I’m trying to get work taste-testing new snacks for 7-Eleven. They pay forty dollars per taste-test in the form of a prepaid Visa gift card, which will be handy for buying groceries or topping up my myki. To apply to be a person to whom 7-Eleven offers such precious opportunities, I must fill out a questionnaire in such a way as to convince their marketing people that I am a frenetic consumer of overpriced snacks.
In the questionnaire, I select the statement ‘I work to live’, which is true, but only in the sense that to pay for the debt of living a person is required to work. This is not a ‘choice’ so much as a banality.
‘How often do you make impulse purchases at 7-Eleven stores?’ the questionnaire asks.
‘Frequently,’ I lie. In fact I hate 7-Eleven and everything in it, in fact I almost never impulse-buy convenience-store products.
Yesterday I applied for work running platters of canapés at the catering company I worked for when I was twenty. Yesterday I signed up to a mailing list for market-research opportunities. Yesterday I asked my friends with kids to pass my number on to any wealthy parents they know who are looking for help with child care or cleaning. Yesterday I applied for work counting votes in the upcoming state election.
An editor emailed the other day, asking if I would contribute to her anthology on abortion, something with the word ‘choice’ in the title, which would raise funds for a national non-profit abortion provider. She said I’d get paid for my contribution. I thought about the kind of anthology this would be, and how the kind of anthology this would be was probably the kind of anthology I would pay little attention to—though I was flattered to be asked to contribute to it—because I am basically a snob, and because I don’t think that politicians intent on restricting or criminalising reproductive rights need to read a nuanced anthology on abortion written by mostly white, mostly middle-class women like me so much as they need to be taken out one at a time. A joke. That’s a joke. And then I thought about the number of 7-Eleven taste-tests I’d have to do for the same amount of money, how many hours of running platters of canapés to hotel corporation stakeholders on Cup weekend. I chose the two hundred dollars.
When I think about the word ‘choice’ I think about how it represents a fantasy. An important fantasy and one, perhaps, worth protecting, but an unreal circumstance, really. ‘Circumstances,’ writes Anne Boyer, ‘are the stage on which agency performs.’ Agency as opposed to autonomy, which requires some degree of control over circumstances. For example, I didn’t choose to be alive and I didn’t choose to be settled in an overpriced city and I didn’t choose at age thirty to be lying about my love of Slurpees to pay for groceries from one of the duopoly of price-fixing supermarkets, groceries I cook up at my house that also serves as my primary workspace where I work at my several not-really-real jobs, and I didn’t choose to carry around a small robot that exposes me to radiation and listens to all of my words and bodily excretions—well, perhaps I did choose that purchase, naive consumer me, but without it my several not-really-real jobs would fast become unviable.
—Siri, do I have a choice?
—I really couldn’t say, Ellena.
I didn’t choose my parents and they didn’t choose me—they didn’t choose my particular genetic code nor my penchant for feeling hard done by nor my rather negative attitude towards the hegemony of biological family-making. I didn’t choose to be a person who finds intolerable things that other people, most people—normal people—tolerate seemingly with pleasure and with ease. Things like handing over personal data to corporations in exchange for small product bonuses. Things like wedding registries. Things like the legal enforcement of helmet-wearing.
I didn’t choose to get pregnant when I did, though I was complicit in the choice in that I chose to have sex that night, I suppose, in the mangled way that sometimes happens with a person you have not planned to have sex with and probably won’t again, and I chose to have it in such a way that made possible a slippage of biological material from one place to another, though in all honesty I didn’t think that the person I was with would be so careless or cruel as to endanger me in that way, and I chose to imbibe the several drinks that led me to this somewhat unglamorous affair. I did not choose the patriarchal condition of normative heterosexual hook-ups whereby the primary form of eroticism is the careless penile penetration of women and woman-shaped people in pursuit of male orgasm regardless of the risk of disease or pregnancy, but I did choose to exercise in my warped way my puny young-girl agency to ‘objectify’ guys with the aim of reversing the ways in which I had been fucked and fucked over by them.
I didn’t choose to be too broke to pay the out-of-pocket for the abortion anaesthetic, which at the Royal Women’s was a hundred and forty dollars, and I didn’t choose the character of the girl I was seeing at the time, though the character of the girl I was seeing at the time was what had endeared her to me, and while I did not choose for her to pay for the anaesthetic, she did it anyway, because that was her character, and while I was getting my guts pried open the girl napped on her rolled-up leather jacket like a sweet punk-rock baby in the barren chamber of the hospital, and for this she is due my eternal gratitude.
I didn’t choose to have zero emotional after-effects from that abortion, though I felt I couldn’t mention this too often or too loudly in case it seemed in some way to trivialise the emotional after-effects others experienced after theirs. More trivialising, I think, is the dominant cultural narrative I choose now not to abide by, the narrative of inevitable future shame and regret post abortion, as though a feeling of regret is worse than a lifetime of poverty, or being eternally tethered to a man you hate, or being dependent for years on a biological family you wish to be separate from, or simply being forced to do something you instinctively don’t want to do. I regret a lot, believe me: I regret my poor food choices and my poor work choices and I regret being born with the biological equipment that bears the burden of poor sexual choice-making under the influence of alcohol at age twenty. But in no chamber of my soul is there an inkling of regret about ending a pregnancy I did not want, and if I hadn’t had the legal choice to end it at the Royal Women’s I’d have done it anyway, I’d have rolled down a flight of stairs, I’d have seen a dodgy doctor, I’d have drunk poison, I’d have done it all, and I might have died trying.
Because this is what agency is: it is doing what you can do with the circumstances you are dealt. It is choosing to do what you need to do, even and especially when your parents or your superego or the law disapproves. In my opinion, sex is not a sacred jewel, and poor erotic decisions are not something women need protection from, and motherhood is not holy. In my view, any effort to pair femininity with maternity with biological destiny with virgin births with earthy crystal-lovemaking is an effort to relegate the female form to a position of inferiority, to a state of constant need and gratitude and dependence.
It’s all predicated on a founding myth of Christian society, the ideal of sexless maternity. But Julia Kristeva writes that the ‘virgin’ of the Virgin Mary was in fact a mistranslation of an ancient Semitic word for unmarried young woman. Conflating ‘virgin’ with ‘unmarried young woman’, she says, erases the young mother’s extra-patriarchal jouissance, evidence of her bodily joy and her sensual desires, and subsumes it under the sign of the male-controlled ‘virgin’. The mistranslation is said to strip pre-Christian societies of their matrilineal inheritance rites, and it strips Mary of her agency, too—her scampish, light-filled, unwed spirit—and replaces it with the sign of the father.
In other words, if the Virgin Mary had more correctly been named the Unwed Teen Mum Mary, we who inherit the moral framework of the Christian tradition might not feel compelled to trot out our narratives, our evidence that access to safe and affordable abortion is a moral good in that it is a material good in that there can be no moral good without humans exercising their agency in whatever piddling ways they can. Sexuality and impurity might not be coupled. Maternity might be understood as just one of the many ways a person can choose to belong to time rather than as a duty women with wombs have to tip themselves completely into the wellbeing and service of others.
It is also true, however, that we who have inherited the moral framework of the Christian tradition have inherited a limited set of tropes through which we understand what a body is and what a gender does, and from within this fog we find it challenging or perhaps inconvenient to look upon the full force of the animal urges that course through us all. The animal spirit that offers recourse to say no, to say I will not abide, to say I will choose the smallest thing that has been offered to me, to protect me, to protect the others whose tender red organs have been taken, in name and in law, away from the law of their own agency.
At twenty I did not want to be someone’s mother. At thirty I have been all kinds of mother: I have paid the rent for rock-dogs, I have made more meals than have been made for me, I have given more pleasure than has been given me, I am practically a saint, but no one tells me that, not enough anyway, though I am trying again to choose to not do that, to not be a mother.
Instead I’m trying to see that my tender red organs and the few dollars I earn and the words that I say and write are truly mine and that I’m therefore responsible for what I do with them. Sheila Heti writes that the hardest thing for a woman to do is to choose to not become a mother, and while the hardest thing is not always the best thing I am curious about a life where choice is more rigorously available to me and perhaps the first choice to make is the choice to take my agency take it make it mine.
‘What do you love most about 7-Eleven stores?’ the questionnaire asks me.
‘The convenience,’ I reply. ‘And the charming service I always receive! :)’