 Many women describe the feeling of having a baby come out of their vagina as taking the biggest shit of their lives. This is not really a metaphor. The anal cavity and vaginal canal lean on each other. They too are the sex which is not one. Constipation is one of pregnancy's principal features. The growing baby literally deforms and squeezes the lower intestines, changing the shape, flow, and plausibility of one's feces. In late pregnancy I was amazed to find that my shit, when it would finally emerge, had been deformed into Christmas tree ornament type balls. Then all through my labor I could not shit at all as it was keenly clear to me that letting go of this shit would mean the total disintegration of my perineum anus and vagina at one time. I also knew that if or when I could let go of this shit the baby would probably come out. But to do so would mean falling forever, going to pieces. In perusing the Q&A sections of pregnancy magazines at my OBGYN's office before giving birth, I learned that a surprising number of women have a related but distinct concern about shit and labor. Either that or the magazine editors are making it up as a kind of projective propaganda. Question, if my husband watches me labor how will he ever find me sexy again now that he has seen me involuntarily defecate and my vagina accommodate a baby's head? This question confused me. Its description of labor did not strike me as exceedingly distinct from what happens during sex or at least some sex or at least much of the sex I had here to foretaken to be good sex. No one asked how does one submit to falling forever to going to pieces? A question from the inside. In current girl culture I've noticed, like GRRL, I've noticed the ascendancy of the phrase, I need X like I need a dick in my ass. Meaning of course that X is precisely what you don't need. Dick in my ass equals hole in my head equals fish with a bicycle and so on. I'm all for girls feeling empowered to reject sexual practices they don't enjoy. And God knows many straight boys are all too happy to stick it in any hole, even one that hurts. But I worry that such expressions may only underscore the quote ongoing absence of a discourse of female anal eroticism. This is all a quote from Eve Sedgwick. The flat fact that since classical times there has been no important and sustained western discourse in which women's anal eroticism means anything. Eve Sedgwick did an enormous amount to put women's anal eroticism on the map, even though Sedgwick was mostly into spanking, which is not precisely an anal pursuit. But while Sedgwick wants to make space for women's anal eroticism to mean, that is not the same thing as inquiring into how it feels. Even ex-Ballerina Tony Bentley, who knocked herself out to become the culture's go-to girl for anal sex in her memoir, The Surrender, which I cannot recommend to you, cannot seem to write, although I did read it as research for this book, can't seem to write a sentence about ass fucking without obscuring it via metaphor bad puns or spiritual striving. I am not interested in an hermeneutics or an erotics or a metaphorics of my anus. I am interested in ass fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris disguised as a discrete button sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its 8,000 nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated, not innervated, innervated parts of the body as Mary Roach explained to Terry Gross in a perplexing piece of radio that I listened to while driving my son Iggy home from his 12 month vaccinations. I checked on Iggy periodically in the rear view mirror for signs of a vaccine induced neuromuscular breakdown while Roach explained that quote, the anus has tons of nerves and the reason why is that it needs to be able to discriminate by feel between solid, liquid and gas and to be able to selectively release one or maybe all of those. And thank heavens for the anus because, you know, this is still a quote, really a lot of gratitude ladies and gentlemen to the human anus. To which Gross replied, let's take a short break here and then we'll talk some more. This is fresh air. So I'll just read a little bit more from a different part of the book. Every other weekend, I want to say the Art of Cruelty, we also have this in common. I wrote my last book, The Art of Cruelty at the end of it at Radar and which was a spectacular thing to do with the birthing turtles on the beach and writing about cruelty down there. So anyway, every other weekend of my pregnant fall, my so-called golden trimester, I traveled alone around the country on behalf of my book, The Art of Cruelty. Quickly I realized I would need to trade in my prideful self-sufficiency for a willingness to ask for help by lifting my bags in and out of overhead compartments up and down subway steps and so on. I received this help, which I recognized as great kindness. On more than one occasion, a service member in the airport literally saluted me as I shuffled past. Their friendliness was nothing short of shocking. You are holding the future, one must be kind to the future, or at least a certain image of the future which I apparently appeared able to deliver and our military ready to defend. This is the seduction of normalcy, I thought, as I smiled back, compromised and radiant. But the pregnant body in public is also obscene. It radiates a kind of smug autoeroticism. An intimate relation is going on, one that is visible to others but that decisively excludes them. Service members may salute, strangers may offer their congratulations or their seats, but this privacy, this bond, can also irritate. It especially irritates the anti-abortionists who would prefer to pry apart the twofer earlier and earlier, 24 weeks, 20 weeks, 12 weeks, 6 weeks. The sooner you can pry the twofer apart, the sooner you can dispense with one constituent of the relationship, the woman with the rights. Place me now like a pregnant cutout doll at a prestigious New York university, quote-unquote, giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says, I wish I could imitate his voice, but I just couldn't do it, you know, but he says, I can't help but notice that you're with child, which leads me to the question, how did you handle working on all this dark material, sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on, and your condition? Ah, yes, I think digging a knee into the podium, leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady's speaker back to her body, so no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks, which is really just a pumped-up version of the more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks, as if anyone was missing this spectacle anyway, as if a similar scene did not recur at every location of my so-called book tour, as if when I myself see pregnant women in public, there isn't a kind of drumming in my mind that threatens to drown out all else, pregnant, pregnant, pregnant, perhaps because the soul or souls in utero is pumping out static, a static that disrupts our usual perception of an other as a single other. It's the static of facing not one, but also not two. Truth be told, when we first started trying to conceive, I had hoped to be done with my cruelty project and on to something cheerier, so the baby might have more upbeat accompaniment in utero. But I needn't have worried. Not only did getting pregnant take much longer than I'd wanted it to, but pregnancy itself taught me how irrelevant such a hope was. Babies grow in a helix of hope and fear. Gestating draws one but deeper into the spiral. It is not cruel in there, but it's dark. I would have explained that to the playwright, but he'd already left the room. After the Q&A at this event, a woman came up to me and told me that she had just gotten out of a relationship with a woman who'd wanted her to hit her during sex. She was so fucked up, she told me. She came from a background of abuse. I had to tell her I couldn't do that to her. I could never be that person. She seemed to be asking me for a species of advice, so I told her the only thing that occurred to me. I didn't know this other woman, and all that seemed clear to me was that their perversities were not compatible. Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people, reminds Eve Sedgwick. This is a crucial point to remember and also a difficult one. It reminds us there is difference right when we might be looking for an expecting communion. At 28 weeks, I was hospitalized for some bleeding. While discussing a possible placental issue, one doctor quipped, well, we don't want that, because while that would likely be okay for the baby, it might not be okay for you. By pressing a bit, I figured out she meant, in that particular scenario, the baby would likely live, but I might not. Now, I loved my hard-won baby to be fiercely, but I was in no way ready to bow out of this veil of tears for his survival. Nor do I think those who love me would have looked too kindly on such a decision, a decision that doctors elsewhere on the globe are mandated to make and that the die-hard anti-abortionists are going for here. Once I was riding in a cab to JFK, passing by the amazingly overpacked cemetery along the BQE Calvary, my cab driver gazed out wistfully at the headstones packed onto the hill and said, many of those are the graves of children. Likely so, I returned with a measure of fatigued trepidation, the result of years of fielding unwanted monologues from cab drivers about how women should live or behave. It's a good thing when children die, he said. They go straight to paradise because they're the innocents. During my sleepless night under placental observation, this monologue came back to me, and I wondered if instead of working to fulfill the dream of worldwide enforced childbearing, abortion foes could instead get excited about all the innocent, unborn souls going straight from the abortion table to paradise. No detour necessary into this den of iniquity, which eventually makes horrors of us all, not to mention social security recipients. Could that get them off our backs once and for all? Never in my life have I felt more pro-choice than when I was pregnant, and never in my life have I understood more thoroughly and been more excited about a life that began at conception. Feminists may never make a bumper sticker that says it's a choice and a child, but of course that's what it is, and we know it. We don't need to wait for George Carlin to spill the beans. We're not idiots, we understand the stakes. Sometimes we choose death. Harry and I sometimes joke that women should get way by beyond 20 weeks, maybe even up to two days after birth to decide if they want to keep the baby. Joke, okay? I have saved many mementos for Iggy, but I admit to tossing away an envelope with about 25 ultrasound photos of his in utero penis and testicles, which a chirpy blonde ponytail technician printed out for me every time I had an ultrasound. Boy, he's sure proud of his stuff, she'd say, before jabbing print, or he really likes to show it off. Just let him wheel around in his sack for Christ's sake, I thought, grimly folding the genital tryptics in my wallet week after week. Let him stay oblivious for the first and the last time, perhaps, to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off of us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self. I guess the cheery way of looking at this snowball would be to say, subjectivity is keenly relational and it is strange. We are for another or by virtue of another. In my final weeks, I walked every day in the Arroyo Seco and listed aloud all the people who were waiting on earth to love Iggy, hoping that the promise of their love would eventually be enough to lure him out. Alright, thank you all. Thank you, Michelle.