Getting Lucky
I’ve written here about past romantic relationships, but I have not generally been interested in or comfortable with sharing publicly about sex. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about how lucky I am to have been sexually active for the last 15+ years and to have only ever gotten pregnant on purpose. This is rarer than you might think. In 2011, 45% of all pregnancies were unintended, and though that number is an improvement (!) from 2008, it’s likely going to get worse again. As Mara Gay wrote in a recent editorial, women having sex for fun is increasingly coming under threat.1
In her piece, Gay writes about how, in her public school, “The focus was on how to practice sex safely and responsibly, and with consent. We were taught that our sexuality was part of our humanity, and that it belonged to us alone.” She notes that this is one of the reasons she practices safe sex. Gay happens to have been a couple of years ahead of me at our high school, which was enormous, so we didn’t know each other; I just knew who she was because she (of course!) edited the school paper. I had a great experience at White Plains High School and am generally happy to give it credit for whatever. However, I remember absolutely nothing about ninth grade health class. Really, my own good fortune in this department can be credited much more to my mom.
Despite being secretly freaked out, my mom did an A+ job responding when I told her the summer before senior year that I wanted to start having sex. She offered me one main cautionary piece of advice, which was the reminder that despite a lot of cultural messaging to the contrary, sex often does come with heightened emotional stakes. She then encouraged me to think carefully about what birth control would be right for me. And she told me to ask my high school boyfriend, a nice Catholic boy, about his stance on abortion. This was maybe a little odd, since if I’d needed to, I could have gone ahead and gotten an abortion whether or not Boyfriend — let’s call him Chris — wanted me to or not. But I think my mom’s very wise calculus was that one’s teenager probably shouldn’t choose to have sex if she’s not prepared to think and talk about what would happen if she got unintentionally pregnant.
It turned out Chris did support abortion rights, and he also was in general very much down to talk and plan about potentially reproductive sex for a while before having it. He was happy for me to take the time I needed to think about birth control options, make the necessary appointments, and just generally be sure I felt ready, which I think took about three months from thought to deed. I still remember the look on his face as I described my gynecologist visit to him by doing a speculum-insertion gesture while saying “So, how’s school?” Our relationship turned out to be complicated in various ways that maybe I’ll write more about some other time, involving some cultural and class differences and also the horrors of the college application process, but Chris’s kindness, patience, and empathy in this department was impressive for any guy, teenager or no. He also understood that we would use whatever method(s) of contraception I picked. After talking with my mom and my pediatrician about the pros and cons of hormonal birth control, I wound up choosing to use multiple barrier methods, making me the only 17-year-old girl in America in 2005 to carry around a diaphragm in a little pink case in my school bag.2
I want to emphasize that everything about this story, not just the diaphragm, is completely and utterly unrepresentative of most young women’s sexual experiences, including my own in the years after high school. For some counterexamples, I recommend Elif Batuman’s autobiographical second novel, Either/Or, which takes place during the narrator’s sophomore year at Harvard. The book grapples in a mostly hilarious but occasionally upsetting way with what Adrienne Rich terms “the compulsory heterosexual experience,” meaning the cultural pressure for women to be having sex with men and — of particular interest to Batuman — the pervasive artistic valorization of exploitative heterosexual relationships. I won’t spoil the end, but it really gets into this in on a troubling and personal level for the main character, and I will say I found it unfortunately totally believable. There’s just a lot of ambient cultural pressure to be having penetrative sex, from which hyper-educated coeds from East Coast suburbia are not spared, and a lot of technically consensual but nonetheless rather nasty sexual experiences that follow from that.
There’s been a lot of focus on the extreme horrors that are already happening because of Dobbs, the women and young girls in red states who are being denied life-saving care. These stories are obviously important and utterly horrific. But even on the left, there’s still a real sense that Dobbs is mostly going to harm those we usually think of as “other people”: people in red states, people who are poor, people who are rape victims, people with relatively rare medical conditions. One of the things I appreciated about Gay’s editorial, and one of the reasons I wanted to write about my own experience as a teenage sex-haver, is the reminder that this new reality may also impact the experiences of your average woman, denying them — us — the security we deserve. What does a parent’s advice to their teenager look like in a world in which abortion access is no longer a given? Would Chris’s attitude have been different if he’d been raised in a country where the laws treated women as potential housewives and baby-making vessels rather than as people? Who is looking out for all of the victims of compulsory heterosexuality, which is arguably basically everyone, regardless of sexual orientation?
I wrote that I’ve been lucky so far to have only gotten pregnant on purpose, but maybe luck is the wrong word, since I also had structural access to various types of birth control and, a couple of times, emergency contraception, and, should I ever have needed it, my local Planned Parenthood. I had a nightmare last week that I accidentally got pregnant now, realized it was too soon for our family to have another baby, and started freaking out because the end of Roe means that it’s going to be harder for people in blue states to get abortions, too. Whether my experience of reproductive agency was or wasn’t luck before, it sure will have to be now.
And same goes for anyone with a uterus; not linking here to recent TERFy pieces about how using the phrase “birthing people” is akin to overturning Roe v. Wade, because COME ON. That said, I will be using “women” and “people” interchangeably here.
They’re probably not for everyone but it actually worked great for me, with spermicide of course because if not it’s pretty useless. Feel free to write if you’re diaphragm-curious and want to hear more!