Today I stuck my foot in my mouth online yet again. Though at least this time I didn't offend anyone at 3WA. (Though after this entry, that might change.)

I'm not going to link to the site this happened on here, as God knows I don't need to cause even more trouble there. (Note: everything here is paraphrased so as not to come up in an exact search. Words are not exact and not necessarily precisely correct.) I'll just summarize it as this: The owner of the site very badly wants children and had been told she couldn't have any. She managed to get pregnant and miscarry within a few days recently. Meanwhile, some asswipe of a guy was going around posting inane and/or offensive comments to the site, sometimes about infertility (it was something along the lines of "those people with the site begging for people to pay for their infertility should be shot") and ticking her off, so she posted a "cease, desist, and bugger off" notice to him. Naturally, people started making comments about this.

There are a few other women who are infertile and desperately want children who post there, and their posts, and another one I happened to see today, really bothered me in one disturbing respect. The one I saw today pretty much outright said that she was worthless as a woman if she couldn't have a baby. I'd seen other women say similar things (not the woman who owned the site though).

And it really saddened and disturbed me that someone would feel like this. That their entire life, happiness, and self-worth revolved around something bad happening to them that was not under their control.

Okay, here's some situations I can think of where you would be worthless as a woman if you could not breed:

(a) if you lived in the Republic of Gilead and risked losing your life in some horrible way if you didn't put out.

(b) if you and a guy are the last two existing humans out there.

And possibly (c) if you were colonizing a new area and you were told that every woman HAD to have a kid, but if others are having one there's some slight amelioration there in that it all doesn't depend on you. I'm sure they'd all make you feel like shit though.

Oh yeah, and I forgot (d), if you're the last of the line and getting guilt from everyone for it. How could I of all people forget that one?

Okay, so there's (d), and you can't help that one. But the other three, well, that's extreme circumstances that most of us aren't living under. And I can't say for sure if any of these women or their husbands were the last of the line.

But at any rate, I thought it just seemed incredibly wrong that someone would feel that bad about themselves for not being able to get pregnant. It's not THEIR fault! It's not like they went out and say, deliberately slept with someone with chlamydia and then ignored their funky symptoms down below until it was too late and they lost their fertility. It was the luck of the draw. It's their body that is failing, but they didn't do a damn thing wrong, and I just don't feel like they should feel like utter shit about themselves for that. If they truly feel like that, then that's even more of a tragedy.

Then again, I always felt like being a woman was more about the personality than the body's functioning uterus and tits. I maybe have been reading too many transgender things lately here, though.

I was stupid enough to try to say this on the site. Not as well as I have tried to explain it here, I guess. I tried to be as nice about it as possible. I tried not to insult anyone. I tried to figure out if it would be mortally offensive before posting.

As usual, I was wrong.

Of course, you know what happened- I was roundly castigated for not being an infertile woman who wants babies and therefore I can never understand their utter agony and pain, and I should have kept my goddamn mouth shut and gone to hell, and how can I ever understand it when your husband only wants your biological babies and you can't give them to him, etc., etc.

And also as usual, I felt like the biggest asshole alive, because once again I'd managed to tick more women off about their feminine issues, and obviously I was an insensitive bitch who just Doesn't Fucking Get What A Real Woman Feels Like.

Since I was already on chat at the time of foot-into-mouth-insertion and had yet to piss anyone off there today so far, I explained the situation to them and asked if I'd really been that rude, insensitive and offensive yet again. Opinions varied, from "I think you were probably a little offensive, yeah, since they're infertile and all," to "Well, I personally don't think so, but I can see how they might have taken it," to "I don't think so." I asked my friend Denise (who I did lunch with today) and Dave, and both agreed with me. Hm. So I don't know what to think about my behavior, really.

I'm not sure what the owner of the site made of it- I guess I wasn't offensive enough to get banned on the spot. I did get some e-mail from her saying that (a) asswipe had sent her something offensive, (b) she was banning his ass, and (c) thanks for posting, but I think that was a generic thing that went to everyone in the thread. I don't think she would have sent that to me personally. At any rate, I won't be stupid enough to post there ever again. I rather knew I shouldn't have said a damn thing in the first place, but someone else had said something similar to what I was thinking and I suddenly felt compelled.

I need to stop talking about any female issues in any place where discussion goes on. Period. I seem to always be saying the "politically incorrect" thing if I say anything that can even remotely be taken as anti-something-female-dominated. And then every woman around kicks my ass from here to Kentucky and I feel like the most evil insensitive bitch on the planet.

And perhaps I am. I really don't seem to relate to female issues at all. I certainly don't understand what it's like to want my own biological baby with all my heart and soul and not be able to have one, no. I start reading stuff like this and go "Huh?" I'm the kind of person who thinks adoption is a damn good thing, and doesn't really get why certain people insist that they couldn't love a child if it wasn't theirs biologically. (I really don't know why anyone would say that. Is it that important that the child looks like you? Are they hoping for a little mini-me or something? Because it doesn't seem to me like kids take after their parents in personality so much any more. This may still be a crap shoot even if you grow your own.)

I think deep down, I must not be a woman at all. In reality, I'm an insensitive male pig who just happened to be born in the wrong body.

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