I stumbled across this, in searching for something else entirely. I’m sad that I did. It’s a story with a moral and a motivation that I can’t understand. It’s a story that’s interesting and somewhat lyrical. It’s a story of selfishness. It’s a story of how oxytocin changes abilities to reason. It’s a story of what we are told we can do. And then some women go out and do it. And some blog about it, and compare their choice to kill their lentil-sized baby with deeply significant religious events like Passover that do not celebrate what she thinks they celebrate. Then trendy magazines like Slate give a forum for such articles and the author feels satisfied that she is a real artist.
Pro-lifers in this world always understand what it means to be pro-choice better than pro-choicers understand what it means to be pro-life. That’s what it means to be a minority: you have to understand those you live with, at least a little, while the majority assume everyone thinks like they do. But sometimes I’m truly at a loss.
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Oh Andrea! It’s just so sad and so tacky. The snobbery about her boyfriend’s “class” and her obvious use of him for sexual thrills and her hectoring “oh he isn’t ambitious enough”! Wasn’t he teaching at the same college as she?
And I’d like to know which college this was, as in 2011 (a quick search reveals) she was teaching at a Jewish private school for children. The whole story is bracketed by Jewish religious rituals and when she still wanted the baby she reflected that it was a Jewish baby (“all brains and hair”) and then she…had him/her killed.
The one hope I am hanging onto is that the story is fictional, like the “college” she claimed they taught at. But I’m not sure. Because the one thing this story has in buckets is resentment and blame for “Josh.” One gets the sense that if Josh weren’t ultimately so “small” and “young” and “lacking in initiative” and in “business skills” she wouldn’t have changed her mind about the baby. Apparently if there is any blame for anything, we are to put it squarely on inadequate young Josh, before whom she “gave up” and let him into her bedroom, hot and sweaty, to kiss unfeeling her until, what? Her reason was entirely overthrown?
And having the abortion on Passover was supposed to be… what exactly? The Jews didn’t slaughter their own first born.
Anyway. It’s very sad and a bit mad, in the sense of insane, and absolutely furious at Josh, the inadequate, -turned-out-to-be-good-only-for-sex although “he was a good person.” I have a hunch that, if this story is true, Josh fell out of love because he felt crushed by his girlfriend’s hints that he simply wasn’t good enough for her.
I’d like to read Josh’s side of the story.
Self-indulgent narcissism dressed up in fancy language, metaphor and imagery. None of it has to add up to anything – if you say it in a literary way, it’s art. Another example of the moral blankness of 21st century, so-called educated women. Ugh.
I weep for mankind.
Oops, sorry, feminists. I weep for humankind.