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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?

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