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I graduated from a West Side suburban Catholic all-female high school June Ist. I wore a long white gown (virginity was an unwritten graduation requirement) and carried one dozen red roses. As I sat on stage listening to a recitation of the glories of Catholic education I recalled what the past four years had meant to me. It meart having my best friends unceremoniously kicked out of school by those "pro-life" nuns for being pregnant. It meant developing an inferiority complex for two years until I realized that the problem was them, not me. It. meant getting kicked out of school senior year for hosting a show on WERE radio about high school feminism.

I looked at myself for a moment 1 have spent the past two years doing everything I can to destroy what West Side suburban culture and that damned institution has tried to build 1 have begun becoming myself: proud, strong, aggressive, independent and assertive. Tanı working on overcoming the fucking virginity trip they have put on me. I have told them in so many words that they can take all the expectations they laid on me when they conse crated me to and named me after the year of the Blessed Virgin and stick it (you know where).

I proudly state that I don't want kids and that as far as I'm concerned, marriage is for friendship and sex. I consider myself to be a Clevelander (despite the suburban mentality of my far West Side neighborhood) as I know the city like the palm of my hand. I feel safer at Harvard & Lee than I do in Avon Lake (where a friend of mine was almost raped and Villed one Sunday morning), I walk downtown at night alone, unafraid. I don't have to say "Some of my best friends are black" because they really are my friends. The racist, sexist hung-up trip of this place can only be understood by someone who's been through it.

Many doctors are handing out birth control pills as if they were candy. The pill is not perfected 100%. It is very safe as a form of birth control, but a lot of women are gaining excessive amounts of weight, and their bodies are forming blood clots, etc. One pill in particular to watch out for is Ortho Novum. I know of women who had to have D&C's (dilation and curettage) because of excessive bleeding caused by the pill, Ortho Novum in particular. Also, one woman who used

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Ortho Novum began bleeding excessively, and her doctor told her to stay off of it for a while and to go back on it when the bleeding ceased. About a year later the woman died due to a blood clot in her leg. There is no proof that the blood clot was due to the pill, but I think women should be vary careful of what they are swallowing and also be sure that they have good recommendations before they go to a doctor.

Another bad thing is that when a woman goes to a clinic all the time, she often has a different doctor every time, and he doesn't know her case history. Also, you sometimes have a young, new doctor who isn't very experienced and diagnoses your case wrong such as a woman I know who had trichomonos, and it had been diagnosed as a yeast infection and went on for about four months hefore she finally got the right diagnosis and the proper medicine. Meanwhile this woman suffered with itching and burning for four months.

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page 10/What She Wants/July, 1975