The YDN also asked a bunch of doctors whether Aliza's little stunt was medically possible. Dr. Edward Funai, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology and chief of obstetrics at Yale-New Haven Hospital totally pwns Shvarts. "The most likely scenario," he told the YDN, "is that all Shvarts was seeing every month was her own menstrual blood. Half of the Yale community sees art of similar quality when taking care of their monthly hygiene." (Oh, snap!)

Yale brass are standing firm on their decision to keep Shvarts's work out of the exhibition. They told her last week that in order to have her work show, she would have to confirm that "her project was 'a work of fiction,' [admitted] that she did not inseminate herself or induce miscarriages and promis[ed] that no human blood will appear in the project." Shvarts would agree to none of those conditions, and so her work was not shown.

Since there was little to no hubbub at the exhibition, I'm hoping that this will soon disappear into the internet ether and I won't have to see those scuffed, fringed cowboy boots ever, ever again. Unless, on graduation day, she decides to smear her cap and gown with menstrual blood to protest Yale's suppression of her ideas — then I just really hope someone tapes that and sends it to us, with or without the cowboy boots.

After Buildup, A Quiet Opening [Yale Daily News]
Experts Shed Doubt On Shvarts' Claim [Yale Daily News]

Earlier:
Avant Garde Assholes
One Thing Is Certain: Right Now, Yale University & Aliza Shvarts '08 Are 100% Annoying
Aliza Shvarts: The Halloween How-To For Harvard Students
Yale: Abortion Art Piece Was "Creative Fiction"
Just How Do You Give Yourself An Herbal Abortion?
Yale Senior Undergoes Multiple Self-Induced Miscarriages In The Name Of Art

• Slut Machine took one for the team and Intern Betty filmed her getting a colonic. Crappy hour indeed.
  
• Speaking of Crap: If Aliza Shvarts smears her uterine lining all over Boot Barn and no one is around to see it, did it really happen?
  
• We learned why mommy's face no longer moves.
  
• The kind of mommy who reads Baby Couture!
  
• Paul Janka + Tyra = Our pop cultural worlds colliding

• We met Sarah, an American journalist in Yemen. She misses booze.
• The American economy through the lens of hand jobs and Dov Charney: a treatise.
• The conspiracy against curls must be stopped.
• Even though Mark Ronson might be off the market, get your ass effects out on the town this weekend! It's been a doozy of a week.

[Image via Oh! My God! I Miss You]

The foundation of Aliza's outfit is, naturally, built upon the shopping mecca of aspiring hipster poseurs everywhere: American Apparel. Below, the leggings, scoop-neck leotard and black hoody.

(Unisex flex fleece zip hoody, $40; cotton spandex jersey legging, $26; jersey short sleeve t-shirt leotard, $28.)

And her boots? White fringe stylings are something that could only be found at a place called the Boot Barn.

(Oak Tree Farm "Oasis" fringe boot, $89.99)

And don't forget the hair! This Beverly Johnson wig in Shade 4 ought to do the trick.

(H-214 by Beverly Johnson wig, $45.90)

But to really encapsulate Aliza-style, you've gotta rock the baggy leopard-print short. Where to go? The men's underwear section of WildFree, naturally.

(Wild Free men's lingerie silk leopard-print boxer shorts, $24)

Related: Shvarts Explains Her 'Repeated Self-Induced Miscarriages [Yale Daily News]

Earlier: One Thing Is Certain: Right Now, Yale University & Aliza Shvarts '08 Are 100% Annoying

Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University's statement "ultimately inaccurate."...But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly used a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant. "No one can say with 100-percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen," Shvarts said, "because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties."

University Calls Art Project A Fiction; Shvarts '08 Disputes Yale's Claim [Yale Daily News]

Actually, "gullible weenies" isn't the term that was used, but that's pretty much what it amounted to. Here's the full statement from Klasky:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Yale Press Release [Yale]

Earlier: Yale Senior Undergoes Multiple Self-Induced Miscarriages In The Name Of Art
Just How Do You Give Yourself An Herbal Abortion?

We all know well that to get rid of your baby at home you should generally submit yourself to the inimitable mix of RU-486 and — UGH — cytotec they give you at the abortion clinic? I looked on the internet and all the sites you get upon Googling "herbal abortion" are like "DUUUUUDE, TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT THAT THIS IS A MATTER FOR MODERN MEDICINE."

Herbal Abortions

Earlier: Yale Senior Undergoes Multiple Self-Induced Abortions In The Name Of Art

We've all met young men and women like Aliza Shvarts: They come from relatively happy, upper-middle-class families, and are so desperate to be "edgy" and "crazy" that they perform a series of stunts — whether through drug experimentation, sexual exploration, or bad performance art — to differentiate themselves from their hopelessly bourgie peers and parents. The problem with Shvarts' little art project, however, is that her need to rebel has potentially big ramifications outside her ivory tower of academia. (One assumes that Shvarts used, at least in part, the abortifacient RU-486, a prescription-only drug that some politicians want added to the list of Schedule I controlled substances.) Plus, conservative bloggers are already up in arms and using Aliza's capriciousness to support their anti-abortion agendas. (At 9:00am this morning Shvarts' name had 53 hits on Google; as of 11:52am, it had 291.) And though the Buckley School valedictorian claims that she wants her piece to be a medium for "politics and ideologies," it's not like she's shedding light on an obscure subject. People debate the ethics of abortion constantly, and possibly harming your body by forcing it to miscarry repeatedly? Yeah, that's not helping the discourse.

Molly Clark-Barol, a Yale student and commenter on the YDH's website, sums up Shvarts's egocentrism better than I could: "Congratulations, Aliza Shvarts '08: you have single-handedly trivialized not only an entire generation and a half's fight to gain and retain the right to choose, through harassment and against massive odds, but also history of women's struggles, not only politically, but with the emotional, moral, and spiritual impacts of the choice to terminate a pregnancy. You also spit upon every couple who has tried, and failed, sometimes repeatedly, to have children. it is the emotional impact of these struggles, emotional impact that you shamelessly exploit, not explore, in your senior project."

[Image via Soapbox Event]

Related: Absolutely Fascinating [Bitch, PhD]