Sex and Birth Control
I am a young-adult Jewish white middle-class female USer.
Sex in romantic relationships is a contemporary women’s issue that I have struggled with. To be a desirable and “good” female, I feel a strong pressure to have sex often, and casually, and when I have sex with a male partner to have it be determined by his needs, his feeling bad, his isolation, and so on.
The sexist idea of women always being available for sex is exacerbated by modern dating websites, which focus strongly on what someone looks like and on sex at the beginning of a relationship.
Hormonal birth control is pushed to young females because it is more profitable than non-hormonal birth control and involves less thinking and decision making. Younger females are not expected to be able to think about when to have sex or how to do it safely.
My partner and I decided we wanted to use a diaphragm and spermicide as our form of birth control. We didn’t want to put hormones in my body, and we liked that inserting a diaphragm would force us to think and make sure we really wanted to have sex before we did it.
The gynecologist who prescribed me a diaphragm did so reluctantly. She didn’t have much information about it, as she considered it an outdated form of birth control. I had to do a lot of searching to find the little bit of information out there about non-hormonal birth control and to finally find an older woman gynecologist who could answer my questions about the diaphragm. She reminded me that diaphragms didn’t become unpopular because they were ineffective but rather because more profitable kinds of birth control were discovered. As she said to me, in a capitalist system it is all about profit.
Washington, D.C., USA
(Present Time 184, July 2016)