Bad sex, Golf Balls and Reproductive Rights

Roxana Voicu Dorobantu
4 min readAug 11, 2017
The fascination with balls and games… (Image by Vivek Chugh, via Freeimages.com)

The story is banal. It tells of bad sex and a golf ball and fundamental reproductive rights. It has no dramatic plot, no heroine dies La Dame aux Camelias — style of some debilitating disease. It is a boy meets girl and perhaps a man in the hole (pun intended) if we are to consider Vonnegut’s shape of stories.

It all started in June with a “night to remember” that lasted all of two hours and one orgasm (male) and left our heroine reconsidering her life and mate choices. Casual sex is fun, but what are the manners to be exhibited in this hookup culture? Do you kiss afterward or do you just leave? Do you message the next morning or move slowly into the ghosting part? What do you do when you have been friends for years and all of a sudden you shift into the sex stage of the relationship and that is sub par? Cue the SATC rhetoric and the overthinking of a generation that needs to put names to everything.

But this is not even the plot. Three weeks and three episodes into the Handmaid’s Tale later, our heroine finds herself in the unlikely situation of being late. As in that “late,” uncharacteristic and disturbing. The country she lives in currently has passed in the 80s through a criminalization of abortions, so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there is a frenzy of using this as contraception. It is even cheap, less than 100 euros to have it done in a hospital or a private clinic.

But this is not a story of abortion. It never came to that. It is a story of choices and questions and the Peter Pan syndrome and the problem that has too many names[1]. First came the thought of a possible pregnancy. What if she keeps it? She has the material conditions, a job that allows for maternal care, a strong support system around. The cons are simple, in her mind, at least: no father to speak of as part of the life of the child and in the end, not really wanting to go through with it. So the decision comes quickly. If it is, then it’s not. No remorse and no second thoughts. She even scared herself with how easy it was to reach that conclusion. So she took a test. Negative. And she started using reason and overthinking: the probability of condom breaking is 2%, the probability of getting pregnant on that night considering her cycle and the app counting it and the studies [2](yes, she read the studies) is less than 10%, the probability of a pregnancy test to be false negative is rather high as these do not exhibit a high effectiveness (yes, she read those studies as well)[3]. So she took another test, another negative. And she had to wait for the doctor’s appointment on a Wednesday.

And then he messaged. It’s considered crass these days to call, even after sleeping with a person. We communicate through emojis and written words. So she told him there are chances of pregnancy (just not how slim they seemed even in her probabilistic analysis) and her decision and that she will let him know when she knows for sure.

Wednesday. “It is definitely not a pregnancy. However….” Knees up and feet firmly planted on the doctor’s couch, she could hear the whoosh of waves. After all, that is almost the position one takes on a beach chair. Of course, on the beach, there is more light and no transvaginal probe inside one’s nether regions. And on the beach, there is no black ball on the screen of an ultrasound machine. There it was: the ball. “It seems to be a cyst, but we should run more tests. Meanwhile, I’ll change your pill prescription.” She left the doctor’s with one idea swirling in her mind: Well, people have told me I have balls bigger than some men. It seems I’m growing them now. Well, one ball.

A golf ball is 42.7mm in diameter. So was mine. So is mine.

In some ultrasounds, it seems to be bigger, in others smaller, like it changes shapes. I’ve grown fond of it. I’ll see it in 3D at the end of August, and then the diagnosis shall be clear. The guy is no longer in the picture. He never was really in the picture. But both he and the ball taught me something (see? The man in the hole plotline, Vonnegut be praised). It is wonderful to have the right to have an abortion if that is best for me, the right to choose to keep the pregnancy if I wanted with not a significant loss of income and career plans, the right to buy contraceptives (for medical purposes this time) without social stigma, the right to be single, unmarried and sexually active. Those are rights that no government and no church should be allowed to take away, and I shall be even more vocal about it.

Because I grew some balls and I am keeping them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC27529/

[3] https://triggered.clockss.org/ServeContent?issn=1063-3987&volume=7&issue=5&spage=465

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