A private matter UPDATED

All of the discussions lately about contraception - so much catchier than the Big Political Issues, and yet more hard-news than whatever else you might get from WWPD, so allow me to proceed - center on the question of "access to." What does it mean for women to have "access to" contraception?

The problem with this topic is that it's, well, personal. Female friends might discuss this, but typically, in my experience, certainly past college, they - we - do not. I assume that the heterosexual women I know who don't have 15 children are doing something, but couldn't say in most cases whether it's actually that they're abstinent; discreetly lesbian; or infertile; or with infertile men; etc., etc., etc. It's not my business. This is, after all, an issue whose legal grounding comes from a "right to privacy."

And yet I wish that as a rule, there were more openness about contraception. I wish that frank discussions of birth control weren't somehow equated with confessions of what, precisely, goes on in the bedroom, how often and with whom. But that's how it goes. If a woman announces she's on the Pill, it's kind of... inappropriate, as if she's set up a webcam in her bedroom - no! - in the public parks where she and her myriad lovers fornicate the night away. Admitting to being on the Pill is like confessing to a sordid private life. Shouldn't be, but is. It's TMI! Overshare! What if the young woman's parents or potential employers read this thing? What if They - that amorphous They, including, of course, the potential elementary-school-age students of women who aren't even teachers - were to know? What then?

Never mind that the reality of this is, it's about the same as if all of a sudden, men had to partially subsidize tampon purchases. It's an expense that impacts virtually all women for some period (sorry) of their lives. It benefits all of society that random benches and office chairs and seats at the movies aren't destroyed, yet the people whose clothing/reputations would also be impacted tend to be the ones purchasing the Tampax. Men would probably resent having to pay for something they don't, personally, use. Given the extent to which contraception is employed, this is, more or less, what we're looking at. It absolutely means something about society that there is now contraception, but on an individual level, it tells you approximately as much about a female pharmacy-goer that she's purchasing a month's supply of birth control pills as that she's stopped by the Always aisle.

Precisely because contraception is oh-so-private, misconceptions arise - especially, needless to say, among men - about what this "birth control" thing is all about. They easily forget that the very need for contraception comes from women having sex with men. Sparing these men - I might add - 18 years of child-support payments, not to mention the serious possibility of 18 years of continued communications with every woman they've ever slept with. It becomes a discussion about women choosing to have sex, when the sex in question by definition involves men. Not such an issue for women who have sex with women. Not to bring my dissertation into everything, but this is kind of like when Napoleon and others in 19th C France wanted "the Jews" to intermarry, without ever considering that for this to happen, non-Jews would need to be involved.

They also - further evidence, if any were needed, that "Seinfeld" has covered everything - don't have an immediate sense of how it is that they haven't impregnated the women they've been with. They don't, in other words, have a terribly good sense of what birth control is. It's going on behind the scenes, so they can pretend it doesn't happen, like the proverbial high school boy who imagines girls lack digestive tracts. There was, of course, Rush Limbaugh, making the leap that a woman who defends the Pill a) uses it herself, b) uses it as contraception, and c) needs lots of pills in order to have lots of sex. Then, in this nutty-but-popular article that's being linked to left and right, a genius named Craig Bannister hears that it would cost a woman $3,000 for three years' worth of birth control, and concludes that women with this complaint "are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently." How so? "At a dollar a condom if she shops at CVS pharmacy’s website, that $3,000 would buy her 3,000 condoms – or, 1,000 a year. [....] Assuming it’s not a leap year, that’s 1,000 divided by 365 – or having sex 2.74 times a day, every day, for three straight years."

It did not occur to these men that there are forms of birth control other than the condom, let alone that these might not all be equally effective. And it appears that many found Limbaugh and Bannister's argument convincing. One adds a new level to the brilliance by catching on that this $3,000 figure is in reference to a prescription method, but assuming that a young woman is on the Pill to avoid the need to use condoms. The word "steamy" is used. If this episode tells us anything surprising, it's that not all sex-obsessed social conservatives are closeted homosexuals. Some are merely repressed straight men with active imaginations.

In one sense, the "$3,000 worth of sex" contingent is just being misogynistic, just making the most of a politically-sanctioned opportunity to call women sluts. Maybe some know what the Pill is, but get a kick out of hurling epithets. It points to anxieties about what it means that a woman can go out and have sex with tons and tons of guys and not bear any physical consequences whatsoever.

But I suspect all this discussion points to a genuine misunderstanding about the technology underlying our experience. There are some concrete reasons why, despite lower infant and childbirth death rates, the average woman doesn't have a dozen kids, why women are able to participate in the workforce, why young women and men - for that matter - are not forced into marrying the first person they've slept with. It saves everyone from having to promise a lifetime of fidelity to someone it may turn out they don't even enjoy sleeping with once. On some level, the anti-contraception side - and I mean by this not only whichever tiny minority would have contraception banned, but also the great many social conservatives who see contraception as kinda-sorta a bad thing, kinda squicky, part and parcel of These Corrupt Times - imagines that those who eschew the extremes of the "hook-up culture" - a couple of serious, monogamous relationships in high school and college, say, followed by marriage around age 25 - somehow don't need to use contraception. "Nice" girls/women do not have post-its on their foreheads bearing the name of whichever prescription they're on, so it can be assumed that "nice" means eschewing contraception.

The debate ends up putting defenders of contraception in a bind. On the one hand, there is the desire to point out that the Pill has medical uses, and that contraception is used not only by the young and promiscuous, but also by the married-yet-premenopausal. To beat it over the heads of the reason-impaired that non-barrier methods of contraception are not used more often by those having more sex, but are a binary, on-it-or-off-it sort of thing. It's entirely possible to use birth control daily and have sex yearly, or never. It's also entirely possible to support access to contraception and not, personally, use contraception. There's a perfectly understandable desire to emphasize, in other words, that contraception =/= sluttiness.

On the other hand, while beneficiaries of contraception tend to fall all over the spectrum on these issues, as they include virtually everyone in heterosexual relationships (with the possible exception of closeted politicians, whose family fertility may bear some resemblance to that of the Protestant couple at the beginning of The Meaning of Life: "We have two children, and we've had sexual intercourse twice."), supporters of contraception tend to also oppose making value judgements about the difference between consenting-adults sex with one partner, and with 1,000. I mean, not entirely - even Dan Savage rails against bathhouses and the like - but "slut-shaming" is, as a rule, considered unacceptable discourse. Thus SlutWalks. No, being for/on contraception doesn't make a woman promiscuous, but if she is promiscuous, don't judge. While the not-that-there's-anything-wrong-with-it approach has its merits - ideally women wouldn't be any more judged than men, and it's important to remember that "promiscuous" is subjective, as is "sex positive" (Dan Savage, after all, is anti-bathhouse), and that even those who take a pro-marriage, pro-monogamy stance might support premarital experimentation - it has the unfortunate impact of alienating those who acknowledge they benefit from contraception and would openly support it, if they didn't think doing so was signing onto some kind of broader pro-libertinism agenda.

The problem with either approach is that it's inevitably about the question of women having sex, even though the sex in question is, of course, with men. A woman who takes a pill each day to prevent pregnancy is, each day, acknowledging that she is, or is open to being, sexually active. Men... might carry condoms if intending to have sex relatively soon, or in a relatively casual capacity, but a man who has sex whenever luck strikes, or with a woman/women with whom (responsibly or otherwise) no condoms are used, is not continuously on birth control. So, apart from the (significant!) social double-standard regarding male and female sexual activity, there's this way that men can kind of play at being chaste-but-for-procreation. It's plausible that an individual man only ever had sex to produce whichever children he and his wife ultimately bring into the world, because she and whichever women he'd been with before were the ones making those monthly trips to the pharmacy.

This was long and rambling, the result of more drafts than a WWPD post usually receives (which is to say, there were drafts, and when this post was, as it were, conceived, the Limbaugh kerfuffle had yet to even happen). Shorter version: the invisibility of contraception does much to explain why the conversation surrounding it is so screwed up.

UPDATE

Just noticed Emily Bazelon's take. And... I'm not sure where Bazelon gets her definition of "sex-positivity." Sandra Fluke's Affaire produced outrage precisely because Fluke reads as mature and super-serious. Fluke did not ask for any "slut" solidarity, or even, from what I understand, mention if she herself uses contraception. She certainly didn't just proclaim the right of women to sleep with hundreds, thousands of partners, so long as everything's between consenting adults. The controversy came from the fact that the woman slut-shamed does not come across as a "slut." If she had been even a touch "alternative," this all would have played out differently.