Discharging about Birth Control
A while back I led a class on birth control for my RC class of almost all young adults. (I am a woman in my sixties.) We discussed the following topics, taken from an RC article on birth control written by Jennie Evans:
• Access to birth control is important for women.
• Women should be in charge of their bodies and their sexual relationships.
• Birth control should be based on respect for women’s thinking and on women having sexual relationships that make sense for them.
• Hormonal birth control may not be good for women—we don’t know the long-term effects. Also, it’s designed so that people don’t have to think beforehand about having sex.
• No woman is better or worse for what she has or has not figured out about birth control.
A wide range of issues opened up, so I taught another two classes, with just the women, in which we focused on sexual relationships between women and men.
The women worked on fears about getting pregnant, deciding if or when they wanted sex with men, pleasing men, not feeling in charge of their bodies, doing sexual acts they didn’t really want to do, sexual abuse, not speaking up for themselves, and not being in charge of their medical choices. Some were afraid of sex. Others were having sex compulsively because they wanted to be desirable to men.
I wanted them to be able to talk about birth control, notice the sexism that shapes the choices available to women, and discharge on how sexism had influenced their feelings about reproduction and sex. Talking about “female first” seemed to help them look at some of their harder feelings. Stressing that “no woman is better or worse for what she has or has not figured out about birth control” helped them to trust each other more.
Though having birth control has been a major victory for women, many women still struggle to get access to it. This reflects how society doesn’t put women’s health and thinking first.
The lack of respect for women’s thinking also shows in how, in the United States, hormonal birth control is usually the only choice offered to women. The underlying assumption is that women should be ready to have sex with men at any moment. (And the medical industry profits from women’s thinking that this is a big advantage and the best “choice.”)
Sexism says that women should be ready to please men rather than doing what makes sense in any particular sexual relationship or encounter. I said that sex is something that two people figure out together and do in a way that works for both of them. I also said that, given sexism, the woman should be in charge and lead the man; that her thinking and desires should come first. Some of the women had never thought that was possible.
One woman was surprised to hear that she didn’t have to do a particular sex act if she didn’t want to. I told her she never had to do it again in her life, and she discharged on talking with her boyfriend about not doing it.
Another woman discharged on the fact that some women, because of forced sterilization, don’t have the choice to have children.
Another said that she didn’t know if she ever wanted to have sex, that perhaps she just wanted to snuggle and be close with a man. After discharging, she said that maybe if she could stop and discharge in the middle of sex, she might want to have it. I told her that she was in charge and could set things up exactly as she wanted. And I suggested that she discharge on telling her boyfriend what she wanted and getting him to be an ally.
Another woman decided to stop taking her birth control pills. She decided that, since she wasn’t having sex, it didn’t make sense to keep taking them.
It was hard for some women to think about using non-hormonal birth control, such as condoms or diaphragms, partly because they’d been told that it was difficult or because the men didn’t want to use a condom. Some were afraid they’d get pregnant if they used non-hormonal methods. (In fact, these methods almost always work, if used correctly.)
Birth control is not a personal issue for me because I am post-menopausal. However, I remembered all the years I had struggled with it as a young adult. It had been hard to show my real self to a man and talk about what was important to me. I hadn’t known how to have a voice in a relationship with a man. So talking about birth control hadn’t been a real conversation.
Eventually I did develop real relationships with men, but it was still hard to tell them what I wanted sexually. I fought through that, but it took a few decades. I still have lots of tears to cry about my experiences.
I would like to do more work on this topic with the women in my class. I’d like to ask them how sex would be for them if they could have totally effective non-hormonal birth control. I’m also planning to do some classes on early sexual memories, with both the women and the men.
(I wrote this with permission from the women in my class.)
Somerville, Massachusetts, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail
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