From the Associated Press: FDA Eases Limits on Morning-After Pill

The good news: Women 18 and older can now obtain Plan B without a prescription. The bad news: Teenage girls still face restrictions.

A partial victory, however, is better than none at all. Readers of my private blog might recall an entry I wrote a few weeks ago about my own experiences with obtaining Plan B. In light of recent news, I have decided to repost it publicly here:

Excerpted from LiveJournal entry, “When Plan B is thrawted, what’s our Plan C?” (August 7, 2006)

I took Plan B for the first time last month. Since I’m not on the birth control pill, I wanted to play it safe when the condom slipped off. The entire process of obtaining a packet of Plan B was stressful in an already distressing situation — from locating a pharmacy that didn’t require a prescription to filling out the forms and having to use someone else’s address instead of my own. And I’m an adult who lives in Los Angeles. My experience made me empathize deeply with adolescent girls without understanding parents and with women residing in unaccommodating conservative areas. If it was such a disconcerting process for me, how terrible must it be for millions more out there?

I work, I go to Harvard, and I date guys who are MBA candidates. I’m not exactly the typical case study for the pitfalls of premarital sex. Still, if I found myself caught in a situation like that (through no fault of my own), how many other women out there are in the same position? Plan B is not just important for the poor or for the rich or for the uneducated or for the young. It’s important for all women. We shouldn’t have to suffer through an unnecessary bureaucratic struggle to locate it. Our government should be making it as easy as possible.

Will some people abuse Plan B’s over-the-counter availability, if legalized? Probably, but it’s their choice, their bodies, and their morality. That’s not for anyone else to regulate. So I find it repulsive and mind-boggling that against all common sense, the FDA continues to delay over-the-counter access to Plan B. This isn’t gun control here. This is uterus control. What happens when emergency contraception is rendered unattainable by our government? The answer: pregnancy followed by an abortion, miscarriage (not unlikely considering the stress), or childbirth, all potentially traumatizing and life-changing. How can a group of wealthy, white men decide the fate of millions of women, many of them with backgrounds unlike theirs?

Yet dishearteningly, it is proving far to difficult to obtain an abortion. For city dwellers, finding a clinic is inconvenient but not unrealistic. It’s a different story in less metropolitan areas. There is one abortion clinic left in the entire state of Mississippi. What are women supposed to do when their first option requires a prescription no one will give and their second option is virtually impossible?

There are no easy answers to these questions, though just about everyone seems to have one. There are people purporting to be the watchdogs of American morality. There are people claiming to look out for women’s health. What I don’t see is anyone taking care of women’s emotional well-being. And isn’t that what’s impacted most in the event of a pregnancy? Until legislators cease kowtowing to the religious right, women’s bodies and minds are the property of the US government.

I don’t think this is a liberal issue or a democratic issue. My Republican friends support my right to choose, as much as I support yours. We may not use this right, but it’s good to know it’s there, and I, for one, am going to be responsible about it. For millions of women, unfortunately, choice exists only in theory.

We met on the second night of school via our mutual friend Kam, although “met” implies handshakes and introductions while our meeting consisted of Kam escorting me from the door of a finals club to the door of my bedroom.

Immediately, she hated me. The feeling was more than mutual. She was the worst kind of abstinent. Laying no claim on holier-than-thou coolness, CK refrained from drugs, alcohol, and sex out of personal conviction alone. You could call her moral, but you wouldn’t dare call her straightedge. While she thought, “That rash, drunken whore is going to get herself killed,” I silently fumed, “Who is this short-haired, fully-clothed monster telling me what to do? Kam better get rid of this pint-sized bitch by morning.” Neither of us was particularly impressed with his taste in friends that night.

What followed that disastrous first encounter is a bit of a blur. Against all odds, we came around to liking each other. Precisely how, I can’t say because I barely remember. She informed the gay best friend that I was “actually cool” when sober. JB, in return, sang her praises. I decided that I was a fan of CK after all. After repeated run-ins through mutual friends, we became comfortable enough around each other to hang out, just us. One night in early fall, she stopped by my dorm room, upset at a guy’s inconsiderate actions. Mid-explanation, her voice cracked and eyes welled up. I didn’t expect it. The vulnerability she showed made the difference between friend and confidante. I trusted her completely after that.

Before two months had passed, we were living together. I relocated from my tense Canaday D suite into hers in the neighboring building. I liked her roommates better than my own. In a box by her closet, I kept a toothbrush, a towel, and flip-flops. Each evening between her sheets, I cradled my laptop, slept against her back, and crooned off-key the Bright Eyes that accompanied the late night. In the morning, I’d scurry down her stairs, across the courtyard, and up into my room where I quickly showered and changed. But after class and between meals, I’d be found in CK’s room more often than in mine, whether she was there with me or not. Sometimes, all the others were out, and they came home to no one but me, their adopted roommate, napping away in CK’s bed at the most content I’d been since college had begun.

I began to feel more comfortable in her skin than in my own. I took to wearing her clothes like I would wear a boyfriend’s, though I joked that her wardrobe (which ran more casual than mine) was reserved only for my grungy days. Her tshirts and sweatshirts and pants and even socks – they were all fair game, except for the size six shoes that would not fit. And although the mismatched outfits I constructed fit my frame, my appearance was that of a stranger invading fabrics not her own. I looked just as out-of-place in CK’s clothing as I did in the oversized garments of my male lovers.

At a concert a few weeks ago, I took notice of the two girls standng in front of me. Both were in their late adolescence, one short-haired and boyish and the other undeniably feminine. Face to face, they locked and unlocked their hands, swinging their arms to the music while watching the performance as much as they watched one another. Even the musician they were there to see couldn’t have tempted their gazes away from each other for too long. As I watched them, I couldn’t help but think of CK and me. Together, we are just like that, enveloped in each other’s presence and content to reside in a space apart from others. Together, we share thoughts too intimate to be communicated above a whisper. Together, we would have smiled at those girls, knowingly.

To my left, I heard a boy whisper to his friend a hushed message, indecipherable save for the word “lesbians.” I was less certain than he was that these girls were more than just friends. I had my doubts. What was undeniable, however, was that they were in love.

I object when people insist on labeling me bisexual – or worse, bicurious. They hear me profess my love for CK, and at once, they disregard the many, many male precedents who have come before and after her. CK is not a fetish. She is not an experiment. CK is not the exception to the rule even though she is far from the rule. I do not love her in spite of her womanhood, but because of it. Yet I hold no misconceptions about my overwhelming attraction toward men; I am not interested in women in that manner at all. I am not bicurious. I am CK-curious.

There is something about my relationship with CK that I have never been able to pinpoint. I think I now know what it is. Our relationship is marked by a level of emotional and physical intimacy unmatched by any relationship I have shared with another woman.

I love her. I love her in the way that I love my girlfriends, but in another way as well, not just unconditionally but intimately. I feel for her in a manner only a lover can. I appreciate qualities like her voice. I like it whether it is pitched high with laughter or dipped low with reprimand and concern. I like her when she is girlish and I like her when she is boyish, but mostly she’s in between. And I like that too. I like her deliciously disheveled as much as I like her when she is in stockings and pearls. I have picked up her habit of saying “baby” and her Southern accent is now more song to me than drawl.

It’s ironic that my first romance-related entry on Sex and the Ivy is about a woman. But perhaps, it is fitting, because loving CK taught me just how unimportant sex is. She has told me repeatedly that we would never work out romantically. Besides our insurmountable preference for men, we’d be faced with disagreements about all the essentials – money, lifestyle, and most importantly, sex. But in a relationship like ours, sex, for the first time, hardly matters.

While riding on the Metro 70 this morning, I saw the man beside me reach over to his female companion and pick something out of her hair. A year ago, I wouldn’t have thought twice about the gesture, but that was before I met CK.

CK is one of my closest friends at college. But more than that, she is also the first and only woman I have ever been romantically interested in. That fact is as public knowledge as it is a running joke. But it is also the truth.

Her hair and I are deeply involved. Poofy, unkempt, and unapologetically black, it shuns chemicals that threaten to smooth out its kinks. It has a life of its own. It has a spirit. My job is not to break that spirit, but to calm it. CK looks different when her tangles are neatly pried free. I wish I knew better how to handle black hair, because if I did, I’d pick out her hair completely for her. She rarely does it for herself, and so I find myself constantly retrieving odd pieces of paper and dust from her fro, when not busy taming it with my fingers.

CK doesn’t conform to traditional beauty standards — at all. And yet she has managed to capture my heart while piquing my sexual interest, no small task when considering that I am decidedly preoccupied with what our culture deems pretty. Here is a picture of her, if you can close your eyes and imagine: brown skin, full lips, big mouth, wide eyes, slender legs, round nose, and rounder bottom.

To me, CK is always attractive — but this is not merely an empty compliment I offer all my girlfriends. She is beautiful in a way that wine is better tasting once you have had a few sips to start. She is beautiful in the way that a lover is always beautiful. When she is fresh out of the shower, I sneak glances at her breasts and backside as she changes, because I might catch something new I haven’t discovered before on these seldom-seen spots. I have long determined through close observation that I have never seen a more beautiful body than hers.

For starters, CK has an amazing mouth. It is full and juicy, the most kissable I’ve ever encountered. Sometimes slick with gloss but usually bare, CK’s mouth is a contradiction of sorts. Peeks of metal and colored plastic hint at a tongue piercing, unexpected of this chaste Southern girl. The precise manner with which she bites down on her lower lip is altogether coy and disarmingly seductive. CK is a virgin. But of course.

Invariably, I am tempted to request a kiss, but the rare lip-to-lip contact she makes me crave often comes when I least expect it and never when I outright demand it. She is a frustrating lover who operates on a whim, most affectionate when least solicited.

CK is a small woman, and that too is part of her charm. She is compact, portable like me. Even with all her curves, CK is adorably petite, possessing a slender frame and the features of a cherub. Now that I have known the build of her body, I question whether I could ever be attracted to an Amazon, a taller, broad-shouldered species of girl. And the truth is, part of CK’s appeal lies in the fact that she reminds me astonishingly of me. We are girls who can be broken if squeezed a bit too hard, if pulled more forcefully than expected. And there is a kind of solidarity in living in the same five-foot-tall world.

This started as a piece about my relationship with CK’s hair but I realized in the middle of writing it that there is so much more that must be explained about her body and about her quirks in order to communicate the intimacy of my fingers working through her locks. So I will try, for the first time, to write more clearly than I ever have about what it means to love someone.

I am not Carrie Bradshaw.

Or Samantha Jones. Or for that matter, any of the Sex and the City women.

Nor do I aspire to be. But I’m not surprised by the parallels people have drawn between us. Long before I named this website, quoted Carrie on Facebook, or even referenced the show in my blogs, my friends tagged me as the younger, crazier version of Sex and the City’s protagonist. Wannabe columnists (but really, diarists), Carrie and I are chock full of frank and self-centric insights about men and sex. All I’m missing is a Manhattan zip code.

Chic comparison, right? Well, actually, it’s probably more trite than trendy to be likened to a fictional character. Carrie’s not even a good writer at that (have you heard the voiceovers?) Yet many people mistakenly believe that the resemblance is complimentary. After all, doesn’t this fashionable, unabashedly sex-loving feminist represent everything I stand for and others want to be? Not really — more like everything we should avoid. I’m sorry to say it, but I think American women have been had. Sexual liberation does not equate to promiscuity, and financial independence does not mean irresponsible consumerism. So unless the next wave of feminism champions hedonism, Sex and the City is hardly Generation Y’s answer to double standards and the glass ceiling. Simply put, Carrie is not someone to aspire to.

Why, then, do I watch the show, and why does this website carry its name? Besides morbid curiosity and the need for a catchy title, I’ve come to realize that although I am not Carrie, she is most certainly me and in fact, every other woman out there. Producer Darren Star delivered a goddess made in our own image. At the core, Ms. Bradshaw and each of her friends represent the very parts of ourselves. But these women are just one side to who we are, and that’s an important distinction to make. Most of us are more than shoppers and girlfriends and exes. We are not necessarily white or wealthy or even straight. And hopefully, we have something to offer beyond Vogue-worthy wardrobes and mind-blowing head (no pun intended).

Sex and the City is called a guilty pleasure for a reason. It is about the superficial. It is not the big picture, but it is a picture of what happiness might look like with enough swipes of the plastic. It is the ultimate incarnation of our id and our insecurities. And as a television show marketed via wish fulfillment, Sex and the City delivers on what we’re after most: reassurance. We look toward the four lead characters as girlfriends with valuable opinions, as comrades on the frontlines of love, but most knowingly, as reflections of who we are ourselves. Therein lies the appeal of Sex and the City. Although Carrie isn’t perfect, she winds up being okay. We want desperately to believe that if she can succeed, so can we. We cling to the hope that we all have a chance at happiness — commitment-phobes, romantics, and workaholics alike. But unfortunately, Manolo Blahniks don’t lead you down the path to contentment and one-night stands aren’t the cure for heartbreak. The only part of Sex and the City we’re really after is the happy ending, and that is far more difficult to write into the script of real life.

Carrie — with her insecurities, neuroses, and all — is more us than we were ever her. But just think, if Sex and the City represents the worst in us, then there is so much unrealized potential for the best. So I am not Carrie Bradshaw, and neither are you. We are much, much more.