My boyfriend has issued me an ultimatum: either I go talk to a doctor about beginning some form of long-term birth control, or we start using condoms again. He's doesn't want the anxiety of the Pull Out and Pray method, and I can't say I blame him. And there will be none of that "just-put-it-in-for-a-second" or "oh-my-God-I'm-about-to-come-let-me-get-a-condom" business that has launched a thousand frantic E.P.T. tests, but rubber start to finish, every single time we have sex, just like it says on the box.
I hate condoms. I hate how they feel. I hate how they smell. I hate how they make perfectly adorable penises look like the sinister alien pods at the bottom of the pool in Cocoon. I hate how they seem to suck up one's natural moisture like a wee, one-eyed WaterVac (although at the moment, this problem is being remedied with a frosting-like substance I received a goodie bag at a magazine launch.) I hate how they remind me of the dentist.
But what I hate even more than condoms is the idea of going on birth control.
Let me clarify by saying that I am completely, one-million percent in favor of reproductive freedom for all women. I believe that every woman's body is entirely her own, free from judgment or guilt; and anyone who attempts to legislate or encroach upon its freedoms is an asshole, be they asshole judges or asshole congressmen, asshole "Concerned Women of America" or asshole presidents. I think the notion that some dickhead pharmacist can decide his own stringent morality precludes his professional ethics and deny (or at least, impede) birth control to a woman he may have never met and will surely never impregnate is disgusting, and a serious threat to democracy and a free
society. I was raised in a religion that believes life begins at birth, not conception, and very possibly not until one is accepted to medical school. As far as prudery goes, well, I've written an awful lot about the social calendar of my vagina to start worrying about that now. Guilt, religion, morality, shame (and aren't they all, effectively, the same thing?) are not an issue for me. Nor are health or safety concerns; I am lucky to be in a trusting, monogamous relationship.
So why don't I just pop into my friendly neighborhood gynecologist, waltz out with a prescription, and kiss sticky bellies and latex irritations goodbye? The answers lurk somewhere in my confused psyche. And I know they are stupid, childish answers.
There are two kinds of hypochondriacs — those who fly to the doctor at the slightest sign of a blister, and those who are so convinced of their terminal status that a visit to the doctor is tantamount to a death sentence, ruining what might be an otherwise lovely afternoon. I, both an obsessive pessimist and an Olympian procrastinator, am firmly the latter. Even a visit to an unthreatening sort of doctor — a dermatologist, for example — is for me fraught with such primal terror (what if that thing on my toe is cancer? What if he weighs me?) that any examination of a more intimate nature is nearly untenable. It's
"I just don't like the idea of putting something so unnatural in my body," I've informed my suitors as I mainlined Diet Coke.
called "latrophobia", fear of going to the doctor, and I've got it so bad I'm practically a Christian Scientist. But in my defense, a few really terrible things have happened to me at the gynecologist. Knocked to the pavement outside Planned Parenthood by a protester wielding a placard with a glossy photograph of an aborted fetus on one side and a concentration camp inmate on the other. Misdiagnosed with gonorrhea by a reproachful doctor ("You might consider aaaaaaab-stinence" was his stab at comfort). Supine in a university hospital as a cheerful intern rummaged around my cervix with a pair of forceps, extracting a tampon that had mysteriously lost its string.
"So what's your major?" she chirped.
"Theater," I replied.
"Oh wow!" she squealed happily. "You're going to be famous!"
And I was. For everyone in that ward, at least.
Nobody likes a pelvic exam, unless she is very, very, lonely. But birth control pills (or patches, or those creepy little rods they implant under your skin) are not available over the counter, and I doubt they will be until long after I'm closed for business. Still, even if some godless abortionist like Hillary Clinton made it into office and people started handing them out like Halloween candy, I'd have issues.
The most common reason I've heard from others with similar reservations is discomfort with ingesting synthetic chemicals designed to alter the normal reproductive functions of the body. I personally have absolutely no problem ingesting synthetic chemicals in a variety of forms, but I've used this from time to time. It's an easy excuse to hide behind, and in bad taste to challenge, like vegetarianism or joining the Marines. "I just don't like the idea of putting something so unnatural in my body," I've informed my suitors wispily, twirling my hair with one hand as I mainlined Diet Coke with the other. I can drink a box of Nerds in sixty seconds, but taking a pill designed to protect me from a dilemma in which both options are traumatic and expensive poses too dire a threat to the sanctity of my body.
"Why should I have to be the one on birth control? Why can't he just get a vasectomy or something?" I have asked my mother angrily, on occasions.
"If your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle," she replies.
I started taking the Pill for the first and only time shortly before I moved to New York City to begin my first year of college. Despite my various medical neuroses, it seemed somehow glamorous to me, liberating and sexy. I would accidentally drop the sleek little wheel of pastel tablets on the floor in front of visitors, self-consciously proud, like a fourteen-year-old smoking a cigarette in the park. I felt like I belonged to a New York where a spunky small-town girl in a suit and hat could pop out of Grand Central Station, just another addition to a teeming, Technicolor mass, and have the city and the leading man eating out of her hand by the end of the third act.
Then I went crazy.
I hated myself. I burst into tears daily. Never previously a big drinker, I took to cradling bottles of Southern Comfort to my breast as I watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf again and again on my small TV. When my boyfriend at the time
While moodiness and weight gain are possible side effects of the pill, they are also side effects of freshman year.
intervened, I would scream "I HATE YOU!" and burst into furious sobs. Most alarming of all, for a teenage girl with dreams of movie stardom, I gained weight.
A cooler head might have inferred that it wasn't entirely the Pill's fault. While moodiness and weight gain are possible side effects of the pill, they are also side effects of freshman year, and all that bourbon wasn't helping either. However, I am not lucky enough to count lucidity among my gifts, and so I did what seemed reasonable at the time. I went off the Pill, and I developed a serious case of anorexia.
It's difficult to understand, let alone empathize with the furtive, private hell of a serious eating disorder unless you've experienced it firsthand. I am about as recovered as it's possible to be, and I think of that period in my life as something that didn't quite happen to me. The girl who drank vinegar and ate only scraps picked out of the trash is certainly someone close to me, a sister or a friend, but not me, not the person I have become. This detachment makes it all the more startling when glimmers of that person resurface. She is someone I never want to see again. And somehow, to my mind, her genesis has something to do with being on the Pill.
I know that there are new lower dosages. I know that at twenty-five, my body is unlikely to respond the way it did at eighteen. I am in a vastly different place and state of mind. I can eat bagels now and say snide things about Nicole Richie without feeling jealous of anything except her money. Yet the thought of going back on the Pill is like running into someone who broke your heart — dread, anger, and the underlying fear that given the opportunity, you'll go there again.
But I have realized that expecting the worst from yourself, while useful for stand-up comedy, is no way to live your life. Which is why I'm making a doctor's appointment. At first, just to talk.
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