So look, Ann Patchett’s writing is great and the Sexual Revolution is great and I think everyone should be in favour of birth control because really, why not? But I’m just going to come right out and say it: it’s completely depressing that one of America’s greatest living novelists has to spend her time writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal to state the painfully obvious:
Let us so empower the young women in our communities with the excellent education that is available to them, the love and support of their families, and the abundance of positive role models, that they are strong enough within themselves to wait until they feel fully ready to have sex with a person they trust, a person who values them. And let the young men of our communities benefit from that same education, that same love. To make things easier, let’s remove several million degrading images of women that can give a boy the wrong ideas about the value of other people.
When everyone is good and ready, let’s supply them with birth control that allows them to decide when and if they want to have children together and, as an extra bonus, protects them from sexually transmitted diseases. We all have our utopian ideals and that’s mine.
“I Can’t Believe We Still Have to Protest This Shit,” indeed.
My point is that Ann Patchett could be out there writing us another book like Bel Canto or my actual personal favourite, her first book The Patron Saint of Liars (which is set at a home for unwed mothers), but instead she is doing yeoman’s pundit work because that is where the public conversation is at, at the moment. Because the fact is you have to yell just as loud and as long to be heard. Roxane Gay does a lot of the yelling for us, around here, and I love it. But I still wish we lived in a world where she didn’t have to.
