In Corpore Vulgaro
In Corpore Vulgaro
In defense of talking about vaginas at the abortion protest
I. Shit. Fuck. Piss. Pussy. Cunt. Cock. Pussy, pussy, pussy.
I hope that did the job of weeding out any sanctimonious types early enough. This is not a conversation, this is my rant. This is not a conversation, this is a furious vomit-like cathartic release of nearly 25 years of living in a shape this world likes to hate. This is not a conversation, this never was a conversation, you were not invited to participate because this does not concern you.
II. The right wing has won because I am terrified of my body.
I am terrified of my period because that means my budget for that week will take a hit because menstrual products are so expensive here but I am terrified of not getting it because that would mean I am pregnant (even though I have been unintentionally celibate for several years now, thanks pandemic) and being pregnant is terrifying.
Being pregnant is terrifying enough, when you’re already nervous about having a uterus like me, reading some of the symptoms and side-effects feels like getting dropped on your head into a horror movie where everyone around me is smiling at me with too wide teeth and I would just desperately love to change the channel.
I am terrified of being pregnant and watching this unwanted thing grow inside me and not being able to do anything about it because someone said God said so but everyone forgets that in the Bible, God asks Mary first and in this hypothetical situation I’m pretty sure nobody asked me because I would have very emphatically said no thank you.
I am terrified of being pregnant and wanting my child, which is something I assume might happen in a few years (despite my vulgarity in my little Internet essays I think that I would make a decent mother), and then of having to give birth. Where should I give birth? In Croatia, where I live, where the state of maternal care is a joke and in certain hospitals you can’t even get an epidural outside of certain hours? In the United States, the other country of my citizenship, which has the highest rates of maternal death in the so-called developed world and where I would potentially pay thousands of dollars for the privilege of maybe dying as a squalling infant plops out of my vagina?
The right wing in both countries and in so many other places has made it so. The right wing has made it so, the right wing presses in on my body and I look at my body and I look at my body’s potential to destroy my life in a way that it can’t for my brother or my guy friends and I am scared.
III. They can do anything they want to us, but we can’t talk about it.
Last Thursday, thousands of people in several Croatian cities turned out to protest for abortion rights. The catalyst for the protests was the case of one woman, Mirela Čavajda, who was denied her legally guaranteed right to an abortion after doctors discovered her fetus has a fatal brain tumor, but it was about more than her. It was about the general state of reproductive rights and women’s rights in Croatia, a state of disarray.
The signs were vulgar. The chants were angry. One group of artistic protesters brought a hyperrealistic painting of a bloody vagina. The signs were vulgar, I would argue that the state of affairs we were protesting is far more vulgar, but many men seem not to agree. One man on Croatian Twitter called the vulgar language and insulting posters of activists, “counterproductive and above all, stupid,” claiming that it pushed him away from joining the march even though he agreed with our goals.
He quickly got roasted, but it’s not just him. It’s not even just random Twitter men—a few years ago, the president of the Croatian Sabor told a colleague after she shared her story of medical malpractice during a miscarriage to advocate for better women’s health, “come on don’t do this, now you’re sharing a very personal thing and putting me in an uncomfortable position.”
I hate these men more than I hate the thousands of Jesus-loving freaks that thundered through my city a few days after our protest claiming to defend the right to life (including one very confused granny claiming life begins at erection). At least the Jesus-loving freaks are honest about hating me. These guys are genuinely convinced they’re on my side and the side of thousands of oppressed women, if we could just be a little quieter when the doctors are scraping away at us with no anesthetic, the game is on.
IV. Vulgarity is a tool.
The feminist Mona Eltahawy emphasizes the importance of profanity and vulgarity in her work and in feminism as a whole, often bringing up the work of Ugandan advocate Stella Nyanzi. “Profanity is the verbal equivalent of civil disobedience,” she says, explaining that patriarchy gets reinforced every time people react with more intensity towards women and girls swearing than at the systems keeping us down.
Vulgarity is a tool. It is certainly not the only one (I’m inclined to think Eltahawy sometimes assigns a bit too much importance to the word “fuck”). I also agree that it is not always appropriate. After the protest, I had a rather interesting conversation with an old friend who I know supports feminism as completely as any man can, but was worried that some of the more aggressive anti-Catholic language around this fight might make it harder to find common ground with more religious members of our society. We managed to agree in the end that neither of us should start a conversation with our Catholic relatives with “keep your rosaries out of my ovaries” if we want to change their mind, but that wasn’t the purpose of the protest anyway and language policing isn’t appropriate at a protest where people gathered to express their anger.
Vulgarity is a tool, because it says that the normative forces have not completely shut out dissent. It is a medium for expressing anger, and anger makes foundations that are already rotten to the core shake.
If vulgarity is a tool, then so is tone-policing. Whether those men who engage in it think they are good men or not is not a question I find particularly interesting. What I’m more interested in is the effect of what they do. When we have to defend our right to tell Vili Beroš “mrš u pičku materinu” at a protest against the corrupt health system he runs, that’s less time to engage in productive work. If we decide to listen to concern trolls and spend time policing each other’s language, we spend more time fighting and monitoring each other than the enemies that want to crush us. Tone-policing is almost always a tool of the oppressor.
V. I may be afraid of my body, but when I curse, the right wing is afraid of me.
Croatian attitudes towards women are sometimes so backwards, my Armada cousin (hardly a social progressive) once grumbled that he wished our grandmother would join the 19th century if the 21st was too much of a stretch.
I’m supposed to be quiet. I’m supposed to be faithful. I’m supposed to be shy, submissive, subservient, and since I am almost 25, I am probably supposed to be married by now.
I occasionally inhabit some of these roles to smooth over disagreements when I’m with my family, but I’m none of those things. I’m pretty loud, I’m tattooed, I’m pierced, I’m bisexual, and ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always been very, very angry. When I’m angry the profanity pours out of my mouth and some people still jump at that more than they do when my brother does it.
I said earlier that vulgarity is a tool, and it can be useful. But I don’t like it because it’s useful. I like it because it’s fun. I like it because it disrupts these comfortable sanctimonious wannabe patriarchs, it makes them surprised and uncomfortable, if it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that they’re scared. It’s a victory every time I make their day a little bit worse because I was myself in public.
It’s a small victory, I never claimed it was a large one. But some days, myself and the other women fighting against the same exact shit all over the world get so few of them, even the small ones feel like mountains.
And I’ll be fucking damned before I let some sanctimonious tone-policing Internet freak take even one of those small victories from me.