Why I'm Not Celebrating the Pill

Cross posted from my rh reality check blog post.

I’ve mentioned before that hippie immigrant Puerto Rican parents raised me in the US. One of the messages that was transmitted to me as a young Puerto Rican woman growing up was that the birth control pill kills Puerto Rican women. And it did.

Excuse me if I do not partake in all of the celebration of The 50th Anniversary of The Pill because from my perspective it is still very much a reminder of the exploitation and violation of human rights among Puerto Ricans (and Haitians, and working class women in general) that continues today. Ignoring this reality is easy. Yet, it is a part of my, our history that I can’t simply forget or overlook. If I choose to ignore this history I also choose to ignore the history of activism by members of my community that has helped to create change at an institutional level. Ignoring this reality and history also perpetuates the ideas that historically oppressed communities are not important in the work we do today.

There are some things I’m not ready to ignore or forge and many of those are the power of language. The adjectives used to describe members of my community are horrifying. I don’t care if it was how people spoke “in that time,” they were and remain inappropriate. To describe our homeland as “slums,” “jungles,” and our community as “undesirable,” “genetically inferior,” and “ignorant” is defendable? The ideology “that the poor, uneducated, women of Puerto Rico could follow the Pill regimen, then women anywhere in the world could too” is not condescending to you? Don’t be fooled. There was almost nothing that was “female controlled” or “empowering” about being a part of the trial for many participants, especially after they realized they were taking a medication that they did not know was not approved.

I remember reading the book Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill over a decade ago when I was in graduate school. The conversation we had as a group about the book shocked me. While I was sickened by the overt ethnocentrism, classism, ableism, xenophobia, and racism, other classmates were mostly intrigued by what the history was in the US. It was an extremely painful book for me to discuss with a group of 99 percent White people who viewed the history of my community as less than and Othered as fascinating. When I realized a yam in Mexico was a part of the early production of the pill and how the US obtained it, the inclusion of animal products that included pork and how some communities do not consume this product for various reasons, I was floored. Some classmates rolled their eyes at me as if I was making something out of nothing. To this day I’m surprised those people are now working within my community. I hope they have learned something over these ten years about the ways their thought processes isolated the people in the community they now try to provide services to. Engaging in these conversations continue to hurt.

Often, when I bring up this topic, I have people who say to me “but that was the ‘norm’ back then.” Just because it was/is the “norm” does not automatically make it “right.” Others have said to me “Look at how many people and families the pill as helped.” As if the lives of the women who were injured, died, or experienced some major side effects during the trials makes that ok. Who is thanking them? Who is remembering them? Then there are the “We need more of a biomedical model and not just a social one.” I don’t disagree, I just think that a biomedical model can also recognize how the field is constructed and given value by a society that gives it value (and money). I also think a biomedical model can be one that does not completely ignore a community response. Just because it has more money behind it does not make it better than other models.

On anniversaries such as these, I ask that we all take a moment and think about the people who have been directly impacted negatively during trials, especially when historically discussions are not comprehensive and exclude us. Also think about how pharmaceutical companies are still engaging in some questionable actions and continue to purchase land in Puerto Rico, which does bring jobs to the island, yet those jobs are not always permanent.

All these talks about Puerto Rico and our status, do people really think that big money corporations want to lose the ability to work in a “foreign” country with a completely different approach to taxes? Think about it and consider doing some research on your own.

Femme-Macho & Virgin-Whore Dichotomy circa 2004

I enjoy looking back at what I wrote in my blog over these past 5 years. There's a lot of growth that I can see and there is also a lot of similarities that I see remaining. This is exciting for me. I started writing online in 2004. Here's one of the first entries I ever published. Lots of ideas here; kind of incoherent at times, but important thought processes occurring.

Virgin/Whore Dichotomy?!

why am i and my latina homegirls plagued by the virgin/whore dichotomy!? why must we be seen as either sex feigns or virginal? what about women who buy into this only to say "i'm neither, i'm in the middle"? am i really a femme-macho for now. don't know what that is? check out aida hurtado's the color of privilege three blasphemies on race and feminism. hurtado defines a femme-macho as one who: unlike the virgin or the whore, can either be attractive or unattractive. A strong personality is what characterizes her. The strength of the femme-macho does not lie in her racial/physical appearance but, rather, on remaining emotionally uninvolved though sexually active.

The man’s challenge is to deflower the femme-macho emotionally. "The femme-macho can be sarcastic, funny, outrageous, aggressive, mean, or belligerent, but she cannot be tender, loving (except in a political or abstract sense), frightened, or insecure (p. 50-51). This description is in some ways liberating and in others restricting. A woman who chooses not to give up her ability to enjoy herself sexually, can only do so at the cost of not experiencing an emotional relationship with her partner(s).

The issue of fluidity comes into play when Hurtado states that the “femme-macho also plays with the notion of bisexuality” (p. 51). Identities such as bisexuality have not been discussed in Latina feminist literature, or queer literature, as much as lesbianism has. Hurtado used her discussion of femme-machos to discuss lesbianism in the Chicano community. In Gloria Anzaldúa’s book Borderland/La Frontera, she discusses her perspectives on the Chicano community and her lesbianism. Anzaldúa writes “I made the choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (emphasis Anzaldúa’s) (p. 41). Her statement to be queer speaks to her conscious decision to challenge stereotypes about women and the relationships they are capable of having and their positioning on the hierarchy Hurtado discusses.

Emma Pérez writes that the “arguments that men pass down to white women are passed down to us. We are forced to address issues as they define them, not as we define them. Our work reconstructs as much as it has always deconstructed the white-male order and white-feminist assumptions about women of color” (1991, p. 161). If anything, the virgin/whore dichotomy is not a Latino construct, it is a white one, along with ideas of machismo and Marianismo. The theories are backwards.

In Puerto Rico, traditional sexuality and relationship formation does not mean sexual oppression, traditional means historically known, autonomous, liberated sexuality, and oppressive and rigid sexuality and relationship formation is historically known to be a construction of colonizer’s “white” sexuality. The idea that Puerto Rican women, when sexually active, having more than one partner in their lifetime, and cohabitating with a partner, is not a result of acculturation to US society, but is actually a result of historical “traditional” Puerto Rican ways of living, loving and creating social support systems.

Attempts all racial/ethnic researchers, scholars, authors and others make to identify Latinas, especially Puerto Rican women’s, sexuality and relationships as dichotomous in a virgin/whore situation is inaccurate. I perceive this attempt to be a “new” and “modern” form of colonization of Puerto Rican women. Neocolonization doesn’t occur too far from “home,” and this example of Puerto Rico demonstrates that point.

I believe that it is appropriate to end this paper with a quote by Anzaldua. In her section “somos una gente” (we are one) she writes “I think we need to allow whites to be our allies…They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead” (p. 107). What is currently considered “liberated” white acculturated sexuality does not help Puerto Rican women and some Latinas, it is Puerto Rican women and Latinas helping liberate white sexuality.

I would rely on the memory of my mother telling me that I should live with a man for at least one year before marrying him. When I asked her why she said that, she responded that it was something she wished she had done before marrying my father (they have been separated for 10 years), that people change and that I will change and that I have to be aware and prepared for those changes before I get married and/or choose to share my life with someone.

Clearly, my Puerto Rican mother supports cohabitation and advocates it, she uses her own experiences to guide me towards a better understanding of my relationships and sexuality in hopes that I come to realizations about who I am and what I want, deserve, desire and need before I make life changing commitments. I believe this is her guiding me to creating and achieving what Chela Sandoval calls “revolutionary love.” June 8, 2004: 7:13 pm