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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).

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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

Pulling out?

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

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.

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.