Get ready to ENHANCE!
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Can You Read These Increasingly Blurry License Plates?
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19 Reasons You SO TIRED All The Time
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23 Lessons You Learn In Your Early Twenties
None of us have any idea what we’re doing.
You learn that the friends you thought would be there forever won't be, and the ones you never expected to stick around will be right by your side.
CW
You learn that no one really cares about your GPA and that college didn't actually prepare you for much.
You learn that your first job is most definitely not your dream job.
And you might not even know what your dream job actually is anymore.
20th Century Fox
And you learn that budgeting is ESSENTIAL and will be forced upon you by student loan payments that you can no longer defer.
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What's The Smartest Way You Saved Money On Your Prom?
One special night. One big bill.
In high school, prom is the party of the year.
Music, dancing, and friends! What more could you want?
Paramount Pictures / Via gimme-some-lovin.tumblr.com
But the costs of a tux, dress, and limo are enough to stress anyone out.
This 2014 report says prom spending was around $1,000 per household for the big dance!
Walt Disney Pictures / Via skunkandburningtires.tumblr.com
Davis Fashions / etsy.com
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Neil Gaiman And Amanda Palmer Just Announced Their Pregnancy On Twitter
That’s going to be one talented baby.
Amanda also posted a photograph of her baby bump on Instagram.
The creative duo are no strangers to making big announcements on Twitter.
Tim Mosenfelder / Getty Images
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Woman Says Obama Tried To Nuke America, Santorum Offended She Suggested He’s Still In Congress
“First off, I take somewhat offense of referring it to ‘you’ because I’m not a sitting member of the Senate so I’m not taking blame for any of that stuff.”
Former Sen. Rick Santorum addressed the South Carolina National Security Action Summit last week, put on by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., president of Secure Freedom. Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. Bobby Jindal (by recorded message) also addressed the event.
Obama is not a citizen.
President Obama attempted to nuke Charleston.
Obama is a "communist, dictator."
Obama could have been removed a long time ago.
Obama has fired all the generals who would not fire on U.S. citizens if he attempted to take away people's guns.
Everything Obama has done is illegal.
He takes offense she might have suggested he was still in the Senate.
Santorum says he can "absolutely agree" that there's "a complete lack of leadership."
Obama's executive action on immigration does make "the word tyrant" come to mind.
Santorum says "the president has done a lot of dangerous" things, but his executive action of immigration is worst because it sets a bad precedent.
Santorum says he would shut down the government over the president's executive action.
Here's video of the exchange:
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PSA: Chai Tea Latte Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means
Just “chai” is fine.
We need to have a conversation about the term "chai tea."
New Line Cinema / Via giphy.com
When you think of chai, you probably think exclusively of that mildly spiced, milky tea (often made from concentrate) popularized by Starbucks and Oregon Chai.
Well, hate to break it to you, but...
Antonioguillem / Getty Images
In China, where tea originated, it's cha. Elsewhere, you have the "Russian chai, Persian cha, Greek tsai, Arabic shay, and Turkish çay."
In South Asia, where corporations likely got the word, "chai" can be used to describe tea that's been made black or with milk, with spice or without... IT'S ALL CHAI, BROTHER. "Masala chai," or "spiced tea" is probably the closest thing to a chai tea latte, but even that's stretching it.
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This Viral PSA Urges Men To "Do Something" About Sexual Assault Against Women
“When you do nothing, you’re helping him. But when you do something, you help her.”
The Ontario government has issued a new video to inspire men to "stop sexual violence when you see it."
The PSA first opens with perpetrators "thanking" bystanders for staying mum as they're about to commit sexual assault.
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Which Selena Are You?
Time to find out which Texan queen of pop you really are.
Thinkstock / Pam Francis / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images / THOMAS SAMSON / AFP / Getty Images
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Can We Guess Who You Have A Crush On?
We have state-of-the-art fortune teller technology to help us!
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8 Marvel Superheroes Reimagined As Post-Punk Rock Stars
This is what happens when Avengers assemble … for 80’s band practice. But where’s Cap?
Hulk as Morrissey
Butcher Billy / Via behance.net
Spider-man as Ian Curtis from Joy Division
Billy Butcher / Via behance.net
Spider-man as Ian Curtis unmasked
Billy Butcher / Via behance.net
Iron Man as Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo
Butcher Billy / Via behance.net
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Can You Pass This Quiz On Common Literary Devices?
Can you tell the difference between synecdoche and metonymy?
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21 Great Things About Being In A Long Distance Relationship
Your phone bill goes way up but your razor bill goes way down.
You don't have to share the covers.
Shady Schenck / Via BuzzFeed
You don't have to be presentable every second.
Just wash your hair in time for Skype.
Warner Bros. Television Distribution / Via giphy.com
You have more time for friends.
Girls night out, anyone?
Bravo / Via realitytvgifs.tumblr.com
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23 Times North West's Face Perfectly Described Your Life
So much face.
When you take your first sip of coffee and it brings you to life:
When you can't decide on an outfit:
When mom won't stop hovering:
Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
When your cashier at Chipotle forgets to charge you extra for guacamole:
Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images
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For Everyone Who Both Loves And Is Grossed Out By "Truffle Butter"
How can a song so gross ALSO BE SO GOOD?!
... When "Truffle Butter" comes on. And YOU. ARE. EXCITED.
You're like FUCK YEAH, IT'S TIME TO DANCE TO TRUFFLE BUTTER.
You're not really sure what the words in the chorus are, but you're trying to sing along anyway.
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Belgium's Foreign Minister Thought It Was A Good Idea To Wear Blackface
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Do You Remember The Lyrics To "Fergalicious?"
I be up in the gym just workin’ on my fitness.
Interscope
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A Black Girl's History With Southern Frat Racism
Flickr: Jimmy Emerson/Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) / Via Flickr: auvet
When footage of the University of Oklahoma’s SAE fraternity singing a disgustingly racist chant — which included the phrase "there will never be a nigger in SAE" — emerged a couple weeks ago, I felt many things, but surprised wasn’t one of them. The video may have been taken at a private fraternity event on a bus, but I know firsthand that pervasive racism in white Greek organizations is not a new thing. I spent four years at a mostly white college in Kentucky, where daily acts of racism occurred in front of my face. So after seeing the way that some Southern white college students act in the presence of black people, it did not surprise me at all that they’d sing a fun little song about lynching niggers when they think we can’t hear them.
Transylvania University is a small college (yes, it really exists; yes, that’s really what it’s called; no, I didn’t major in bloodsucking) in Lexington, Kentucky. The school was a handful of blocks away from the better-known University of Kentucky and an hour and some change away from Louisville, where I'm from. That’s why I chose the school, in part; I was an anxious kid who wanted to start over with a new group of classmates, and nearly every high school student in Louisville enrolls in either the University of Kentucky or the University of Louisville. Transy was far enough away from home yet still close enough for regular visits, had a great academic reputation, and a really cool name. And they gave me a scholarship. I decided to commit to Transy without visiting the campus; I felt like I knew enough about it, and again, they gave me the biggest scholarship of any other school I’d been accepted to (I was also really into vampire lore at the time). But on move-in day, my already rioting heart nearly stopped beating altogether as my mother and I turned into the dorm parking lot to find a Confederate flag in every window on the second floor of one of the boys’ dorms.
When I enrolled at Transylvania in 2000, there were about 1,100 students, and about 20 of them were black — which, as I understand it, was a school record (Transylvania was founded in 1780). A quick Google image search of the school name yields acres and acres of smiling white faces, except for the occasional basketball player. The college itself is about two blocks of bright green grass and rich brown brick buildings punctuated with trees that explode white in the spring. The apex of the campus, the building proudly displayed in their marketing materials, is a stark white building with big, stately columns called Old Morrison. There’s no sweet way to say that Old Morrison looked like the Big House on an antebellum plantation, so I won’t try to be poetic about it. So: It looks like massa’s house, and paired with all the weeping willows and the blazing pink blooming trees and the bluest sky you’ve ever seen in your life arching forever overhead and all the melodic country accents traveling along with you as you walk through the courtyard, it sometimes feels like you’re walking through a scene in Gone With the Wind. And we all know what that was like for black folks. (Spoiler: slaves. We were slaves.)
The back of the school, known as “back circle,” is anchored by a large oval lawn punctuated with trees here and there. Transy’s student dormitories are situated around this circle; the flow of traffic, once you enter the circle’s entrance on the right-hand side, moves right, past the two boys’ dormitories collectively known as Clay/Davis. You first come to Davis Hall, home of upperclassmen and fraternity members — this is the building that housed the row of Confederate flags that greeted my mother and me. After that is Clay Hall, where Transy’s freshman boys live. Davis Hall was named for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, while Clay Hall was named after early 19th century Kentucky politician Henry Clay, who owned slaves (but magnanimously freed them after he died). Davis attended Transylvania, and Clay was once a faculty member there. Forrer Hall, the girls’ dorm, rounds the circle. (Another man with the last name of Clay — Cassius, who was an abolitionist — is also a Transylvania alum. There aren't any buildings named after him.)
Here’s why there was a Confederate flag in each of those windows on the second floor in Davis Hall. The school, being as small as it was, had Greek organizations, but rather than having separate Greek housing, they had Greek floors in the dorms where all members lived. The floor with the Confederate flags in the windows was inhabited by the men of Kappa Alpha Order, known as the KAs. Every black person on campus (and those who were attuned to racial insensitivity) knew to stay away from the KAs. They were the good ol’ Southern boys, and the organization itself was founded on loaded terms like “chivalry,” "modern knighthood" (gee, why does that sound familiar?), and the “ideal Christian gentleman." They list Confederate commander Robert E. Lee as their “spiritual founder,” which still doesn’t really make much sense to me, and though it wasn’t their official emblem, they were very, very fond of the Confederate flag. Those windows and the flags in them belonged to the KAs.
When I saw the row of flags in the building I instantly told my mother that I wanted to go back home. She told me, of course, that wasn’t an option, and so I dealt with it as best I could. I went to class, tried to be open and sociable, and vented to my handful of black friends when we were alone. But those flags never let me forget that I was not wanted at any point in history, not then and not now, not in my temporary home, the place where I slept, the place my mother was spending her hard-earned money to send me.
Growing up in the hood, you assume that living where white folks live means safer streets and unlocked doors. But I never feared for my safety more than I did at Transylvania University. Those flags were often the first things I saw in the morning and the last things I saw at night, smugly watching me scurry to class, snickering, mocking. Well, I do declare! Look at that uppity coon, making like she belongs here, like she’s one of us. This is what happens when you teach ‘em to read. Hope that nigger makes it home before the sun goes down.
I couldn’t understand why we had to work so hard to get the KAs and their supporters to understand that those flags were unwelcoming to nonwhites, that they meant something totally different to us, descendants of people who were enslaved and murdered and disenfranchised on the turf that those flags flew over. I didn’t understand why they pushed back so hard against us. We do not feel safe, said black kids in campus forums and anonymous discussions and newspaper articles. This is painful. This hurts us. This distracts us from learning. And the fact that you don’t care for our happiness or well-being hurts us even more.
Their rebuttal was, “It’s heritage, not hate.” The flag was just a symbol of Southernness and Southern pride, not racism, not slavery. The cognitive dissonance makes me laugh even today.
Another incident: During my freshman year, I remember going to my dorm room window, which faced a big green lawn across the street, after hearing chanting outside. It was dark and raining, and through the streetlights I could see a bunch of shirtless KAs, at least one draped in the Confederate flag, singing “Dixie” beneath the trees (“Dixie” is listed as one of the “Songs of Old KA” and members are reportedly to stand facing the South when it plays).
I don’t think we changed any minds, but the Confederate flags were eventually taken out of the KA windows. At the time I thought that it was because of the fuss we made, but according to these KA laws, displaying the flag was banned in KA chapters everywhere in 2001. The flag business was just the tip of the iceberg. Long after the flags were removed their whispers still clung to the air and became screams inside my head whenever I saw someone I knew to be a KA.
Some time after the flags had been taken from the KA windows, I went to my first and only frat party. I had a natural mistrust of fraternities — they aren’t exactly known for being pro-woman — and my time at Transy gave me motivation to mistrust white men in particular. Throw liquor in the mix and it seemed like an all-around bad idea for a black woman to wander right into the heart of the cesspool. But I was curious, so I went with two of my best friends on campus, both black women, to check out the scene. We may have moved through the halls of Phi Kappa Tau, Delta Sigma Phi, and Pi Kappa Alpha, but I’m not certain. All I remember is the KA Hall, my heart in my throat, my eyes wide as spotlights trying to keep an eye simultaneously on my friends, all the drunk men, and the nearest exits.
I remember the stares, people silently but obviously wondering why we were there. In a sea of skinny white girls and burly blond boys, three thick black women definitely stuck out like flies in buttermilk. I was instantly uncomfortable — the flags had been removed from the windows, out of public view, but many of the KA brothers still had their flags displayed in their rooms. The flags seemed oddly glad to see me and the fear on my face. You scared, nigger? You should be scared. Somebody oughta put you in your place. Maybe tonight.
We did not stay long. We made our grand exit after seeing a mountainous white boy walking toward us, cheeks flushed raspberry red, blond hair aflame, full-size Confederate flag draped around his shoulders. His face and eyes were blank; he seemed asleep on his feet, stare transfixed, walking a slow, deliberate pace. We moved out of the way as he approached and he moved past us, continuing his trek. We left immediately after and I felt like I’d just survived something, like I’d escaped rather than walked calmly out the front door. As we walked back to our dorm, the sound of rap music snaked through their open windows behind us. Look like we got ourselves some runaways! Don’t stop walkin’ till you get to Africa, nigger!
As if Confederate flags and singing Dixie in the moonlight and terrifying parties weren’t enough, there was Old South Week, a weeklong celebration leading up to the KA spring formal. It includes a parade wherein the men dress as Confederate soldiers and the women in attendance (nearly always white) dress in hoop skirts, high-piled curls, and other Southern belle regalia (just look at how much fun these Old South partygoers were having back in the '70s, complete with a guy in blackface with “slave” written on his chest just in case someone didn’t get it).
The first and only time I saw one of my schoolmates dressed as a Confederate, I was alone, walking the paths through the impossibly green courtyard lawn. I saw him in the distance, wearing pale blue from head to toe, and I chuckled and shook my head thinking about how crazy it would be if he were dressed as an actual Confederate soldier. The closer I got, the deeper my heart sank until my sadness was interrupted by a cackle that started at my toes and bubbled up and around my teeth before thudding heavily into the ground. What else can you do but laugh when you see someone in this century dressed as a Confederate soldier? What does anyone do in the face of absurdity? You laugh. But it wasn’t funny.
KAs celebrate Old South Week at many colleges and universities in the South. KAs at the University of Alabama issued a formal apology to the historically black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority after their Old South parade — in which they were decked out in full uniforms — “happened” to pause in front of an anniversary event they were having.
Kappa Alpha issued a national ban on the donning of the Confederate uniforms the following year. But, like the moving of the flags from the windows, nothing really changed at Transy. I still felt unsafe and unwelcome. Could've had something to do with the huge portrait of Jefferson Davis hanging in the lobby of the hall that the KAs called home.
My friend's dorm room door.
Tracy Clayton
The boys' dorms may have been named after both Davis and Clay, but Davis received the most fanfare. A 9-foot statue of Davis hung in the lobby of his namesake residence hall, and a huge bust of him lived in the campus library. In April 2001 (April also happens to be “Confederate History Month” in the states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia and in spots of other Southern states), someone vandalized the door of a black male friend of mine by scrawling “nigger” on it in black marker. My friends and I hurried over to take pictures of the graffiti before the administration painted over it, which we knew they would do quickly. Newspapers reported that someone scratched another slur into the same door later, but I don’t remember that.
The incident spurred another round of “important conversations” on campus that typically lead nowhere, but this time did lead to the removal of the portrait of Jefferson Davis, which I definitely saw as a good-faith effort to at least pretend to care about whether or not students of color felt safe and welcome on campus. I hoped that we were finally chipping away at what really was a modern-day Confederate fort housing men who actually thought of themselves as Confederate soldiers, who flew the stars and bars and faced the south to sing “Dixie.” Then-university president Charles Shearer said of the incident and the portrait, “If you have African-American students who live in that hall ... I can understand how that would make them feel.”
His understanding apparently ran out four months later when the portrait was rehung in a different part of campus (“A portrait of Confederate president Jefferson Davis has risen again at Transylvania University,” reported the Associated Press), its removal now positioned not as an attempt to ease worried brown hearts and minds as it was before, but as a preplanned maintenance removal. The same article contained praise for Shearer’s decision to rehang the picture from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a nod to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
And so Davis Hall remained Davis Hall, home to Confederate sympathizers of all ages. I often wrote articles for the school paper complaining about the racial climate on campus (the newspaper staff was amazing and allowed me to run some pretty sharp-tongued pieces), and at least one was ripped out and taped to a wall in Davis with the words “A FINE EXAMPLE OF IGNORANCE” scrawled across it with a marker that looked a lot like the one used on my friend’s door.
The day before my graduation day, I walked about the lawn of Old Morrison, strewn with lawn chairs placed for the commencement ceremony. We’d already gotten our seating assignments and I wanted to check mine out. Mine was near some scaffolding on the side of the stage, and hanging loosely from the scaffolding, within eyeshot, was a tiny black noose. I don’t know if someone put it there knowing that I would see it. But it sure felt like it.
I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that everybody living in the dorm or on campus was racially insensitive and addicted to Confederate insignia — I met some truly wonderful and beautiful people of all races at Transy. Nor am I positing that members of KA were the only racially insensitive people on campus. But I do mean to paint a picture of why that SAE video, while jarring, did not surprise me. For a black girl fighting to get an education in the South, fraternities were an early introduction to privilege. I learned then that certain people could essentially do and say what they wanted with little more than a slap on the wrist or a moved portrait as punishment.
White fraternities seem to attract the most privileged of already privileged men and boys, and they become breeding grounds for all the "isms" that white exclusiveness can create — sexism, classism, racism. And their offenses are often explained away as mistakes. Someone wrote “nigger” on a black kid’s door? A prank gone wrong. A girl is raped at a frat party? Boys will be boys. A group of white frat boys sings a song about hanging niggers on a bus? Everyone makes mistakes.
This week, as I clicked through my alma mater’s website to jog my memory to write this essay, I noticed that all references to Jefferson Davis seem to have been quietly removed, even from the short list of notable alumni that ends the brief telling of Transy’s history. Davis is slated to be torn down and rebuilt soon. I wonder if they’ll quietly drop his name from that too.
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Here's What Happens When A Big Dog Collides With A Dachshund On The Beach
The dachshund’s name is Maggie, and she’s fine, btw.
A few months ago, Maggie the wiener dog was just hanging out on the beach, minding her own business, when a much larger dog bounded onto the scene.
Look at him bound!
Maggie belongs to my awesome mother-in-law, btw.
Maggie did her best to escape the oncoming collision, but her tiny little legs just couldn't move fast enough.
Oh no!
And then physics took over.
You can totally laugh, because no dogs were injured in the making of this video or GIF.
Maggie got up after the ill-fated encounter and continued hanging out on the beach as is nothing ever happened.
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Expensive, Exhausting, And Deeply Unsexy: Babymaking While Queer
Trying to conceive can be difficult and emotionally draining, no matter who’s making the attempt. For a queer couple like us, the process has been nothing short of excruciating.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
My partner Charlie and I had been married for a little over a year when we decided to start trying to have a baby in August 2013. Despite being the butch in our relationship and using male pronouns, Charlie knew from the start that he wanted be the gestational parent. He's always had a fascination with pregnancy and birth — a fascination that once led him to briefly pursue a midwifery apprenticeship — and he was excited to experience all the highs and lows of carrying a child. I, on the other hand, dread physical pain, and was overjoyed by the prospect of becoming a parent without going through pregnancy.
Charlie's cycle operates with clocklike precision, so we figured it would be easy enough to identify the opportune moment. We started by trying to conceive at home — all you need is a syringe and a clean jar. We painted our guest room in pastels, recruited a dude we know and love to donate sperm, and got underway.
Unfortunately, the magic I'd anticipated was pretty much gone the first time I went for a walk around the block so that our friend could jerk off in our bathroom. After that, we decided that it would be less awkward if he made his donation at his own home, then dropped by with the jar — sperm can live outside the body for several hours, especially if they're kept warm — but calling and saying, "Charlie's ovulating, can you come over?" wasn't very romantic either. We had to skip insemination one month because our donor couldn't escape his roommates, who didn't know about our conception attempts, for the requisite five minutes. Also unforeseen was the discomfort of making small talk every time he dropped off his jar, camouflaged in a paper bag — no one really wants to chat about how work is going at such a moment, but without a little conversation the whole thing felt too transactional. "Thank you for your genetic material, Unit B. Your service is no longer required."
And there was a squick factor that neither Charlie nor I anticipated. We were competent, sex-positive adults who wanted to have a baby — surely we could handle a jar with a little semen in it! Turns out that other people's bodily fluids are disconcerting, no matter how chill and mature you promise yourself you'll be about the whole thing. I'm sorry to contribute to the body-shaming and negativity that pervades our culture, but let's be real: A jar of sperm is super gross. Every month, Charlie would calmly draw up the sperm into the syringe while I shrieked and covered my eyes as though it was the gory scene in a horror movie (no, that's not true — movie gore bothers me way less).
The insemination wasn't much better. We had originally looked forward to this part — the two of us alone in our room, sharing the beautiful, intimate moment of creating our future child. Inseminating just before or even during sex is supposed to up your odds of success, which we figured was a bonus. We'd read about it online and it seemed easy, straightforward, and even fun. But it was almost impossible to get into the moment, since we were pressed for time (sperm were dying by the second!) and limited by the necessity that Charlie stay lying on his back with a pillow under his hips. I tried to help with the syringe, but couldn't find a comfortable angle, so Charlie had to take over.
Nothing kills a mood like a syringe.
Technically you're not considered infertile until you've tried to conceive for 12 months straight with no result, but five negative pregnancy tests in a row made us question the efficacy of our approach. First we investigated the possibility of Charlie taking Clomid, an ovulation-stimulating drug used to treat infertility — if we could up his egg production, we might increase our odds of a successful at-home insemination. But we couldn't get anyone to prescribe Clomid.
"It's not safe to take if your insemination isn't being overseen by a doctor," said the nurse Charlie talked to on the phone.
"But if we were a straight couple, we could just take Clomid and have sex, right?" Charlie argued.
"Well, yes, we would prescribe it for a normal couple," the nurse said.
Oh. Although in some subsets of our culture the phrases "artificial insemination" and "lesbians" go together like peanut butter and chocolate, the medical infrastructure surrounding assisted reproduction is still staunchly heteronormative. We tried to appeal the Clomid decision, but got nowhere; every doctor we talked to agreed that, for no reason they could pinpoint, taking fertility treatments and then trying to get knocked up at home was much more dangerous for lesbians than for straight people.
The next step was to try intrauterine insemination, or IUI. We had to set up a directed donation account with a local sperm bank, meaning that our donor's sperm could only be used by us, as opposed to anonymous donor sperm, which is available for purchase by any of the sperm bank's clients. Directed donation is expensive — they test the donor for all kinds of communicable or congenital diseases, and we had to pay for all those tests, whereas with an anonymous donor the cost is spread across multiple customers. We were spending hundreds of dollars and still acting as reluctant consultants for our donor's masturbation calendar, but at least there were no more jars of semen.
On our first visit to a reproductive endocrinologist (RE), Charlie was officially diagnosed with infertility, despite being well below the threshold for unsuccessful conception attempts. Being part of a reproductively incompatible couple is apparently, in itself, a medical condition. This reminded me of the time Charlie's doctor wrote down that his birth control method was "abstinence." Is there a rule somewhere that says doctors can't write or speak the word "gay"?
The IUI process, which was both invasive and impersonal, carried us even further from the romantic candlelit conception of our dreams. Charlie had to take pills, undergo transvaginal ultrasounds (which he termed "the snatch wand"), have blood tests and X-rays, and get inseminated via a cervical catheter two days out of every month. Physical modesty and privacy went out the window. There were medications for everything. Charlie was briefly put on a diet — in fact, the doctor suggested that I should lose weight too, as though the size of my ass was somehow eclipsing Charlie's fallopian tubes. The underlying message was clear: There is something wrong with you, or you wouldn't be here. And of course, that "infertile" diagnosis lingered, growing more and more ominous as more months passed without a positive pregnancy test.
While Charlie's experience with IUI involved being constantly scrutinized and objectified, mine was alienating in a different way. Our doctors all but ignored me. I still remember the rush of excitement I felt when we came in on a Saturday and the weekend RE actually shook my hand. I exist! It's possible that as a male partner of a straight woman undergoing IUI, I would have been more included in the process, but maybe not. I only know that frequently, the doctor would come in, perform the procedure, and leave without so much as a word to me. I'm not sure any of our providers knew my name. Or Charlie's, for that matter — they continued calling him by his legal name, despite all the forms where he wrote CHARLIE in big letters under "name you prefer to be called." We could have made a drinking game out of it: Take a shot every time a doctor gets one of our names right on the first try! It would hardly have interfered with Charlie's medically endorsed sobriety.
Contrasted with the doctors and nurses in reproductive endocrinology were the lab techs in the basement, whom we saw several times a month — Charlie more often than me — for blood tests and to defrost our sperm samples. Knowing nothing about us except that we wanted to be parents, they were still warm and welcoming. Each month after the first time, they gave a sympathetic sigh as we walked through their door: "Back again, huh? Hopefully this time it will work!" They ushered us out with our thawed vial and a cheerful "Hope we don't see you again!" Upstairs, no one ever acknowledged that our repeat visits were a source of unhappiness and stress — they just pulled out the speculum and got down to business.
One month, we happened to show up for Charlie's procedure on the office's unofficial Dyke Day. There were two other lesbian couples in the waiting room, clearly for the same reasons as us, and we all shared an informal little Queer Solidarity Salute.
"This has got to be a good omen," said one of the other women, who was a textbook Crunchy Granola Lesbian. "Awesome lady-power vibes." We smiled at each other, and I felt an irrational jolt of optimism. This was perfect! I was already imagining what I would say later: We knew it was our lucky day when we walked in and saw that the waiting room was full of lesbians…. Sadly, population density of queer women is not an accurate predictor of fertility. I don't know if either of those other couples came out of their visits expecting, but we did not.
After five months of IUI and five more negative pregnancy tests (necessitating five weekends spent at home, crying and watching Juno), we've moved on to in vitro fertilization, adding injections and hormone side effects to the list of things Charlie gets to guilt-trip our child for, assuming we ever have one. On top of that, we burned through our savings paying for IUI at a rate of about $1,000 a month, and had to take out a loan to cover the cost of IVF. With all the money we've spent trying to conceive a child, we joke that we can no longer afford to actually raise one. (It's a joke in that we laugh when we say it, but that's mostly just to mask our fear that it's true.)
We still have nothing to show for our efforts, and there's a part of me that feels like, for that reason, I should keep all this to myself. As a culture, we're very uncomfortable with the concept of trying and failing. We prefer to see the finished product, not the struggle and sacrifice it took to get there. Thus, many individuals and couples who are trying to conceive keep that fact to themselves until and unless they get pregnant, all the while fielding questions like "So when are you going to have kids?" from well-meaning family and friends.
I wish it were more acceptable to talk about this. Trying to get pregnant using assisted reproductive technology is hard, and people going through it deserve support and sympathy. We need to be able to talk about the sometimes obstacle-filled journey to parenthood openly, but without fielding tons of intrusive questions that further fracture our already tenuous privacy. And as queer people, we need culturally competent health care providers who understand and sympathize with what we're going through. Assisted reproductive technology isn't anyone's ideal way to start a family, but if it's needed it can be an enormous blessing. I think it's worthwhile to share our stories and realize that, while this issue is emotional and deeply isolating, those of us going through it are not alone. I'm tempted to end on some kind of platitude — like "I know it will all be worth it when I finally get to hold our child" — but the sad truth is that we might not succeed. Some couples don't. Some stories don't have happy endings, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve to be told.
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