Jenna, reporting from Santa Fe, NM: The withdrawal method, aka "pulling out," long the black sheep of contraceptive options, is making a come back. Or rather, thanks to Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute's recent article in Contraception, we've finally got some respectable data on not just what's wrong with withdrawal but what's right about it. In a year of perfect use, 2% of women using condoms and 4% of women using withdrawal will get pregnant; with imperfect use, those percentages jump to 17% and 18% respectively. Yet pulling out has been stigmatized, by health professionals and the sexual health community alike, as an irresponsible, unreliable option hardly worthy of mention. Except, of course, to highlight irresponsibility! Jones confronts this stigma and engages in a frank discussion of risks and realities, operating under the inspiring principle that accurate information--not pre-determined health advice--is what people deserve most. See below for the Guttmacher Institute's release:
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---It seems a day,
One of those heavenly days which cannot die,
When forth I sallied from our cottage-door, And with a wallet o'er my shoulder slung,
A nutting crook in hand, I turn'd my steps
Towards the distant woods, a Figure quaint,
Trick'd out in proud disguise of Beggar's weeds
Put on for the occasion, by advice
And exhortation of my frugal Dame.
Motley accoutrements! of power to smile
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I got tired of writing about sex. I got tired of reading about sex. I would be tired of having sex, probably, if we weren't cat-sitting (in Austin TX) at the apartment-from-hell, so befouled, so entirely reeking of feline shit that mutually agreed upon abstinence has ensued from the team effort to avoid all unnecessary squalor-to-skin contact. My hanky-panky fatigue started on a seemingly benign Friday night two weeks ago when, waiting to judge an Iron Chef contest [1], I stumbled across Courtney Martin [2] and Hannah Seligson's Huffington Post diagnosis of the "Carrie Bradshaw Effect" and was launched into a state of existential sex blogger angst. I couldn't help but wonder (to lift a rhetorical prompt from none other than Bushnell's Bradshaw herself) . . . whether I was suffering from--and complicit in--The Effect? And, if so, was there a cure?
One time, not so long ago, back in those darker days when it was still relevant, I said I liked Sarah Palin. This was just after her first speech as the Republican vice presidential candidate. My exact words were, "I like her." When asked to clarify, I responded (to my current chagrin[1]), "I found her to be likable." Greg, alarmed by the new possibility that he might be dating a self-declared feminist and progressive activist-cum-Republican sympathizer, set off on a dense exegesis about ethics and my "deeply disturbing" lack thereof, launching us into the most existentially perilous fight of our relationship. It wasn't even a fight exactly, but one of those dissonant moments when it occurs to both lovers that what once felt like a stable basis of mutual respect might actually be a tenuous and now doomed balancing act brought off by fundamentally incompatible psyches. This is, after all, the partisan era that brought us the Facebook group "I Don't Hook Up With Republicans."
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Greg writes . . . I'd like to note, for the record, that one of my hopes for our trip was to escape Sarah Palin rallies. And not just Sarah Palin rallies, but Sarah Palin demonstrations, too. And not just those, but Obama rallies, and eviscerations of the Bush administration and John McCain courtesy of Maureen Dowd, and Nicholas Kristof's sober analysis of Obama's international appeal, and really, when you get down to it, the whole New York Times editorial page, and televised debates, and televised attack ads, and conversations about the candidates' policies and hotness, and fucking David Gregory. I wanted, that is, to escape just as the political season arrived at climax, all those obligations of the responsible and well-informed citizen alive in the midst of a world-historical election. I'd been living in D.C. for the prior year and a half, and the darkness of that place in that era corrupted my psychological and physiological health like some grave disturbance in the Force. I imagine the atmosphere as much like that aboard the behind-schedule Death Star: Vader haranguing effete British generals—"What do you mean we can’t find the rebels and crush their technologically primitive insurgency?"—an influx of wounded Storm Troopers returning from Endor and everybody vaguely unnerved about when the next thing might blow up.
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Jenna Does America
