A bit of background: If you’ve ever cracked a joke about poor white trash, the butt of your joke was me at the age of 3. My father was your standard shiftless batterer. My mother was too smart to be there but too afraid to leave. I was their straw-thin, hyperactive daughter. My brother was just a baby. We were a family of four, poor as dirt, living the low life in Lubbock, Texas. The year was 1976.

It fell to my mother to make ends meet. She typed term papers for college students, took office jobs now and then. Often, we’d collect cans and bottles off the street, recycle them and buy food and other necessities with the change. On days when the citizens of our flat, dingy town were particularly careless about disposing of their emptied bottles and cans, we might be lucky enough to get hamburger-potato goulash.

When you are poor, money taunts you constantly. It is the ticket to a full stomach, medicine, clean clothes, a good night’s sleep. You see it all around you — in other people’s wallets, in their tailored clothes and fancy cars — yet it’s never quite within your grasp. So there is a certain thrill in outwitting the dollar, in making it stretch beyond its obvious limits.

Meat wasn’t cheap. Even ground beef was pricey by our standards. Yet it was the most important component of the goulash, since it gave us much-needed protein and savory grease fat to slather on our skinny bones. The potatoes were cheap. You could buy a huge sack for the change under your couch and still have money left over to go on the horsy ride outside the Piggly Wiggly. Plentiful, malleable and delicious, potatoes are poverty’s trump card, triumphing over hunger and humorlessness.

And ketchup is one of those things that just seems to come with the fridge. What’s an upstanding blue-collar family without ketchup? It’s a garden without weeds, a sidewalk without cracks, a soup with no moisture. Who knows when we bought it or where the money came from? Ketchup was a ubiquitous presence when I was growing up. We slathered it on hot dogs and burgers, casseroles, even chicken. When we were older, my brother and I would pour it on our arms and lick it off and call it blood.

You fry up the potatoes for poverty, then fry up the beef for blessings. Throw them together, add some salt and a pinch of pepper, then drown the mixture in ketchup — which brings it all together.

Even in better years, when we could afford fried veal cutlets and steak and chicken with barbecue sauce, I would still clamor for goulash. But when I left home, I grew to despise all the things I ate as a child. Buttered hot dog buns stuffed with bacon? Appalling! Iceberg lettuce? God help us. “Velveeta is not a cheese,” I would say, enunciating each word in a high staccato voice, “and Folger’s hardly qualifies as coffee.” Goulash, too, became the object of my derision as I sought to differentiate my life from the one I’d lived growing up. It was not enough to simply no longer care for the cuisine and poverty of my childhood; I wanted to deny that any of it had ever been a part of me.

I developed a taste for wine, ports and, for a time, scotch. I replaced iceberg with braised greens, Velveeta with brie and pecorino. Today, my pantry is stocked with exotic Asian spices and the finest of virgin olive oils. I make apple pie from scratch, pair my meats with my wines and buy locally grown organic whenever possible. I devour Saveur and travel overseas on culinary missions. (I just got back from the birthplace of pesto.)

Yet there are days when the craving for fatty beef, oily potatoes and ketchup overwhelms me with desire and nostalgia. In these disconcerting moments I realize that while every cell in my body has replaced itself in the 10 years since I last ate goulash, I will always be, to some extent, what I ate as a child.

I was out on a date. The guy seemed nice, but he wasn’t. I won’t go into details because it’s too painful and not necessary, but he raped me.

I’m OK with it now. I’ve had some therapy. I’ve moved on. I don’t even think about it all that often. It certainly doesn’t affect us, just me, but like I said, I’m fine. I’m a survivor. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? I just thought, if we’re to grow close to one another, it’s important for you to know this thing about me. I hope you won’t think I’m needy or fucked in the head or anything like that.

Hey, are you OK? You seem distant.

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I cannot count the number of times I’ve had some variation of this conversation. More often than not, it’s the beginning of the end. How the listener responds tells me everything about his character and his readiness to take on a person like me. I’ve been disappointed more often than I care to remember.

Some guys immediately distance themselves, not wanting to be supportive of yet another needy victim. Much to my dismay, one boyfriend actually started snoring partway into the big conversation. Others have responded with smothering compassion, choosing to treat me as a weak and broken creature in need of their impressive male strength. “Let me take care of you,” they say. Or, “What’s his name? I’ll kill him, then it’ll never bother you again.”

The sad truth of rape statistics is that they can only measure the event itself. Every two minutes, a woman is raped in the United States. An estimated 68 percent of rape victims know their assailant. More than 670,000 women were the victims of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault in 1995 and 1996. And so on.

These numbers affix mathematical value to a host of similar incidents in an effort to help us conceptualize the severity of an inconceivable problem. But they tell only the beginning of the story. The tragic event recorded by these statistics lasts only minutes or maybe hours, but it changes a woman’s life forever. And not just her life, but the life of every person she encounters. It’s what happens after these 670,000-plus rapes in 1995 and 1996 that concerns us here — how these rapes play out in the context of relationships.

Honey, I’ve been raped and I’m fine. Honey, I’ve been raped and if you act nonchalant now I’ll fucking kill you with my bare hands. Honey, I’ve been raped, but I’m OK now; don’t you worry. Honey, I’ve been raped and that’s why I tend to compose my grocery and to-do lists every time we’re in bed, because if I think about sex, I think about him. Honey, I’ve been raped and I want you to tie me up because I’m that screwed up. Honey, I’ve been raped and I wish neither of us ever had to deal with it, but if you want to continue with me, it’s your problem now, too.

Many sigh with pain; they’ve heard it all before and wish to god they weren’t hearing it again. Not another one, they think. At first, their sadness seems selfish: What right do they have to feel bad when you’re the one who has to live with this for the rest of your life? Yet, who can blame them? Someone has hurt a person they care very much for, and now they, too, are being made to suffer through it.

One of the most gorgeous aspects of my current relationship is that this conversation was never necessary. Just after we met, he read an essay of mine that went into some detail about my painful past. In fact, he loved the essay so much, he’d sent a note saying as much. That note led me to ask him out to lunch. That lunch led to our first date. That date has lasted a year and a half and still counting. Knowing that he knew made entering the relationship palpably easier, safer. I already knew he wouldn’t disappoint me with his reaction to the news that I’d been through this awful thing. Not only had he already reacted compassionately, but he’d openly expressed admiration for how I’d chosen to deal with it. His mature and wise response was a rare and precious gift.

I am yoked to this thing. It is as much a fact of my existence as my major organ systems or the man and woman who joined to create me. It is woven into my identity, my sexuality, my approach to information and responses to others so intricately that extricating it would be akin to self-lobotomizing.

In stripping me of my trust of authority, being sexually violated taught me to question everything — the birth of my cherished iconoclasm occurred on a shag carpet covered in semen, blood and tears. It’s given me an edge, a strength that has helped me overcome lesser crises. It has also given me nightmares and an unhealthy fear of the world that sometimes makes it difficult to even go outside. It’s made me want to die; it’s made me want to live as an act of vengeance on those who have hurt me.

All I can do is talk about it, write about it, express and manipulate it — or let it sit and stagnate inside of me. It is part of who I am. If you accept me, you accept it.

Just as there is no one typical response to hearing that someone you care about has been sexually assaulted, there is no standard reaction for women who are working through the rape itself. For some, it is their first introduction to a series of abusive relationships. Many women walk away from the crime only to develop a steadfast hatred of their bodies and sexuality, often expressed through promiscuity or, conversely, frigidity. Some lose the ability to have an orgasm, or to develop trusting, meaningful relationships with the opposite sex. A few women become activists, speaking out against this cancer in our society; many women never speak of it at all.

What always holds true is that a woman who has been raped is a woman whose worldview is forever altered. Her faith in humanity’s goodness and her trust in others are damaged, if not completely destroyed.

How this all plays out in her romantic relationships is as unpredictable as people themselves. But when a woman who’s been raped becomes romantically and sexually involved with a man, or another woman, you can be certain that the rape continues to play out — whether she brings it up or not. To say it doesn’t affect things is to lie. This is why the when, why, where and who of divulging the information is so important.

To talk of this event is also an act of trust by a person whose trust has been terribly damaged. It should not be taken lightly.

Everywhere I look I see sex: On television, in films, in short stories, on billboards, in magazine profiles about dominatrixes and Web tycoons, in “sex-positive” feminism, in religious preaching and condemnation, on the Senate floor and in the Oval Office, on “60 Minutes.” We talk about sex more than we discuss what’s for dinner. Yet here’s this thing that has somehow touched the sex lives of almost every person I know, and it’s taboo to speak of it. How can this be?

But we don’t talk really about sex at all. We talk about what we wish it could be: light, without consequences, fun, undemanding, a theory, a worldview, sexy, disposable.

But sex is messy. Sex is crude. It reaches deep inside us and pushes buttons we weren’t aware existed. Sex is painful. Sex is sweet. It is sometimes beautiful. It is always complex. Sex turns us into fools. It turns us into gods.

We should talk about it, but that would mean acknowledging a lot of things we’d rather pretend did not exist.

Bottling up what happened has never been an option for me. I’ve never been good about keeping my feelings or thoughts under wraps. For one, it causes me undue stress that manifests in dramatic panic attacks. In the case of rape, I’ve always felt that not talking about it helps reinforce the shame and guilt that tend to arrive shortly after the crime. So I think about it. I write about it. And whenever I sense that I’m growing close to a person, it’s not a matter of whether we’ll talk about this. It’s just a matter of when and how.

College was the worst. Like many women in my position, I lacked the judgment and maturity to pull off the conversation with anything resembling grace or tact. I’d blurt it out in all sorts of situations — stuck in traffic, during finals week or even in the middle of sex. I was equally indiscriminate about who I told. Boyfriends or one-night stands — it hardly mattered who was on the receiving end. This was my identity we were talking about. I was a rape survivor, and if you were going to get with me, you had to carry this burden.

This reckless, unlearned behavior led to many disappointing reactions, helping to reinforce the distrust of others that began with my first sexual assault (there has been more than one instance).

Once the conversation ended, the relationship (if there was indeed a relationship involved) would veer in one of several possible directions. Often, I’d grow suddenly and desperately clingy. If the fellow left after this conversation, I reasoned, it wasn’t because of the way I’d told him; he was rejecting me because I’d been raped; I was damaged goods; I had been turned into a despicable creature who could never be redeemed.

I wonder now if many men who react badly to this sort of news have been introduced to the idea by a novice such as myself. I wonder if my first ill-conceived attempts to reconcile myself to the event — and to reconcile the event to someone else — didn’t result in my giving these guys a permanently dim view of women who’ve been through this.

So many women have been through this that even statistics don’t do the numbers justice. You can picture a dozen women, 100 women, even a stadium full — but 670,000? The magnitude stretches far beyond what can be imagined. Perhaps that is why we’re still surprised when it happens to us or to someone we love. The reality stands in rude contrast to abstract, distant figures.

And still the greatest damage to mind and soul occurs after the fact — in the form of ruined sex lives, emotional distance. It derives from the shame that develops from not talking about it — or talking about it, only to have the discussion result in rejection, confusion or more hurt.

Honey, like countless thousands of women, I’ve been raped. This is a sickness of violence by men against women that is destroying our society person by person, relationship by relationship. It is no longer something you can dismiss and say, I am immune to this because I am a man. It has happened to me, hence it has happened to you, and this terrible act continues to hurt all of us.

Others can express only gratitude: “I am so glad that [the Today Sponge] is finally coming back! I am so miserable without them! I cannot be on the Pill anymore, and I used to use these things all the time! Only went to the Pill because they got rid of the sponge! My prayers are finally answered!”

Who can blame them for being anxious? It’s been five long years since the Today Sponge sat on drugstore shelves. In March 1999, the newly formed Allendale Pharmaceutical Co. announced it would bring back the sponge, possibly as soon as fall 1999.

Fall came and went, then winter. Now Allendale predicts its resurrected product will be released in Canada sometime this month, and in the United States no later than May. For fans of the contraceptive sponge it can’t happen soon enough.

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I was 22 when American Home Products halted production of the Today Sponge — too young and promiscuous to have considered it an option. When it comes to birth control, I’ve always preferred my methods to be chemical and imperceptible — provided I’m in a long-term, monogamous relationship that supports such characteristics.

During the times in my sexually active life when I haven’t been on the Pill or Depo Provera, the trusty condom suited me. Unlike female barrier methods such as the female condom, the diaphragm or, god help us, the vaginal film, condoms effectively stop pregnancy and disease without similarly putting an end to the mood.

For many women my age (and younger), when the Today Sponge returns it will feel much like it did in 1982 for another generation of women when a brand-new form of birth control was introduced.

The sponge was invented by Bruce Ward Vorhauer, who struggled for seven years to get the device approved and on the market. The Today Sponge was the first new contraceptive method to appear in decades and, for more than 10 years it was the most popular female, over-the-counter birth-control method around. Five years after its release, 75 million sponges had been sold. During its 12 years on the market, it is estimated that 6.4 million women (11 percent of all women using contraceptives at the time), had tried the sponge at least once, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit family-planning advocacy organization.

(Vorhauer, meanwhile, spent his fortune on a lavish lifestyle, was forced to sell his company to American Home Products in 1987, moved to Montana where he ran for the U.S. Senate and lost, went bankrupt again, set fire to his yacht in an insurance scam and was facing potential arson charges when he committed suicide in 1993.)

The reasons for the sponge’s popularity begin with convenience. It was bought over-the-counter and could remain inserted in the vagina for up to 24 hours and multiple ejaculations. You could slip a sponge in before your date and avoid the mad, drippy dash to the bathroom once the deed was done. At a half-inch thick and three-quarters of an inch in diameter, it was both discreet and portable. The sponge was also empowering — the only nonprescription birth-control method that put women in control of their own contraception from purchase to insertion and beyond.

There were benefits for men as well. “There was definitely the advantage of not having to think about putting on the condom,” recalls Matthew, a New York media consultant. He used the Today Sponge with a former girlfriend, who had mood swings while on the pill. And unlike with the condom, there’s no loss of sensation for him or her. In fact, Matthew says, it added a new element. “I noticed it inside her because I knew her well. You can feel it. It’s not like you’re running into a hubcap; it’s a soft object.”

But it’s unclear whether the sponge will be as impressive the second time around. Its low, 90.8 percent effectiveness rate in preventing pregnancy will give many women pause. And the sponge may be even less effective for women who’ve already had children, because their vaginas and cervical openings are larger, according to Rebecca Pinto, a physician’s assistant at Planned Parenthood Golden Gate in San Mateo, Calif. “You have more room for the sponge to move off the cervix and move around,” she explains.

The sponge does not protect against sexually transmitted diseases. For women in 1982, that may not have been a huge concern. But for those of us who grew up under the shadow of AIDS and have been taught to use condoms, condoms, dental dams and more condoms in our sexual encounters, the sponge won’t even be an option unless we’re being monogamous with a thoroughly tested significant other.

For a small number of male and female users, the sponge was more painful than pleasurable. One former male user described the sensation he experienced using the sponge as “the flaming urethra.”

“Some people are allergic to the spermicide,” explains Pinto.

None of this seems to dampen the enthusiasm of former sponge users, like those in the birth control chat room, whose love of the method was commemorated in an episode of “Seinfeld” titled “Spongeworthy.” In the oft-cited installment, Elaine begins stockpiling sponges when she hears that the product will be discontinued. In an effort to conserve her limited supply, she starts determining whether the men she dates are “spongeworthy” — that is, not only worthy of going to bed with, but of using a whole sponge on.

“With birth control you want a lot of choices. That’s because everyone’s situation is somewhat different,” Pinto says. If you want to get a woman riled, ask her about the availability of effective, user-friendly, inexpensive birth control options. Pills, diaphragms, shots and implants all require doctors visits, can cause serious side effects and are rarely covered by insurers. Female condoms and vaginal films are so poorly designed that their greatest effectiveness in preventing pregnancy lies in their ability to kill the mood. Condoms, while convenient, are still a male method. When the sponge was taken off the market, women lost one of the few decent pregnancy preventers they could call their own.

In the United States, it’s worse than in other developed countries. The FDA is slow to approve new methods, such as RU-486. Meanwhile, abortion foes use everything from clinic blockades to “partial-birth” abortion bans to limit women’s reproductive options.

While thousands of Elaines stockpiled sponges, Canadian women were enjoying a perfectly decent alternative, the Protectaid Sponge. In fact, the Protectaid Sponge may be even better, according to Barbara Bell, host of the Canadian-based Birthcontrol.com, which sells the Protectaid Sponge (to Americans and Canadians alike) and will sell the Today Sponge when it’s available. She explains: “There are a lot of women who are less allergic to the Protectaid Sponge,” which uses a mix of three spermicides instead of just nonoxynol 9, which many women and men are allergic to. It also has three finger slots for removal instead of the sponge’s string.

“Apparently the United States is one of those countries that’s very behind in contraceptive choice for women,” Bell states.

Particularly frustrating for American women is the fact that the Today Sponge was deemed perfectly safe by the FDA when it was taken off the market. It was American Home Products’ plant, where the Today Sponge and several other pharmaceutical products were produced, that had problems — specifically, high levels of bacteria in its air and water.

Gene Detroyer, president and CEO of Allendale Pharmaceuticals, explains: “What American Home Products did is take their big products to a new plant. Those that could be made by an outside packer were sent to contract packers. The Today Sponge fell in between. It had to be made on special equipment. It wasn’t a very big product, $20 million in sales. They decided not to do anything with it but to sell it.”

Allendale bought the patent and the equipment and moved it to a new plant. All that remains now is FDA approval of the new plant, which has been a slow and grueling process, to say the least. In fact, Detroyer refused to comment on the agency’s snail’s pace, lest there be ramifications that would slow approval even further.

The sponge’s difficult journey from success to near death and impending resurrection after five years is difficult to come to terms with. Whom do you blame? The FDA? But it was only looking out for women’s best interests. American Home Products? It made a tough business decision, and women paid the price of one less choice in contraception. It’s unfortunate, but now there is nothing to do but wait.

How the Today Sponge will fare this time around is anybody’s guess. Pinto says her clinic will probably stock them again, and there’s clearly an eager base of former users on Birthcontrol.com ready to purchase it as soon as it’s available again. Detroyer is, obviously, optimistic: “We’re very encouraged that we have a very solid foundation of users. I get e-mails from them every day — who really like the product and will be the foundation of our business. We’ll have to spread the word to women who may have been too young to use the sponge.”

I found these stats on CrimeWatch, a one-of-a-kind application on the Oakland city Web site. Basically, an interactive map, CrimeWatch lets anyone select an area of the city and find out how many crimes have been committed there over a specified period of time. Originally created for internal use by the police department and city officials, the site allows users to create maps, graphs and spreadsheets, which can then be downloaded for personal use — or activism.

“It was really [Oakland Mayor] Jerry Brown’s decision to push this out to the public,” explains Frank Kliewer, project manager for the Oakland site. “As we say, democratize information and improve public awareness and get them into a partnership with the police department. In Oakland, having the capacity to see police data geographically projected, allows citizens to focus on [improving] neighborhoods and blocks.”

It’s a familiar Internet refrain: better democracy through the free exchange of information. But there are a few problems with this particular expression of the ideal. “Crime is focused in pretty much the same area where we’re experiencing a digital divide,” Kliewer says. In other words, a lot of my blue-collar neighbors are not online; so while they might benefit from this great, open flow of information, for now they are out of its reach.

Even if every resident of Oakland could access CrimeWatch, Barry Kriberg, president of the National Council on Crime Prevention, doubts the program would make any difference. “Most of the crime mapping technology essentially reproduces what seasoned policemen know already,” he says. “It produces knowledge that isn’t new or different … Who doesn’t know where the high crime area is?” Rather than help neighborhood groups attack crime problems, Kriberg says the site will probably prove most useful to people deciding where (and where not) to buy homes or to insurers looking for an excuse to raise rates.

I spoke with a police officer a few days after my Web discovery, only to be told that the few blocks near my house were indeed “very quiet”; the view outside my window was not as deceptive as I’d thought. It turns out the site had not made me a better citizen, just a more fearful, distrustful one. And even if my neighborhood had been a den of iniquity, CrimeWatch offers no suggestions for what I might do to change that.

Nevertheless, the site is being heralded as a communications breakthrough by city officials and the media alike. According to Kleiwer, civic leaders from other parts of the country are coming to Oakland to learn about the site, which is, he concedes, a work in progress. “The functionality and the display, the ubiquitous nature of it are all still being worked on,” he says. “Like the Internet, it’s a work of art in development.”

The group, which will also be led by therapist Claude DeLaubert, will meet for a minimum of six weeks and address the issues of loss and disappointment, as well as anger, guilt and shame experienced by those who feel betrayed by the media and retailers who capitalized on pre-New Year’s hysteria.

People who carefully prepared for disaster by changing investments and stocking up on canned goods tend to be hardest hit by the Y2K letdown, Coryell says. “Those people are even more limited in talking about their feelings because of the shame involved, as if they did something wrong. But the thing is, if it had turned out differently, those would be the people we would say, ‘They were prepared.’”

Coryell is somewhat unique among mental health professionals. She worked for 20 years as an MIS director and a system administrator prior to becoming a therapist. “I’m a ‘technotherapist,’” she says with a laugh. “I have a Palm Pilot, a cell phone.” She also owns a consulting business called Sage Advice, which trains people on how to use computers and software. Coryell says her corporate experience gives her special insight into how technology and work affect people — and after Y2K, she became acutely aware that people were feeling upset and stressed, even though it was essentially a happy ending.

Sensible as Coryell’s explanations for the group may be, it’s difficult to shake a feeling of dij` vu. Prior to New Year’s Day, a host of authors, magazines, “crisis investors,” individuals and organizations got plenty of press mileage and no shortage of profit from the dreaded millennium bug. Isn’t this recovery group just the last of such exploitative measures? Or at the very least, aren’t most people just anxious to forget about it and move on?

Coryell says skepticism and incredulity are typical responses — at first. “Initially, people laugh. But then, as you start to ask them a little more about the stress they’re feeling, they stop laughing and go, ‘Huh, yeah, that’s what I’ve been feeling.’ It’s difficult to name.”