A guest post by Chanel Dubofsky. 

The first time I escorted at a clinic, it was at a Planned Parenthood in New York City. For the most part,  the protesters stayed across the street from the clinic, praying, holding a giant wooden cross, but some of them spread out onto nearby street corners and attempted to pass out “literature.” I was nervous about interacting with the antis,  being physically attacked, but mostly, screwing up.  The main job of a clinic escort is to make sure the patients can get into the clinic, with the minimum amount of harassment. Under no circumstances are you to escalate the situation by arguing with the antis. On one hand, it’s a lot of standing around, and on the other, you’re always looking around, up the street, down the street, behind you. Every moment matters.

Mostly, I opened doors for women and men and small children, who kept their eyes down and hustled inside quickly. It was relatively low activity kind of day, according to the other escorts. The more aggressive antis hadn’t shown up. The folks with the cross left earlier than usual. I went home atnoon, exhausted.

The second time I escorted was in May, in Los Angeles with LA for Choice. I’m not sure what I thought would happen, but it was very different from my Planned Parenthood experience-more antis, more aggression, more required from the escorts. I was testing myself, I think. (Can I do this, even when it’s scary?)

Saturday, May 25

8:30 am: I’m not caffeinated and I haven’t had enough sleep, because, even after almost a week, my brain and body have still not adjusted to California time. I hope I’m sharp enough to do this.

9:00 am: (Still not caffeinated. Who do I think I am?) There are four of us, wearing orange tank tops that say “Pro choice Clinic Escort.” Antis, mostly women of color with rosaries, amass,  some on  the sidewalk in front of clinic, others leaning against the window of the T Mobile store. They start to pray loudly in Spanish. A tall, white man in a black coat, wearing sunglasses, stands near them. The other escorts recognize him. When people walk by, he tries to give them business cards that have a pictures of a fetus in utero on them, as well as a pool of bloody sludge which are supposed to be the “remains”. Some take them without looking at them.  G, an escort, says to a woman who has a card in her hand, “I can take that from you if you want.” She shakes her head and keeps walking.

9.15 am: It occurs to me that what the man is doing with the cards is actually violent. Maybe people take it and don’t look at it right away, and then they’re halfway down the street, or inside the brunch place near the clinic, or in the clinic, and then they look down, and they’re horrified, triggered, angry. But this is what he wants.

10.00 am:  Another white man, this one wearing white pants and a white shirt, shakes hands with the man who’s been handing out the cards. Lots of eye contact, nodding, and smiling with the women praying loudly.  White Shirt pulls out a cell phone, moves to the corner of the T Mobile store window. He’s really close to blocking the sidewalk leading to the clinic. An escort sidles up to him. He turns around and goes back to his original spot, still talking on the phone. We talk amongst ourselves: Does he seriously think we believe he’s looking for privacy to make a call?

10:15 am: Business Card Man walks away from the window towards the driveway, presumably so he can hand things to the people approaching from that direction. I follow him, stand beside him. I don’t make eye contact. He moves back after a few moments. This is physical in a way that’s different from my first experience-we’re using our bodies more actively, more directly. We spread out, we cover, we go where they go.

11: 00 am: A woman arrives. She’s a regular. She has a sign that says “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. God.” Predictably, there’s a picture of a fetus on it. (Are there ever any antis who aren’t religious?) She stands near the driveway. N, another escort and I follow her.  She faces the road for a while, holding her sign up so drivers in passing cars can see it. Then she turns to us. “Do you like that babies are getting murdered in there?” she asks. “Does that make you happy when you get up in the morning? Does it make you say ‘yay’?” I have no idea what to do. “You don’t have to say anything,” N tells me. “We try not to do anything that escalates the situation.” “Do you know about Kermit Gosnell? He murdered babies. He cut off their arms and legs. But you wouldn’t know about that.” N and I ignore her. She stops talking to us and turns back to the road.

11.15 am:   A couple walking by stops to check out the scene. The woman  who talked to N and I about Gosnell tells them that “people inside are murdering babies.” S, an escort, positions himself near them. (Sometimes people talk to the antis, and it’s okay to let that happen, unless it’s clear that they want out of the conversation.) I can’t hear what’s being said, but the couple seems attentive. They don’t want rescuing.

11:30 am:  A woman stops to tells us that she’s on the board of a family planning clinic in Cleveland. “I am shocked,” she says, “that you have to deal with this bullshit here.”

12: 00 pm:  A man and woman walk through the protesters towards the clinic. There’s a little kid in pink pajamas between them. They’re all holding hands, tightly.

By 12.30, the antis are gone. The clinic stops taking appointments at one. We take off our orange shirts and bring them back inside the clinic. I keep looking around, expecting a mob with crosses and signs to come streaming around the corner, but it doesn’t happen. I get in the car with N and S, and we drive away.

When we’re on the highway, S asks me what I thought. “It was different,” I say. This was a non answer, I know, but at the time, it was easier than the truth, which is that for me, today was about figuring out if I could keep escorting, regardless of my fears. Escorting is about immersion, and practice, and support. There’s a process to be trusted. So, for now, the answer is yes. I’m still in.

What’s happened to the landscape of later abortion care since Dr. Tiller’s murder? In a political environment where some states are trying to restrict abortions at 12 weeks, it’s no surprise that there are now only two states where it’s legal to obtain an abortion after 26 weeks. Who are the clinicians providing this care? What are their stories?

The movie After Tiller attempts to answer this question by profiling four abortion providers–Dr. Leroy Carhart, Dr. Warren Hern, Dr. Shelly Sulla, and Dr. Susan Robinson–who’ve pledged to carry on Dr. Tiller’s work of providing later abortion care. The movie is beautiful both in aesthetics and in spirit. We see each provider grapple with the moral complexity that sometimes comes with providing abortion care, and yet the movie isn’t really about whether abortion is right or wrong, but rather how these clinicians treat their patients. We see them comfort and coach their patients through heart-wrenching circumstances, even providing patients with language to help explain their pregnancy loss to family and friends. We see them talk openly about their own moral struggles in performing later abortions, how they decide if they’re able to perform an abortion for someone, and what happens in the circumstances where they cannot. We see them emphasize time and again that they believe that women can struggle with complex moral and ethical issues, including a ending a pregnancy in the third trimester.

While watching the film, I kept waiting to hear more from patients. All we see of them throughout the movie is their clasped hands or messy ponytails. We hear their shaky voices, but we never see their faces. I can imagine that Martha and Lana, the film directors, probably asked patients if they wanted to be filmed head on, and they declined. They have every right to do so. When you take into consideration the risks involved in putting a public face to later abortion—possible community condemnation, judgment from friends and family, not to mention harassment from anti-abortion activists—it makes sense to keep a low profile. In a cultural context where abortion even in the first trimester is so stigmatized, it makes sense that a family pursuing an abortion in the third trimester wouldn’t want their experience or their faces to be made public.

Yet this disappearance of the full selves of patients makes me uneasy. It gives the impression that these patients were victims, and that doctors were their saviors. These wonderful, brave doctors got to have faces, full stories, moral complexity. Patients didn’t even have names. I don’t think the filmmakers intentionally created this dichotomy. Of course, with all the rampant negative stereotypes about abortion providers, “savior” may be a welcome label. Yet it doesn’t leave room for these physicians to be just that—doctors who are following their conscience and taking care of their patients.

Maybe I am asking for too much. Abortion providers, especially providers of abortion in the second and third trimester, are frequently victims themselves of vicious anti-abortion smear campaigns, not to mention under the near-constant threat of violence. This film is explicitly about showing the compassion and empathy inherent in providing abortion care, particularly later abortion care, and it does a remarkable job. Perhaps it’s not the right space to tilt the camera up and allow patients the same room to talk about empathy and compassion in ending their pregnancies. As I watched the movie I found myself wondering what other abortion providers would think. Do they think of themselves as “saving” their patients? Do these four providers in the film think of themselves as heroes? In fact, on a panel with the four profiled providers after the movie, one of them explicitly said that she doesn’t like being referred to that way.

There’s no doubt in my mind that After Tiller is a significant film. Everyone who can see it should. It lets the audience go behind the curtain of the political debate on abortion and into the realm of personal experience. I hope we can continue to explore personal experiences with later abortion care, and find ways to include the voices of people who obtain abortions, too. Dr. Tiller said that he was a “woman-educated physician.” I’d like to think that part of honoring his memory is figuring out how address the risks of sharing personal experiences with abortion so that the people who educated him can educate us, too.

I’m on board with every single tip these fabulous women have laid out, and probably many of the other tips in the many other blog posts on the same topic. I’m a huge advocate of self care for my friends, colleagues, and the young activists I work with. I always faithfully tweet and email and Facebook these tip posts because I want the activists in my life to have the tools to be happy, healthy, and doing social justice work for decades to come.

And yet, I have to admit that I’ve often thought of self care as something other people need and deserve but not something that applies to me. I don’t need another post that teaches me what self care looks like or why it’s important for the sustainability for the movement. Instead, I’ve been looking for tips to teach me how to internalize that I, individually, deserve to embrace and practice self care.

Of course, I have theories as to why I can’t seem to understand this seemingly simple concept. I find myself rationalizing that my heavy privilege set — white, cisgender, American, able-bodied woman with a financially sustainable job that provides good health benefits — should reasonably exclude me from “indulging” in self-care. So many of the folks I work alongside struggle with far more oppression on a lifelong and daily basis than I ever have or ever will. How dare I  take an hour off to meditate or do yoga rather than diving in right away to help fight oppression? This isn’t rational — and, even worse, it’s a textbook example of privilege guilt — but I’ve said it to myself more times than I’d care to admit.

It doesn’t help either that I didn’t grow up with good role models for practicing self care. My mother, a wonderful woman who made me who I am today, was the first in my family to give up going to the doctor if money was tight or skip something she really wanted to do with friends if my brother or I wanted her time. I watched and learned, and I’m sure many other young women did the same with their female relatives — we live in a society that celebrates self-sacrifice in women, even to the point of killing them or making them seriously ill.

The feminist movement, my chosen field and chosen family, replicates this with our own toxic — and yes, patriarchal — version of the martyr complex. We talk a good game around self care while exploiting the unpaid or low paid labor of young people, telling them this work is “dues” that will pay off later in their careers. When eager activists burn out or simply can’t afford to stay, I’ve seen fellow feminists passive aggressively suggest that they just weren’t willing to give it all — or “lean in,” some might say — to the fight for gender justice. These judgments pass without any or much analysis of the systemic oppressions we’ve replicated and reinforced in the movement that are the true reasons behind these departures. And, if you do have the resources and support systems to stick around, you learn quickly that the one with the busiest schedule and the darkest circles under her eyes gets the most praise, if not a reasonable salary, benefits, or a title bump.

I started writing this post because I know that when one woman has an issue, like an inability to see how the need for self-care applies to her, then another likely feels something similar. And that means it’s not an individual failure but a systemic problem, and that there are people with whom you can get pissed off and fight back. That’s power. That’s sisterhood. That’s the definition of feminism.

 In that spirit, I’m not ending this post with tips. I don’t have the answers for me, or for anyone else. I’m an organizer and I deal better with consciousness-raising and problematizing nebulous concepts, like “self-care,” so that we can define them individually and collectively in a way that embodies diverse and intersectional lived experiences.

I would love for this post to start that deeper conversation. Do you ever feel like “self-care” doesn’t apply to you? Did you feel that way at some point and have now changed your thinking? Have thoughts on how we use the term “self-care” in the feminist and reproductive justice movements? Please share them in the comments!

A guest post by anonymous.

Recently, Farrah Abraham, of Teen Mom/sex-tape/DUI fame, decided that she wanted to go back to school. She picked a relatively well-known, but not super high-profile school: Pace University. She’s planning on majoring in Business, because she eventually wants to run her own restaurant. With an Associates in Culinary Arts, the combination makes sense.

What does not make sense at ALL is the backlash that the public has had over her decision to better herself through higher education. First of all, if the girl has got the grades (she does, though she may not speak like it), being in a porn isn’t a reason to deny someone their education. Because, and this may be news, porn stars are people too. Some are very smart people. And these very smart, open, honest people enjoy having sex and enjoy making money to do it on camera. Good for fucking them. Seriously.

Second, many of the comments left on the original TMZ article call this woman “too ugly” to be a chef and business owner. Wait… what do the looks of person cooking your food or running the restaurants you go to matter? That’s the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever heard. When you go to a restaurant, do you refuse to order until you can undress the chef with your eyes? Um, no, you don’t. Because that’s stupid and irrelevant. You really just want to make sure that your steak is well seasoned, or that your vegan curry mayo is spicy enough. Not to mention that her looks have nothing to do with her culinary ability, or with how intelligent she is, or how well she will do in Business school.

Third, the responses from the Pace University traditional student population have been disappointing. A few sample tweets:

Pace seems to pride itself on acceptance. From their Center for Community Action and Research to their LGBTQA center to their Young Republicans club, they seem to have mastered the art of making everybody just be cool. With a campus in the middle of downtown Manhattan, it would be super challenging to run a school that allowed for hate. There are just too many different people that live in NYC, and like nobody would tolerate that shit. So why is it cool to hate on Farrah? Because porn and perceptions of porn stars (as seen above, totally unfair and awful).

So, with that, we’d like to take this moment to ask that everyone just stop. Farrah made a great decision to go back to school, and we wish her success in that endeavor. At worst, she will earn a bachelors degree so that she can open her own business and support her daughter. At best, she’ll be super successful with her restaurant and not only prove her “haters” wrong, but give Pace the best kind of press.

Good luck, Farrah!

If you want to embark on your reproductive justice reading as part of a community, the RJ Reads online book club (organized by Backline) is reading Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty this month. There will be local groups gathering across the country — check out the Goodreads group to see if there’s a in-person meeting in your area, or just read along and join the online discussion. You can also check out the RJ Reads site to vote on the next book selection.

If you want to dive into a book on your own, here are a few of my personal suggestions. These books are all newer publications, so hopefully you’ll find something you haven’t heard of before.

Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement by Sarah Erdreich. An “on the ground” book with slews of interviews from activists all over the country, including abortion fund volunteers, clinic escorts, current students, and movement bloggers (including our own Steph Herold), this book seems like a 240-page rebuttal to the idea that the our generation isn’t actively inheriting the pro-choice movement. Erdreich includes mention of accusations of complacency levied against younger people, the content of the book argues against just that. She speaks with young(ish) activists that are currently studying law, practicing medicine, founding organizations, sharing their stories, and challenging the movement’s power structure. Generation Roe is a quick read that makes the future of the movement – albeit with its many challenges – seem hopeful.

Crow After Roe: How “Separate But Equal” Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That by Robin Marty and Jessica Mason Pieklo. From RH Reality Check writers Marty and Pieklo comes this easy to follow legal primer on the current status of attacks on reproductive health across the country. With twelve chapters examining issues on a state-by-state basis, the book provides essential background on the Bei Bei Shuai case in Indiana, the Jennie McCormack case in Idaho, the abortion funding ban in Washington, DC, and for Arizona, Chapter 12: “Banning Everything but the Kitchen Sink.” I was familiar with all of these stories before reading Crow After Roe, but after reading it you have a much greater sense of both the legal framework behind the cases and the potential policy implications that could follow. The book is equal parts frustration and motivation.

The Child Catchers: Rescue Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce. This book has gotten a lot of deservedly wonderful press, along with the expected backlash.  It deftly covers the motivations (both well-meaning and corrupt) driving adoption in this country, considering the role of the Evangelical church and the anti-abortion movement, crisis pregnancy centers, and international politics. I wrote a full review for The Declassified Adoptee, which I invite you to check out.

Reproductive Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know by Rickie Solinger. I haven’t actually read this one yet, but it’s on the very top of my list, and I’ll swear by anything Solinger writes. Her Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America should be required reading for every reproductive justice activist in the US, with Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States assigned for extra credit.

(The next paragraph contains some minor spoilers, but nothing that would give away the most important parts of the stories mentioned.)

Beyond these titles explicitly about reproductive health and justice, though, it seems I have a knack to picking up books that have abortion storylines in them this spring. I really try to diversify my reading and intentionally pull books off bookstore shelves that, at first glance, seem to have nothing to do with abortion. Yet, three of the four non-abortion books I’ve read in the past two months have all had abortion plot points that have surprised me.

It seems not to matter the genre or type of story: I found discussion of abortion in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (about her hiking of the PCT after her divorce and her mother’s death), Kate Atkinson’s dark novel Life After Life (about a young woman in World War II-era England leading infinite parallel lives in an attempt to stay alive in any one of them), and Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (about an American movie actress – and the young man she captivates – in Italy in the 1960s, and a film producer in contemporary Hollywood, with guest appearances by Richard Burton and side trips to Seattle, Edinburgh, and northern Idaho). None of these are niche books about reproductive rights, of course. They’ve each taken their turn near the top of the New York Times bestseller list, which makes me feel hopeful about unplanned pregnancy and abortion being seen as a normalized part of the human experience, a plot decision that so many face at some point in the course of their own personal narratives, but that – depending on the decision and its context – may or may not impact their entire life. But whatever the impact of these decisions, the consideration (or obtaining) of an abortion is not that story’s defining purpose.

Other AGers had their own recommendations, with some older classics and newer favorites, to add to my list:

• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Sister Outsider by Audre Lord
• The Birth House by Ami McKay

What are your recommendations? Please share!

A guest post by an author who wishes to remain anonymous.

I remember waking up on my 23rd birthday and deciding today was the day I had to acknowledge the pregnancy I had been carrying since February — my birthday is in August. Although I had been raised in a solidly pro-choice family, I was incredibly ashamed of myself for getting pregnant and found that denial was the easy out. I tried everything I could in the beginning to force miscarriage; I remember hitting myself in the stomach, getting so drunk I would hold a trash bag to throw up into and then drink more, and taking every medication I had in my little apartment in the hopes that something would work. Nothing did.

My boyfriend was living in another state and I will never forget the phone call I made from our little apartment to tell him the news. I’m lucky today that I can call him husband; it was this pregnancy situation that helped me see what a wonderful man he is. After hearing about the pregnancy, he resigned his internship and jumped on a plane the next day to come home. We went to our local clinic and, of course, were told I was too far along for them to help. 24 weeks pregnant. 24 weeks.

We went to see a later abortion provider 70 miles away and were again told no. We traveled three hours to another clinic, but I was just days beyond their limit. Another no. But they had one last little tiny bit of hope. As we left the clinic one of the women behind the counter handed me a card with a name and a phone number written on it: Dr. George Tiller, 316-684-5108. Little did I know, this card would change my life.

My boyfriend and I made the long drive back home and made the phone call. The woman on the other end of the line was one of the kindest, most caring individuals I had ever spoken with. She didn’t start the call asking how far along I was or how much money I had, she asked if I was okay. She walked me through the scheduling process with care and love, and checked in with me multiple times in the days before we again made the long trip to Dr. Tiller’s clinic.

I was terrified as I rode in the car, couldn’t sleep the night before we went to the clinic for the first time, and watched my hands shake as we walked into the clinic for the first time. We couldn’t afford to pay the cost of the abortion on our own but were lucky my parents agreed to help us with funding; many women don’t have this luxury. Later I would learn of many funds throughout the United States who exist solely to help women pay for their abortions.

From the moment we checked in it was clear this was the place I was supposed to be. Looking across the room at the faces of the people who were there with us: husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, mother and fathers with their daughters, I felt less alone; I wasn’t the only one. As Dr. Tiller walked into the room, everyone silenced. He smiled. “Welcome,” he said. His first word was exactly how I felt.

I was lucky to have Dr. Tiller provide my abortion. I was lucky to have been taken care of by his incredible staff. I was lucky to be part of the program he had built for his clients, including counseling, care, and love that was needed during a very difficult time. When it was time for us to return home, I remember feeling conflicted. I didn’t want to leave this safe space. I wanted to stay here with the people who understood and supported what I had just been through, but I knew it was time to go home, and I knew I had support in Wichita whenever I needed it. I was ready to move on and not let this experience hold me back. Thank you Dr. Tiller for your wonderful care. You are missed every day.

To honor his legacy, the Abortion Gang and the Provider Project asked folks to reflect on later abortions. Below is a list of posts taking on this topic and thinking about Dr. Tiller. This list will be updated as the day goes on:

Dr. Tiller Remembered
The Legacy of Dr. George Tiller
In Memory of Dr. Tiller, on the Fourth Anniversary of His Death
Dr. Tiller, Beatriz, Savita, and all the others
Remember
Remembering Dr. Tiller
Dr. Tiller was my abortion provider and he changed my life
On Anniversary Of Dr. Tiller’s Murder, Anti-Abortion Harassment Is Still Hurting Women And Doctors
Abortion Rights 2013: To Honor George Tiller’s Legacy, Give to An Abortion Fund
Late-term abortions: Remembering Dr. Tiller
I write letters

If you’ve written a post in honor of Dr. Tiller and don’t see it above, please email the URL to info@iamdrtiller.com or tweet the link to @AbortionGang.

I know that everyone will be talking about who Dr. Morgentaler was, what he did and why he was important. That information is easy to find. All I know is who he was to me – a very human hero, a real person who did a remarkable thing; after escaping with his life from a concentration camp, he willingly put that life at risk to make the world a better place for women.

Dr. Morgentaler exemplifies allyship. He was willing to sacrifice everything he earned – his reputation, his medical licence, his practice, his family, and his freedom – to improve the lot of a group he didn’t belong to. He saw injustice and saw his own power to make change and he did it.

In his early life, Dr. M. had the good fortune to escape darkness, but then he had the courage to spend the rest of his life attempting to bring others up into the light. His work in Canada literally saved lives – directly, for many of the women to whom he provided abortions (particularly when it was illegal), and indirectly for thousands of people, by being instrumental in striking down the abortion law.

The only time I ever met Dr. Morgentaler was two and a half years ago, at an end of year staff dinner when I worked at his clinic here in Toronto. For his toast he said a few humble words of gratitude, and then immediately turned the attention back to the roomful of people and insisted the true credit go to us. He was not a perfect person – nobody is – but as far as heroes go, we could have done a lot worse.

Though I didn’t know him, Dr. Morgentaler’s work changed my life for the better. Because of him, abortion is legal in this country and even though there’s a long way still to go, if I get pregnant that’s a pretty significant hurdle I don’t have to jump. Not to mention the two amazing jobs I’ve had because of him, and everything that brought me – spirited allies, lifelong friendships, life-changing experiences and a sense of purpose. His fight set this country on fire; he never set his torch down for a second, so damned if I will either.

In my mind I see Dr. Morgentaler as having given birth (ha!) to generations of feminist activists, I guess sort of springing fully formed from his head like Athena from the head of Zeus. In illegally performing abortions in defiance of an unjust law, he not only challenged the idea of the law as a standard of morality, he also freed us up to fight for justice in our own way. We pay tribute to Henry when we expand and push beyond abortion rights and into sexual and reproductive justice for all people, in every way. For all his great heroism, Dr. Morgentaler was just the spark. We are the powder keg.

Anyway, what I know is that Dr. Henry Morgentaler changed Canada for the better, and showed us who we truly could be in this country; he was an immigrant who, through hard work, became a respected doctor, and then refused to enjoy the rewards of a hard-won life when he could see that others still suffered. He represented the best of us.

Thank you Dr. Morgentaler, and goodbye – you have truly earned your rest.

The frigid woman, if you are unfamiliar, is a concept that stems from our societal myth of women coming in two varieties hypersexual and non-sexual.  The photos in the article do a really good job of demonstrating this dichotomy, there is the grumpy, sad woman and the woman in ecstasy, with nothing in between. The frigid woman has no passion, is clearly in denial of her need for intercourse, and will probably die alone.   Many of the women depicted in this article seem to be embodying this myth.  They are broken because they no longer desire their partners the way they once did, and feel obligated to “fix” themselves for their partners.

Desire is a very tricky thing. To the journalist’s credit, he does write- off evolutionary psychology as nonsense, and admits that we don’t really know how physical attraction and lust change over time, because no one has studied it longitudinally.  What we do know is that women’s desire generally peaks around 30, about a decade after men’s.  We also know that desire often dissipates over shorter periods of time, but again this too is understudied.  The problem is, that’s not how the article framed it. It was framed as women’s diminishing desire specifically, what about men’s?

Men are completely missing from the conversation here.  Men too potentially have waning desire stemming from considerations outside their partner like jobs, and kids, and whatever else.  Why don’t they need a pill to fix their lust?  Viagra used by men, as it is discussed here, simply creates a physical response in the penis. It doesn’t affect desire.  The sweet, sweet irony being that what they are marketing as a new innovative drug for fostering women’s lust is essentially Viagra, with a mint coating.

So why sell drugs to women by convincing them their desire needs to be fixed?  Because women are clearly all crazy and recognize themselves to be.  Duh.  I mean, the man behind the drug cites his inspiration as being dumped in his 20s and wanting to spend the rest of his life studying the depths of the (crazy how could anyone ever dump me) female mind.  A man scorn hath no fury…or logic.

Perhaps, and heaven forbid I bring this up and try to be credible, not all people are happy being monogamous.  Maybe some people just get bored, male, female, or otherwise.  Maybe there are some people who can be really happy and monogamous for decades while there are other who cannot be for six months.  Sound like anybody you know?  The fact of the matter is the evidence to support any of these suppositions is just not there.  We don’t know.  Maybe in fact we are just like trumpeter swans and there is a reason people keep coming back to the idea of “happily ever after,” or perhaps it is a very cruel trick.  We just don’t know.  And how could we?  People barely have the space to choose their partners and create the relationships they want, with equality and trust.  But maybe there’s a pill for that?