Treatises On Birth Control
"I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, and she said "No"." - Woody AllenIt seems that with each new school I attend, the administrators get more and more candid about how much sex they assume I’m going to be having. In middle school, I was forced to attend, with the rest of my classmates, a multiple-day sexual education class called Students Today Aren’t Ready for Sex, or STARS, or STARfS if you’re a precocious seventh-grader who thinks he’s God’s gift to third period Language Arts (and I was). High schoolers would lecture to us for half an hour or so each day about all the nasty diseases you would get from having sex, and tell us stories about girls who got knocked up and dropped out of school and spent the rest of their lives working at McDonald’s and cursing their horrible luck of not having anyone to tell them that the only good nookie is safe nookie. However, while the STARfS people would explain to us the various methods of safe nookie, they were sure to stress that no nookie whatsoever until marriage was preferable and foolproof, and I seem to remember that the course ended with us signing a pledge saying that we would wait to have sex until marriage.
As a wise man on the Internet once said, “LOL IRONY”, because of course a good number of people in my class violated that pledge in the following years, some of them quite prolifically, and with multiple people, and sometimes on school property. I don’t remember if I was every really vehemently in favor of abstinence, but I do remember some trepidation when I signed the pledge. In seventh grade, I considered it a good day if a girl touched me – and brushing past in the hall totally counted – and so when I completed my STARfS training I was pretty sure that knowing how to properly put on a condom wasn’t going to be of chief importance to me for a good long while. I wrote my name down on the pledge because I wanted an A, but in the back of my mind I knew that if a chance for nookie presented itself in the future, I wasn’t going to let a Xeroxed paper cutout be the deciding factor.
In high school, things became a lot more no-nonsense. Due to my crackerjack knowledge of the human reproductive system I was able to test out of freshman Wellness I and didn’t have to take a health class until my junior year. Now, if you’re in high school and you’re reading this, I’m going to explain to you how things work. There are some people who are passionately devoted to education, and those are teachers, and there are some people who are passionately devoted to making your senior year miserable, and those are Sprague High School administrators, and there are some people who are really, really good at coaching wrestling and absolutely terrible at teaching, and those people are health teachers. Mr. Cox was my health teacher, a slow witted man who would pronounce “also” as “alt-so” and during one lesson referred to the penis as “the tool,” which begs the question of whether it’s a screwdriver or a power drill, which was why I very nearly wound up getting kicked out of class. Despite not having much aptitude at anything but teaching boys how to put on leotards and “wrassle,” he was pretty good at reading health information to us straight from the book, which was how we got a refresher course on condoms, birth control pills, and the menstrual cycle, which is even more fun the second time around. Abstinence didn’t come up at all. It was sort of like Santa Claus for adults, I guess – when we were young, they enjoyed believing that we’d all heed their advice and exercise restraint, but by high school they all remembered what they’d been up to at that age and just gave up on the wishful thinking. Despite the fact that our teachers had woke up and smelled the hormones, a staunch contingent of parents refused to, which was why condoms weren’t freely available in school. To make up for this, my parents offered to put a basket full of condoms in our bathroom for me, which was not only a waste of money considering my less-than-prolific dating record in high school but also highly embarrassing when one has Catholic friends.
But then came college, and God bless you, sir, should you get a girl pregnant in college, because you would really have to be trying hard. In this day and age it would be a veritable Ocean’s 11 of the human anatomy to successfully make a baby because you can’t swing a cat on a college campus without hitting a pile of condoms and/or spermicidal lube, unless you’re at BYU or Liberty University, where the abstinence dream lives on. They give out condoms for free in the health center here, and the University has people hand out goodie bags with condoms in them on holidays (I got a black Halloween themed condom when I was just visiting the school last year, and you’ll be glad to know that I still have it, waiting in my desk for its day of glory that may well never arrive – not unlike a nuclear missile in its silo or Dennis Kucinich, also in my desk). There’s so many condoms on hand that the housing department, in its infinite wisdom, is organizing a “Condom Fashion Show,” in which people create clothes out of condoms, which is a sure sign that some people weren’t paying attention when STARfS taught us how to use the things. But it’s not just condoms, either – while birth control from the male side of things is fairly straightforward (“Put this on your wang so she won’t get pregnant!”) female birth control tends to be much more complicated and mysterious (“Using a horse bone knife, strip the skin from the papaya and let it simmer in Holy Water all night under a full moon, and once you rub the resulting paste in your hair, you will not get pregnant. Probably.). I was picking up a prescription at the health center and I noticed not only a wall sized poster showcasing the literally hundreds of types of birth control on sale, but also a single bottle on the counter, labeled “Vaginal Contraceptive Foam – 50% More Foam Than Leading Competitor!” I can’t imagine that there’s a whole lot of competition in the contraceptive foam market. I mean, when your product is called Vaginal Contraceptive Foam you’re pretty much just trading on the name right there. You know, Women, say what you will about sexism or poor role models in the media or body image concerns, but at least you get foam.
Sure, I’m glad that everyone (and by everyone I mean “Americans attending a major university”) has access to free birth control, but in the end I wind up feeling sorry for the people who manufacture Trojans. I mean, c’mon! You’ve been in a 7-11: Trojans are expensive! And by expensive, I mean that they cost money, whereas the condoms in the health center don’t. By all accounts, it would seem that Planned Parenthood is trying to put other birth control manufacturers out of business by underselling – nay, dumping! Seriously; why buy the condom when you can get the Vaginal Contraceptive Foam for free?
In the course of writing this article, Truman Capps found out that Trojans are manufactured by a company called Church and Dwight, neither of which is a name that he associates with sexual activity.
As a wise man on the Internet once said, “LOL IRONY”, because of course a good number of people in my class violated that pledge in the following years, some of them quite prolifically, and with multiple people, and sometimes on school property. I don’t remember if I was every really vehemently in favor of abstinence, but I do remember some trepidation when I signed the pledge. In seventh grade, I considered it a good day if a girl touched me – and brushing past in the hall totally counted – and so when I completed my STARfS training I was pretty sure that knowing how to properly put on a condom wasn’t going to be of chief importance to me for a good long while. I wrote my name down on the pledge because I wanted an A, but in the back of my mind I knew that if a chance for nookie presented itself in the future, I wasn’t going to let a Xeroxed paper cutout be the deciding factor.
In high school, things became a lot more no-nonsense. Due to my crackerjack knowledge of the human reproductive system I was able to test out of freshman Wellness I and didn’t have to take a health class until my junior year. Now, if you’re in high school and you’re reading this, I’m going to explain to you how things work. There are some people who are passionately devoted to education, and those are teachers, and there are some people who are passionately devoted to making your senior year miserable, and those are Sprague High School administrators, and there are some people who are really, really good at coaching wrestling and absolutely terrible at teaching, and those people are health teachers. Mr. Cox was my health teacher, a slow witted man who would pronounce “also” as “alt-so” and during one lesson referred to the penis as “the tool,” which begs the question of whether it’s a screwdriver or a power drill, which was why I very nearly wound up getting kicked out of class. Despite not having much aptitude at anything but teaching boys how to put on leotards and “wrassle,” he was pretty good at reading health information to us straight from the book, which was how we got a refresher course on condoms, birth control pills, and the menstrual cycle, which is even more fun the second time around. Abstinence didn’t come up at all. It was sort of like Santa Claus for adults, I guess – when we were young, they enjoyed believing that we’d all heed their advice and exercise restraint, but by high school they all remembered what they’d been up to at that age and just gave up on the wishful thinking. Despite the fact that our teachers had woke up and smelled the hormones, a staunch contingent of parents refused to, which was why condoms weren’t freely available in school. To make up for this, my parents offered to put a basket full of condoms in our bathroom for me, which was not only a waste of money considering my less-than-prolific dating record in high school but also highly embarrassing when one has Catholic friends.
But then came college, and God bless you, sir, should you get a girl pregnant in college, because you would really have to be trying hard. In this day and age it would be a veritable Ocean’s 11 of the human anatomy to successfully make a baby because you can’t swing a cat on a college campus without hitting a pile of condoms and/or spermicidal lube, unless you’re at BYU or Liberty University, where the abstinence dream lives on. They give out condoms for free in the health center here, and the University has people hand out goodie bags with condoms in them on holidays (I got a black Halloween themed condom when I was just visiting the school last year, and you’ll be glad to know that I still have it, waiting in my desk for its day of glory that may well never arrive – not unlike a nuclear missile in its silo or Dennis Kucinich, also in my desk). There’s so many condoms on hand that the housing department, in its infinite wisdom, is organizing a “Condom Fashion Show,” in which people create clothes out of condoms, which is a sure sign that some people weren’t paying attention when STARfS taught us how to use the things. But it’s not just condoms, either – while birth control from the male side of things is fairly straightforward (“Put this on your wang so she won’t get pregnant!”) female birth control tends to be much more complicated and mysterious (“Using a horse bone knife, strip the skin from the papaya and let it simmer in Holy Water all night under a full moon, and once you rub the resulting paste in your hair, you will not get pregnant. Probably.). I was picking up a prescription at the health center and I noticed not only a wall sized poster showcasing the literally hundreds of types of birth control on sale, but also a single bottle on the counter, labeled “Vaginal Contraceptive Foam – 50% More Foam Than Leading Competitor!” I can’t imagine that there’s a whole lot of competition in the contraceptive foam market. I mean, when your product is called Vaginal Contraceptive Foam you’re pretty much just trading on the name right there. You know, Women, say what you will about sexism or poor role models in the media or body image concerns, but at least you get foam.
Sure, I’m glad that everyone (and by everyone I mean “Americans attending a major university”) has access to free birth control, but in the end I wind up feeling sorry for the people who manufacture Trojans. I mean, c’mon! You’ve been in a 7-11: Trojans are expensive! And by expensive, I mean that they cost money, whereas the condoms in the health center don’t. By all accounts, it would seem that Planned Parenthood is trying to put other birth control manufacturers out of business by underselling – nay, dumping! Seriously; why buy the condom when you can get the Vaginal Contraceptive Foam for free?
In the course of writing this article, Truman Capps found out that Trojans are manufactured by a company called Church and Dwight, neither of which is a name that he associates with sexual activity.