A woman I know was recently diagnosed with an STD, Human Papilloma Virus to be exact. Not that unusual I know. But here's the thing. She's in her late 70s and hasn't been sexually active in over 35 years. It seems that her abusive ex-husband gave her the disease sometime prior to the early 1970s. It lay dormant in her system for all that time, until last year, when she received radiation treatment for breast cancer. The radiation apparently compromised her immune system, and the long dormant HPV took advantage. Her ex-husband died about 6 years ago. But he's managed to reach out from the grave to abuse her yet again.

I don't know why I'm blogging about this. A couple of reasons I guess. First, because I'm reflecting on the passing of Betty Friedan, and the generation of women that were her contemporaries. The woman who was just diagnosed with HPV was raised in the conservative Catholicism of her times. She has had only one sexual partner in her life. She didn't even know what sex was until she got married. She had no names for parts of her anatomy until she was in her mid to late twenties. She knew nothing of sexually transmitted diseases. She was raised in complete ignorance of her female biology and sexuality. She was in her 40s before she found out how gay people have sex. When she was in her mid-thirties, after the birth of her third child (not to mention the 5 miscarriages) she thought she was pregnant again. She couldn't bear to go through another pregnancy, risk another life threatening miscarriage, give birth to another baby. She was stuck with three small children in an abusive marriage. She wouldn't have known where to get an abortion even if she understood that abortion was an option. She contemplated suicide. Luckily, it turned out that she was not pregnant. I have no doubt, listening to her now, that she would have killed herself if she had been pregnant.

This woman was not alone in her ignorance. Another woman that I know, also in her 70s, did not know how babies were delivered until she was in the hospital giving birth to her first child. She still doesn't understand her female anatomy and until 6 months ago thought the fetus feeds off the food in the mother's stomach.

This is the tragic world into which Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique back in 1963. Surely, not all women of that age were as ignorant of their femaleness as the two women i have described. But many were. And this is the world that the right wing theocrats want to return to. A world where young women aren't given sex education. A world where women don't have access to contraception or abortion. A world where we don't tell young people how to prevent sexually transmitted disease, because that might encourage them to have sex.

The second reason I'm blogging about this is because it is a harsh reminder of how far into the future our actions carry. Long after we are dead, how we lived our lives continues to affect others. Whether we choose to be good to others or choose to mistreat others, the legacy of our actions carries on much further into the future than we might imagine.