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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1897 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 10, 2024

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How did birth control really work before condoms/pills/spirals? If I google for this I get all sorts of weird factoids (sheep skin condoms, animal dung vagina blocking something etc) that makes me think that people probably had other less weird/disgusting methods. After all there were societies with fertility rates around 2 and even below before these technologies

Re sheep skin condoms: 1) they're actually sheep intestine, 2) they're great

That said, I don't know how old their use is, or if DIY sheep condoms were common, or if they would have been as surprisingly not gross as the kind you can buy today.

Should I ask how you that they are great?

I mean, you can reasonably infer, but just in case - I bought them on Amazon and put them on my penis and that into the woman.

For some reason this comment just tickled my inner 14-year-old. I actually laughed out loud at this, well played.

Name checks out. ;)

You can purchase 'lambskin' condoms from most big-box stores in the United States, usually under Trojan NaturaLamb, since they're popular for people with latex allergies or who find latex condoms uncomfortable. That said, they're a) a bit more expensive per-condom, and b) do not reliably protect against most STIs, so they've fallen out of popularity in the casual sex crowd. Also smell a little different.

I think they're available in the UK/EU/AU, as well, but I haven't see them available at convenience stores the few times I went looking.

a bit more expensive

5-10x roughly - about $3

Pulling out?

I have always been taught that this is not an actually effective method. Was this wrong?

The perfect-use failure rate for withdrawal is 4% compared to 3% for condoms; similarly, within the first year of use, 18% of couples relying on withdrawal will experience a pregnancy, comparable to the 17% of couples using male condoms

Who are these 17% per year getting pregnant with condoms?

But anyways, a bit of googling shows a few sources claiming condoms and flawless pullout technique are pretty similar.

Broken condoms, skipping putting it on when passion is running too high, ”let’s do a bit without and then put it on” type of calculations etc

Essentially every aspect of American sex education is lie from the pull out method not working to heterosexual sex being a reliable vector of HIV transmission. If it came out of your high school health teacher's mouth, it's a psyop.

The funny thing is, we did not really have sex-ed at school as I grew up in Turkey (and have teenage pregnancy rates in very low single digits, go figure m) but a specific biology teacher who considered herself very modern and progressive and did some grad course in the US dumped the American high school sex-ed curriculum on my high school class. A bit ashamed to say that I am personally a rather risk averse person so for years I just kept a condom unless the girl asked for otherwise and never bothered to research much about it beyond this.

Same, and basically everyone bought this story wholesale in the U.S. No shame in it, it's a very human condition.

When they teach kids that pulling out doesn't work, it's 99 percent a lie. They just don't trust people to not fuck up

What you're told in sex-ed that pre-ejaculate fluid contains lots of sperm and will totally get you pregnant is basically a lie, yeah -- my guess is that they're going for a noble lie in that the timing aspect is easy to screw up, especially for teenagers. But yeah, no semen --> no babies if you can pull it off. (out)

I suspect this was used a lot historically -- thus all the fuss about Onan.

At first glance, it looks like the sperm counts in pre-ejaculate range from zero at the median to "same concentration as ejaculate, albeit with much less total volume" in a large minority of cases.

But yeah, I always assumed that the "not actually effective" comes from the difference between birth-control-as-designed and birth-control-as-practiced. The Pill goes from like 99% down to like 90% effective when the typical user forgets to always take it on time, and that's for a method where the time you need to be conscientious and the time you need to be passionate don't overlap.

thus all the fuss about Onan.

It's so odd that "onanism" got used to mean pulling-out and masturbation in general. Maybe the Bronze Age was a more strait-laced time, but surely the guy with a weird (or anti-WEIRD? - that rule spanned continents??) marriage-duty toward his dead brother's widow wasn't the first wanker they ever found to make an example of? And if not, then surely they were making an example out of the "you must fulfill your duty to your brother and your sister-in-law" violation aspect of his actions, not the "every sperm is sacred" violation?

I thought the myth started because if you have sex a second time after ejaculating without peeing in between, then the leftover sperm from the first one can impregnate the woman even if you successfully pull out on the second one. This critical detail got lost, and so people reasoned, "Where could that sperm to impregnate be coming from? I know, even the pre-ejaculate fluid must have enough sperm to impregnate!" and since no one ever checks anything when it comes to education about anything sex, this made its way into sex ed, and then became the Truth.

Depends on your metrics.

The official numbers for 1-year pregnancy rate give around 22% normal use, 4% perfect use for withdrawal, as compared to 13%/2% for condoms and 20ish%/2% for natural family planning. These numbers are a little 'fake' -- they're selecting from a much-more-fertile-than-average demographic, exactly what separates perfect use from normal use varies a lot by method and study, a few methods (esp outercourse) get treated as always-perfectly-used, and there's not really a comparable number for no-contraception-at-all besides a very approximate 80%ish -- but they're still directionally useful.

Maybe they used something like this: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/contraception/natural-family-planning/

I was into a girl who did this at some point. Didn’t want to question her too much to not kill the mood. Thanks for giving me the key word to search. I believe this is indeed what I was mostly looking for

I had this question once. There's some big writeup on it on /r/history, but to sum up, I remember the following: malnutrition could have reduced fertility, stuff like intercrural sex could have been more common, and the big favorite, they could have given birth and then left the baby to die on a hill somewhere.

It focuses a lot on prostitution but still a decent answer

I seem to recall there were more than a few fairy tales/fables that started with barren couples that went out for a walk one day and found a baby abandoned on their path.

I believe in Roman times there was an herb/plant that was quite effective as a birth control. but it was used to extinction. I searched it up and it seems to have been known as Silphium. It seems to be called both a contraceptive and aphrodisiac which is interesting. There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.

Probably other herbs/concoctions had varying levels of effectiveness, as well as pulling out or engaging in other kinds of sexual acts that wouldn't result in pregnancy. It might be worth looking into the history of prostitution/sex in Japan to see what was done there. Many women actually wrote fiction and diaries in Japan during the Heian period and beyond so there could be a lot of documentation and scholarly research on that subject.

There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.

It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.

It seems to be called both a contraceptive and aphrodisiac which is interesting.

I could see how pregnancy risk free sex would be an aphrodisiac in certain circumstances.

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