If you have a few minutes, read this article about initiatives to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students.  If you don’t, here’s a summary: community colleges don’t have health centers, and often CCs serve populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to birth control, for financial, logistical, or other reasons.  So, says this article, we need to get those kinds of services onto CC campuses in order to help young women prevent unplanned pregnancies and thus finish their CC degrees.  Long story short: info and services related to pregnancy prevention shouldn’t be limited to high schools.

Ok, so.  I’m kind of surprised by my reaction to this.  Because, on the one hand, yes, unwanted unplanned pregnancies suck ass, and if you find yourself in that situation, it’s important to have access to birth control, emergency contraception, or abortion.

However.

Doesn’t this stink a little bit of classism to y’all? I’m not talking about the issue itself, I’m talking about the way the issue is treated in the article.  The assertion is that unplanned pregnancies occur in high rates among single women in their 20s, and that these pregnancies are probably unwanted, and if they are wanted, they shouldn’t be.

Right? Is that how it sounds? Or am I getting all weird and fundamentalist-y?

I guess I’m bothered by that core assumption that unplanned pregnancy = unwanted pregnancy. I’m also bothered by the notion that a pregnancy must be either wanted 100% or unwanted 100%.  Can I get a little nuance up in here?  Because I hate to break it to the patriarchy, but a good lot of us hover around the 50-90% mark most of the time.  When I found out I was pregnant, I freaked the hell out.  I didn’t actively consider abortion, but I did think, “Well, this isn’t the best time for this, and I’m not sure I can handle this.” Am I glad I’ve got a little dude sleeping on my belly right now?  Indeed.  But that doesn’t mean I was dreaming of onesies and playgroups from day one.*

So I guess what bugs me is this: my pregnancy was unplanned, but hey, that’s cool with my university because I’m 30 and married, and I’m in school but I’ve already got an M.A.  So finishing my degree isn’t that important to anyone but me and the fam.**  But if you’re, say, 21 and unmarried, all of the sudden folks have the right to judge the appropriateness of your pregnancy to their institution. NOT that people didn’t judge mine, and continue to judge it.  But those are individuals, not systems, doing the judging.  Big Difference.

Again, I’m not saying that these services SHOULDN’T be provided, because we all know that one thing this country definitely needs more of is cheap and convenient access to birth control. But by likening CCs to high schools, you’re saying that a 25 year old is as immature and incapable of making decisions as a 15 year old, and that’s just not true.  It’s troubling, too, that the people who want to help women gain access to birth control sound just as controlling and condescending as the people who want to take away our right to abortion.

Perhaps most of all I’m bothered by the emphasis on “retention rates,” which, again, would be cool if The Man were worried about the fact that these women want, and need, to get their degrees.  But what they’re really worried about is money, and the fact that pregnant student = drop out = less money in the bank for the CC.  Show me a woman-centered approach to this topic (free day care, anyone?), and maybe we can talk.

*Let me just remind everyone that we actually thought we were going into this marriage with fertility problems, so on one level we were SUPER super happy to know that we could conceive.  But we obviously didn’t time it, because we didn’t think we had anything to time.  So it was a bit of a mindfuck of, hey, praise be! my uterus works!  But, um, did it have to work right now?  BUT! Don’t take it away, god-like entity who might punish me for not being thankful 24/7!  Yeah, because in addition to the whole “your baby might not have a chin! and you might need an abortion at 22 weeks!” thing, we didn’t think we’d be able to get pregnant without the help of Science. So when I freaked out about being pregnant I automatically assumed that Ye Gods would have their way with me because I didn’t leave cookies on the hearth in their honor or something.  And to a degree, I still freak out about that, which is why I’m always qualifying statements about the unplanniness of The Baby.

** They’re also spending more on me than they make, but that’s a whole other issue.

So I mentioned below that I plan to embark on Infinite Summer in a few days.  I’m also planning to take Wizard along for the ride.  We’ve never “co-read” anything, partly because I read for work and partly because our tastes diverge quite a bit (oh, and partly because we’re not really the co-reading type, by which I mean we don’t tend to bathe in the sicksweet vomit of our love).  He’s mainly a space opera sort, though the range of what he reads outside that genre is wide (Plath, Rimbaud [really?], Coupland, etc.).  I’m more narrow-minded because of the whole exams/proposal/dissertation hole I’ve been stuck in the past few years.  This project will actually be the first time I’ve read for “fun”–not for the diss, not for conference work–in a long time.

I’ve taught post-1945 lit, and I spend my days and nights with millennial lit, and yet I’ve read little DFW beyond a few short pieces that were thrust upon me by an enthused officemate awhile back.  I know what I’m in for–the footnotes, the loopdiloopy plots, the heft and weight of 1000 pages–and yet I don’t look at DFW with the same glare I usually direct toward popular young white male authors (though to be fair, I don’t glare at Franzen or Foer either, so maybe I’m getting soft).  The fondness I have for him, I think, stems from the fact that I don’t think he’s a trickster for trickster’s sake.  That is, I don’t think the footnotes, the plot jumps, the confusion, are inserted into the story because he desperately wanted to earn his pomo cred.  Rather, I sense that he felt those things were integral to the story itself (whatever that story is–I haven’t read any of the overviews or reader guides, and I haven’t brushed up on Hamlet, either).

That said, who knows if I’m going to get through it.  I have a lot of excuses:  the baby, the diss, the advisor I’m currently avoiding.  Oh, and there’s also the abhorrent lack of discipline that has characterized me and my work since, like, September.  Maybe if someone made me a set of bookmarks to guide me through the dissertation I’d have a chapter written by now.  Oh, and I don’t actually have a copy of the book yet because I haven’t made it to the bookstore (thanks, baby!).

So.  Here we go.  75 pages a week.  Back in the day, 75 pages a week would have meant I was rapidly failing out of school.  Back in the day, kids.  Now it’s a fair but possibly unreachable goal.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Some people are very good at weekly features.  I’m not one of them.  But I am in favor of keeping this whole posting thing going, so here are some baby feet from back in April:

By the way, I’ve done two work-positive things this week:  I’ve committed to the diss. writing group at school and have decided to go ahead with Infinite Summer.  It has nothing to with the diss, but it is post-1945 lit (my area), so I’m counting it.

I know, I know, I prefer the alliteration of “Photo Friday” too, but I was away from the desk, eating this pizza and doing various and sundry things in Chicago.

Eating the food a city is famous for is generally lame and unsatisfying, though this was more a case of “it didn’t suck, and it cost five dollars, so it’s a win.”  Props to Chicago for also sporting many and generally good coffee shops.  I’m a fan of any place whose decaf (I told you I was cutting back) iced coffee doesn’t taste like ass.

Alright, enough with the procrastination.  Must go back to reading Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, which may or may not be diss material but is most certainly enjoyable so far.

I want to set up my blog roll, so I’m reading through my rss reader (my life has been oh-so-much better since the coming of the google reader, even though I thought it would be worse, i.e. that I’d get even less work done). What reflection brings, after a season of blind clicking-and-subscribing, is the knowledge that I read a lot of college blogs.  How come?

1. My social life in college?  Nonexistent. In four years, I made two good friends and one “she hangs out with me ’cause I make her look pretty” acquaintance.  That’s it.  I spent all my time studying.  I probably went out more with my professors than with my peer group.  That’s a good thing, I think; there comes a time in every future academic’s life when her professors say, “hey, you should do this for a living,” and from that point on you are a made (wo)man.  What this means, though, is that I still have no idea what people actually do when they’re in college.  I was too busy being valedictorian to care about parties-drugs-sex-drinking-drama.  Some college blogs are fun for me because they prompt me to say aloud, “but when do they go to class?” which makes me feel simultaneously superior and inferior, the queen of restraint and the silly prude.  Others are fun because, after years of teaching automatons and grade grubbers, sometimes it’s nice to find out that “normal” students still exist (“normal”=similar to me).
2. I can’t find my peer group in the blogosphere. Call it bad research habits, call it failure to research at all, but I just can’t find a group of people doing “what I do.”  What I do is 20th century literature in general, a dissertation on the same in particular.  I’ve just started the process, and oh but wouldn’t I love to find a bunch of people in the same predicament.  I’ve found a lot of freshly-minted Ph.D.s, but their problems are not mine.  And I’ve found a lot of literary-minded folks, but they’re mostly 18th-century people, or medievalists.  Why are the medievalists so well-organized and so fond of emergent technologies?  Maybe the problem is that 20th-century people are so eclectic.  We study literature, yes, but also moviesradiotvmyspaceblogschapbooksetc.  So it’s not as easy to find someone studying what I study as it is to find, say, the Swift Scholars Webring.