
Women Own Their Bodies & We Can Control Our Reproductive Process

The issue of paternity looms large in all authoritarian male dominated societies including America. Few men desire a sexually experienced woman so they continue their obsession with womb guarding and the insistence that women be virginal and we dare not interfere with “gods plan” once we become pregnant.
Now that we have RU486 the cats out of the bag so forget about using abortion as a political football in our government’s efforts to control us. Congress now has to face the fact that women own their bodies and we can control our reproductive process, so back the fuck off gentlemen!
I recently witnessed a young woman have an incredibly easy abortion by taking several pills. During a stressful phase, she lost track of her menstrual cycle and realized that her period was late. She got a pregnancy test at her local drug store and had the results instantly:
“Pregnant 3 weeks” the test read. She then called her local Planned Parenthood and was given a date three days later to pick up the necessary pills following a sonogram. The first pill simply left a metallic taste in her mouth. The second day after taking the other pills, she felt chilled and got under a down comforter in bed. This was followed by cramping, passing a few blood clots and bleeding similar to having a heavy period. The entire process only lasted three days.
The contrast between her legal abortion with RU486 pills and my illegal kitchen table abortion back in the fifties would turn any woman into a raging militant feminist. I had to make an appointment then wait a week to see a doctor who took a urine sample to send off to a lab of his choice. That meant several more days of agonized waiting for the results of the “rabbit test.” If I was pregnant, the rabbit’s ovaries would hemorrhage and in order to find out, they had to kill the rabbit.
The statement "The rabbit died," was a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test in the 1920’s throughout the 1950s. I suffered my horrendous abortion in 1953, but killing Peter Rabbit was the least of my concerns. (The details are in my recent self-published sexual memoir, My Romantic Love Wars.)
Fast forward twenty years to the early seventies and a self-help clinic in LA. The women were working toward abortion reform discovered a suction method of removing the uterine contents that revolutionized abortion techniques. They discovered articles in Russian and Chinese medical journals that showed hand operated vacuum equipment that recommended the procedure for contraceptive purposes. The process was not difficult to learn. The introduction of a four millimeter cannula (like a soda straw) into the uterus was not traumatic because the cervix didn’t have to be dilated. There was no cutting or scraping so anesthetics were not necessary and the suction was sufficient to extract most of a woman’s flow in about 30 minutes.
The fact that nearly any woman could learn the technique of menstrual extraction opened up many possibilities. Women could free themselves from heavy painful periods or avoid having one that interfered with travel, athletics or other events including getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy. Ten years later in 1981, the prestigious publishing house of Simon & Shuster put out a fully illustrated book A New View of a Woman’s Body authored by ten women who were part of the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers.
Chapter 8 was titled “Menstrual Extraction” that described and was beautifully illustrated how to perform suction menstrual extraction to empty the contents of the uterus. Imagine! Safe painless abortions done by women for women.
Oh! Oh! The old boys network finally realized that they were about to lose control of our wombs. At the end of the year, the book was discontinued and every single copy was removed from book store shelves. Ten years later in 1991, the book was re-distributed by the Feminist Health Press and is still available today.
While the self-help women in LA were liberating women from the limitations of their reproductive organs, in NYC I was teaching masturbation to liberate women from the male model of sexual response based upon “procreative sex” with the man on top thrusting and ejaculating inside a woman’s vagina. Since our clitorises were ignored, this rarely included orgasms for women who were supposed to have vaginal orgasms. At that time, sex professionals were still under the influence of Dr. Freud, an old Victorian psychiatrist who claimed clitoral orgasms were immature. What a crock of Jewish male propaganda religious crap.
Meanwhile, my Bodysex workshops were based upon the feminist grass roots initiative called CR or Consciousness Raising groups that were spreading throughout America. We began sharing our sexual experiences using “I” statements. In no time, we became aware of the absence of female orgasms and woman centered sex information in general. At the time I was having abundant orgasms alone and with my lover using an electric vibrator. I begin showing adult women how to harness the power of electric massage machines with the intent to awaken all of America’s sleeping clitorises. This turned into the Bodysex workshops that continue today.
I’d learned through experience that massage machines were so strong I needed to cushion the vibrations with some kind of fabric. I also realized that holding the vibrator in one place or applying pressure to increase arousal simply numbed out my nerve endings. The first massager was a Panabrator that was soon replaced by the Hitachi Magic Wand. Just recently, Mr. Hitachi removed his name from this popular massager but continues to make and sell millions thanks to me promoting it for the past forty years. Of course this was without any financial compensation. It never dawned on me to think in terms of getting paid for my endorsement. My background as a fine artist had trained me to base all of my creative efforts on the labor of love.
I wanted every feminist to become orgasmic so we would avoid abusing power like men had done for centuries. Unfortunately, those fast male ejaculations are not the same as having fulfilling and pleasurable orgasms. I believe that’s why we can send our young men off to kill innocent people in another war. Added to that, most American baby boys are sexually traumatized with unnecessary circumcision— a surgical procedure that removes the foreskin which is highly endowed with sensitive nerves similar to a clitoris. To make matters worse, online porn stands in for sex education that further trains boys to jack off fast too frequently hoping for a sense of completion that never happens.
My hope is that each woman who learns to enjoy fuller orgasms will teach each of her lovers how to slow down and experience fuller orgasms of his own. I’m still committed to the ideal that having consistent happy orgasms will heal, or at least modify, mankind’s tendency toward violence— Bodysex for men anyone?