Another cookie with a disclaimer: this is not intended nor should be used as medical advice. This essay was originally drafted in 2015. How many years does it take to work up the nerve to openly share a curiosity? Turns out quite a many. Disclaimery done, onward, or as one of my favourite friends says “anygo”:
Birth control pills were supposed to equate to female empowerment and better life outcomes. The little dab of supposedly inconsequential hormone protected women from some consequences of intimate acts, furthered the unburdening of male contraception and responsibility. Retrospectively, it all seems even more unfair. Women (whether wishing to conceive or not) live knowing they’re responsible for life.
So no wonder the pill often sounded as a wonderful idea to a great lot of people, and still does. As arguments have the tendency to slide way right into slippery slopes of religious dogma, or far left into patriarchal hate, backed by the buttressed catapults from institutions including academies, or the appropriated science of dramatic comedies, let this article not become another stone to cast from a glass home, but an invitation to welcome individual choices despite social influences.
A phrase I kept getting snared on over the years was something like this: “We will really take our power back now.” Was the power gone? Who and where did the power really go to? and the power to what? to have or not have children? Again, the cookie in this week’s jar is not to tell anyone how or what to think, but consider the implications of engaging in intercourse void of the consequences in generating life.
The pill created a sort of false equivalence then, making the women’s body a terrain saved from the reality of conceiving. And while the false sameness was aimed to protect women from their own decisions, what ended up happening also effected men from conse-questions of decisions. As so often I have fallen face-to-face with reality from the height of idealism, the conflict between the real and ideal, ahem, is birthed right through the bio-logic.
The processes at stake by ingesting pills to alter fertility both rationally and actually impacts biological processes. The human nervous system connects with subtle, perhaps considered too subtle to matter, motives related to cognition. Popular cognition categorised as bias, as rational, as idiotic, manipulative, mythological, or at times honest. So when it comes to common sense, the ideas that move into action, quite obviously implicate subtle scent mechanisms related to attraction and behavioural motivation.
At risk of seeming fundamentalist, dominant belief does not always align with the way nature processes work. Humans, thus far, are not cars or robots to exchange parts on. How much of our psychic and mental realm impart onto the physical is a not a pseudo-science any longer. The metaphysical and material questions once reserved for esoteric seekers has breached the realm of social media influencers. I’m not sure which is spookier, individually or institutionally driven thought policing. Again, this article is not to tell anyone how to think, but rather share a reflection I’ve ruminated on and finally wondered if anyone else has wondered about the same thing.
I have never met a human who pretends to be able to reverse the consequences set forth, by the laws of entropy or others. The unfurling chaos organised by the elements of matter themselves, are not only believed to be manipulatable but are delved deeply into by the field of psychobiology.
Hormones, similar but different to minds, are manipulate-able. So of course hormones drive the body. Who we are attracted to, has so much to do with senses, and the dreaded black hole of: getting needs met.
Thankfully a friend told me to look up the meaning of need and getting. The relationship to lack was irrefutable. How many decades have passed carelessly using the word “need” when it has such a close relationship to death or demise through etymological meaning.
The other risk in this cookie are the lovely cake-like kind: black and white. Thankfully such personal and sensorial choices are not split down the middle dualism. There’s a spectrum and zones of dynamics within nature we appear to exist within. Nature permits all behaviours, from calm to tempests, and subjectively individuals have a tendency to experience “karmic whiplash,” a type of ideological physics.
Since we are fully engaged in the methods of technocratic prophesying, did anyone consider whether or not it matters to the life a generation or two after, the attraction to an individual under hormonal change would be different than when unadulterated? How many women and men found themselves in bed with who was later found out to be the enemy. Could the ideologically justified manipulation of hormones become projected expectation?
The gap existing between expectation and lived experience is often closed by the practice of data. Data posing or posturing as accepted fact. What about data that conflicts with the trends? Are the errant variables made invisible for the sake of convenience? And if forcing silence is the first act of violence, who makes space for the quieter, inner voice to come forth amongst the roar of the masses?
As Ann Crittendom wrote in The Price of Motherhood, the social policy around devaluing life has been in play for 100’s of years. As history reveals, anything is not possible. Some things fail, even well intended ideals fail. The Jurassic Museum of Technology in Culver City had quite the display of all the wise-ideas humanity had before, many of which are frankly grotesque. How many of today’s popular ideas will be looked back upon with horror and wonder?
So I kept on wondering, often looking at the practice of bonsai tree growing as a metaphor: bending growth without breaking, coaxing life to grow in a particular manner. Are the gaps of fiscal wealth, arguments and finger-pointing about systems, are churches or yoga and spiritual retreats the only spaces available for matters of soul/psyche and health? Of course not, a bus ride, or walk to work offers time to consider the din of instability found in ideal-reality conflicts. The crooked bonsai trees varying in degrees of victim blaming or pity shouting, finger pointing and responsibility dodging. Reverence is not only for the faithfully pious.
Yet in our age of plenty, daily reverence can become wholly different. Perhaps the respect for being alive, graciousness in existence, to experience wonder and awe at the complexity of life, arriving through understanding: no matter how great we think we are at manipulating outcomes in life, the quiet call of intuition cannot be ignored.
Forget karma, sleeping pills, or other short cuts to spiritual peace. Life in the now is a concept that is free, yet sells so many books. Perhaps due to that which is free is also bound by responsibility, and that is where we seek guides, leaders, or maps of existence. An external object ingested, becomes a tool of empowerment, when it’s digested. The thing I’ve noticed about digestion and passing responsibility batons from one hand to another, the harder the ricochet back to reality becomes. This experience has not shown itself as a belief, but an empirical experience.
Questions are momentum sloggers, opportunities for resistance, conflict, and growth through different choices. And since the lunging forward of progress shoved many back into our proverbial cribs the last couple of years, the playground of work and shared labor does not have to remain closed off behind the screens.
The notion of Progress does not have to remain in limbo as a regressive condition. The invention of lack was not only invented, but proliferated because children (the inexperienced) and those who never stepped outside their own systems of beliefs are also prone to naïveté, and fall for beliefs, myths, and trusted institutions to guide personal, life choices.
Is Western society actually individualistic, and to what extent are such rogue thoughts tolerated when so many of the critical life choices are expected to be taken on lightly? Have we already formed a snowballing of mass consensus, with each passing generation? Does belief in a class-based moral superiority supersede the bounds of bodily sovereignty? Because if the responsibility for life comes down to who pays, then the question is what are we paying with?
For as advanced as we go moving forward, the value of keeping our mammalian agency in tact is something that seems to inspire fear of revolution, but can also serve as a method of prevention. What if the power was not in pills or doing more, but in choosing more carefully? Instead of drawing false equivalencies to remedy emotional reactions, motives in behaviours might be more peacefully addressed interpersonally instead of systemically. What would a culture that matures men, women, and humans overall look like? That is a myth I am interested in telling the next generations.
A sense of control