site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1888 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 10, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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

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.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats