Abortion as “non-essential” during Covid! Lessons from porn! Banging your crush!
Dear angel babies,
Like most people on Instagram, I have been baking a metric ton of bread since entering Shelter in Place over two months ago.
Of course, it’s never been that there’s been a lack of bread. For my household, it hasn’t even been that it’s cheaper to make bread than buy it (we’re lucky we can work from home). However, the making of bread has been a physiological act of anxiety-reducing. A kind of somatic therapy.
In addition to helping my mental health, baking bread has also been a way I’ve been contributing to the homeless encampments in my neighborhood in West Oakland; the already disenfranchised communities are even more so, now — I know I don’t have to tell anyone that.
I’ve organized a bread-baking circle that is about twenty people large; every week, I drop off flour and yeast on various porches, then come back and pick up various boules and rustic loaves, sliced and bagged and ready for the encampments. We have had anywhere from 20 to 60 loaves of bread a week.
A few other organizations working with homeless communities have picked up the activity, too — a way of feeding people, and also a way of navigating our own feelings of helplessness.
What makes this stasis sustainable, I’ve found, is finding a way to think larger than yourself. And also, keeping your hands dirty.
PULP is dedicated to keeping your mind both busy AND dirty, and our stories show it. This week, we tottered between talking about abortion (a NON ESSENTIAL SERVICE, can you believe that??) and talking about poppin’ cherries. Because we got you, in all your sticky messiness.
Love you.
July (+ Katie)
If The Pandemic Is Hard For You, Consider That We’ve Never Been Taught Stillness, by July Westhale
“Because that’s what it is to stay at home endlessly: a kind of regression that is made possible by science fantasy tropes of late capitalism gone very, very wrong — here we are, in that pseudo-realistic speculative dreamscape so often written about in fiction; our systems are failing us, and the only way through is to change completely.”
PULP It Like It’s Hot: My Elementary School Crush Popped My Cherry, by Callie Chute
“I was practically invisible until I got my braces off then poof, instant B.D.E. (big dick energy). Boys who I’d known my entire life, but had never shown romantic interest, were lining up to have steamy, awkward, teenage sex with me. None of them were quite right — but that was about to change.”
The Four Lessons I Learned From Working At Europe’s Largest Porn Publishers, by Maxine Page
“Publishing houses had started producing adult magazines at the beginning of the 20th century, often featuring burlesque models posing semi-nude under the guise of “art magazines”. The scene changed in 1975 when Bob Guccione launched the British edition of “Penthouse”, featuring full-frontal nudes and pubic hair for the first time; the magazine pushed the boundaries of what was viewed as obscene, and it spurred a number of rival titles such as “Mayfair” “Knave” and “Fiesta”.
This Is What Happens When Abortions Are Deemed ‘Unessential’, by Katie Tandy
“In recent weeks, leaders in several states — including Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Ohio, and Texas — have pushed to close abortion clinics or severely limit access, arguing that abortion is, what else, a nonessential procedure that ought to be delayed while our nation’s medical infrastructure is strained under the weight of COVID.
The cruel joke being the fact that abortions — however ‘elective’ a procedure they might be — are the very definition of ‘timely’. There are no realistic means of waiting the pandemic out while pregnant. And bringing an unwanted child full-term is well-documented as one of the most destabilizing and destructive forces to wreak on a woman’s mental health, well-being, and future.”
Lastly, your weekly jams, curated by July Westhale!
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/00M3ygNvZlSSTb9QuVpct2?si=JGPGYphGSAyEqcmSxP7S1Q
