The other side of Pura Vida

Oh, that’s the preventative pill, right? You don’t have something for a mistake with contraception that happened yesterday?” I asked at the counter of my small local Costa Rican pharmacy.

The junior pharmacist smiled sweetly at me. He must have been little older than 22 years old.

“You mean la píldora del día después? Oh, no that doesn’t exist here. Está prohibido,” he shared, looking kindly at me with something akin to camaraderie.

I did a double-take. We had experienced a fairly good pharmacist-client rapport until then. I tried again, certain that somewhere my Spanish had let me down.

“So what does a woman do here, in the case that her usual contraception has failed, as is the case for me?”

“Well,” he said, looking sweetly at me, “if your usual method of contraception fails, and you fall pregnant, then hay que tener un chiquitito.” He beamed, as if this was the greatest gift anyone could hope for. Abortion is illegal in Costa Rica.

I stared at him, not quite believing what I had heard. This whippersnapper was telling me, a 34 –year old woman new to his country, that if I fell pregnant, now, single, and living and teaching here, 6 months into a 2-year work contract; that if the unimaginable had happened and a split condom meant that I was now pregnant by a man I had known for three weeks, I was going to have to GIVE BIRTH TO A HUMAN BEING.

This kind-faced young man, still with traces of post-pubescent acne on his jawline, had laid eyes on me all of 2 minutes ago, and yet, here he was, telling me in no uncertain terms what I was to do with my body. The decision was made. Costa Rica said so. It was possibly the most powerful “computer says no” moment I have ever experienced in my life. And I’ve been to the DMV in New York City, where they have a lot of computer says no moments.

Before you judge me as some kind of promiscuous gringa; someone whose knicker elastic is as loose as her morals, some harlot who goes out corrupting young Costa Rican men with her worldly European charms and her tales of travel and the Theory of Knowledge (the subject I teach), let me make something clear. I’ve had three long relationships since the age of 16. My first lasted 6 years, and we stayed together all through high school and university. I slept with precisely no-one else aged 16-22. Then, upon that relationship ending, I fell in love with an older guy, and we were together for 2 years. He proposed.  I accepted. We realised we had made a mistake. I moved out to a shared house and slept with again, precisely no-one, until a few months later, when I met the guy who I thought was the love of my life. We were together 6 years, and we lived together for 5 of those, moving our lives and work from London to Barcelona. When that relationship ended in 2015, I had a few partners, but you could count them on one hand. I think I was fairly restrained, after a lifetime of sexual restraint. I like being choosy. Not that it should matter, choosing to be choosy is just that: a choice. An equally valid choice would have been to tear up society's rule book and go to wild sex parties, but I'm basically too much of a germaphobe.

In my life therefore I have taken the morning after pill exactly twice.  Once after a very young and very stupid experience with my very first partner, a manipulative older guy, aged 15 ¾, and once again last year, after a night with a close friend, a guy my age (we should have both known better – but – mojitos – and we trusted one another a lot. A pregnancy wouldn’t have been the end of the world, but he was moving to Colombia and I to Costa Rica.)

What I had taken for granted in my EU liberal bubble, I suppose, is how easily available that option had been to me. Even so, in my very first experience at a sexual health clinic, I was terrified. I was technically under the age of consent, by a month or two, and a nurse had to give me an extra assessment to ascertain if I was mentally able to make the decision to receive the morning-after pill without them informing my parent. They also had to check that I wasn’t asking for it as a result of abuse, or something untoward. I had to go with my high-school best friend, whose older sister knew where the clinic was, and assured us it would be confidential. I trembled throughout the assessment, feeling like I’d been sent to the school principal’s office. All of the nurse’s questions seemed designed to make me feel slutty and wrong.

My second experience was much more straightforward. I walked into a Barcelona pharmacy, asked for the pill, paid, and gulped it down. I sent a text to my friend to let him know. He treated me to an ice-cream and a hug, and we resolved to be more responsible.

In a different country, with a different prevailing set of beliefs, with a different partner, I too feel different. It was clear that my values and judgements about what was correct were not totally aligned with the law in Costa Rica. I'd noticed snippets of machismo in daily life here - catcalls, being called muchacha, or girl, by older men, enduring plenty of ogling - but I hadn't imagined that my right to a safe, legal way to control my fertility would have been questioned. After some heavy googling and plenty of frantic whatsapps on the subject, it became evident that Costa Rican women do of course have another method. The Yuzpe regimen, as explained by the World Health Organization, is an equally effective post-coital method of emergency contraception alongside the copper IUD and the morning-after pill. It's sightly more fiddly, requiring two megadoses of the combined ordinary pill taken 12 hours apart, but it exists. And boy, was I glad it did. But I had to question what I would have done had I found myself in the same situation aged 15 ¾. Or were I not an educated woman with access to information from trusted sources and not just the final word from a spotty pharmacist. I asked myself what the outcome might have been for a young Costa Rican girl living in a rural part of the country, or in a very strict Catholic household. I asked myself what many women must have to do in other parts of the world. And even as a committed feminist, a liberal, a teacher - I myself was shocked by how little time I had spent reflecting on what the reality of access to contraception and choice must be for many women worldwide.

For this, and so many other reasons, I marched on International Women's Day, March 8, here in San José, amongst thousands of other women and men, protesting femicide, domestic abuse, inequality, lack of access to legal and safe abortions, and the right for women living here to make their own decisions about their bodies' destinies, as well as their ability to work, live, love and exist without fear of judgement, harassment or comment. As I walked alongside people of all ages, holding placards with slogans like "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries", or "Ni una menos!" (a call to action on the number of femicides, several this year already shaking the bedrock of Costa Rican life to its core), I thought about a time when this won't be necessary. I hope I might live to see it. I also tried to think of my sweet junior pharmacist ever having someone tell him in no uncertain terms that he would have to be a father. (Maybe he already is.) That's the thing about this blinkered approach to birth control. It's offensive to men and women alike, robbing both sides of their sovereignty. It no doubt makes both genders feel trapped, and less trusting of the other. I wondered what the correlation is between countries with legal abortions and widespread access to birth control and equality of opportunity in terms of education, pay and opportunity. This paper from Georgetown University's Law Center helped answer my query.

Don't get me wrong, Costa Rica is a stunning place, with so much to recommend. Its people and way of life are often embodied by the phrase "¡Pura Vida!", which generally means, "no worries, no fuss, no stress, life is good", but I now see: there's still a little way to go.

Findings

On a recent, fleeting trip to the US (to Idaho, no less, a place of which I had zero expectations, and left more than pleasantly surprised), I honoured what has now become a travelling-through-the-US-custom, and bought myself some twizzlers and a copy of New York magazine. During the 50-odd hour roundtrip journey from Barcelona to Boise, I devoured both, along with a book gifted to me by my friend Lo-Sal called Findings, by Kathleen Jamie.

Jamie is first and foremost a poet, who writes about observations in the natural world; in this case the collected essays published are all about Scotland. Her poetic prose is easy to read, loose-fitting, casual, comforting - but no less affecting for it. She said in an interview once that Findings was notoriously difficult to classify - both for her publisher to take it on, and for bookstores to try to decide which section to put it in, but that her readers don’t seem to mind. And I didn’t. It’s like someone pulling a big chunky cable-knit woollen blanket over you and while you’re starting to fall asleep, telling you stories about what they can see from the window. Whilst stroking your hair.

Her style is so natural - of course, for someone who chooses to write about the natural world, this is essential - but her ease with words also makes for comfortable reading.

“Fancy - day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we all spend so much time outdoors. It’s unseasonal, but all weather is unseasonal nowadays. The plum blossom is coming and next door’s old pear tree is a perfect triangle of greenish-white froth. They do this like a conjuring trick, the old trees. They’re brittle and cronish all winter, then blossom issues out of them and fills the tree slowly, like a dancehall filling on a Saturday night.”  Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes, [Jamie, K. Findings: (Penguin, 2005) p.32 ]

Findings is all about looking for things, and what I’ve been looking for is a way to focus my writing, and find the time and dedication needed to finish things. I think that’s why Lo-Sal chose this book to gift to me. He said that my writing reminded him of Jamie's, a huge compliment, but of course my style doesn’t hold a candle to hers, all unbalanced and gawky and newborn as it is. However, immersing myself in someone else’s writing style inevitably gets me thinking about my own, if indeed such a voice exists.

Happily for me, and my fledgling written voice, an article in New York magazine, my other long-haul reading material, introduced me to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. Cameron is a screenwriter, poet, playwright and general all-round creativity guru whose seminal aforementioned work has helped to “unblock” the creativity of countless artists around the world. (She was also briefly married to Martin Scorsese in the late 70s, a factoid which to this day seems to define the poor woman; not that in our fair, equal society a woman is the sum of whoever she happens to have been married to, but it does seem to captivate her audiences).

It’s billed as a self-help book, which does make me shudder a little, and the full title : The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity may support some of its detractors’ claims, which is namely that there is a little bit too much God in it. Having said all of that, two main ideas have caught my interest: Morning Pages (every morning without fail, upon waking, writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness-flow by hand) and the Artist’s Date: a once-per week time set aside, and guarded fiercely, to do something that gives you inspiration, not necessarily an artistic pursuit per se, but perhaps time in a food market, a library, a bookstore or the cinema, the idea being that it’s a safe space for creative thoughts to come to you with a relaxed brain. 

Both of these ideas, I like. And with the next two months of relative freedom from work constraints rolling out ahead of me, and a close friend’s insistence that I really ought to try and finish some proper fiction, and set myself some solid writing goals (quite right, MF, you’ve always been a super editor), I’m very tempted to skip reading the book, take on these two main tenets as experiments in upping my creative output, and set the timer on myself (t-minus 2.5 months) to see what comes forth.  

Show us your Manuelas, Love

There’s an ad on Spanish telly currently that I feel compelled to tell you about. I want you to see it for yourselves. It’s for underwear from the Italian lingerie company Intimissimi, a brand that until now had passed me by, in a sort of “oh yes they’re everywhere but I never really bought anything there, because they’re sort of everywhere and they’re sort of blandly overpriced” way. 

Until this advert found its way into my living room.

Seriously, you have to watch it.

In said ad, we are introduced to a dashing young brunette in her bra and knickers, who appears to be trying to read and make notes in a chilly-looking industrial warehouse space full of books. Ostensibly, she is studying, because soon, flashing onscreen is Maria: Student, Madrid, accompanied by her voiceover - “I’m a student. I’m curious. I’m determined. I am the warmth of my laughter. This is my story.”  (Ok, I admit this is badly, roughly translated from the Spanish, which is in turn translated from the original Italian ad. But I think you get the idea).The hashtag #imastory was all over the screen first, on a book that opened up for us like an enormous disclaimer. It might as well have said #iamcompletelymadeup or #iamtheficticiouswetdreamofanadvertisingexec. 

I nearly spat out my wine as I guffawed at the screen. But then I realised this wasn’t some kind of Rude Tube rundown of the most laughable adverts of the Hispanophone world, it was really an advert trying to sell bras. It was a woman who REALLY was supposed to be a current student, showing us her push-up Manuelas.

¿En Serio? You might well ask. But this advertising concept is too old, and this material too hackneyed, to get all angry young woman about it. It’s just white noise to my generation. We all know we live in a world where Italian lingerie companies don’t have to give a toss about the messaging they send out to young women, or to young men for that matter. What? They’re just #stories, y’all. Students wear lingerie, and yes, they might study for their finals in said lingerie, and yes they might damn well study in large warehouse spaces filled with books in their bras and knickers, and they would be PERFECTLY within their rights to do so, and without judgement. Haters gonna hate.

The main problem I have with this advert, really, is its ludicrousness. But hey, we’ve all seen worse. So maybe, if we just treat it with the same amount of respect that we’d allow a perfume advert with Brad Pitt spouting some nonsense about things being inevitable, or Keira Knightley showing us it is possible to pout intensely whilst driving a gondola or whatever it is she does in those Chanel ads, it’ll make young women who actually are students, and are really thinking, and actually reading, and might already know all about the male gaze, mainstream media’s scopophiliac, voyeuristic and narcissicistic tendencies, treat this ad like the ad execs’ fantasy it really is, and not go rushing out to buy overpriced bland lingerie at the expense of their next couple of jägerbombs, or their books, for that matter.

In fact, why not let’s all go braless in retaliation and squish a few pennies off Intimissimi’s end of year sales figures, in the meantime? You could choose to flounce around an abandoned warehouse space in your drawers, hashtagging it #nobraday as part of America’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or take @augustadt_iris’s great advice and schedule a mammogram instead.