Buy My Eggs, Have Kids With Enormous Vocabularies
Seriously, I'm in an AP article this morning, by Martha Irvine.
Click for article
I wouldn't call myself an "aspiring comedian and model" (more like just a regular comedian and former model), but I think the whole thing is really very nice, and I'm flattered to be the lede on this thing. With photos*, no less!
Update: This story got picked up and is being debated on Feministing. Thanks, Iscah!
* Photo credit: Adam Rountree. If there's another Addams Family movie, I am sooo auditioning.
Click for articleI wouldn't call myself an "aspiring comedian and model" (more like just a regular comedian and former model), but I think the whole thing is really very nice, and I'm flattered to be the lede on this thing. With photos*, no less!
Update: This story got picked up and is being debated on Feministing. Thanks, Iscah!
* Photo credit: Adam Rountree. If there's another Addams Family movie, I am sooo auditioning.
posted by JenIsFamous at 2/19/2007 09:47:00 AM
6 Comments:
Speaking of large vocabularies. . .
I've always thought that those who write for a living might do well to purchase a thesaurus, that they might there find a synonym for "aspiring" or, better yet, a word that connotes an entirely different sentiment. "Aspiring" is such an overused adjective, and more often than not its usage conveys, at best, a rather back-handed compliment. Consider: Olive Hooper is an aspiring beauty pageant winner in "Little Miss Sunshine". Barack Obama aspires to being America's first black president; Hillary Clinton, America's first female one. We all have dreams.
Well, most of us do, anyway. One would hardly consider it complimentary to say, for example, "In addition to possessing a first-rate wit, excellent comic timing, a large vocabulary, perfect SAT scores, healthy ova, and, oh, a physique you're not the only one who'd pay to see naked. . . Jennifer Dziura isn't lazy, stupid, or feckless. She's also kinda hot and will probably make you laugh. She talks good and smells pretty, ma."
See? As I said, "aspiring" is a misused adjective. If you purchased a ticket this week, dearheart, you're an aspiring lottery winner. Okay? Does that put things in perspective?
Preferring industry and hard work to a dollar and a dream, I didn't happen to purchase a lottery ticket this or any other week. But I don't mind saying, either, that I aspire to being the first recipient of some medical engineering marvel that will allow me to eat all the pie I want without gaining any weight. While I wait for that ship to come in or those dice to turn up seven (aspire to picking a more overused expression), I do what I do and I keep on keeping on.
And so do all of you, my aspiring brothers and sisters.
As I expect you know, the article has been picked up and run in a number of places, including Forbes.com.
From there, it was picked up for comment on Feministing.com, where it's under discussion. I have linked them to your egg blog, in my own odd attempt to make my small world smaller all the time. Now go, and dazzle them with your rhetoric.
I'd like to ask those who have a problem with a woman's selling her ova (or a man's selling his sperm) how they feel about ANYONE'S selling a cigarette. For all their yummy goodness, cigarettes are still not part of a healthy balanced diet, and they don't have vitamin C. You sell a cigarette, you are selling death. You sell your ova, you are selling potential life. Pretty simple equation to me, which is the greater evil. And yet, the evil man who owns the bodega downstairs was able to make a better life for himself selling cigarettes to Yuppies on the Upper East Side, than he ever was selling them to GIs in the war-torm streets of Vietnam, so what do I know?
Say, in doing all this heavy lifting that moralizing can so often be, have you given any thought to the fact that many of the children born in this obese country of ours, as a result of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, fertility treatments, ova and sperm donation, etc., are going to be educated (like the greengrocer's three girls who all went to Ivy League universities) at public schools funded by taxes levied on the sale of the aforementioned cigarettes known to cause cancer? How does that make you feel? Or had you not thought about the fact that, if you really wanted to attack those who sell eggs, you might make McDonald's your first target? I mean, seeing as how more Americans are, after all, likely to have a quadruple bypass with cheese this year than donate their ova or sperm. Seems to me that if you wanted to put your argument in proper perspective, you'd acknowledge that if egg donation is suddenly the pandemic the AP article would have you believe it is. . .well. . .Egg McMuffins are WMD, okay?
Of course, I don't want to tell anyone what to believe, though. Those of you who have done such a wonderful job of thinking this through, that you're now prepared to moralize about the "commercialism" of baby-making while failing to acknowledge that the obstetrician also gets paid (a lot) whether he or she is or isn't in "serious" debt, seem to be doing fine thinking for yourselves. I know you don't need me to torment you further with some impertinent thought-provoking question like, "Um, excuse me, but don't you think that, uh, the women who supply their eggs are just the supply side, if you will, of this equation, and that we might look also to consumers like Madonna or Branjelina, who seem to think children are fashion accessories?"
No, I won't trouble you any further. Go back to your televisions. Or your bibles. Talk amongst yourselves.
Please.
New fan here (Jen: your ad in A Word A Day worked; thought you'd like to know).
Anyway, my only problem with the article is semantic.
I was pretty sure, but I wanted to be certain, so I looked it up, and I was right; a donation is:
1 The act of giving to a fund or cause.
2 A gift or grant.
... at least according to the dictionary at www.answers.com (though I added the italics).
Nothing about getting anything in return. If you get something back for it, it's not a donation, it's a sale (or barter, depending). "Donating ______ for money" is a contradiction in terms.
Please note that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with anyone selling (or donating, for that matter) her ova. I would be just as picky (at least, I hope I would) if anyone had suggested women were 'selling their eggs for nothing.' That would be a donation, not a sale.
The phrase "donor fees" is an oxymoron. The phrase "donors who get more than $5,000" is semantically null.
Just saying.
Oh, I couldn't agree more, Wilson. It's a shared cultural fiction.
We also don't really "pass on" when we die.
Jen
As the noted linguist George Carlin has pointed out before on this subject, "sperm donor" doesn't really mean what you think it does!
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