The ins and outs of Plan B, because pregnancy is Plan Z

Left of lipstick: No girl guns: firearms are anti-feminist to the core

My cousin brought a gun to Thanksgiving dinner.
OK—he’s a cousin by marriage, but here’s what happened: he has a small pistol that he keeps in his pocket at all times. This is legal; he has a concealed carry license. We were all sitting around chatting after dinner, enjoying the post-meal lull, when he pulled it out and showed it to my brother. The idea here, I guess, is self-defense. After all, suburbia is a dangerous place for white, straight, tall men.
His wife, my cousin by blood, wants to get a gun too. Again, the idea is self-defense, but now it makes a little more sense. She’s a woman and sells real estate in the south, so she often goes to unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people by herself. This is a quasi-feminist rationale for gun ownership, and I almost get it. Almost.
My dad has a gun. It’s a 22-caliber pistol that he inherited from his father. It slumbers, useless in the basement, and the bullets are locked away upstairs. He has used it before, though, and so have I.
Last winter I went to a gun show in Kentucky, where I grew up, with my dad and a family friend.
The gun show sprawled through the convention center, and I wandered from booth to booth picking up the guns and weighing them in my hand. They had a satisfying heft. More often than not, the proprietor of the booth would address me, “Hey there, I’ve got something I think you’ll like, look over here.” He (the sellers, like the buyers, skewed heavily male) would gesture to the far end of his stand at two or three “girl guns.” Functionally, they were the same as the black and silver ones I was trying, but they were painted pink or leopard print. A few were bedazzled. You know, the way that women are.
“The only thing that can make a woman as strong as a man,” read a t-shirt on display, “is a gun.”
Can gun ownership be feminist? Guns grant women the same power to kill as they do men. They equalize our capacity for destruction.
Since the sexual assault on November 10 and the incident on Potter Street on November 17, women on campus have felt less safe. Consequentially, we are taking measures to make ourselves more powerful. We are taking self-defense classes and avoiding walking alone at night. I thought about buying pepper spray. I’ve begun to make my nightly trek from the library to my house clutching my keys between my fingers, brass knuckle style.
What is the endpoint of this logic? Armed self-defense. Guns. If it is my responsibility to keep myself safe, I will do it as well as I can. There is an organization built around the idea that women should have guns for self-defense called The Women’s Gun Zone.
But that logic is rotten to the core, and we have proof of it almost every day. The more people who own guns, women or not, the more people die by guns. Two weeks ago a gunman killed three people in a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs and shooters killed fourteen people and injured twenty-one in San Bernardino, California. I saw a Washington Post article on mass shootings a dozen times. Everywhere I read news was abuzz with condemnations and despair, again.
We are heartbroken and weary, but not shocked. Tragic murder by gun is not anomalous in the United States. How could anybody argue that now? It is built into the gun-loving system.
I have seen guns, I have touched them, I have fired them. Many people I love own guns. Many women I know own guns. This is my dream for the guns in the United States:
I want to take them all away. I want to knock on the door of every gun owning home in America, including those of my family and friends, and confiscate their firearms.
We will toss them all in a big pile. We will set it on fire.
I want us all to hold hands around this massive flaming pit and chant: No more guns. No more guns. No more guns.
This is unconstitutional, Julia, you say. This is too simple. You can’t do this.
You’re right. I’m telling you my fantasy, not my policy proposal.
If my choice is between unfettered government tyranny and rampant, toxic murder, give me tyranny. But that’s not a real option. Here are some real options: end gun shows, require gun licensing akin to driver’s licensing, undertake more thorough background checks, ban the sale of assault weapons, and extend the 24-hour waiting period and make it universal.
Although the world is doubtless an unsafe place for women, I do not buy the “feminist” spin on gun ownership: that it is the strongest, best form of self-defense. The culture that tells women to defend ourselves with guns is the same culture that gives rise to mass shootings.

Left of lipstick: Believing girls mature faster than boys hurts everyone

“Girls mature sooner than boys.” I’ve got a twin brother, so I heard this even more than most kids, and most kids hear it a lot. It’s the explanation for why girls paint each other’s toenails at slumber parties and boys try to burp the alphabet. It’s the reason parents trust 14-year-old girls to babysit their five-year-old kid. It’s why we’re not creeped out when an 18-year-old girl dates a 25-year-old guy. They may be seven years apart in experience, but emotionally they’re equally mature.
What constitutes maturity? I matured dentally very early. I got my wisdom teeth out when I was 15, which I think is interesting, but you probably don’t. Nobody cares how fast people lose their baby teeth. The maturity we’re talking about is the ability to handle responsibility. It’s doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s judging social situations and behaving appropriately in the context. It’s adhering to social norms. It’s not finding fart jokes funny. We talk about social constructs a lot here. Social construction might be in the drawer of things you’re tired of hearing about, nestled between “problematic” and “appropriation.” Sorry! Often we call something a social construct in order to dismiss it. “What are job applications, anyway? Employment is a social construct. Hahaha!”
This is silly because understanding social construction is really important. Calling gender a social construct means that it is something that we as a society make collectively, not something that “just is.” One of the ways we make gender is by telling and believing myths about how it “just is” that “girls just mature faster than boys.” From a constructivist perspective, it’s wrong because it relates maturity to biological characteristics. That’s enough. But that’s not enough for the world outside of academic feminism. It matters for the rest of us because it’s a myth that serves patriarchy (I know, again with the patriarchy!). To be clear, I mean something specific by patriarchy. It’s a system in which men, particularly old men, have economic and political power over everyone else.
The myth that girls mature faster than boys serves patriarchy in (at least) two ways. First, it justifies romantic relationships between older men and younger women in which there is a substantial power gap (see my column on relationships between upper- and underclass students). And second, it excuses hurtful or irresponsible behavior in men but not in women. The flipside of the first consequence is that we expect behavior of girls that we don’t expect of boys. Believing that girls become women earlier than boys become men is a way of justifying how much we ask of them. Emotional labor, or all of the “feelings” work that women do and men don’t (remembering birthdays, sending get-well-soon cards, giving emotional support), is an idea that’s gotten a lot of traction in the pop-feminist community recently. The teacher’s pets, the helpful daughters, the obliging sisters, they’re all doing work. Labor. And after a lifetime—or just an adolescence—it’s draining.
Somehow this maturity difference is still a thing that otherwise progressive people believe about gender. All too often I find myself nodding along, not sure how to suggest that I see things a little differently. So here it is: the belief that girls mature faster than boys is untrue, sexist and harmful.
My twin brother is more mature than I am by many counts. He works full-time, has bills and rent to pay and cooks all his meals. He thinks about health insurance and helping our dad around the house. Just because he’s a boy doesn’t mean he’s any less mature than I am—in fact, in some ways, he’s more mature. This goes to show, our maturity is developed by our social world, not determined by our gender—even though I did get my wisdom teeth out when I was 15.

Left of lipstick

The ins and outs of Plan B, because pregnancy is Plan Z

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Julia Mead

Columnist

February 4, 2016

It’s late. You’ve had a drink (or four). You’re in your room with a sexy someone going at it. Suddenly he stops and makes a face of horror. “I think the condom broke.”*

“Fuck,” you say.

“That’s the problem,” he says.

“Shit,” you say.

“Yeah, shit.”

After a debate about the impregnating power of precum (answer: it has none, but it can contain sperm from previous ejaculations) you decide on a course of action. It’s not ideal, since it’s the middle of the night, may cost some money and will probably feel embarrassing. But, given the circumstances, it’s the best you’ve got.
It’s time for Plan B.

(Or more accurately, it’s time for emergency contraception. There are a few types.)
If you, like me, binge-watched “Master of None” over break, this scene is familiar to you. Dev (Aziz Ansari), the main character, mitigates the embarrassment by buying Martinelli’s apple juice, which seems like a great idea to me. But y’all should know that there’s nothing embarrassing about avoiding unplanned pregnancy.

There are many reasons why a person might take the morning-after pill, and I’m not here to enumerate or judge them. Plenty of us have been in this situation and plenty more will be. I’ve been there (during my first year fall, incidentally), and it was fine. However, there are a few things I wish I had known.

Q: What exactly is emergency contraception?**
A: There are a few types: “ella” (ulipristal acetate), Plan B One-Step (what people are referring to when they say “Plan B” and also the most available option for Bowdoin students) and Next Choice One Dose (both levonorgestrel). Three years ago when I took Plan B it was two-step, meaning there were two pills that you had to take twelve hours apart. Now it’s just one. Wow, science!

Q: How does the morning after pill work?
A: It prevents the ovaries from releasing an egg. It takes up to six days after sex for this to happen, and if the egg stays out of the uterus it can’t hook up with the sperm. Boom! No babies.

Q: Is using emergency contraception bad for you?
A: Nope. No serious side effects have been reported. Some people have minor side effects, like nausea and breast tenderness. I had none, except for anxiety about where to throw the box away.

Q: Is the morning-after pill an abortion pill?
A: No, neither type of morning-after pill will end an existing pregnancy. The “abortion pill” refers to mifepristone and misoprostol, and you have a right to that too.

Q: How can I get emergency contraception at Bowdoin?
A: LISTEN UP, THIS IS IMPORTANT.

You can get FREE Plan B at the Bowdoin Health Center (they don’t prescribe ella). You call, make an appointment and pick it up. This is a little different from how it used to work. Peer Health used to do “Plan B Day,” where they gave away Plan B for students to have on hand. Now, you have to go to the Health Center to talk about “Plan A,” in order to get your Plan B. I know, the extra step sounds tedious. But it’s free, which is nice.

But the Health Center isn’t open on the weekends, I hear you thinking. When else would I need Plan B??

You’re right! LUCKILY, Bowdoin has this great deal where you can buy Plan B at Rite Aid and they will REIMBURSE YOU, as long as you bring your receipt back to the Health Center. Granted, it costs $49.99, which is an upfront chunk of change. If you ever go this route, I recommend you go Dutch.

Q: Who can buy the morning-after pill?
A: Anyone, any age, can buy Plan B over the counter without a prescription. However, you do need a prescription for ella. The politics of this are messy, but the trend is that emergency contraception is becoming more accessible in the United States.

Q: How long after unprotected sex is emergency contraception effective?
A: Five days, but Plan B is less effective the longer you wait. Ella is equally effective for all five days.

If you’ve got more questions you should probably holler at someone in the Health Center. I’m just a woman trying to de-stigmatize reproductive justice in print, not a medical professional.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention STIs (sexually transmitted infections), and I want to stay in Julie Gray’s good book. Taking emergency contraception won’t protect against STIs, and STIs are a concern for people of all genders and sexualities, so let’s all get tested regularly. Thankfully, the most common STIs in our demographic—gonorrhea and chlamydia—respond easily to antibiotics.

So go forth, UBears, and tackle your sexcapades with your brains turned on. Emergency contraception is an option, and we’ve all got the judgment to know when it’s the best one.

*I’m assuming a heterosexual couple and a female subject. Just writing from my experience here, folks.

**All the information in this column that seems to be researched is. I’ve relied heavily on the Planned Parenthood website and the expertise of Julie Gray, P.A. at the Health Center.

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