept the authority and expertise of doctors, and to feel profoundly reassured by it - are much more comfortable having that experience managed for us. A doctor will tell you, from their experience, whether or not everything is normal and healthy, what to do and how to do it, and has in their back pocket a lot of tools for shaping the labor and delivery, including drugs and surgery. 

That said, PLEASE: CHOOSE YOUR DOCTOR WISELY. They're really not all the same. They have extremely different opinions on how things should go down. Please put your care into the hands of a person you agree with and trust, preferably someone who's recommended firsthand by someone who has comparable priorities to yours. Don't assume a doctor will rise to the occasion to do something different for you in the moment than they normally would, because they won't. They will do exactly what they have consistently done all along. So find out what that is. Ask around. If you want to work with midwives, ask them which doctors they love and recommend to have as their backup - they'll always know the best ones. You want to know in your gut that whatever interventions are being recommended are actually necessary, not merely convenient. 

3) At the risk of repeating myself: if you have never had a baby or seen a birth, you might not really know that it will be the most bonkers experience of your life. We've all seen the movies, but movies are always about something happening to someone else.

So: in all births, but especially in a hospital setting, you want to build in everything you possibly can to ensure that you will have all of the peace and support that you want. You will not be able to keep people out of the room in a hospital, but there are wonderful tricks to making sure it goes as well as possible. Mammals are not built to give birth under observation, so ensuring a maximum of privacy and quiet for your ease in a setting where there is generally very little of either is absolutely key. It is the trick of building a dark cave in the middle of a busy train station.

One such trick which I learned in a birthing class, the best I have ever heard and one I for sure would have used had I ended up in hospital, is to have whoever is filling out the intake paperwork state front and center that the birthing woman has PTSD. Whether she actually does or not (and it's really not for anyone else to say, frankly), saying that she does will ensure that the hospital staff act with much greater care and quiet and respect for space than they ordinarily might: i.e., they will knock before entering, keep voices down, and in general act in a manner that they should be acting anyways, in order to not trigger a freakout. This is a buffer that you want and need. Please don't underestimate the value of this.

4) Get an experienced doula. Seriously. Whether a partner is present or not. Having a seasoned advocate and badass support person whose entire job is to have your back under all circumstances is a tremendous, amazing boon in a situation where the birthing woman is very vulnerable and in a setting where things can happen very quickly. No to mention the arsenal of tricks that doulas have for relieving pain and moving the baby and every other thing one needs in labor. The doula is the person who will stay with you most or all of the time, whereas the doctor and sometimes even the midwife will arrive in time for the pushing and the catch. 

5) Birth is a hurricane of raw emotions and huge sensations and high stakes, and success relies upon being able to relax without self-consciousness into the wildness of all of that.

Therefore: Do Not Have ANYONE Present In Whose Company You Will Not Be Comfortable In An Altered State.  

What this means in reality is that if your mom, for example, wants to be there, but you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have a relaxed and easy time with your mom, NO MATTER WHAT, EVEN IF IT HURTS HER FEELINGS, DO NOT ALLOW HER TO BE PRESENT DURING YOUR LABOR. If she knows anything about anything, she will support you in whatever you need at this time, even if she doesn't necessarily like it. Because it's YOUR BIRTH, and is therefore about YOU. Please accept this Get Out Of Emotional Jail Free card from me. At no other time are you more wholly allowed to be entirely selfish in your choices, so - I implore you - don't let anybody get away with guilt tripping you about this. I have witnessed firsthand and heard endlessly about this exact dynamic: usually parents (but sometimes partners or siblings or others whose closeness "should" be OK but frankly isn't) in the room or at the hospital somewhere waiting and whose presence creates enough stress that the birthing body cannot relax enough to do its thing. The direct and quantifiable result of this is that the labor will stall. It won't happen to everybody this way, but it is frequent enough that it's a commonly told story. 

So: your mom, or whoever fits this description in your world, can come when the baby has been born and bring food and kvell with you. Find a way to say no. Create the buffer. Even if it's your partner. Even if it's your BFF. Examine your heart with great honesty about this, and only allow people to be with you in whose presence you can relax, for real.

6) If you would prefer to not have a C-section, I strongly strongly recommend prepping and birthing with a midwife, as they offer very different care than OBGYNs, and have a skill set that incredibly few doctors in this country are able to match. It was explained to me by an MD while I was pregnant that MDs are trained to intervene in a problematic birth, but not really ever trained in how to facilitate a normal healthy birth without intervening. Many midwives are able to administer drugs (although epidurals are only available in hospitals, as they are delivered by a line into the spinal cord rather than by injection or IV and are therefore more complex to deliver and monitor appropriately.) However: the midwife's expertise is how to employ every trick in the book to get things moving in the right direction without resorting to the surgery and drugs which are the doctor's provenance and are at best never needed, in my opinion. Midwives know how to do a ton of shit most doctors have no idea about and will tell you cannot be done. A perfect example is that it's a rare doctor who will deliver a breech baby - and yet midwives abound who, upon checking and finding out the position of the baby some weeks before the due date, can do a number of things to turn the baby into a more optimal position and/or deliver a breech baby without blinking an eye about it. 

And - you can absolutely have midwives as your primary caregivers in a hospital setting. There are a number of hospitals where that is on offer. So, again: research your options. 

7) Routine episiotomies are, in my opinion and in the opinion of the most experienced midwives I've ever met, a bunch of bullshit. They do not prevent tearing and in fact make tearing worse. There are women whose perineums are so godalmighty muscular and gangster that an episiotomy may be indicated during a delivery, but those occasions are rare. The comparison I was given by my midwife was the notion of trying to tear an intact piece of fabric versus trying to tear a piece of fabric that already has a cut in it - if you've ever tried to rip through something, you know how much easier it is when there is already a cut. Her opinion, as a midwife who's been catching babies since 1975, is that episiotomies performed routinely cause some of the worst damage and the most horrible recovery periods for birthing moms of anything that could happen, including caesarians, and are to be avoided. And, having pushed an average-sized baby out myself now, I concur: I had 2 stitches, was able to have sex after 6 weeks or so, have had minimal scar tissue formation, and my pelvic floor is more or less fully recovered at 4 months out. It is to some extent luck of the draw, but that doesn't make precautions and preparations irrelevant.

Part Two coming soon. Stay tuned, family.

xoxo

Bio: The Hydrated Version.

About me.

My work as a bodyworker and educator began as the silver lining of exploring and transforming my own wounds.

As a dancer in a rigorous conservatory program in college, I developed a chronic injury so severe that I was unable to stand still without searing pain and spasms in both of my hips, and was brought over the course of 2 years to a complete physical crisis that forced me to stop dancing. MDs told me that they could find nothing structurally wrong to explain what was happening to me. Upon their recommendation, I worked briefly with a physical therapist and found that the repetitive exercises were a blunt instrument which, in the absence of understanding, made my condition worse.

The first true relief I experienced was in the sitting meditation practice I cultivated while studying Buddhist philosophy and practice in India and Nepal the following year. The teaching I was blessed to receive during that time from the immensely kind teachers and translators I met turned my entire world toward an unprecedented era of rightness. As I trained my attention, my body began to calm down. It was a vital lesson in subtle awareness and control, in allowing and witnessing my mind amidst all the comings and goings of discomfort, and in our amazing malleability as ordinary human beings.

The second gift of that journey was to receive hands-on Feldenkrais work for the first time from a friend and traveling companion who hipped me to the incredibly rich world of sensation to be discovered in the body’s tiniest movements. The hands-on meditation on micromovement and perception that Feldenkrais offers, and particularly what arose for me in the permissive presence of a loving witness, made a profound impact on my sense of the exponential deepening of healing that becomes possible when attending to oneself at the body’s own pace, and in good company.

As soon as I could get my ass out of school, I enrolled in an accelerated massage therapy program with the idea that I intended ultimately to become an acupuncturist, and wanted to be able to perceive capably with my hands before working with tools. I loved entering into an altered state with people in sessions, both giving and receiving, and began to perceive the body’s structure as the layered material form of someone’s consciousness over time. For the first time I witnessed clients as they experienced shifts of perception which rippled instantly through their bodies, clearly discernible to my hands. 

The next lightning bolt hit in the form of the titan who became my Core Energetics therapist, a person who is still a central inspiration to me. I had recently dropped to my knees in the middle of a sidewalk and received a stern talking-to by a council of Gods while under the influence of psychedelics at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and as the gifts of massively expanded identity and hyperawareness I felt began to fade in the midst of everyday life, I hunted for a way to sustain myself and learn to live in that state of openness all the time.  A trusted friend recommended me to the Institute for Core Energetics, and I was introduced to the work of Wilhelm Reich and his protege John Pierrakos via the fearless presence and teaching of Warren Moe. Reich and Pierrakos’s respective works with human (and global) bioenergetics remain the cornerstone of what I see as the true scope of the human capacity to heal. The total authority and unmistakeable honesty of the body’s knowledge is what makes Core Energetics, and other somatic or body-based forms of therapy, effective where I've found talk therapy inadequate. There was nothing to talk about except what the body revealed, and no amount of posturing, theorizing, explaining or intellectualizing was able to touch what a single instance of somatic recall achieved. I was completely changed by this experience.

Upon moving back to Los Angeles, I simultaneously began to study at the Shiatsu School, which was a hub for renegade geniuses like Dr. Vincent Medici and Ellen Heed, and to work at Play Mountain Place, the oldest free school in the United States and a sister school to Summerhill, the first democratic school for children in the world.  At the Shiatsu School I was plunged into Traditional Chinese Medicine theory and practice. More centrally, Dr. Medici introduced us to his Rule of Four as a thorough, elegant working method for the assessment of dysfunction, and trained us in a hands-on approach to the high-charge psychoemotional centers of the human body. As a new Play Mountain teacher, I was led to study the work of Carl Rogers, and began to recognize the developmental basis of bioenergetic constrictions in the body. I also started to see an alternative to the culture of containment and suppression to which most people are entrained from birth. Play Mountain’s focus on nonviolent communication, parallel with its permissiveness toward and intelligent direction of violent emotions in all people through the same kind of technology I’d experienced in Core Energetics, was hugely eye-opening. I saw adults becoming healthy and treating children with the respect that they had themselves been deprived of as young people, and saw children who were able to be fully and exactly themselves. It was and is a place of enormous wisdom.

I began to study Visionary Craniosacral work with the wizardly Hugh Milne, who guided me to a level of self-trust and self-love that I had never encountered anywhere else. In addition to neuroanatomy and the subtle techniques which allow the body to unwind, much of his teaching focuses on cultivating the intuitive faculties of the healer, and on the tremendous impact of bodywork upon the unconscious aspects of the self when it is presented as a loving act of ritual. I also studied with and then began to teach beside Elizabeth Guilliams, an intensely talented energy worker and intuitive whose use of crystals as living tools for transformation became a pillar of my understanding of the human bioenergetic field and its expressions across the material plane. Liz and I have taught children and adults together for well over a decade, and our work is a continuously unfolding marvel in my life, a lens of unwavering clarity and an effortless invitation to play with the constant brilliance of Life. 

I began to work as a volunteer sex educator for Planned Parenthood, teaching their curriculum on sexuality and anatomy and answering anonymous questions in 9th grade classrooms all over Los Angeles. The anatomy geek in me really bloomed when I began to delve into sexual anatomy. I discovered the radical literature of the Federation for Feminist Women’s Healthcare which began in the early 70s, when women began to teach themselves and their communities gynecological self-care in order to take control of their own sexual well being. That, and Ellen Heed’s then-nascent work with sacred female sexuality, inspired a deep inquiry into birth control methods that could be both female-controlled and non-disruptive to the delicate harmony of the neuroendocrine system. Despite my immense respect for Planned Parenthood's hard-won political clout and the adherence to mainstream medical practice that allows for their radical work, I quit when I couldn’t justify teaching 14 year old girls that their only good option is to take synthetic hormones to prevent pregnancy in lieu of a proper education about their bodies. As someone who champions the agency and intelligence of young people, I felt strongly that there had to be another way to move forward. The beginning of a new sex ed curriculum for teenagers began to form, one that proposed developmentally appropriate ways to discuss barrier methods, the cycle of fertility, the spectrum of gender, an exploration of consent, and pleasure as something that’s essential to human health. 

I began to learn from friends about the politics of pregnancy and birth in the United States, and trained as an Orgasmic Birth doula with the amazing Debra Pascali-Bonaro, who showed me for the first time in my life that a peaceful, empowered, normal birth is actually well within reach for the majority of birthing people - and that it is far from the usual state of play in the US. She planted some essential seeds of revolution in my heart, handed me a set of effective tools for supporting birthing families in both the hospital and home, and kicked me out the door to go see for myself and change the world. 

Over the subsequent years I assisted with the births of my friends, all in hospital, and saw firsthand the limitations and boons of the kind of care MDs and hospitals have to offer to the huge majority of birthing people in the modern world. I also saw information withheld that could have prevented unnecessary interventions, and a general lack of interest in helping people who had experienced their birth as traumatic, or who had suffered birth injuries which set up patterns of dysfunction that would be with them, according to their doctors, for the rest of their lives. In particular, I witnessed a flavor of shaming around vaginal injuries, especially  those that prevented pleasure, that provoked a really deep ire in me. The need for a feminist model of healthcare became all the more evident in the context of the banality of birthing practices that are violent towards women and trans people, and I committed myself to becoming an axis for accurate information and stalwart support across the spectrum of our changing needs and desires. I began to escort at abortion clinics on major church holidays when protesters would come out in force, and began to comprehend more completely the realities of a culture that has only recently begun to contemplate its emergence from a belief system in which women and people of color are the property of white men. 

In a spontaneous ritual, I invoked what I would need in order to serve the needs of the people who were showing up in my practice and in my life, and the Gods disrupted my entire life by granting my wishes. I went to study Holistic Pelvic Care with the incredible edge-walker who is Tami Lynn Kent, and immediately afterwards immersed myself in the world of Rosita Arvigo’s Maya Abdominal Therapy. Within two weeks of my return home to my beloved partner, and having just been turned upside down by unexpectedly and unmistakably falling in love with a fellow Arvigo student, I got pregnant for the first time ever after 15 incident-free years of tracking my cycle and using a cervical cap as my primary methods of birth control. During pregnancy, I enrolled in the California Sexological Bodywork certification program through the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, and in my second trimester I traveled to San Fransisco for the intensive hands-on portion of the certificate course. I was the only pregnant person who had ever participated in the program, and became a state-certified Somatic Sex Educator (SSE/CSB) less than a month before our daughter was born. 

Kora’s birth was the most insane and extraordinary experience I have ever had, and I couldn’t have asked for a better experience: fortune smiled upon us and we were able to go through the portal in the privacy and safety of our home. I was free of complications beyond my control, and handled the complications within my control with solid research and excellent help. And, maybe most importantly, I was cared for through the birth by my dearest beloveds, who acted as my capable and loving doulas, and was delivered by an indomitable mountain of a midwife. I had minimal tearing, received excellent scar tissue remediation care (and, more recently, essential formal training) from Ellen Heed and Kimberly Ann Johnson, and healed quickly. If you want to read a more detailed account of my pregnancy and birth, it can be found here.

There is much to say and a great difficulty in adequately expressing the transformations of the past 14 months. As a woman with an expanding identity, as a parent to a willful, clever daughter, as a sexual animal, as a partner to two spectacular and very different people, as an educator and practitioner and somatic researcher, it’s fair to say that the past couple of years has had the pace and wildness of travel on a rocketship, one which seems most of the time to be copiloted by angels. These days are filled with wonder. It's perhaps enough to say for now that the urgency I felt previous to pregnancy and birth, the desire to burn the patriarchy to the ground and bring this long age of fear and shame to an end, and my readiness to throw my weight behind creating a culture of power and pleasure and self-liberation, for everyone, here and now, and as the legacy we'll live out and hand to our kids - the force of that desire has drowned out my fears and hesitations, and it is the light I’m walking toward at the end of this crazy tunnel. 

Please feel free to contact me if any of this resonates with something in you. I’m here to connect.

The Racist, Sexist History of Birth Control

VICE has just published a piece on the misogynist, deeply racist origins of hormonal birth control, and it is a fairly amazing read.

Cited at the top of the article and also worthy of some attention is the Danish study, published in psychiatric journal JAMA, showing concrete correlation between the use of hormonal birth control and diagnoses of clinical depression in users, particularly in adolescent girls. There has been an outpouring on the net of responses from women who feel that the study vindicates their personal experiences, which, consistent with medicine's historic dismissal of women's emotional and mental health, have generally and specifically been disregarded by doctors. Holly Grigg-Spall's response in the Guardian is particularly succinct on this. 

The VICE article is part of an ongoing series examining the history and future of reproductive rights to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of Planned Parenthood, bless them, and it is full of jewels.

Highly recommended, y'all.

Womanifesto. 2003.

In 2003, my doctor pressured me to start hormonal birth control in the form of a new plastic IUD that secreted tiny amounts of hormone into the uterus - such tiny amounts, he assured me, that they had no systemic impact at all. I had already had a horrible reaction to the single shot of Depo Provera he'd given me years before, and I refused. I then fought him tooth and nail to fit me for a cervical cap. By the time I left his office, I was in equal parts incensed and elated: cervical cap in hand, I was clueless as to how I was going to use it to not get knocked up. I felt bizarrely like I'd won and lost simultaneously.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself in a bookstore with a copy of Inga Muscio's book Cunt in my hands. I sat down on the floor, read the entire thing straight through, and then went home and wrote what follows. I had never written anything like this before, and after fact checking it obsessively, I sent it out as an email to my friends. I was 26 at the time of writing, and I still get occasional emails from complete strangers asking for the text, 13 years later.

Dearests.

The following, to whatever degree of organization it may reach before I deem it acceptable to send off to you, is for all the women I love, to read and, as you see fit, to add to, revise, & pass on to the women you love as a communal document. Men should read this too. Anyone & everyone who knows & loves women should be in on this conversation.

Certain things that are common to all of us have come to perplex me to no end, and I have finally just hit a fucking wall. 

The object of my present inquiry and fist-waving ire is the medical industry, & the way women are taught to perceive their bodies, and the incredibly duplicitous & bizarre approach taken by conventional medicine to things like birth control. It's at best annoyingly negligent & at worst fatal to be treated with substances that are developed with profit foremost in mind & which approach the patient as a consumer and a guinea pig. This plays with my life & health & the very fabric of my godly soul as if I am expendable, and this has come to be completely unacceptable to me.

I haven't had a major medical tragedy thus far in my life, but I know plenty who have, & I bet you do too. 

Medicine is by no means a perfect science & this is not my contention with it.

I demand an understanding of health & medicine that regards each & every single person manifest in a body as valuable. I want that & i don't think it's too much to ask.

& so: I hop off the soapbox & get into the belly of what this is for, this email.

This is for information.

What I want to share may or may not be old news for you - if somebody along the way enlightened you about the details of your cycle, alternative contraception, and resources for nonmedical interventions in unwanted pregnancy, bless them & spread the word. Keep spreading the word. This information, despite the fact that it comprises the most normal & basic facts about the bodies we inhabit 24 hours a day until the game is over, is for SOME REASON NOT TAUGHT ANYWHERE!

Why don't we get this in junior high? Why are there postmenopausal women who still have no idea how their bodies work? Why aren't moms passing this along with the first talk about menstrual blood?

My personal take is that it isn't taught in schools or popularly endorsed by medical professionals  because there is absolutely no profit to be had from educating people about the natural & healthy states of their bodies, & the ways one can be responsible for avoiding or pursuing a pregnancy in accordance with that. Mindboggling amounts of money are being made in the current configuration of power and knowledge, and you can't sell a damn thing to people who know what's up. We are held in thrall by by our own ignorance. 

Thus, it falls to us to learn, and to make it common knowledge. 

So: herein are the basics of what I know that it seems to me everyone should & certainly many of you do already know.

I believe strongly that all people with a cycle should have full access to this information. And, because the discussion is focused on fertility and pregnancy, this information is most relevant to people who have sex involving vaginas and penises. 

There are a few things in here. They are intended mainly for those among us who don't currently want to become pregnant, but it's all equally essential and helpful for those who do. The information is available. Use it how you will.

The first thing is how to know when you are and are not fertile.

The second has to do with what you can do if something goes awry and there's a possibility that you are already or will soon be pregnant.

PART ONE.

Firstly, it is essential to me to take responsibility for my own body as an adult woman. I don't trust strangers in labs and offices to care about me. This may be cynical, but it is nonetheless the result of hearing and reading many grotesque stories, and experiencing a thing or two with my own doctor which have resulted in him not being my doctor anymore.

Secondly, all forms of birth control, whether barrier or hormonal, kind of suck, in my opinion. Other than the possible variations on abstinence, they all have failure rates, varying levels of discomfort and interference during sex, and/or side effects - and they very nearly all fall to the female partner to handle. Condoms, the pill & all of its manifestations as patches, rings etc., diaphragms, cervical caps, spermicidal jelly, IUDs, nonoxynol 9, and the very sketchy Depo shots.

(Cervical caps, which were the method of choice during the glorious swell of feminist women's health movement during the 1970s, are the least horrible of the lot, in my opinion. But they too have statistical failure rates, and can be exceedingly difficult to find.)

If you disagree with the above statement, you can throw this email away & I love you very much & have no further reason to take up your time.

If you don't disagree with the above statements, & have yet to learn the circumstances in which birth control works, read on.

Every female past a certain age has a cycle, n'est ce pas?

You bleed, regularly or irregularly, approximately every 28 days. I myself bleed every 31 days. Different for everyone. About halfway through that cycle, you drop an egg. It sometimes gets screwy when you travel or are overwrought about something. Normal.

EVERYONE'S CYCLE IS DIFFERENT AND THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN EVER KNOW ALL OF ITS NUANCES & QUIRKS IS YOU, but the basic arrangement is the same for everyone. 

(Of note: one of the side effects of taking hormonal birth control, or having taken it in any significant amount in the past, is that it will totally hijack the normal rhythm of your cycle. Synthetic hormones act to prevent pregnancy by essentially fooling the body into perceiving itself as pregnant all the time, and it takes time, months or years, for the natural timing of the neuroendocrine system to reassert itself without this constant chemical tampering. Trace amounts of synthetic hormone will remain in the body’s soft tissues until addressed. Therefore, supervised nutritional or herbal cleansing after quitting hormones is a REALLY, really marvelously  wonderful idea. Just saying.)

When your cycle is quite itself and you become even marginally aware of what it's up to, it becomes possible to know when you're fertile and when you're not.

You are fertile for about 24 hours out of every cycle, & that is ALL. One day out of the month.

It's tricky as hell trying to pinpoint exactly when that day is coming, but if your cycle is regular, it isn't particularly tricky to figure out more or less when it's come & gone, & to allow plenty of leeway for uncertainty.

Other than this, you are not fertile. There is still decidedly the possibility of various contractable sexual diseases, but you cannot get pregnant. 

This, when i found it out 10 years after it became relevant, was some powerful knowledge. I don't want progeny anytime in the immediate future, &, like most, i think condoms are a necessary evil & am fastidiously careful about things all things sexual. Sex Ed has effectively scared the shit out of all of us. 

However, in the context of a trusting sexual relationship in which everybody has been tested properly, it is possible to dispense with the horrible condom at the right moment.

I love this.

Additionally, it is ridiculous to have a body & not understand what the hell is going on within it, regardless of the presence or absence of lovers in one's life.

I love knowing everything. It is good for me. 

So.

An egg lives for about 24 hours.

Sperm can live in the body for up to 5 days. Conservative folks will say 7 days. 

Thus, if you have sex 5 days before you ovulate, you can conceivably get pregnant. 

If you want to get pregnant, figure out when this happens & do it like bunnies in the wild all week long. Lock yourselves in. Take the phone off the hook. 

If you do not, you need to know how to figure out when all this happens & be very careful all week long.

The way you can know when you have ovulated is multifold but simple. It is easy & good to make it a no-brainer part of your life. 

THIS IS NOT THE RHYTHM METHOD, which has about a 60% success rate. 

This way is known as the strict method, which combines a bunch of factors, and basically holds that the safest time to fuck unfettered is between the end of ovulation & the beginning of bleeding. If you want to go further & investigate when during the rest of your cycle is safe, please read & inform yourself further as that is determined by the length of your own personal cycle. The stuff I’ve put down here holds true for everyone.

1. Keep track of when you bleed. Write everything down: when it starts, when it ends, exactly. This is of utmost importance as it will tell you how long & how regular your cycle is & where it falls in accordance with the rise & fall of the moon, if such things interest you as they do me. The 1st day of blood is considered day 1 of your cycle in the parlance of birth control.

2. Go to the local pharmacy & buy a basal thermometer. Get them to order one for you if they don't have them. Many places don't seem to have them, or if they do it'll be part of a kit designed for couples trying to get pregnant. Don't be deterred by this - the tools are the same, regardless of intention. I had to look all over the place & finally somebody just ordered me three of them. They usually cost less than 4 bucks & they absolutely rock. It's just a thermometer which shows temperature to 1/10th of a degree. It will tell you when your egg has come & gone.

3. Get familiar with your genitalia. Aside from being endless wholesome good times, if you get to know your fantastical cunt as well as you do the rest of you, the workings of your cycle will become clear. The mucus that emerges from you constantly changes in color, texture, smell & taste throughout the cycle & if you get to checking it out regularly it will tell you everything you want to know.

& by the way, i'm a big fan of the shared responsibility idea. If you have a constant lover, he or she or they can & should be made aware of all of this too. It's an honor to know a body so intimately, & everyone involved should be aware of the comings & goings of said body, to my mind. 

If you are keeping track of when you bleed, taking your temperature, & checking out your mucus, you are golden.

PLEASE, please keep in mind that this stuff varies from woman to woman, according to natural tendency, what you've eaten, if you smoke or do drugs, if you've had a sip of wine or the whole bottle, if you’ve recently skipped time zones in a plane, if you're doing a lot of physical labor or none at all, if you're running around the city or lounging in the country. THE POINT IS FOR YOU GET TO KNOW YOUR OWN UNIQUE & GLORIOUS BODY. Only you can ever really know it. 

This is essentially how tracking your cycle works:

TEMPERATURE: 

Take your temperature every morning. Do it before you roll out of bed, before daily activities bring the numbers down. It takes a minute. Write it down. It's clearest to make a graph & keep track of it there. Write down any relevant-seeming details, like if you only slept for 2 hours, if you got up a while before to take a pee. Anything that might affect the accuracy of the reading. You will have lower temperatures until you ovulate, and then it will rise about 6/10ths of a degree. It might happen all at once or over a few days.

An egg lives 24 hours.

You want to record 3 consistently high temperatures before you throw caution to the winds. The book from which I first learned this provides this rule: Don't make love until you have recorded three consecutive temperatures that are .3 degrees higher than the constant was before it began to rise.

Yes?

OK.

MUCUS: 

Sperm need an alkaline, as opposed to an acidic, environment in order to survive for a while. This is where mucus comes in - your body produces a bunch of very alkaline mucus when you ovulate to kick up the chances of a pregnancy. This mucus is different in taste & texture & is just a whole other substance than it is at infertile times. If you're paying attention & checking yourself out throughout the month whenever you hop into the shower, this will become abundantly clear. IT IS IMPORTANT NOT TO CHECK OUT THE MUCUS WHEN YOU ARE HORNY, as lusty mucus is entirely different than cervical mucus.

It occurs to me what a horrible word mucus is.

Mucus. Mucus.

The mucus you want will be accessible with a shallow finger swipe - you don't have to do a serious prowl. Typically, fertile mucus will be more thin, white or faintly yellow, milky or clear, sort of liquidy and flowing, sweeter in taste, and there will be plenty of it. Infertile mucus is thicker, pastier, has more matter in it, stickier & gooier, and more strong and sour tasting. The closer you get to ovulation, the more clear & liquidy & profuse it will become. After you ovulate, it will return to the pasty gluey. When you are absolutely infertile, there will be little or no mucus at all. The specifics will vary quite a lot from girl to girl. Pay attention to your own monthly fluctuations & see what goes on for you personally. Keep track of the state of your deliciousness and record it all with the temperature observations. Write it all down on the graph. Makes everything super easy.

THE 4th DAY AFTER YOU OVULATE, the mucus will be back to the thicker type. This ideally will correspond to the 3rd day of higher temperature. THIS IS THE PARALLEL CHECKPOINT. If the temperature is still low or wavering, bust out the condoms or other barrier. If the mucus is still suspiciously flowing along, barrier.

Leave a day or 2 safety margin, definitely. 

And by all means, please please read. Read up on this. Don't take my word for anything.

PART TWO.

So, a condom has broken, or you've sucked it right off your lover with the might of your womanhood as I recently did, or there was no condom to begin with. This happens.

Here is what you can do.

AT THE TIME IT HAPPENS, as soon as possible - 

- Take 1 or 2 tablets of non chewable vitamin C, preferably a 500-mg pill, and insert it as far into your vagina as possible, up near your cervix. The C changes the pH of your vagina and makes you very acidic, making it very difficult for sperm to hang out for long. Insert a tablet or two every 12 hours for 3 days. If it irritates you, insert some plain yogurt with a teaspoon or a baby syringe or steal someone's turkey baster.

- Start pounding lots and lots of C orally. THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR WOMEN WITH KIDNEY PROBLEMS, & the oral doses will be less effective for you if you take lots of C already. In general, you can start taking major doses of C to bring on a late period whether or not there's been a mishap. Drink lots and lots of water with your vitamins, to help their passage through your system & keep it all moving along.

- Take 1 teaspoon of wild carrot seeds orally as soon as you can, and thereafter every day until you bleed. This is the old-time remedy & works by making the uterine wall slippery so that the egg can't implant. CHEW THE HELL OUT THEM TO RELEASE OILS, and make sure if possible that they haven't been chemically treated, as this makes them considerably less effective (as is true for all plant medicines.) Find organic or wildcrafted ones, if you have the choice.

- Start eating parsley like it's going out of style, and keep a sprig of it inside the vaginal canal as a pessary, much like a tampon, also up towards the cervix. It will get soft and fall apart and it's absolutely nothing to worry about. Can't hurt you. Change it twice or 3 times a day. This is also a time-tested remedy for any kind of late period, & one that has brought on blood for me consistently.

(ALSO: Since the writing of this, we had a second condom mishap, while traveling, at exactly the riskiest time of the month, & I was panicky enough that we trundled off to Planned Parenthood, goddess bless them, and they gave me the new & improved morning-after pill. It's called Plan B, rarely has side effects, & didn't disturb my cycle at all. Whereas the old pill brings on the blood early & rudely disrupts everything & makes you feel like hell for days, the new one is a motherlode of synthetic progesterone which delays ovulation for another 3-4 days to keep sperm & egg from bumping into one another and makes the uterine wall less friendly to implantation, effective only if the egg hasn't already made a nest for itself - i.e. pre-conception, as medically defined, NOT an abortifacient pill. It's not as sweepingly certain on its own, but can be safely combined in a pinch with any or all of the above home remedies for good measure. And while taking a single strong dose of hormone isn't an awesome thing to do, it's far easier to deal with the systemic toxicity of that than it is with the effect of years on the pill, and worth it to me for the peace of mind.)

AT THE END OF YOUR CYCLE, if bleeding has not yet commenced for whatever reason:

- You can investigate and work on them yourself, or find an experienced & trustworthy practitioner of acupressure or acupuncture and ask them to work on the 22 "forbidden" pregnancy points to bring on your period. These 22 points are traditionally avoided because they faithfully provoke uterine contractions and keep the period regular. This has worked quickly & well for me. Acupuncture and acupressure are High Arts.

- Visualization is some powerful shit when it comes to bringing on one's period. Concentrate your days & nights upon visualizing your womb gently shedding the egg and massage your lower belly to get things moving as much as you can stand it. Talk to your body in the shower. It will respond.

- There are a number of simple and effective recipes for herbal emmenagogues which will, if prepared carefully and taken at the right time (i.e. within 5 days of when the period is supposed to begin and no later), bring on a miscarriage. 2 of them are printed in Hot Pants by Blood Sisters, and others can be found at wwww.sisterzeus.com. They are potentially hard on the body, but if you are attentive & careful they are an option. *It is very important to note that herbs in this context work as a poison, and that in the event that they do NOT produce a miscarriage, the fetus will likely not be viable, and you will need to seek medical intervention to complete the process of aborting. So: this isn’t anything to fuck with if you are’t very, very sure about terminating your pregnancy. 

Here are the books i know (there are also a ton more out and available):

A Cooperative Method of Natural Birth Control. - Margaret Nofziger

Cunt - Inga Muscio (fucking GREAT, please read.)

Hot Pants (Do it Yourself Gynecology) - Blood Sisters (www.bloodsisters.org - they are awesome)

The New Our Bodies, Ourselves - the Boston Women's Health Book Collective.

A New View Of a Woman's Body - The Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers

And a couple of recent teacher recommendations i'm about to crack into myself:

Woman, Heal Thyself - Jeanne Blum (contains precise information about the 22 forbidden pregnancy points)

What your Doctor May Not Tell You About Pre-Menopause - Dr. John Lee (This guy also wrote one about menopause and about breast cancer. There is apparently a lot of grody information in here, including a lot of AMA-suppressed research which conclusively links the use of the Pill to ovarian, breast & cervical cancers.)

Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom - Christiane Northrup

*Hygeia - Jeanne Parvati

The Clitoral Truth - Rebecca Chalker

And an amazing website: www.sistezeus.com

Check the index in any of these for a trove of further references.

That's what i have to say about that for the moment.

The purpose to this is to get folks talking. We have to talk about this stuff, all of us. Write back if you feel like it. Edit this if you like, and send on what, if anything, you find useful. Inform your beloveds & friends. Correct me if I’ve screwed anything up or if you've learned differently.

Be in touch.

Love you.

Pamela