Dear Gay Guys, You Are Not a Friend To Women Until You Know What an IUD Is
Dear fellow gay men, you need to never make a joke about a woman’s period ever again. Or perform your hilarious disgust for tampons, female body hair and the smell of vaginas.
The communal gay experience of hysterical revulsion to female biology is done. Disparaging body parts you don’t have or want to fuck is over. To continue participating in that misogyny is unacceptable. We now have a president-elect who also “jokes” about the female body and his jokes are seriously triggering and have imminent consequences. Disdain for a woman’s body once might have tenuously passed as defiance against heterosexuality, a way to embolden gayness, or just harmless camp passed down through generations. But it was always misogyny and it still is. As of several weeks ago, it has never been more important that you quit this bullshit.
You are not Nathan Lane in a 1998 rom-com. You can no longer stick your fingers in your ears and make vomit-gag-face anytime someone mentions the word “vulva.” If you can’t deal with a world of women shedding their endometrial linings every month, near you, around you, next to you, then you don’t get to have Sunday mimosas with your Instagrammable gal pal at that bar that opened six months ago but looks like it was designed in 2005. You don’t get to steal inspiration and strength from female pop idols and then laugh about how their bodies disgust you. You don’t get to wear trendy feminism T-shirts and then behave like an asshole. You don’t get to “slay mama.” Gay men can no longer condone their own obsolete frat boy misogyny nonsense. That’s Trump stuff.
It’s basic bro self-centeredness, acted out in ways you don’t even realize. The morning after Trump’s first post-election interview on 60 Minutes, my gay Facebook “echo chamber” let out a sigh of relief because Trump said he’s “fine with gay marriage.” Update after update was very “maybe it won’t be so bad.” I get that the false security of strategic doublespeak from an empirically untrustworthy president-elect, with the most homophobic running mate available, must have felt nice. But no one was moved to post anything about another message Trump delivered: that women’s health progress is over. No one spoke out against Trump promising to simultaneously dismantle the Affordable Care Act and send abortion rights back to the states, two decisions that will drastically impact women everywhere. These men only heard, ‘We can still get married. Reconfirm the reservation at the Red Inn in Provincetown.’
When you hear that women are fearful of losing Obamacare, it’s not for the same reasons that you might be. Let me explain the difference so that you can never again say that you don’t understand. One of Obamacare’s most significant provisions is that — for the first time ever — insurance companies in all 50 states are required to offer prescriptive birth control to all women with no co-pay or deductible fees. The pill is a big fucking deal for women and not just to prevent pregnancy. Mistaking birth control as simply an “option” for only managing sexual activity — and not a crucial medication that also treats everything from anemia, excessive bleeding and intense pain, to fibroids, endometriosis and cancer — is sexist ignorance. To take those benefits away or once again make the pill financially inaccessible means that only rich women get relief from menstruation-related crippling pain that can last for two weeks a month or monthly migraines that can keep women bedridden for days. This future is so terrifying that huge numbers of women are currently enduring the invasive procedure of having an Intrauterine Birth Control Device implanted through their cervix. An IUD releases copper or artificial hormones to kill or block sperm and thin out the endometrial lining so periods are less intense. The upside of an IUD is that it can last from five to ten years (and therefore outlast Trump’s presidency); the downside is that it can be excruciatingly painful and come with serious side effects. It was reported that appointments for IUDs at Massachusetts Planned Parenthoods increased sixteen-fold in the two days following the election.
Now on to abortion. If you don’t follow these things, Trump’s position might seem benign enough — overturn Roe v. Wade and let abortion be decided state by state — unless you actually put yourself in the position of a woman living in a red state who finds herself with any version of an unwanted pregnancy and then has to finance and arrange cross-state travel to receive the procedure. It’s ridiculous. Once again, Republicans make a medical treatment for women available only to those who can afford it. Republicans are also using abortion to shut down Planned Parenthood, which provides low cost healthcare to 2.5 million women and men a year, including everything from STD testing, vaginal infection checks, pelvic exams, thyroid screenings, and abnormal bleeding exams. But because 3% of the treatments are abortion, the G.O.P. intends to halt government funding. Where these people will receive medical care after Republican interruption is unclear and apparently of no concern to Republicans. (Does your interest in Planned Parenthood change when you find out that they prescribe PrEP there?)
As an acupuncturist who extensively treats female health issues, I hear from women who are seriously scared by Trump and the Republicans. They are scared about a profound loss of autonomy. If you are “grossed out” by anything, it should be that people you love soon may not have access to life-saving preventative procedures like mammograms and breast cancer genetic screenings, or Pap smears to detect cervical cancer, all of which Obamacare made free of charge. It should gross you out that it took Obamacare to eliminate the “gender tax” that allowed health insurance companies to charge women as much as 80 percent more than men for the exact same benefits. It should gross you out that an IUD can cost $1000 or more without insurance. And it should gross you out that Mike Pence is so militantly anti-abortion, even in cases of genetic abnormality and rape, that he infamously closed so many Planned Parenthoods in Indiana that he inadvertently caused an HIV outbreak. But instead maybe what grosses you out is “icky vaginas.” Hilarious.
I am asking you to engage the world as an adult because the women in your life do not have the luxury of childishness. It has never been more important to identify with our allies and consider needs and concerns outside of one’s experience. Put to rest the convictions that our rights are the most fragile and that our persecution excuses us from deplorable behavior. There are so many women who have had your back. Like the women who worked as nurses to men dying of AIDS at the start of that health scare — when no one else would even touch them. Have some fucking respect.
I promise you, gynecology is not a threat to your gayness or masculinity or whatever else you think you’re defending. If you want to be a cunty queen, you can start by getting down with cunts.
