My Contraceptive Journey

Part of Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice

I have been aware of contraception since before I was sexually active. Before any of us had even kissed anyone, my friends and I knew about condoms, birth control pills, diaphragms and other contraception. We attended a progressive Catholic school in New York City, where our sex education classes went into great detail about birth control methods. It was also the late 80s, and AIDS was ravaging our communities, despite President Reagan’s persistent and immoral denial of the disease and its toll. Just as important in shaping my ideas around sexuality was the fact that by my freshman year in high school, I had several friends who became pregnant and struggled with their decisions about whether to parent, place for adoption or terminate the pregnancy. I knew then that preventing pregnancy and STDs would be an important part of my life for a long time.

I became sexually active in my teens, much earlier than my mother would have wanted, and if I am honest, earlier than I was emotionally ready for. I was in love for the first time, and my boyfriend and I were pretty inexperienced (read: virgins). At that point, condoms were my contraceptive of choice. They were cheap, accessible and my mother did not need to know about them. (Let’s not even discuss my father’s knowing anything about my sex life.) Condoms also meant that my boyfriend could and would share in the responsibility of keeping us both free from disease and pregnancy. The latter was still a more real and terrifying thought to me than the former, even at the height of the AIDS pandemic. Condoms continued to be my go-to birth control method until college.

As an undergraduate, I continued using condoms, this time with spermicide. It took me a while to realize that I the irritation I was experiencing was an allergic to nonoxynol-9 , the spermicide used in several brands of condoms. On to the next method. Like my friend, Bianca I tried withdrawal. I even tried the sponge – yes that sponge made famous by the character Elaine on Seinfeld. I felt clumsy inserting it and wasn’t confident that I had done it correctly. Not a good starting point for a relationship with a contraceptive.

Finally, I made an appointment with my campus health services to get a prescription for birth control pills. It seemed like the right birth control method for the relationship I was in. They were only $5 a month through University Health Services, and I didn’t have to worry about my mother finding them. I suffered few side effects and overwhelming relief that I’d found a birth control that worked for me. Sometime after college, I got tired of taking the pill. I wanted to share the burden of preventing STDS and pregnancy with my partner, not carry the whole responsibility myself. I was also a little concerned about putting hormones in my body. So the pills went on hiatus, and I went back to condoms. This time it was an eye-opening experience. Had I forgotten what condoms were like? Or had my body changed? Or was my current relationship different from the last time I used condoms? I wasn’t sure which it was, but now condoms were yucky, uncomfortable, and a complete turn-off. How had this happened? Condoms had been my go-to birth control method before, but I realized that they weren’t right for me in the relationship I was in. The hiatus was a short one. While I still wanted a more equitable sharing of the responsibility for birth control, I was not willing to sacrifice a happy sex life for it.

Things went along like this until my 30s. My husband and I were thinking of having children, and we stopped using birth control altogether. We didn’t get pregnant, and we were okay with that (and still are). Since we hadn’t gotten pregnant, we figured we wouldn’t get pregnant and kept using nothing. Then I went in for my annual check-up with my OB/GYN. I love my doctor, who I have been seeing for more than 10 years. Like me he’s a cyclist, and he admires the work I do. He also appreciates seeing my husband in the waiting room during my visits to him. Many of his patients come by themselves, even well into their pregnancies. Doc was aware that my husband and I had tried to have children and weren’t successful. He very gently suggested that it just might not happen for us. When he asked me about birth control, I was confused. Hadn’t he just said that “it just might not happen for us”? Then he asked me if I was prepared for an unexpected pregnancy at this stage of my life. “NO!” I almost screamed.

That question and the subsequent conversation I had with my doctor convinced me to consider yet another contraceptive method – the IUD. I had my initial misgivings about it – political, medical and social. Doc talked over my options with me and made clear that I should take time to think and talk with my husband. I went home with the brochures and did some research on my own. Once I had spoken to friends about their experiences with the IUD and sufficiently answered my own questions, I realized that the IUD was the right choice for me. My doctor’s office also made it easier by looking into what my insurance would cover. Luckily for me, my insurance paid for all the costs.

That was a year-and-a-half ago. I feel really good about my decision to get the IUD. My goal at this stage of my reproductive life is less to prevent STDS than to prevent pregnancy. That doesn’t mean my contraceptive journey is over. I’m only 37, and who knows how many more years I might be able to get pregnant (and not want to). I look back on my sexual and reproductive life and see that I made some really good decisions about what was right for me at any given time. I had access to good information, financial resources and support from my partners, family and friends. Shouldn’t everybody have the same?

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Growing Up With Roe

I first became aware of abortion around the same time I became aware of many things related to sex and sexuality – during puberty. It was 7th grade, and I was nursing both a broken heart and raging hormones. One day during a break between classes, my best friend slipped me a piece of paper. On it were the names and numbers of every family planning clinic in NYC. Neither of was us was sexually active – YET, but we both understood the risks of becoming pregnant at such a young age. Although we were aware of HIV at that time, an unplanned pregnancy still posed the greater risk to our educations, happiness, and possibly our very lives. We all knew of girls who were beaten, forced to drop out of school, thrown out of their homes, and expected to get married because of an unplanned pregnancy. When we became sexually active, we needed to know where to go for information, advice, and yes, abortions.

At the time, abortion represented survival to me. As a little brown girl from the Bronx, I knew what the statistics said about girls like me and our chances of “success”. If I knew one thing, I knew this: I was not going to come home and tell my mother that I was pregnant. I was not going to have to tell my father that I was pregnant. And I would do anything to make that true. So I was always practiced safer-sex (my first boyfriend, poor guy, had to wear two condoms the first time we had sex). I limited the number of partners I had. And for years, I kept that piece of paper Selene gave me. For me, abortion meant a chance to go to school and get a job – to create the life I had dreamed of. Abortion gave me the chance to be a mom when and if I wanted to be, not just because my body said it was time. Abortion represented the chance to live.

During high school and college, abortion represented the awakening of my social and political consciousness. I argued on behalf of women’s rights to bodily autonomy and self-determination. I raged when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court for many reasons, the foremost being his opposition to abortion rights. In fact, for a great deal of my life, abortion was an IDEA. I placed a lot of my identity, political, social and cultural onto my support for abortion rights. In my view, if you didn’t support a women’s right to safe, affordable abortion, then you didn’t support women. No discussion needed. That line was drawn in not in the sand, but in concrete. That was my one non-negotiable.

As I began my 30s and my work in the reproductive justice movement, I carried all the past history with me. And I realized for all my ranting and raving, I had lost sight of the most important part of the abortion experience – the woman. On any given day, I could count more than two dozen women in my life that had had abortions: family, friends, acquaintances, sorority sisters, classmates, co-workers, and neighbors. Each experience was unique, and I was deeply thankful that each had legal access to abortion. My focus shifted from abortion as survival or political to abortion as a lived experience. The innovative work of Exhale and the life-saving efforts of the National Network of Abortion Funds and many other amazing organizations, reminded me that ultimately abortion is about each woman doing what is right for her.

Despite the barriers to access, the constant legislative and legal challenges to abortion, and the ongoing cultural warfare over abortion, I remain grateful for the rights granted under Roe v Wade. And as I approach my own 37th birthday I am more committed to Roe than ever before.

Originally posted at

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STDs in your inbox

This is brilliant from a communications and public health perspective. I can see it causing problems if someone is immature or jilted (or both) and uses this service as a prank. But I think email helps people bring up topics that would otherwise be hard to discuss...and allows for communication between people in relationships of all types across the spectrum. Text messaging should certainly be the next frontier especially since many STDs can be spread through one-night stands, f*ck buddies, casual hookups...you know the story.

STD postcards: You've got mail — and more
Early data shows it helps to have partners break bad news online
By Brian Alexander
updated 7:59 p.m. ET, Mon., Oct. 20, 2008

Thanks to a new Internet-based service called inSPOT, people are now receiving anonymous e-mails about sex, but they aren’t spam and there is no hidden ad for herbal concoctions to increase the size of anything. Rather, the “e-cards” are notices from a previous sex partner that the recipient may have been exposed to a sexually transmitted disease.

The site, www.InSPOT.org , is a way for people newly diagnosed with an STD to notify their partners to be tested, too. The e-cards, a sort of greeting card you’d rather not receive, are direct and to the point.

“Who? What? When? Where?” one available e-card begins. “It doesn’t matter. I got an STD; you might have it too. Please get checked out.”

Recipients can then click links to learn more about STDs, possible treatments, and clinics in their cities where they can be tested.

The service started in San Francisco in 2004 mainly to serve the gay community, but it has since been broadened to include heterosexuals and expanded to cities across North America. This month, early data reported in the journal PLoS Medicine shows the STD e-mail alerts are a success.

The service is the creation of Deb Levine, a sex educator and author of a book called The Joy of Cybersex, and of Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, director of STD Prevention and Control Services for the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

“In 2001 I noticed a big rise in the number of syphilis cases among gay men,” recalls Klausner. “In 1998 it was about five cases. By 2001 we had 150 cases.”

Klausner set out to discover why the rate jumped and learned that men had begun meeting each other online for casual encounters. Those encounters may be anonymous, but usually involve an exchange of e-mails. “That turned on a light for me and I realized we needed to do something online.”


He tracked down Levine, who was living in Oakland, Calif., and the two created ISIS, a non-profit community organization to put sexual health information online. One of their first projects was the e-mail notification system.

49,500 postcards sent since 2004
More than 750 people visit the inSPOT site daily. Since 2004, the service has sent more than 49,500 e-cards. Syphilis and gonorrhea cases have each accounted for approximately 15 percent of the total cards sent, followed by chlamydia at 11.6 percent and HIV at 9.3 percent. More than half a dozen other diseases account for the rest, including crabs and scabies; hepatitis A, B and C and trichomoniasis, a parasitic STD.

Importantly, the “click-through” rates, the number of recipients who click to see testing site information, is high for an e-mail response, ranging from 48 percent in Idaho to 20.4 percent in Los Angeles.

“I think that is great,” says Andrew J. Woodruff, ISIS project director. “If you take 100 people, that is 20 who are finding out an important piece of information and being linked to services so they can take care of themselves. They might be 20 people who would never have known.”

Receiving such an e-mail could elicit some pretty negative feelings, of course, but Klausner says that while recipients may not be thrilled, they are grateful.

“I talk with them about how comfortable they would feel using it and their attitude is that ‘It works for me. I would be happy to help someone else,’” he says. Many recipients tell him they had not been, and probably would not have been, notified by any other means.

So far he has received only about three angry e-mails “from people who said ‘This is clearly a mistake! How can you make this so easily available?’” But almost all comments are positive.

Data on inSPOT’s real effectiveness is still spotty. Nobody knows the number of people who use the service who would not have otherwise notified partners, for example. And it’s too soon to know the effects, if any, on the rate of STD infections, diagnoses, or numbers treated in the cities where inSPOT is operating.

But the idea makes sense, according to Mary McFarlane, a behavioral scientist with the Division of STD Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “The Internet is a good place to generate risk behavior, and if we want to do public health, and stop the spread of diseases, we need to be where those risk behaviors are, and introduce health into this venue."

Dr. Emily Erbelding, an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the director of clinical services for STD clinics run by the city of Baltimore’s Department of Public Health, believes that “if this leads to more people knowing they might have been exposed to STDs and leads to them getting an evaluation and treatment, it is a good thing.”

Lack of face-to-face contact is worrisome
One drawback, Erbelding says, may be the lack of face-to-face conversation about sex and risk between partners. And in some ways it may be too convenient. In San Francisco, for example, a person receiving a notice about being exposed to chlamydia can click to download a prescription to cure the disease and bypass a doctor’s visit. But seeing a doctor could reveal other STDs or health issues a patient should address.

However, the inSPOT service may already be slightly behind the technology wave, the CDC's McFarlane believes. “More and more people are going with mobile phone technology” to facilitate casual hookups she says. “I think it is very important that we in public health pay attention to these innovations and provide health information in those places.”

Still, Erbelding and Klausner say the cost to health departments to set up and operate such a system is low (about $15,000 initial outlay) at a time when public health budgets are stagnant or even declining. In many locations across the country, patients diagnosed with reportable diseases like syphilis may or may not get a call from the local health department.

Even if they do, and agree to identify partners, many agencies do not have the manpower to contact those people. Often, it is left to the diagnosing doctor to urge partner notification. Now, such a doctor can simply hand the patient a palm card with inSPOT’s Internet address.

Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction."
© 2008 msnbc.com

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Debate me, baby!

Who says politics can't be sexy?


Naked politics gets US debate watchers hot and bothered

NEW YORK (AFP) — The debate was intense, titillating, raw, even perverse -- at least for those watching Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama on screens in New York's Museum of Sex.

Debate parties are a dime-a-dozen in New York, but this must have been the only such event Wednesday where viewers' attention wandered so easily.

The session of naked politics took place in a hall where dozens of TV screens only minutes earlier had been filled with quite a different kind of nudity.

To one side was an exhibition devoted to the sex lives of animals, including X-rated action from panda bears and the sexual cannibalism of the whiptail lizard.

To the other side ranged a display of the more peculiar inventions devoted to human sex habits, ranging from whips to what could have been a dentist's chair, except for the life-like penis.

Meanwhile, on the multiple TV screens, McCain the Republican and Democrat Obama argued about energy resources and tax policy.

The 200 or so New Yorkers present seemed to think the mix just right.

"What better than to combine sex and politics, the two things you're not meant to talk about in public?" giggled Simon Betz, 37, as she scrutinized the non-dentist's chair.

"Everything is so messed up in our country that it's good we go and have fun and think about sex. Hey, it's better than thinking about the collapsing economy and how poor we're all going to be."

Not surprisingly, this was not Republican territory.

Boos at McCain and cheers for Obama punctuated the debate -- almost as loud as the recordings of moans and cries that had filled the same room just before.

"Obama put sex back into politics," said a dreamy Jennifer Wright, 22, wearing a long red dress and black nail polish.

Artist Molly Crabapple, with a huge orange butterfly hairpin and a low-cut dress, used the occasion to unveil her painting "Politics."

The water color, which was hung opposite a sex robot, depicts an orgy of money and sex in which a rampant red elephant, the Republican mascot, is intimately involved with a blue donkey, the Democratic Party symbol.

Crabapple said the nightmarish scene reflects that "US politics is all a huge game of distractions played by people who are essentially all like each other."

That's the kind of cynicism that has become widespread in the United States and which both McCain and Obama claim they can address.

But Crabapple, a fervent Obama supporter, had only one regret.

The painting was completed two months ago, before she believed her hero, now leading opinion polls, could win.

"If I was painting it today, I'd have the donkey on top," she said.

Despite the bizarre atmosphere, viewers clearly had a deep interest in the November 4 election, which they think Obama has still not sewn up, despite his current advantage.

"Right now, Obama's ahead. But what are people going actually to do once they're in the polling booth?" said Eileen Sharaga, 58, resolutely attempting to ignore an explicit instructional video on masturbation.

"I'm anxious, extremely anxious," she said.

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What's in a number?

From the archives of my email that I'm cleaning out today (and always)...but good for thought. Women live in this constant double standard so at the end of the day, it's up to each individual goddess to be comfortable with her actions. People are always going to judge but you have to live your life with personal integrity and of course, with no regrets.

Sexual Math: A Small Number of Partners Does Not Add Up to Happiness
By Rachel Kramer Bussel, Huffington Post
Posted on August 11, 2008, Printed on August 12, 2008

I'm not going to tell you exactly how many people I've slept with, partly because I don't know, partly because I stopped caring long ago, and partly because it's none of your business. But I will tell you it's more than French First Lady Carla Bruni's reported number: 15. Way more. I share that information to make the point that how and why we choose our sexual partners differs for everyone; there's no single perfect number that will make you: a) happy and b) not a slut.

But to read Virginia Ironside's recent tirade against Bruni's perceived promiscuity is to think you've landed back a few centuries. Any hint that we might have come a long way, baby, that there was ever such a thing as feminism, let alone the misguidedly labeled "do-me" feminism, is forgotten as Ironside leaves us with such gems as more than fifteen lovers means you're "starting to demean sex itself" and "it's no longer something special that you do only with the chosen few."

Ironside has a lot to learn about sex. I believe that sexual decision-making should be left up to the individual, based on their own desires and values, not some random standard based on what other people think. If your goal is to not be labeled a slut, and you're a woman, well, good luck. Have even one partner, wear a skirt too short, make out on a street corner and be ogled by a particularly nosy, nasty neighbor, and you're a slut, plain and simple. Reputation has little to do with actual sex acts and everything to do with perception.

Further, Ironside assumes that the only reason a woman would sleep with many lovers is for "experience," presumably meaning some kind of sex acts she hasn't done before. "It's unlikely Carla will ever be thinking: 'What might have been.' She's been there, done that and got the nightdress. But what would be the point of Carla -- or anyone else -- accumulating more lovers?" This viewpoint is what truly dehumanizes sex, turning it simply into a robotic, mechanical movement of bodies rather than a complex set of impulses, attractions and acts driven by all sorts of motives.

Your number of partners and how "special" the sex is are not necessarily related. To me, sex is special when it takes me somewhere I can't go alone (and I don't just mean orgasm). When I'm with my boyfriend, I'm certainly not thinking about my past bedmates, and I highly doubt he is either. If you're doing it right, you're fully in the moment, swept away, as it were. Sex is as special as we want to make it, and for some people, that means exclusivity, for others, casual sex, and for many, some amalgam of the two.

Ironside, like many casual sex detractors, needs to place sex within marriage or committed relationships above more temporary affairs in order to bolster her sense of her own morality. I might go that far -- 12, 13, 14 or, well, okay, 15 lovers -- but 16, and no man will ever want to touch you again!

During the fifteen years I've been sexually active (with some pretty long dry spells in between), I've been in monogamous relationships, been single, had one-night stands, threesomes, and hookups. I've slept with people I loved, and people who I'd just met. Some trysts were amazing, some were forgettable. But isn't that the same with everything we do?

I can tell you that one of the best lovers I've ever had was during a one-night stand. I was hopelessly besotted with someone else, so much so that I thought about him all the time, thrilled when he said hello to me, and was so locked inside my fantasy life I couldn't see my way beyond it. This other man sweetly propositioned me, and I turned him down, explaining my crush. "Maybe I can help you get over him," he suggested. And that's exactly what he did. We had a torrid night in his apartment, and he drove me home the next morning and shared some of his own heartbroken moments. It was hot, but also sweet.

The notion that there is one right number for everyone (and by "everyone," we're usually just talking about women; men seem to be granted immunity from the numbers discussion) crops up every few months, as if to remind women not to take our perceived sexual freedom for granted. I wrote about this topic in June 2006 for The Village Voice, and praised an excellent novel (and fun summer read), Twenty Times a Lady, by Karyn Bosnak. In the book, the heroine backtracks to find her former lovers so that her number doesn't get too high for her comfort. I quoted Bosnak as saying, "When I'm 70, I don't care if I've fucked 70 people. I want to look back and say I took every chance I could."

I agree wholeheartedly. I'd be lying if I said I didn't wish my number were lower, but not because I have some artificial limit on how many lovers I think is acceptable. Rather, there are plenty of people I've bedded where, looking back with the power of hindsight, I see how wrong they were for me. But even those experiences have taught me things about myself, and my sexuality, and have informed my future choices.

To Ironside, women are reduced to nothing more than our number of partners; not our sexual comfort level, sexual satisfaction, or any other indicator of sexual health and happiness. It's the number, not the people informing that number, that matters. That tally becomes the sum total of our sex life, regardless of what we got out of it. It's possible to try everything under the sun with one person and be completely content, or sleep with 100 people and still feel unfulfilled.

Further, her notion that men are so fragile that they'll be tortured by the idea of a woman's prior experience is hopelessly outdated. Sure, some men long for the chaste virgin, but others want a woman who knows what she likes, and doesn't like, in bed. My fellow Huffington Post blogger Jenny Block explores this conundrum in her book, Open, suggesting that men who hold onto the ideal of the virginal women aren't always that thrilled once they get her into bed.

Basically, Ironside is saying that if you've screwed more than 15 people, you're a big slut who should hardly dare show her face, let alone expect to date or marry. Bruni is not only showing her face, but proudly claiming her past paramours. So am I, and if you want to call me a slut, go right ahead. That urge says more about you than it does about me. Some, like Ironside, are happy to cast aspersions, make ridiculous proclamations, and pretend they know best for everyone. If that sounds like you, have at it. I'll be busy doing you know what.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is an author and editor of over a dozen erotic anthologies, most recently Hide and Seek and Crossdressing. She hosts In The Flesh Erotic Reading Series and is a former sex columnist for The Village Voice.

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Sex and our Vets

I hope everyone enjoyed this long and lovely (at least in NYC) Memorial Day weekend. Since I live the 9 to 5 life, I have grown to appreciate the "holidays" but also take the time to think about why we are given this day off from the rat race. So please, if you haven't already, take a moment to remember our soldiers and veterans who are in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular fighting in an unjust and unending war brought on by Dubya and his power hungry cohorts in crime. Anyway, while your hot dogs and other BBQ goodies are digesting, say a prayer, light a candle, or have a moment of silence in hopes that these young men and women make it home (relatively) unscathed and can take the steps towards leading a "normal" life once they finish their tours.

The article linked below is only one more way that vets who come back with post-traumatic stress syndrome, financial and health worries, and other re-assimilation issues have to fight an uphill battle. More costs of war for us to consider...

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2008/05/21/is_sex_over_badly_hurt_vets_and_sexual_intimacy/

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