Make Sex Wild Again Why women should stop taking the pill

Agree.

Antidepressants save women’s lives. They have serious side effects that need weighing up against the benefits and often takes many attempts to get the optimal dose of the most effective one for an individual.

If they are taken when they aren’t needed there will just be awful side effects with no benefit to see.

If women who don’t need them argued that they should all be removed from the market and we should rewild our mental health then feminists would not be impressed.

How can it be feminist to argue against women having control of our reproductive health!? That’s just cockshit. Completely great that women avoid it if it isn’t for them and any risks shouldn’t be down played, but the idea it is all bad is delusional.

The pill is not just for birth control

That's what it is designed for. You can use it for other purposes, but it is likely not ideal for those purposes. It was recommended to me as an easy fix for too high testosterone - I am sure there is a better solution.

And sorry, the pill is not medicine. Being fertile is not an illness.

I totally agree that the side effects of the pill might be worth it in some cases, but it cannot be truthfully called medicine, because medicine is something used to treat illness.

Amen, sister. Women should be the gatekeepers of fertility. They are, on average, far more invested in the well-being of their children than men are.

Birth control isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

There are other methods though, not just the pill. IUDs for example

I’ve been saying this for years too!

Agree.

Saying risking conception is the only true eroticism is awful.

Even in my long term, very secure and sexually satisfying relationship I find the idea of risking conception terrifying and the exact opposite of erotic.

Before we had children I knew he would stand by me, but I would have been terrified to be pregnant before we planned it, before we had saved and bought a house and had both decided we wanted a child at that point. I wanted any baby we had to be wanted and chosen by both of us.

Then we had twins and any further pregnancy and birth would have been a huge risk to my life and been impossible to care for the children we had (due to the impact on my underlying health conditions). There’s nothing erotic or arousing about risking that.

I breastfed so it wasn’t an issue until my periods returned years later, but I would have been far too exhausted to try and map my cycle even if it had been regular prior to children. The idea we might get a rare night they were asleep and we could have sex but I would have to check my dates and take temp and so on…. Not erotic at all to take that risk.

Risk and erotic don’t go together for me in any way. I doubt I’m unusual in that respect. I get the pill really doesn’t work for some women and changes desire and sexual response, but it doesn’t for me at all. I can’t feel desire without feeling safe and I can’t feel safe if pregnancy is a risk, or a higher risk. Feeling in control of my body is more erotic for me.

I'd like women, sympathetic to Harrington's article (book excerpt), to discuss this part:

The true, deep wildness of sex can only be reproduced, in the sterile order of de-risked consumer sex, by the stylised violence of ‘BDSM’. Add the real, material ‘power exchange’ of fertility back into sexual intimacy, and I’m willing to bet the popularity of ‘kink’ would evaporate overnight. Or, rather, return to its proper place. In turn, then, we might see fewer incidences of girls passing out in a rear naked choke-hold and fewer incidences of death from ‘rough sex’; fewer injuries; perhaps also fewer men driven to ever more extreme stimuli in search of the one thing that’s truly forbidden: sex with the real danger left in.

Harrington is functionally saying, the reason why men and women accept practices from porn and BDSM, is that they are a substitute risk-seeking activity to the risky activity that is procreative sex. I mean, she literally calls fertile heterosexual sex, a "power exchange", for fucks sake, without spelling out what that means for the female end of the act.

PS the number of women who die in childbirth, or during pregnancy, during any particular year is far higher than the number of women dead from "kink" influenced sex. The original risky sex is just literally just sex. Harrington knows this but thinks one risk is not just better than the other, but is inherently fulfilling and erotic to women. I cant think of anything more insulting to our sex, at the bottom of it.

Yeah, I found it a weird take that she thought the only options were: hormonal birth control pills or sex without contraception.

That's right, Mary Harrington is a conservative. Catholicism actually requires that women never use birth control.

I'm not sure if she is Christian, but her views in this article are completely consistent with conservative Christianity.

The very profound effect is why I needed to take it. Without this profound effect my pmdd was ruining my life and the excessive blood loss and 14 day cycle meant I was so dangerously anaemic as a preteen/teen I needed blood transfusion. Just because I have EDS, which can’t be fixed.

Saving my sanity meant my adhd was more manageable also, because the pmdd stretch of cycle meant much worse adhd symptoms.

I never lost sexual desire, never had any negative side effects (on the ones that work well for me, some others v bad reactions but they were changed quickly), only very positive ones. Coming off it and living through early peri (genetics unfortunately) reminded me how unwell I was when I had no choice as a young girl dealing with puberty. Hrt and mirina has helped massively and I feel like myself again. Although not before my iron got dangerously low and I caught every bug going, including long covid that ducked my immune system. Which in hindsight my anaemia may have played a role in why I was so vulnerable to glandular fever at 10 or perhaps partly why I ended up with post viral fatigue that wiped out my early teens. (No one else in my school caught it despite us all being around the kid I knew I caught it from).

Access to this profound effect is what saved my life and meant I was functioning well throughout my fertile years. For every woman who reacts very badly to hbc there will be one of us who thrives on it and suffers without. It shouldn’t be expected that women take it, but taking that choice away from us is the opposite of feminist.

I never gain weight on it either. Her whinging about women being fat and sexless is gross misogyny. If fat women are so unfuckable or lacking in desire pressumably we all skip many months of sex while pregnant then 🙄

She makes the point that the pill has meant that the only way women have been able to participate in society and be seen in equal terms to men is by artificial interference with the natural functions of their bodies.

Except the point Harrington is making is not true! Many sexually active heterosexual and bisexual women who have participated very fully in society and have made great strides in achieving equal opportunity and staus over many decades did so without taking or relying on the pill or any other form of birth control that inferfered with the natural functions of our bodies. I am one of them.

After the pill became a big success in the USA following its introduction in 1961, only a few years elapsed before the pil began generating a lot of negative word of mouth as rumors spread that that the pill in its original formulations was having damaging effects on women's health. By the end of the 1960s, there were many stories in mainstream women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook and Cosmopolitian about the healdth dangers of the pill.

As result, a lot of women of the baby boom generation who were involved in and/or influenced by the women's liberation movement admantly and consciously eschewed the pill (and IUDs too). We used diaphragms, condoms and contraceptive sponges instead.

Women who used barrier methods of BC in the late 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s might have been a minority compared to all the women over that time period who used hormonal BC and IUDs, but we were a very significant and sizable minority all the same. Some of us tried the BC pill initially, but decided to discontinue it because we had negative "side effects" and/or health concerns. Others never took the BC pill at all.

So the idea that we were all on the pill and the contention that this proved that

the only way women have been able to participate in society and be seen in equal terms to men is by artificial interference with the natural functions of their bodies.

Is a total distortion and a big fat lie. A distortion and lie that is fucking insulting to women of older generations. Aargh. The very idea makes me want to throw my laptop across the room in rage. It's bad enough when TRAs erase women, our history and "lived experience." But it's doubly infuriating when women like Mary Harrington are the ones doing the erasure, and they're doing it in the name of creating a better brand of "feminism" than the sort of feminism of stupid women of earlier generations who supposedly only achieved anything coz we were all on the pill.

Some background info about the backlash against the pill amongst American women in the 1960s and 70s, which helped make other methods of BC popular, and caused many women influenced by and involved in the women's liberation movement of the 70s to adopt the diaphragm as their preferred and main or sole method of contraception:

in a world where the pill represented a complicated portrait of both reproductive autonomy and unnecessary risk—manufactured by the hands of the male-dominated institution of medicine and pharmaceutical industry—the diaphragm re-entered the picture as an icon of female control. While radical feminists wielded it as a technology of self-exploration and a site for the production of experiential knowledge, young, middle-class women saw the device as an obligatory accessory to a successful, cosmopolitan lifestyle.

in the decade that followed the pill’s release, the promise of “one-size-fits-all” hormonal birth control unraveled. Over the course of the 1960s, Americans were generally losing faith in free-market medicine and pharmaceuticals... Women pill users in particular, already dissatisfied with the status quo of the medical marketplace, were in for even more disappointment. By 1962, the Food and Drug Administration reported on 26 pill users who developed thromboembolism, a serious blood clot; six cases resulted in death, while another 20 survived. Large-scale epidemiological studies of the pill’s side effects began to emerge later in the decade, confirming that oral contraceptives carried serious health risks.

While consciousness-raising groups of the women’s health movement acted locally, [Barbara] Seaman’s journalism [in many magazine articles published in major magazines] brought national attention to the problem of paternalistic medicine. When [Seaman's book] The Doctor’s Case Against the Pill [was published in 1969, it] prompted Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson to call for a Senate hearing on the oral contraceptive pill in January of 1970.

The hearings eventually resulted in new rules for pharmaceutical companies that required informational inserts to be included in all pill packages to ensure informed consent among users, as well as the development of the milder “mini-pill” with lower hormone concentrations. But most importantly, millions of Americans—many of them pill users—watched the televised hearings with rapt attention.

As sensational as the pill was when it was first introduced as a contraceptive panacea, it only made more headlines in its fall from grace. By early February, just one month after the Nelson hearings, the New York Times reported that “nearly one-fifth of the estimated total of eight-and-a-half million American women who have been using birth-control pills have recently stopped.”

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=uhf_2019

Mary Harrington is 44. Which means she was born in 1979, and she turned 21 in 1999. I don't think she has much grasp of what actually happened after the pill was introduced. Harrington's mistaken belief that women of earlier generations were only able to participate in society and be seen as equal to men because they/we were all on the pill suggests to me that the famous Seinfeld episode "The Sponge" from 1995 would go right over her head. A main reason that episode had such resonance, and worked to such comic effect, is that a great many successful, pioneering, feminist women of Elaine's and Jerry's generation and earlier generations consciously decided not to use the pill or any other form of BC that "switched off" part of our natural biology - yet we still had plenty of sex with men and avoided unwanted pregnancy anyway.

I've taken the pill, several different brands and strengths of it, and it absolutely did affect my mental health (depression -- severe with Ortho-Novum, low-grade with the lowest-dose pill on the US market), my physical health (it jacked up my cholesterol, and when I stopped taking it I lost 10 pounds in about a month with no effort), and my sexuality.

So that's n=1 but I'm just posting as counterpoint to VestalVirgin.

I honestly do not think that the pill affects women's choices that much.

Now, I admittedly never took it myself, but when I look at the mediocre men with whom the women around me start relationships (in some cases the first relationship, where presumably they weren't on the pill before), I get the impression that the social pressure to get a man, regardless how shitty, just to have a man, is affecting womens' choice (or lack of choosiness) more than the pill.

Do women become less choosy when taking the pill? Possibly. But ... does it even make a difference, considering the overall readyness to get with mediocre to outright horrid males?