For those men who take for granted the concept of oral contraception, let's pretend that it's 1958 and there's no pill. What were your contraceptive options back then?
First, there was the prophylactic. A disease preventative, yes, but also an exasperating hassle.
Back in 1958, just buying a package of condoms was unpleasant because you first had to endure the disapproving scowls of practically everybody standing behind you in line, not to mention the lewd chuckles from the pharmacy clerk.
Then, when the time came for you to actually use the damn thing, you cursed the folks at Trojan because you had to spend 15 minutes fumbling in the dark to rip it out of its secure little tea bag package before the mood subsided or she fell asleep or, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, you were suddenly faced with the humiliating prospect of having to shoot pool with a rope.
Then there were diaphragms, those little rubber thingies that kept slipping out of her hands like oily yarmulkes every three seconds while you quietly growled in frustration at the seemingly interminable delay.
For some guys, there was early withdrawal, which was not the kind you performed at a bank, and often didn't work anyway because your idea of early wasn't early enough.
Abstention? Forget it. Abstention is something Congressmen do when they don't know which way to vote. Or a method that the Palin family pretends to use.
There were gooey spermicides (which didn't really work) and the rhythm method (which didn't work either, even if you were a good dancer).
IUDs, though invented in the 1920s, became an option, although they were so complicated, your lady love needed a degree in engineering and an owner's manual to figure out what went where.
If you used nothing, you had nine kids.
Abortion was not an option.
Sounds like the 15th Century, doesn't it? It wasn't. It was only 50-some years ago. In the late 1950s, nobody took the pill. By 1962, 1.2 million women were on it. In 1963, it was 2.3 million; by 1964, 25 percent of all couples in American used oral contraception. And the rest is history.
History, that for some perverse and incomprehensible reason, the Republican Party seems intent on reversing. Republican men in particular. And their wives are okay with this?
Seriously?
If I were Roy Blunt's wife, I'd make him sleep in the garage forever.
If I were Rick Santorum's wife, I'd lace his Viagra with arsenic.
If I were Rush Limbaugh's wife, I'd do something unspeakable to him and not in the good sense.
And when Rush calls Sandra Fluke a slut, isn't he really calling your womenfolk sluts too? Shouldn't you beat him up for that? What happened to chivalry?
On top of that, do you really want some repressed guy in a lab coat probing your lady's private parts for absolutely no good reason whatsoever?
So here's the question, guys: Why is this considered a "women's issue"? Sure, it's about privacy and self-determination and a woman's right to control her own body -- and all men should appreciate and respect that. But in a different and perhaps more superficial way, it's also about our bodies. Sex and spontaneity make excellent, ahem, bedfellows. Fatherhood is great but not if you don't want children.
Do you seriously want to go back to the Stone Age?
Not surprisingly, polls show that a huge majority of women are really really pissed off about this nonsense. Duh.
The question is, why aren't you?
Courtesy: asapmfg.com, blog.sarcasmsociety.com
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Steven J. Gulitti
Rachel Velamur
Jan Sand
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Comments
I've been so pissed for so long at the right's increasingly rabid reactionary positions that this seemed just one more item to add to the list. I guess I need a reminder that even in the midst of disasters during a typhoon, the tidal wave coming at you is more important than your flooded basement. [Warning: metaphors may be stretched beyond capacity.]
That said, having been conceived by a couple of college kids in the late '50s, I might not be here if oral contraception had arrived sooner. Timing is everything.
Excellent post. Thank you for saying this.
As for the rest of it--the real issue comes back to the governmental intrusion into what is totally none of government's business. The question of when a business can opt out of providing coverage for contraception is one which will eventually come before the courts because it is an interesting question of balancing privacy rights, the 1st amendment, the ability of business to conduct its own business and the rights of individuals who are employed by those businesses.
As for Republican wives, they ought to take a clue from Lorena Bobbitt -- that's one sure method of birth control. Wonder what the Pope's position on that is? Hell, he shouldn't care, he's supposedly not using his appendage except to piss, and he could always sit down like a woman. Say, how about turning the Papal throne into a porty-potty?
Note: I suspect Rush's wife (as Whitey Shafer wrote: I love you little darlin' Number Four) would need a magnifying glass and tweezers.
HUGGGGGGGGGGGS
HUGGGGGGGGGGGS
That's the best I could do. Anyway, thumbs up, new favorite!
Bravo! The day that we will really know that women are equal in this country is the day that everyone realizes that this is not just a women's issue. It is an issue for both men and women.
I said the very same thing to a certain former writer here on the day he posted something on this topic, and when he finally realized he was wrong, he deleted his post. That was right before he deleted his account.
You make a great points with a sense of humor.
But the Garage is TOO good for Blunt. It's too good for all the rest of those assholes, too. But I kind of want them to realize it on the wednesday after election day after experiencing the Electoral equivalent of World War III that female voters are more dangerous than the males.
but enthusiastically rated for being a guy with his head on straight.
I was a teen in the fifties waiting for the line to disappear at the out of my neighborhood drug store so I could whisper " a box of trojans please"! My girl was so proud of her man!!
:-) / r
It's always a pleasure to encounter your ideas, here they are not lopsided as they are mere opinions. It is one of the hardest arguments to have with a man, why? you might ask and you should. Because you of all people who have written amazingly clever and witty pieces on very serious submects, and this is as serious as it gets. Sex is serious business, but we in our enlightened sense of what is right by our standards of what is correct in todays society. People have forgotten about forget chivalry, forget about political correctedness, but do remember that it is a God given right to choose how and why we have sex in the first place.
I by no means are holier than thou, but I do know sex si a very precarious art, I say art because there are no end in the alibies that come out of pre-mature sex, fictionalized accounts of what went on, what could go on, what didn't go on, and yet we have many children in our realm with no fathers, or people that weren't planning to become parents, but...it is now part of the preliminary equation. The sense of American and European sex ellicits the very young I mean 10 and then some age groups to consider sex with some very high authroity. Parent's try as they may to keep the subject at bay, know it's a matter of time before trying on condoms will be the least of thier worries. Then you have the flip side, those that are quite prudent over the idea of the school teaching children about sex, and adding in the condum. Then you have the after school set, which is the most precarious of the bunch if you ask me. Where does all of this get us? Love American Style, may have been a sit-com back in the day, but to think of people not seriously sitting down and biting down on the idea of how innocent mistakes create many other innocent mistakes as well. One of the saddest would be the girl who must consider giving her child up for adoption because her guy dosen't want to be a young father, and a millieou of other stories that focus on young teens that are becoming parents at a scarry rate. I beg that men must think this old fashioned stuff over once or twice, as to why? When the right answer comes about, then it will definitely be one of those "oh" moments.
I suspect that the last time Rush had an erection was when he spilled pepper in his lap and it sneezed.....!
.
Lezlie
Never heard Rush or Hannitty speak out against it. I do not know anyone who is adamant about forcing people to stop using BC.
Target sells them for 9 bucks a cycle without insurance, you want sex , put down the Latte twice a week and you can bang away. Fluke's premise was a joke and we still do not know how she got in front of congress yet Nora Dunn (Obama connection) is now representing her.
Most Conservatives I know advocate liberals use as much BC as possible !!!!:->
But all due respect, John, all of what you say is why I had a vastectomy before I was 30. I've never once regretted it, if only because it put the onus for birth control squarely where it belonged: On me.
I think the rest of us are outraged, but most are confused; as in, "I can't believe this sh*t." Hilarious, blu. R
to the 50's & even further back.
i am still naive politically enough to feel that it will fade away,
this awkward attempt by these nutballs to
turn back time.
What i find odd is how our fundamentalist fellow citizens
share so many qualities with our supposed ENEMY,
the muslim fundamentalists...
they hate our freedom,
said GWB.
So we have devolved into a society that reverses
women's, and you goddamn right, men's...freedom.....
odd how history works its ways..............................
Glad to hear somebody else out there is wondering the same thing!
Maybe it's a couple reasons. First, the assault on the vulnerable is so overwhelming, that outrage gets buried.
And maybe its that part of this assault's goal is to divide us so that we lose any sense of connection to each other.
Because you are of course right---this is everyone's problem.
You have restored my faith in the male species, who, ehem, could not continue to raise hell and havoc if we women really did put an asprin between our, ehem, knees.
My dad had a vasectomy (and I have vivid memories of the event -- he got drunk on Strawberry Hill and passed out in my Nannie's bathroom). Among my group of girlfriends, the majority of spouses have been snipped because we understand that that within a healthy adult relationship, partners want to have sex without producing a soul-sucking, finance-sucking, bodily-fluid sucking infant EVERY TIME. And a loving male partner, upon witnessing his female partner breathe -- hoo-hoo-hoo and push-push-push -- realizes it's his turn to sit on a bag of ice for a couple of days.
There's no way I would look twice at a man who thought birth control was "women's business."
But seriously, for many men, and in some situations, women -such as myself - are guilty of this as well. We see a someone who can be "useful" to us (a handyman? A sugardaddy? A blowjob in the back alley?) and we think "how much trouble is this going to be for me to get what I want?" If the person in your life has a "purpose" by which you measure their value, they are not a person--they are a tool.
Great post John. Thanks for this. I guess there is one advantage to being 62!
excellent piece, john b.
The self same men who are dead set against straight women having the pill are dead set against the mere idea of a couple of lesbians having children.
I guess they are just confused, huh?
If conservatives are racists,don't want to pay their fare share and do not want abortions then show me a few that are trying to stop BC.
Tilting at windmills.
but this tidy tune of falling into bed with Santorum's backers, with these evangelicals, et al, lying there spread out like some awful B movie on very late Friday night's, with the plot points wrapping freedom of religion, its expression and how ObamaScare will uproot your last bit of freedom, is the most ridiculous notion this country has ever experienced.) The Big Church is now campaigning, blindly, for whichever Republican is eager -- and stupid enough -- to wrap themselves in our flag, and while this fandango would take the athletic skills of Michael Jordan, to also find the gold & white flag of Rome itself, wrapping this neatly about themselves like a noble Roman would, to embolden the masses to refute this corruption of our freedom being scuttled away. Do these people have any connection with our Earthly reality? Or has Newt offered them Frequent Flyer Mileage double points to go to Mars?
Contraception? Where is that in their Constitution?
Why not go back to the way it was way back in 2011? Contraceptive coverage not being a government mandate, and it being legal and fairly cheap.
Besides the nutcase Santorum, nobody (not even the Catholic Bishops) is suggesting that contraception should be banned.
I think these guys Santorum and others think birth control pills are akin to Viagra. The women who take them everyday are therefore sluts. That is how dumb they are... i think i thought this myself but Bill Maher had a great riff on this too. R
As for the people who claim nobody wants to ban birth control...The Arizona legislature just passed a law stating life begins two weeks BEFORE conception. The intention is to make any form of birth control illegal. Guess a whole lot of right wing religious zealots will need to resort to their own hand! A huge thanks to all the men who can see the absurdity in this! (Even if you just do it to get laid!)
R
As for that rope and pool remark - I'll never get that one out of my head from now on...
Rated.