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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
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.
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.
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?
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