Now, this was a situation I had not yet had the privilege of being in. Did these people really think that a penis was going to solve this conflict? Frankly, the last thing I needed was an anonymous dick anywhere near me. Look, I’m a big fan of dicks, but I have yet to come across a problem a dick can actually solve besides wanting to become a mother. Even most men I know would agree that their own dick is the source of most of their problems, so adding a miscellaneous dick to the equation would just further complicate things.
Look, dicks are great. I think we can all agree on that. They’re very awesome for, like, an hour at a time, but there are some drawbacks. Sometimes that awesome hour is accompanied by a bummer aftermath like a UTI or a visit to Planned Parenthood. Dicks also have the ability to give me a baby, which is the most stressful thing I can think of. But even without these side effects, dick was not going to get me out of this pickle.
I’ve never been trying to sleep with noisy people in the hallway and thought, “You know what this situation needs? A dick.” I mean, maybe if I can use your dick as an earplug? If each of them put a dick in their mouths so they’d stop being able to yell? Or maybe they could put all their flaccid dicks under the door so I couldn’t hear the racket from the hallway? Or if they used the most impressive dick of the bunch to cajole the women at the front desk to get me a later checkout so I can sleep in? Maybe if their dicks shot out sleeping pills so I could actually fall asleep? I’m genuinely trying to figure out why guys think dicks are these magical wands that contain the panacea for all stress. Unless they’re covered in Xanax and Nutella, in the long run most dicks cause me way more anxiety than they alleviate.
This weird night in Vegas haunts me to this day. I’m always trying to own my part in situations because that’s the only way for me to feel some power, especially in a case where I specifically feel powerless. Ultimately I think I could have handled this one with more grace and class, and likely should have just called security first, but my fear of “wasting time” usually prohibits me from asking someone to help me with something because I figure it’ll just be faster if I do it myself, a belief that has yet to yield a single positive result.
Now I’m not trying to solve sexism with this chapter. I can’t do that. I can hardly write about it as comprehensively as I would like to, much less solve it. Sometimes I can’t even see or feel sexism, but I’m going to try and do my part in trying to deconstruct it. Maybe cultural conditioning is to blame, maybe primal neurology, misguided parenting, the media. Or maybe it’s a tight knot of all of these things that needs to be delicately untied.
I lose a lot of sleep at night thinking about why some men need to be dismissive to women. When I look back at those guys in the Vegas hallway, I don’t feel anger, just overwhelming sadness for them. After learning that anger is just pain all dressed up in a scary yet cheap Halloween costume, I feel we’re somehow doing our men wrong. After all, “hurt people hurt people.” Maybe our men aren’t being seen or heard, or maybe they’re not growing up with role models that treat women with respect so they have no blueprint. Maybe nobody’s given them the tools to solve problem without their dicks. I’m not a sociologist, so I’ll let someone else more qualified dig into all that pathos, but I want to do my part in illuminating my experience because hearing other people share theirs is what gave me the courage to come to terms with mine.
Anyway, I hope this chapter doesn’t make you feel sorry for me or anything because I’m obviously fine.
THE EGG FREEZING CHAPTER
“Good for you!”
This is a phrase you really need to get used to hearing if you decide to freeze your eggs. But if you decide not to freeze your eggs, good for you!
My egg-freezing journey started a long time ago. Specifically, thirty-four years ago when I was endowed with two X chromosomes. My fate was sealed when I grew up listening to Dolly Parton sing about working “nine to five” and watching Roseanne, who imprinted on my brain when I was twelve that children are an irksome financial drain. Roseanne also crystallized my worst nightmare about having a family: the presence of a hideous brown plaid couch in your living room with a crocheted blanket on it that can’t actually keep anyone warm.
My indifference toward motherhood was solidified by my extremely hardworking mother who had an all-consuming job. She worked in fashion, and it was very glamorous to me because when I was ten, going the mall was the epitome of glamour. The ladies spraying perfume testers! The generic, monotonous music blaring from Macy’s! The toe ring kiosks!
I would go to my mom’s office every day after school and wait for her to finish work. When I wasn’t busy shoplifting, I’d sit at her desk and play with her colored paper clips and acrylic stapler, dreaming about the day when I’d have my own office supplies. This seems like a silly dream, but back then, office work was much more charming because people used cute pens, notepads, and colored paper clips. Flash-forward to my office life now, which mostly consists of forgetting my passwords and constantly reinstalling Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The point is, the women I was influenced by either didn’t have kids, had kids and regretted it, or refused to be slowed down by the ones they (probably accidentally) had. I just wasn’t exposed to a paradigm that glorified having children. That may not be totally true. I did religiously watch Small Wonder, but it didn’t make me want kids, it made me want to be a robot, which I think I actually accomplished for a couple years in my twenties.
As a child I didn’t play with baby dolls or even Barbies. For whatever reason, I had the maternal instincts of a fire hydrant, so I felt it was a cruel joke when at seventeen, I got pregnant.
I used to get benign cysts on my ovaries when I was a teenager due to a steady diet of caffeine and adrenaline. One day I was getting them checked with some sort of internal camera-type thing that goes up your most valuable crevice and the doctor said, “Well, we got rid of the cysts but not the pregnancy.” He directed me downstairs to a doctor who would “terminate” said pregnancy. It was said with such nonchalance that it didn’t even occur to me that it was a thing. It felt more like another chore: Do math homework, pick up Vidal Sassoon hot oil, get a mani, terminate pregnancy.
In this other doctor’s office, who in retrospect I really hope was a gynecologist, I was given a clipboard with a comical number of papers on it to read and sign. One of them had a list of side effects of the vacuum aspiration procedure (of course I just had to Google that, since “vacuum thing” felt slightly insensitive and crass). One of the warnings was that the procedure could “possibly cause infertility.” My heart puked. Even though I had absolutely no ostensible proof that motherhood was fun, I guess my primal instincts took over. I may not have dreamed of being a mom, but I wasn’t ready to shut my uterus down before I knew who I was and what I wanted out of life. My imagination got the best of me, recoiling at how brutal a procedure must be to render a woman barren. I didn’t have enough life experience yet to know that the chances of something going wrong were tiny and that the procedure’s totally safe, but this was pre-WebMD, folks. I refused to sign it.