By now, most of you will have heard Santorum funder Friess’ stunningly out-of-touch answer to “this contraceptive thing.” My gosh, back when people weren’t “so preoccupied with sex,” he said, “they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”
Sheesh, just what era does Friess think he’s taking us back to anyway? The 50′s? Yes, I did a lot of knee clenching back then. But not in that silly way, and not, as Friess seems to suggest, because I was obedient to social rules or immune to sexual desire. It wasn’t contraceptive strategy on my part so much as gut reaction to man-in-the-flesh (locking him out even as I reveled afterward in fuzzy erotic fantasy). And it certainly didn’t answer historic problems of birth control that I heard about from my mother, who seemed to associate them with a certain male indifference to reproductive reality.
“Come back after you’re married, dear,” Mother’s English doctor told her when she sought to be fitted for a diaphragm in 1931. Not very helpful of him–by then, of course, she was already pregnant, though not as catastrophically so as women living under the shadow of the “anti-obscenity” Comstock Laws in America. Women from the teeming slums of NYC’s Lower East Side, trapped in grinding poverty and endless childbearing. It was they who propelled Margaret Sanger, already determined to escape the fate of her own mother (who died at fifty, after 18 pregnancies in 22 years!) into writing and acting, setting up the first US birth control clinic in 1916, getting arrested for distributing contraceptive information and convicted by a trial judge who held that women did not have “the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception.” (And men did?)
“Tell Jake to sleep on the roof,” the doctor told Sadie Sachs in 1912, when the bitterly poor mother-of-three pleaded for contraceptive help, and Margaret Sanger sat by as attending obstetrical nurse, her lips sealed. Three months later, Sadie died of yet another botched home abortion . . . and Sanger gave up her nursing job to become a full scale activist in the cause of birth control (her term–sensitive allies preferred “planned parenthood”).
So here we are a full century later, with the organization Sanger founded on first-hand experience (and in response to hundreds of thousands of letters she received in the 1920′s) vilified by Santorum and other “pro-lifers”! With this idiot of a man giving singularly unhelpful contraceptive advice. And using one of my tropes to do so? Clenched knees are indeed a big deal in my website (especially in “Pastoral misadventure: the scene that nobody wants”) but I’m having trouble imagining Friess as one of my readers. . . .