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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2109 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:

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  • 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?

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.

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