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I promise that I didn’t start a blog just to link to my friends, but how can I help it when they’re such good photographers? My girl Meredith started a photo blog with pictures she’s taken at concerts. Meredith is a nice girl who shares my well-cultivated appreciation for LOLcats, regular cats, and keeping in touch poorly. Check her out!

License to pill

Feministing has a poll up about birth control methods that got a lot of interesting comments, especially about some that are more innovative or long-term like the implant, sterilization, etc.

H/t to another of my A-list blogs, Pandagon, for directing me to The Pill Kills. It’s an online campaign to make birth control illegal because it’s dangerous for women’s health and it hinders the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus (i.e. kills babies). The best estimate I can find for the numbers on breakthrough ovulation and rates of fertilization says that this occurs maybe 1% of the time. A lot of feminists, like in Amanda Marcotte’s post, believe that the real motivation behind things like this is to keep women from controlling their fertility. I think it’s true that in a lot of cases, a scary video and a dramatic list of side effects are a cover for a thoughtless, across-the-board opposition to birth control. I also don’t think the pill is quite so liberating as some feminist writers believe. The control that it gives a woman over her fertility also comes with the burden of birth control being placed entirely on her–remembering to take it every day, paying for it, dealing with the side effects, etc.

I’m not meaning to say that I think the pill is bad or that it’s a tool of oppression or anything like that, and I obviously don’t think it should be illegal, but reading about this campaign just led my thoughts this way. This is just to say that it’s hard to liberate women from every kind of oppression when it comes to birth control, and even though I and most women don’t feel particularly burdened by taking the pill, there is some unfairness to it. Male birth control, anyone?

Menstrual suppression: empowering or dangerous?

I don’t remember how my power-browsing got me to The Well-Timed Period today, but I’d be tipping my hat accordingly if I did. I think it’s pretty much common knowledge that women can use birth control pills to skip inconvenient periods. What I didn’t realize is that there are people who advocated doing it all the time, and it seems like a very emotionally driven campaign. NoPeriod.com, a big menstrual suppression site, is a little bit low on facts but really big on horror stories about terrible periods coming at the wrong times. All of the empowering language is weird too and almost anti-feminist, really. It’s not like menstruation is forced upon women to oppress them, and since it’s a natural occurrence, it seems like feminists would be more inclined to embrace their periods as a sign of what a woman’s body is capable of. That’s probably further than I’m willing to go in loving being a girl though. I don’t like my period, but I’m not sure I’d want to run the risk of filling my body with more hormones to get rid of it forever.

This is really different than the controversy over pills like Seasonale and Lybrel. For one, those are FDA-approved. The FDA won’t approve monthly-cycle birth control pills for non-stop use, and there are a lot of risks involved in long-term menstrual suppression. Most of the writing on these risks is about pills like Seasonale and Lybrel, and I wish I could find something good about renegade use of monthly-cycle pills. I guess it’s safe to assume that it’s at least as dangerous as the normal use of other pills.

NoPeriod.com is a decent resource, even though it doesn’t quite bring the facts about menstrual suppression like I want. Their useful period planner says I’ll be on my period on my birthday, so I’m thinking about using the pill to skip it then for just the one month. I’ll report back on that in a month and a half.

On an unrelated note, I got a lot of hits yesterday from people browsing the “safe sex” tag on WordPress. That warms my little heart.

Quick hits

A couple things that aren’t big enough for their own posts, but worthwhile and interesting nonetheless:

• A man in South Africa bungee jumped using a rope made of condoms. “Latex is latex. But the cord was based on a mathematical formula and although I was 99 per cent sure that it would work, my stomach was in a knot for a month before the jump.” Sounds a lot like having sex.
• A pharmaceutical company is working on getting generic Yasmin on the market. Bayer, the company that makes Yasmin, is putting up a fight.
• Good post with good links about birth control options and prices. She talks about cost per year where I would be more interested in cost per sexual encounter.

It’s a Newmanium party

So as to avoid giving the impression that all male college journalists are idiots, I give you A Newman Scorned. It’s notable that I suggested Newman start a blog about TV before I even met him, and I’m delighted to be called one of the godparents of the most successful three-day-old blog on the internet. I can’t even watch TV when I try to, but I’m impressed so far in post quantity and quality, so check it out.

Cornell columnist is a misogynist, fool

So much sarcastic thanks to Tony Manfred (I hope he has a Google alert on his name) from the Cornell Daily Sun for pointing out what the real problem with sex education and contraception is: women are too well-informed.

I wouldn’t believe it if it weren’t coming from a male college journalist (and I won’t touch on what he looks like or where he goes to school or his obvious virginity), but this kid has probably the most skewed perception of what the process of getting on and being on birth control is like. I tend to agree with one of his commenters that “this is the worst article I have EVER read.”

But the question I should be asking isn’t, “Where can I get a pill that renders my sperm lame while giving me huge muscles, clear skin, and the inoffensively bland personality of a lobotomy patient?” It’s, “Why the hell do I know so much about a drug that I’m physiologically ineligible to take?”

Why should a boy know anything about birth control? It’s not like it matters to him if the girl gets pregnant, right? And it’s not like it matters to him that taking hormones to trick your body into thinking you’re pregnant isn’t all fun and games–if he thinks it is, then he’s the one being duped by commercials–as long as he can get his rocks off without a condom in his way.

We take drugs either because we are sick or we don’t want to become sick, not because a commercial was seductive enough to send us to our doctor’s office demanding medication.

Since being pregnant isn’t the same thing as being sick, I guess he’s advocating that we get rid of birth control pills altogether. Because what a fly-by-night scam this has been, over 40 years of 99% effective birth control that women only want to take because it looks like so much fun in the commercials.

Even if it means fewer girls can experience the superhuman, miraculous benefits of Yaz, at least we’ll be taking the medicine we should be.

I’m still not sure if he just hates birth control or not. I think he’d be hard-pressed to find someone who was seduced by advertising into taking Yaz or any other pill when they weren’t interested in being on birth control in the first place. And I don’t really know who he’s trying to target that doesn’t deserve to be on Yaz - girls who watch TV?

Ordinary citizens don’t have the power to prescribe themselves powerful medications for a reason. It is the burden of the doctor to examine his patient and decide which medication is best for the patient’s individual set of conditions.

After insisting that he knows so much more about birth control than he even needs to (since he’s a boy), Tony really shows what a fool he is here. No one walks into a doctor’s office and demands a prescription like that. A little bit of research, or having ever talked to a girl, and Tony would know that any sexually active woman undergoes yearly gynecological exams, after which her doctor will talk with her and recommend birth control options based on her exam and what she wants to do.

All direct-to-consumer advertising of these drugs should be outlawed in order to place the authority back with the doctor — who has decades of medical study and experience that dictates his medical recommendations, as opposed to the 30-seconds of highly focus-grouped, intentionally enticing commercial that the patient is exposed to.

I don’t think a woman going into a doctor’s office with at least a little bit of information is a bad thing, but I guess if you think decisions about women’s health should be left up to doctors (usually men), you might think so.

Hating on this kid is easy, but the real problem isn’t his article, it’s what articles like this from boys like this are symptomatic of. Too many boys don’t know enough about birth control to be sensitive about it, even though information is so accessible. They think they don’t need to care, and a lot of girls will let them get away with that. I can’t stress enough that both partners should have a say in decisions about birth control, but that requires that both partners take an active interest and know enough to make good decisions.

Bad side effects love company

I’m going to write a lot more about the side effects I’ve been dealing with since I started Yasmin soon. Right now I still feel like I’m going through the worst of it and I’m not quite ready to bare my soul, but this website has helped me more than you’d expect in the last few days. I don’t tend toward paranoia and depression at all, so feeling that way has been especially scary. I think seeing that it’s happened to other people makes me feel a lot less helpless and a lot less scared of how out of control my emotions have been recently.

It doesn’t look like this particular website has such extensive input from users of other birth control pills. I don’t know if that’s because the incidence of negative side effects with Yasmin is higher (which could be true, considering it’s fairly new) or what. Anyways, I can’t really talk about other pills the way I want to talk about this one. I have some good things to say, but I really need to collect my thoughts on ruining my sex drive and being more depressed and anxious than I ever have been in my life just so that I feel safer, then I’ll post about this again.