Coronavirus and Sex: Questions and Answers
Some of us are mating in actual captivity. Some of us not at all. The pandemic raises lots of issues around safe intimate physical contact, and what it may look like in the future.
These are not sexy times.
As an obstetrician and gynecologist in the Bay Area, I’ve been caring for my patients via telemedicine for the past three weeks because of the new coronavirus pandemic. When I ask patients about new sex partners — a standard question for me — the answer is a universal “no.” They are taking California’s shelter-in-place very seriously.
In fact, many of my patients are more interested in updates about the virus than the medical (and often sexual) problem for which they were referred.
The pandemic has most of the world practicing exceptional hand hygiene and social distancing. This coronavirus is so new that we don’t know what we don’t know, and while fresh information is coming at an incredible pace, one medical recommendation has remained constant: the need for social distancing.
This time has been an exercise in prioritizing needs from wants. So where does sex fall on that spectrum?
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/styl ... n=Trending
Solutions to Sexual Problems.
What Single People Are Starting to Realize
What will the first post-pandemic kiss be like?
In recent months, singles have fielded dating advice from unusual sources. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York suggested it’s wise to skip a kiss. Health officials across the country reminded us, “you are your safest sex partner.” And Anthony Fauci outlined a PG evening in which those looking for love “put a mask on and, you know, chat a bit.”
Despite this chaste advice, people are dating. One Saturday, I dined with a funny Brit. The following Thursday, I met a handsome cinematographer for a gym session. All of it happened, awkwardly, on Zoom.
The dating scene is booming — it has just gone virtual. The League’s video speed-dating feature saw attendance double in the first week of social distancing. Messaging on Hinge surged 30 percent. And since March, the number of OKCupid users who have been on a video date has quadrupled.
Being single in a pandemic prompts an extreme reaction to that status. Early research from the Kinsey Institute suggests that while everyone is lonelier now, single people are the loneliest. The psychotherapist Esther Perel explained to me this is because crisis is a “relationship accelerator.” Unhappy marriages lurch to divorce. Young lovers rush to cohabitate on a third date. And single people realize: I don’t want to die alone.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What will the first post-pandemic kiss be like?
In recent months, singles have fielded dating advice from unusual sources. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York suggested it’s wise to skip a kiss. Health officials across the country reminded us, “you are your safest sex partner.” And Anthony Fauci outlined a PG evening in which those looking for love “put a mask on and, you know, chat a bit.”
Despite this chaste advice, people are dating. One Saturday, I dined with a funny Brit. The following Thursday, I met a handsome cinematographer for a gym session. All of it happened, awkwardly, on Zoom.
The dating scene is booming — it has just gone virtual. The League’s video speed-dating feature saw attendance double in the first week of social distancing. Messaging on Hinge surged 30 percent. And since March, the number of OKCupid users who have been on a video date has quadrupled.
Being single in a pandemic prompts an extreme reaction to that status. Early research from the Kinsey Institute suggests that while everyone is lonelier now, single people are the loneliest. The psychotherapist Esther Perel explained to me this is because crisis is a “relationship accelerator.” Unhappy marriages lurch to divorce. Young lovers rush to cohabitate on a third date. And single people realize: I don’t want to die alone.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
BIRTH CONTROL IS NO LONGER PROTECTED
Karim,
As many as 126,400 women.
That, per Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is the estimated number of women who will lose access to insurance-covered birth control as a result of today’s devastating Supreme Court decision in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.
We’ve spent so much of the last few months—as a result of both COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement—talking about health-care disparities and inequities. Today’s ruling is not only another setback in the ongoing fight for bodily autonomy, but also a new blow to underserved communities seeking reproductive justice.
What’s particularly alarming is that Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the conservative faction of the Court to issue a landslide 7-2 decision that now allows any employer to deny birth control coverage by claiming a moral or religious exemption.
Done rolling your eyes yet? Us, neither. But fear not, as our dynamic legal duo, Jessica Mason Pieklo and Imani Gandy, are back with a rapid reaction podcast that will have you laughing and crying about the madness of it all.
What happened today is a direct attack on reproductive freedom—and the nuns’ victory is likely only to embolden those seeking to diminish reproductive rights. But as we’ve always done, Rewire.News will continue to provide the timeliest, most informative coverage on these efforts, ensuring that fair, accurate conversations about reproductive and sexual health issues stay front-of-mind.
Best,
Galina Espinoza
President and Editor in Chief
P.S.: Keep up with legal news and the courts by subscribing to the Rewire.News Weekly newsletter.
Karim,
As many as 126,400 women.
That, per Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is the estimated number of women who will lose access to insurance-covered birth control as a result of today’s devastating Supreme Court decision in Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania.
We’ve spent so much of the last few months—as a result of both COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement—talking about health-care disparities and inequities. Today’s ruling is not only another setback in the ongoing fight for bodily autonomy, but also a new blow to underserved communities seeking reproductive justice.
What’s particularly alarming is that Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined the conservative faction of the Court to issue a landslide 7-2 decision that now allows any employer to deny birth control coverage by claiming a moral or religious exemption.
Done rolling your eyes yet? Us, neither. But fear not, as our dynamic legal duo, Jessica Mason Pieklo and Imani Gandy, are back with a rapid reaction podcast that will have you laughing and crying about the madness of it all.
What happened today is a direct attack on reproductive freedom—and the nuns’ victory is likely only to embolden those seeking to diminish reproductive rights. But as we’ve always done, Rewire.News will continue to provide the timeliest, most informative coverage on these efforts, ensuring that fair, accurate conversations about reproductive and sexual health issues stay front-of-mind.
Best,
Galina Espinoza
President and Editor in Chief
P.S.: Keep up with legal news and the courts by subscribing to the Rewire.News Weekly newsletter.
Sexual Morality by C.S. Lewis Doodle (BBC Talk 14, Mere Christianity, Bk 3, Chapter 5)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RkZXZx ... ex=13&t=0s
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RkZXZx ... ex=13&t=0s
Dating Means Fear. Again.
I never imagined I’d live to witness another viral threat.
Bob and I stood on his deck of his San Francisco flat, with the bright lights of the city behind us and the first wisps of the summer fog creeping in. The attraction was palpable. His finger traced the outline of my nose — and then we kissed. It was our first — romantic and passionate. And more: fraught with the unknown. The year was 1988, still early in the AIDS epidemic, when about one in two gay men in the city had been infected with H.I.V. We had not yet had the talk (“Do you know your status?”).
There was still so much we didn’t know then. A scant two years before, the surgeon general had ruled out “casual” modes of transmission — like mosquito bites, toilet seats, swimming pools and kissing. But fears lingered, especially with no vaccine or treatment, and a frighteningly high death rate. And then there was the stigma: gay men with H.I.V. were ostracized, fired from our jobs and abandoned by our families. Intimacy became woven with fear, kiss by kiss.
And now here we are again.
I never imagined I’d live to witness another such viral threat. At the time I met Bob, I was young and on a quest for my first big love; today I am divorced and again seeking connection. Looking for love by definition means taking chances, but pandemics are terrible times to take them.
By the time Bob and I became bedmates and boyfriends, he’d disclosed that he was H.I.V. positive (and I was not). We engaged in what was first known as “safe” sex but later became known as “safer” sex because nothing is absolute. Still, every sexual encounter required some degree of vigilance. I remember our anxiety-ridden conversations. “How safe is oral sex?” “What do we do if the condom breaks?” For me, then 31, the plague slowed my coming out; it reinforced notions that homosexuality was “bad”; and it bred a firestorm of fear about sex and intimacy that took years, and much therapy in my case, to work through.
Later on I learned how fearful Bob had been to reveal his H.I.V. status to me. “I told some women friends of mine, and they broke off all contact with me,” I remember him saying as he began to cry. “It was very painful.” He also worried that my fear about becoming infected would drive me to stop dating him, which in the end turned out to be true, and which I came to regret.
“We do not know if Covid-19 can be spread though vaginal or anal sex,” reads the New York City Department of Health’s “Safer Sex and Covid-19” guidelines (although the department acknowledges that other coronaviruses aren’t easily spread through sex). But kissing — not intercourse — is considered the riskiest sexual activity this time around. “Contact with saliva from kissing is a potential mode of transmission but is not well documented,” Dr. William Marshall III, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic, told me in an interview. In Dr. Marshall’s words, I recognized my previous fear of the unknown, the ill-defined risk lurking in the shadow of intimate human connection.
Many of my friends are starved for affection and intimacy these days. We can’t even hug, much less smooch, without taking a risk. Not surprisingly, dating and sex are frequent pandemic topics. “Even those coffee dates aren’t a good idea,” a female friend messaged me, noting that masking and distancing “don’t make for much intimacy.” A recent journal article about sexual behavior during the pandemic concluded “nearly half of the sample reported a decline in their sex life.”
What to do? Celibacy is the safest option but not a reasonable one considering the nature of human beings. Still, there are adherents. A friend in his 60s told me in September: “This is the longest I’ve gone without sex since I was about 16. That is no joke.” A profile I saw on a dating app reads: “Available to chat/meet. Covid-19 got me into forced celibacy.”
My own experience on the matchmaking apps reveals many who claim they’re “only chatting now” to plenty who are still “looking.” Curious, I asked one fellow how he chose “safe” partners. “If they have a good job and are well-dressed, I’m more comfortable,” he replied. He then blocked me before I could tell him that his filters are proxies of privilege, which viruses do not respec
Others have made different adaptations, seeking companionship over intimacy. Braden Toan, another friend in his 60s, changed his dating profile in May to declare sex “off limits.” “That being said,” his updated profile reads, “a six-foot-apart walk in the park or a bike ride with an attractive and interesting man would make my day …. It’s gotta be better than sitting in your apartment waiting for a vaccine.” Mr. Toan now has a boyfriend. “I credit the virus for slowing down the process of dating, causing us to approach with a new set of needs that were more rewarding to satisfy,” he told me recently.
I joined what I call the “celibacy club” during the first week of March. No vaccine. No treatment. Too many unknowns.
Then, three months into the pandemic I felt I needed a “safe-ish” way out of my celibate state. And so early this summer, I agreed to let a friend set me up with a colleague of hers. He lived in another city, making it easier to keep our distance at first. We had video dates but no “sexy ‘Zoom parties’” of the sort recommended by New York’s Health Department. We chatted about our coronavirus exposure (minimal) and both agreed to get tested before we met in person a few weeks later. (We each tested negative.) When we met we had dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio, without masks and not six feet apart. After dinner we took a walk, and I could feel that familiar electricity building. Before the evening ended we embraced, then kissed. It had much of the sweetness and excitement — and some of the fear — of being with Bob all those years ago.
Maneuvering through these uncertain times, I’ve thought a lot about Bob, who died in 2015, at age 64. Condoms became lifesavers, allowing us to be intimate. What now — dental dams for kissing?
Because for now, at least, there’s still no vaccine and not much treatment. Intimacy remains woven with fear, kiss by kiss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
I never imagined I’d live to witness another viral threat.
Bob and I stood on his deck of his San Francisco flat, with the bright lights of the city behind us and the first wisps of the summer fog creeping in. The attraction was palpable. His finger traced the outline of my nose — and then we kissed. It was our first — romantic and passionate. And more: fraught with the unknown. The year was 1988, still early in the AIDS epidemic, when about one in two gay men in the city had been infected with H.I.V. We had not yet had the talk (“Do you know your status?”).
There was still so much we didn’t know then. A scant two years before, the surgeon general had ruled out “casual” modes of transmission — like mosquito bites, toilet seats, swimming pools and kissing. But fears lingered, especially with no vaccine or treatment, and a frighteningly high death rate. And then there was the stigma: gay men with H.I.V. were ostracized, fired from our jobs and abandoned by our families. Intimacy became woven with fear, kiss by kiss.
And now here we are again.
I never imagined I’d live to witness another such viral threat. At the time I met Bob, I was young and on a quest for my first big love; today I am divorced and again seeking connection. Looking for love by definition means taking chances, but pandemics are terrible times to take them.
By the time Bob and I became bedmates and boyfriends, he’d disclosed that he was H.I.V. positive (and I was not). We engaged in what was first known as “safe” sex but later became known as “safer” sex because nothing is absolute. Still, every sexual encounter required some degree of vigilance. I remember our anxiety-ridden conversations. “How safe is oral sex?” “What do we do if the condom breaks?” For me, then 31, the plague slowed my coming out; it reinforced notions that homosexuality was “bad”; and it bred a firestorm of fear about sex and intimacy that took years, and much therapy in my case, to work through.
Later on I learned how fearful Bob had been to reveal his H.I.V. status to me. “I told some women friends of mine, and they broke off all contact with me,” I remember him saying as he began to cry. “It was very painful.” He also worried that my fear about becoming infected would drive me to stop dating him, which in the end turned out to be true, and which I came to regret.
“We do not know if Covid-19 can be spread though vaginal or anal sex,” reads the New York City Department of Health’s “Safer Sex and Covid-19” guidelines (although the department acknowledges that other coronaviruses aren’t easily spread through sex). But kissing — not intercourse — is considered the riskiest sexual activity this time around. “Contact with saliva from kissing is a potential mode of transmission but is not well documented,” Dr. William Marshall III, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic, told me in an interview. In Dr. Marshall’s words, I recognized my previous fear of the unknown, the ill-defined risk lurking in the shadow of intimate human connection.
Many of my friends are starved for affection and intimacy these days. We can’t even hug, much less smooch, without taking a risk. Not surprisingly, dating and sex are frequent pandemic topics. “Even those coffee dates aren’t a good idea,” a female friend messaged me, noting that masking and distancing “don’t make for much intimacy.” A recent journal article about sexual behavior during the pandemic concluded “nearly half of the sample reported a decline in their sex life.”
What to do? Celibacy is the safest option but not a reasonable one considering the nature of human beings. Still, there are adherents. A friend in his 60s told me in September: “This is the longest I’ve gone without sex since I was about 16. That is no joke.” A profile I saw on a dating app reads: “Available to chat/meet. Covid-19 got me into forced celibacy.”
My own experience on the matchmaking apps reveals many who claim they’re “only chatting now” to plenty who are still “looking.” Curious, I asked one fellow how he chose “safe” partners. “If they have a good job and are well-dressed, I’m more comfortable,” he replied. He then blocked me before I could tell him that his filters are proxies of privilege, which viruses do not respec
Others have made different adaptations, seeking companionship over intimacy. Braden Toan, another friend in his 60s, changed his dating profile in May to declare sex “off limits.” “That being said,” his updated profile reads, “a six-foot-apart walk in the park or a bike ride with an attractive and interesting man would make my day …. It’s gotta be better than sitting in your apartment waiting for a vaccine.” Mr. Toan now has a boyfriend. “I credit the virus for slowing down the process of dating, causing us to approach with a new set of needs that were more rewarding to satisfy,” he told me recently.
I joined what I call the “celibacy club” during the first week of March. No vaccine. No treatment. Too many unknowns.
Then, three months into the pandemic I felt I needed a “safe-ish” way out of my celibate state. And so early this summer, I agreed to let a friend set me up with a colleague of hers. He lived in another city, making it easier to keep our distance at first. We had video dates but no “sexy ‘Zoom parties’” of the sort recommended by New York’s Health Department. We chatted about our coronavirus exposure (minimal) and both agreed to get tested before we met in person a few weeks later. (We each tested negative.) When we met we had dinner at a restaurant with an outdoor patio, without masks and not six feet apart. After dinner we took a walk, and I could feel that familiar electricity building. Before the evening ended we embraced, then kissed. It had much of the sweetness and excitement — and some of the fear — of being with Bob all those years ago.
Maneuvering through these uncertain times, I’ve thought a lot about Bob, who died in 2015, at age 64. Condoms became lifesavers, allowing us to be intimate. What now — dental dams for kissing?
Because for now, at least, there’s still no vaccine and not much treatment. Intimacy remains woven with fear, kiss by kiss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
You Were Duped Into Saying Yes. Is That Still Consent?
Legal scholars have long debated this question. Recent psychological studies shed new light.
Imagine the following hypothetical situation: Frank and Ellen meet at a night course and end up getting drinks together after class several times. The drinks start to feel like dates, so Ellen asks Frank if he is married, making it clear that adultery is a deal-breaker for her. Frank is married, but he lies and says he is single. The two go to bed. Is Frank guilty of rape?
To most people, even those who consider Frank a dishonorable creep, the answer is clearly no. The law agrees: In most American jurisdictions, Frank is not liable for any tort or crime, let alone something as serious as sexual assault.
But why? This question has been a source of contention among legal experts for decades, ever since the law professor Susan Estrich argued that the law of rape should prohibit fraud to procure sex, just as the law of theft prohibits fraud to secure money. Ellen did not consent to have sex with a married man, the argument goes, so the sex she had with Frank was not consensual.
To many feminist legal scholars, the law’s failure to regard sexual fraud as a crime — when fraud elsewhere, such as fraud in business transactions, is taken to invalidate legal consent — shows that we are still beholden to an antiquated notion that rape is primarily a crime of force committed against a chaste, protesting victim, rather than primarily a violation of the right to control access to one’s body on one’s own terms.
It’s a powerful argument. Still, to many people, even those concerned about accountability for sexual misconduct, the notion that Frank has committed sexual assault remains deeply counterintuitive. How are we to reconcile these competing considerations?
I recently conducted a series of psychological studies that shed light on this debate. My research suggests that the reason people think Frank is not guilty of rape has less to do with their treating rape differently from other offenses and more to do with how they understand consent. Many people, it turns out, believe that an individual can give consent even though she was lied to by the person seeking her consent.
I asked hundreds of research participants to evaluate hypothetical situations in which a person is tricked into agreeing to something he would otherwise refuse. In one situation, a patient agrees to a medical procedure as a result of a doctor’s false representations. In another, a civilian allows police officers into his home because they lie about what they are searching for. In another, a research participant agrees to enroll in a study after the researcher lies about its purpose.
Surprisingly, I found that most people say that the victims in all these cases have “consented.” I also found that most people agree with the moral and legal implications of that view: For instance, they say that a doctor who performs a surgery after obtaining consent by lying deserves less punishment for medical battery than a doctor who simply performs the surgery without asking permission.
These findings fly in the face of the standard scholarly understanding of consent, which is that it is an expression of an individual’s autonomous will — controlling one’s life as one would like. Interestingly, my participants agreed with this standard legal understanding when presented with situations in which coercion or threats were used to achieve the same ends, such as when someone agreed to sex as a result of blackmail. It was only when the situations involved deception that respondents thought the victim’s “yes” counted as consent.
So it seems that the reason many people have a strong intuition that Frank didn’t rape Ellen is that they think it’s fair to say she consented, not because they think rape must involve physical force.
Of course, my empirical discovery does not resolve the question of whether our laws should criminalize sex-by-deception. It merely shows that if you have conflicted feelings about the case of Frank and Ellen, it may be because you think that his deception does not fully invalidate her consent. Whether lawmakers ought to disregard that intuition and insist on treating such cases as nonconsensual remains an open question. There might be good reasons, after all, for the law to discipline us against following our gut instincts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Legal scholars have long debated this question. Recent psychological studies shed new light.
Imagine the following hypothetical situation: Frank and Ellen meet at a night course and end up getting drinks together after class several times. The drinks start to feel like dates, so Ellen asks Frank if he is married, making it clear that adultery is a deal-breaker for her. Frank is married, but he lies and says he is single. The two go to bed. Is Frank guilty of rape?
To most people, even those who consider Frank a dishonorable creep, the answer is clearly no. The law agrees: In most American jurisdictions, Frank is not liable for any tort or crime, let alone something as serious as sexual assault.
But why? This question has been a source of contention among legal experts for decades, ever since the law professor Susan Estrich argued that the law of rape should prohibit fraud to procure sex, just as the law of theft prohibits fraud to secure money. Ellen did not consent to have sex with a married man, the argument goes, so the sex she had with Frank was not consensual.
To many feminist legal scholars, the law’s failure to regard sexual fraud as a crime — when fraud elsewhere, such as fraud in business transactions, is taken to invalidate legal consent — shows that we are still beholden to an antiquated notion that rape is primarily a crime of force committed against a chaste, protesting victim, rather than primarily a violation of the right to control access to one’s body on one’s own terms.
It’s a powerful argument. Still, to many people, even those concerned about accountability for sexual misconduct, the notion that Frank has committed sexual assault remains deeply counterintuitive. How are we to reconcile these competing considerations?
I recently conducted a series of psychological studies that shed light on this debate. My research suggests that the reason people think Frank is not guilty of rape has less to do with their treating rape differently from other offenses and more to do with how they understand consent. Many people, it turns out, believe that an individual can give consent even though she was lied to by the person seeking her consent.
I asked hundreds of research participants to evaluate hypothetical situations in which a person is tricked into agreeing to something he would otherwise refuse. In one situation, a patient agrees to a medical procedure as a result of a doctor’s false representations. In another, a civilian allows police officers into his home because they lie about what they are searching for. In another, a research participant agrees to enroll in a study after the researcher lies about its purpose.
Surprisingly, I found that most people say that the victims in all these cases have “consented.” I also found that most people agree with the moral and legal implications of that view: For instance, they say that a doctor who performs a surgery after obtaining consent by lying deserves less punishment for medical battery than a doctor who simply performs the surgery without asking permission.
These findings fly in the face of the standard scholarly understanding of consent, which is that it is an expression of an individual’s autonomous will — controlling one’s life as one would like. Interestingly, my participants agreed with this standard legal understanding when presented with situations in which coercion or threats were used to achieve the same ends, such as when someone agreed to sex as a result of blackmail. It was only when the situations involved deception that respondents thought the victim’s “yes” counted as consent.
So it seems that the reason many people have a strong intuition that Frank didn’t rape Ellen is that they think it’s fair to say she consented, not because they think rape must involve physical force.
Of course, my empirical discovery does not resolve the question of whether our laws should criminalize sex-by-deception. It merely shows that if you have conflicted feelings about the case of Frank and Ellen, it may be because you think that his deception does not fully invalidate her consent. Whether lawmakers ought to disregard that intuition and insist on treating such cases as nonconsensual remains an open question. There might be good reasons, after all, for the law to discipline us against following our gut instincts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
What Will Happen When Americans Start Having Sex Again?
As we creep back toward normal, we have to figure out how to deal with sexually transmitted infections.
Dr. Hilary Reno’s eyes widened as she scanned the waiting room at the St. Louis County Sexual Health Clinic in Missouri, where she’s the medical director. She was used to seeing a swath of humanity parked in those plastic chairs: middle-aged men secretly screening after a tryst; college students making a post-hookup pit stop; teenagers, fresh in love, testing together before taking the next step. But now, in the spring of 2019, every seat was filled, with more patients leaning up against the walls. “How,” she thought to herself, “can we possibly keep up?”
This week, in its annual S.T.D. Surveillance Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed what physicians like Dr. Reno already suspected: that 2019, the most recent year for which data was collected, would set a record for reported cases of sexually transmitted infections. In 2018, an estimated one in five Americans had an S.T.I.; that’s about 68 million people. At least 26 million new infections were contracted during 2019 alone. Chlamydia hit an all-time peak — St. Louis, as it happens, has historically led U.S. cities in cases — while gonorrhea and syphilis, along with congenital infections and newborn deaths, were at their highest rates since the early 1990s. The trends for syphilis are particularly striking, given that two decades ago, it was close to elimination.
For a while, it appeared that the pandemic lockdown might unintentionally ease the surging S.T.I. epidemic. While a few holdouts chose to manage their anxiety through sex with strangers rather than stress baking, most people hunkered down, socially and sexually distancing. And it wasn’t just Americans. Studies from Britain, Asia and Australia also found that Covid-19 dampened people’s sexual ardor: About 40 to 60 percent of adults reduced their number of partners; a similar percentage reduced the frequency of sex or abstained altogether. Instead, like everything from cocktail hours to corporate meetings, hookups went online. Tinder saw a record 3 billion swipes on a single day last March. Likewise, from March through May, OkCupid recorded a 700 percent increase in virtual dates.
But fear of contagion and death will depress libido for only so long. Just when quarantine fatigue began eroding sexual restraint, the urgent needs of Covid-19 gutted the country’s fragile infrastructure for S.T.I. control. Two-thirds of public sexual health clinics were forced to cut back their services or shut their doors in 2020, their staffs redeployed to the Covid-19 response — only one of New York City’s eight clinics remained open during the early months of the pandemic. Screenings were eliminated, follow-up of patients and their sex partners reduced.
Contract tracers, too, were reassigned to track coronavirus transmission, so attempts to reconstruct sexual networks — a major tool in reducing the spread of S.T.I.s — plummeted. The result? Delays in diagnosis, scarce access to treatment and the likelihood that we’ll keep racking up those astronomical transmission records, albeit without the same ability to document that it’s happening.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
As we creep back toward normal, we have to figure out how to deal with sexually transmitted infections.
Dr. Hilary Reno’s eyes widened as she scanned the waiting room at the St. Louis County Sexual Health Clinic in Missouri, where she’s the medical director. She was used to seeing a swath of humanity parked in those plastic chairs: middle-aged men secretly screening after a tryst; college students making a post-hookup pit stop; teenagers, fresh in love, testing together before taking the next step. But now, in the spring of 2019, every seat was filled, with more patients leaning up against the walls. “How,” she thought to herself, “can we possibly keep up?”
This week, in its annual S.T.D. Surveillance Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed what physicians like Dr. Reno already suspected: that 2019, the most recent year for which data was collected, would set a record for reported cases of sexually transmitted infections. In 2018, an estimated one in five Americans had an S.T.I.; that’s about 68 million people. At least 26 million new infections were contracted during 2019 alone. Chlamydia hit an all-time peak — St. Louis, as it happens, has historically led U.S. cities in cases — while gonorrhea and syphilis, along with congenital infections and newborn deaths, were at their highest rates since the early 1990s. The trends for syphilis are particularly striking, given that two decades ago, it was close to elimination.
For a while, it appeared that the pandemic lockdown might unintentionally ease the surging S.T.I. epidemic. While a few holdouts chose to manage their anxiety through sex with strangers rather than stress baking, most people hunkered down, socially and sexually distancing. And it wasn’t just Americans. Studies from Britain, Asia and Australia also found that Covid-19 dampened people’s sexual ardor: About 40 to 60 percent of adults reduced their number of partners; a similar percentage reduced the frequency of sex or abstained altogether. Instead, like everything from cocktail hours to corporate meetings, hookups went online. Tinder saw a record 3 billion swipes on a single day last March. Likewise, from March through May, OkCupid recorded a 700 percent increase in virtual dates.
But fear of contagion and death will depress libido for only so long. Just when quarantine fatigue began eroding sexual restraint, the urgent needs of Covid-19 gutted the country’s fragile infrastructure for S.T.I. control. Two-thirds of public sexual health clinics were forced to cut back their services or shut their doors in 2020, their staffs redeployed to the Covid-19 response — only one of New York City’s eight clinics remained open during the early months of the pandemic. Screenings were eliminated, follow-up of patients and their sex partners reduced.
Contract tracers, too, were reassigned to track coronavirus transmission, so attempts to reconstruct sexual networks — a major tool in reducing the spread of S.T.I.s — plummeted. The result? Delays in diagnosis, scarce access to treatment and the likelihood that we’ll keep racking up those astronomical transmission records, albeit without the same ability to document that it’s happening.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Mormon sex therapist ousted from faith for critiques
Associated Press Thu, April 22, 2021, 1:43 PM
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A sex therapist in Utah who has publicly challenged her faith's policies on sexuality has been kicked out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints following a disciplinary hearing.
Natasha Helfer received a letter Wednesday from a regional church official explaining the reasons for her removal from the Salt Lake City-based church, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Helfer was disciplined by church leaders in Kansas, where she lived before moving to Utah in 2019.
“After carefully and prayerfully considering this matter,” the letter states, “it was the decision of the council to withdraw your church membership in response to conduct contrary to the law and order of the church.”
Helfer shared the letter on Facebook. Church spokesman Eric Hawkins said that, based on the letter, regional church leaders' decision was not related to her private practice as a therapist.
“As the letter shared by Ms. Helfer indicates, the decision of the local leaders was based on her public, repeated opposition to the church, church leaders and the doctrine of the church, including our doctrine on the nature of the family and on moral issues,” Hawkins said in a statement.
Helfer has been outspoken on sexual issues and supports same-sex marriage, counsels that masturbation is not a sin and says pornography should not be treated as an addiction. She had said that she hoped to remain in the church.
The story was originally reported by The Washington Post.
Helfer told the Tribune that she was asked to leave her disciplinary hearing before it began on Sunday because she refused to turn off her phone, which contained her notes.
“It is common for participants to be asked to turn off technology (including cell phones) or leave it outside the room, as was the case with this council,” Hawksins said. “All but one of the participants complied with that request and had brought their statements in writing.”
Church members are taught not to have sex before marriage, engage in passionate kissing, touch another person’s private parts or arouse “emotions in your own body” that are supposed to be reserved for marriage. Homosexual relations also are forbidden even if a person is married or in a relationship.
Helfer did not immediately respond to The Associated Press' request for comment.
Her ouster means she’ll be leaving a religion she’s been a member of since she was 5 years old.
While not a lifelong ban, the withdrawal of a person's membership by church leaders amounts to the harshest punishment available for a member of the faith. These ousters used to be called excommunication before the faith changed the terminology last year to “withdrawal of church membership.”
People in this category can’t go inside temples where members are married and other ordinances such as baptisms for dead relatives are performed.
Sam Young, a man who led a campaign criticizing the church’s practice of allowing one-on-one interviews of youth by lay leaders that sometimes included sexual questions, was kicked out of the church in 2018. Kate Kelly, founder of a group pushing for women to be allowed in the religion’s lay clergy, was excommunicated in 2014.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mo ... 21431.html
Associated Press Thu, April 22, 2021, 1:43 PM
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A sex therapist in Utah who has publicly challenged her faith's policies on sexuality has been kicked out of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints following a disciplinary hearing.
Natasha Helfer received a letter Wednesday from a regional church official explaining the reasons for her removal from the Salt Lake City-based church, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Helfer was disciplined by church leaders in Kansas, where she lived before moving to Utah in 2019.
“After carefully and prayerfully considering this matter,” the letter states, “it was the decision of the council to withdraw your church membership in response to conduct contrary to the law and order of the church.”
Helfer shared the letter on Facebook. Church spokesman Eric Hawkins said that, based on the letter, regional church leaders' decision was not related to her private practice as a therapist.
“As the letter shared by Ms. Helfer indicates, the decision of the local leaders was based on her public, repeated opposition to the church, church leaders and the doctrine of the church, including our doctrine on the nature of the family and on moral issues,” Hawkins said in a statement.
Helfer has been outspoken on sexual issues and supports same-sex marriage, counsels that masturbation is not a sin and says pornography should not be treated as an addiction. She had said that she hoped to remain in the church.
The story was originally reported by The Washington Post.
Helfer told the Tribune that she was asked to leave her disciplinary hearing before it began on Sunday because she refused to turn off her phone, which contained her notes.
“It is common for participants to be asked to turn off technology (including cell phones) or leave it outside the room, as was the case with this council,” Hawksins said. “All but one of the participants complied with that request and had brought their statements in writing.”
Church members are taught not to have sex before marriage, engage in passionate kissing, touch another person’s private parts or arouse “emotions in your own body” that are supposed to be reserved for marriage. Homosexual relations also are forbidden even if a person is married or in a relationship.
Helfer did not immediately respond to The Associated Press' request for comment.
Her ouster means she’ll be leaving a religion she’s been a member of since she was 5 years old.
While not a lifelong ban, the withdrawal of a person's membership by church leaders amounts to the harshest punishment available for a member of the faith. These ousters used to be called excommunication before the faith changed the terminology last year to “withdrawal of church membership.”
People in this category can’t go inside temples where members are married and other ordinances such as baptisms for dead relatives are performed.
Sam Young, a man who led a campaign criticizing the church’s practice of allowing one-on-one interviews of youth by lay leaders that sometimes included sexual questions, was kicked out of the church in 2018. Kate Kelly, founder of a group pushing for women to be allowed in the religion’s lay clergy, was excommunicated in 2014.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mo ... 21431.html
Should You Always Pee After Sex? Here’s What Gynecologists Say
Some people like to cuddle after sex. Some want to shower or fall right asleep. Others may even cry. But one thing all women should do is pee after sex ... right? You've probably heard the recommendation before. But is this a crucial vagina health tip or just an old wive's tale? We spoke with doctors to get the lowdown.
What does peeing after sex do?
The main benefit is potentially cleansing any bacteria away. While there are some possible benefits to a post-sex pee, there are definitely some myths surrounding the practice.
Does it prevent UTIs?
Women who are prone to urinary tract infections (UTIs) may believe that the practice can help. Uncomfortable UTI symptoms include burning or pain while peeing, frequent or urgent urination, cloudy urine, and leaks. Bottom line: you want to avoid them. Gynecologist Alyssa Dweck, MD, co-author of V is for Vagina, and Mary Jane Minkin, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine, say it's all related to anatomy. A woman's urethra, vagina, and anal area are within close proximity to each other. "The urethra, which is the tube from the bladder to the outside in women, is very short and sits right next to the vagina, which is loaded with bacteria," Dr. Minkin says.
The urethra, the place where you urinate, is also close to the anal area, which is normally colonized with tons of bacteria, according to Dr. Dweck. During intercourse and all types of sexual play, bacteria can get near the urethra and increase the chance of infection. "Lots of different activities, including sex, can facilitate bacteria from the anal area towards the urethra and cause an infection," Dr. Dweck says. "And that's why women, in general, are more prone to UTIs than men."
Another reason some experts associate sex with UTIs is because penetration may put pressure on the urethra. This irritation may force bacteria into the urethra towards the bladder, raising the likelihood of infection. In fact, people who go on their honeymoon and have lots of intercourse sometimes get sexually associated UTIs or "honeymoon cystitis," inflammation of the bladder. Taking a pee may mechanically cleanse the bacteria away. So for women who are prone to UTIs, it's a good habit and an easy effort that'll help prevent infection, says Dr. Dweck.
(Related: How Bad It Is to Wait Too Long to Use the Bathroom)
What does the research say?
One study in the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal found that pregnant women who usually urinated within 15 minutes of sex had a lower likelihood of developing a UTI than women who did not urinate afterward. Dr. Minkin notes, that other studies have found no such connection. However, no research indicates that it raises the risk of UTIs, so consider it potentially protective: If hitting the bathroom helps you avoid UTIs, great; if it doesn't, no harm done.
Reoccurring UTIs
If you have reoccurring UTIs, get in touch with your doctor—don't expect peeing after sex to address your problem. There are medical measures that can help.
(Related: 9 Totally Not Weird Questions You Should Ask Your Gynecologist)
What about men?
Men who sleep with men are often engaging in anal sex, so they may have some bacterial exposure to the tip of the penis. That can potentially raise the risk of UTIs, but it's not the rule, according to Dr. Dweck. "The distance of the urethra and the length of the urethra—from the bladder to the outside world—is really long and scopes the length of the penis," she says. "So that's why this is not usually an issue for men."
Does peeing after sex prevent pregnancy?
"That is 1,000 percent false," Dr. Dweck says. It's among the worst pieces of health advice gynecologists have heard. "When you urinate, your urine comes out of your urethra," she says. "The vagina is where sperm gets deposited to create a pregnancy. These are two completely separate holes, and urinating is not going to flush out sperm from the internal vagina."
(Related: Samantha Bitty Knows Good Sex (and Wants You to Know It, Too))
Does peeing after sex prevent STIs?
Again, absolutely not: This isn't a solution or a recommended way to prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or other infections, Dr. Dweck says. If you're sexually active, use protection, get tested regularly, and follow the instructions and recommendations of your doctor.
If you don't normally pee after sex, should you start?
Although the habit could be helpful, it's not an urgent medical recommendation for everybody. "We're not trying to mechanicalize sex into this overwhelming medical experience," Dr. Dweck says. Dr. Minkin agrees, saying that at the very least it can't hurt. Again, if you have reoccurring UTIs, talk to your doctor—peeing after sex is not the first line of defense.
Dr. Dweck says once someone has a bad UTI, they often remember to pee after sex because the infection is so uncomfortable, they'll take easy, preventive measures over an infection any day. And, no, you don't need to make a beeline for the bathroom the minute sex ends. Just pee in a reasonable time frame before you go to sleep.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellne ... li=AAggNb9
Some people like to cuddle after sex. Some want to shower or fall right asleep. Others may even cry. But one thing all women should do is pee after sex ... right? You've probably heard the recommendation before. But is this a crucial vagina health tip or just an old wive's tale? We spoke with doctors to get the lowdown.
What does peeing after sex do?
The main benefit is potentially cleansing any bacteria away. While there are some possible benefits to a post-sex pee, there are definitely some myths surrounding the practice.
Does it prevent UTIs?
Women who are prone to urinary tract infections (UTIs) may believe that the practice can help. Uncomfortable UTI symptoms include burning or pain while peeing, frequent or urgent urination, cloudy urine, and leaks. Bottom line: you want to avoid them. Gynecologist Alyssa Dweck, MD, co-author of V is for Vagina, and Mary Jane Minkin, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Yale School of Medicine, say it's all related to anatomy. A woman's urethra, vagina, and anal area are within close proximity to each other. "The urethra, which is the tube from the bladder to the outside in women, is very short and sits right next to the vagina, which is loaded with bacteria," Dr. Minkin says.
The urethra, the place where you urinate, is also close to the anal area, which is normally colonized with tons of bacteria, according to Dr. Dweck. During intercourse and all types of sexual play, bacteria can get near the urethra and increase the chance of infection. "Lots of different activities, including sex, can facilitate bacteria from the anal area towards the urethra and cause an infection," Dr. Dweck says. "And that's why women, in general, are more prone to UTIs than men."
Another reason some experts associate sex with UTIs is because penetration may put pressure on the urethra. This irritation may force bacteria into the urethra towards the bladder, raising the likelihood of infection. In fact, people who go on their honeymoon and have lots of intercourse sometimes get sexually associated UTIs or "honeymoon cystitis," inflammation of the bladder. Taking a pee may mechanically cleanse the bacteria away. So for women who are prone to UTIs, it's a good habit and an easy effort that'll help prevent infection, says Dr. Dweck.
(Related: How Bad It Is to Wait Too Long to Use the Bathroom)
What does the research say?
One study in the Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal found that pregnant women who usually urinated within 15 minutes of sex had a lower likelihood of developing a UTI than women who did not urinate afterward. Dr. Minkin notes, that other studies have found no such connection. However, no research indicates that it raises the risk of UTIs, so consider it potentially protective: If hitting the bathroom helps you avoid UTIs, great; if it doesn't, no harm done.
Reoccurring UTIs
If you have reoccurring UTIs, get in touch with your doctor—don't expect peeing after sex to address your problem. There are medical measures that can help.
(Related: 9 Totally Not Weird Questions You Should Ask Your Gynecologist)
What about men?
Men who sleep with men are often engaging in anal sex, so they may have some bacterial exposure to the tip of the penis. That can potentially raise the risk of UTIs, but it's not the rule, according to Dr. Dweck. "The distance of the urethra and the length of the urethra—from the bladder to the outside world—is really long and scopes the length of the penis," she says. "So that's why this is not usually an issue for men."
Does peeing after sex prevent pregnancy?
"That is 1,000 percent false," Dr. Dweck says. It's among the worst pieces of health advice gynecologists have heard. "When you urinate, your urine comes out of your urethra," she says. "The vagina is where sperm gets deposited to create a pregnancy. These are two completely separate holes, and urinating is not going to flush out sperm from the internal vagina."
(Related: Samantha Bitty Knows Good Sex (and Wants You to Know It, Too))
Does peeing after sex prevent STIs?
Again, absolutely not: This isn't a solution or a recommended way to prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or other infections, Dr. Dweck says. If you're sexually active, use protection, get tested regularly, and follow the instructions and recommendations of your doctor.
If you don't normally pee after sex, should you start?
Although the habit could be helpful, it's not an urgent medical recommendation for everybody. "We're not trying to mechanicalize sex into this overwhelming medical experience," Dr. Dweck says. Dr. Minkin agrees, saying that at the very least it can't hurt. Again, if you have reoccurring UTIs, talk to your doctor—peeing after sex is not the first line of defense.
Dr. Dweck says once someone has a bad UTI, they often remember to pee after sex because the infection is so uncomfortable, they'll take easy, preventive measures over an infection any day. And, no, you don't need to make a beeline for the bathroom the minute sex ends. Just pee in a reasonable time frame before you go to sleep.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/health/wellne ... li=AAggNb9
The Pill Helped Start the Sexual Revolution. What Will Phexxi Do?
Saundra Pelletier is marketing a new form of birth control to women wary of hormones.
SAN DIEGO — If you’re a woman aged 18 to 34, you may have seen a Phexxi ad during a commercial break on Hulu. Or you could have come across the product — a non-hormonal contraceptive gel that women can use within an hour before having sex — while scrolling through Instagram, somewhere between a recipe for Paleo bagels and an ode to body positivity.
Phexxi went on sale in September in the United States, after receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Prescriptions for Phexxi are in the low thousands, according to its publicly traded parent company, Evofem — about 17,280. This is puny compared to the estimated 8.6 million women who have undergone female sterilization or the 6.6 million women on the Pill.
But Saundra Pelletier, the chief executive officer of Evofem, is hoping to reach a generation that, unlike their foremothers, who were “liberated” by the Pill, then schooled to insist on condoms, have grown up with hormones as the default birth control option.
“I think it’s insane that women have not had an option like this before now,” she said in May.
The conference rooms in Evofem’s offices are all named after women who left a mark on the world: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rosa Parks, Marie Curie. A stylized Joan of Arc, in hot pink, looms on a screen in the “war room.” In the cafeteria, “feminism” is written on a plaque, along with a definition of the word.
The messaging in Ms. Pelletier’s personal office is even fiercer. In the bathroom, a cup holding a toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink reads: “Tears of My Enemies.” A shower curtain (yes, there’s a shower in her office) proclaims in bold, uppercase letters, “Here’s to strong women/May we know them/May we be them/May we raise them.”
The shower is there because Ms. Pelletier, 51, works a lot. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, she sought doctors who would accept that she had no intention of taking a break while undergoing treatment.
“If I stop working, I’m going to take pain meds all day, watch ‘The Price Is Right’ and end up in the fetal position in the corner,” she said. So through six months of chemotherapy and through a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy and an oophorectomy, she continued working, even appearing at conferences around the country.
Phexxi is intended not only for women questioning whether they want to take hormones, an increasingly vocal contingent during a boom of wellness culture; it is also for women who are told not to take them. Women with breast cancer, for example.
Phexxi’s mechanism is simple: the gel alters the pH of the vagina to make it more acidic and inhospitable to sperm. The product is about 93 percent effective with perfect use in clinical trials reviewed by the F.D.A., and 86 percent effective with typical use.
That rate falls somewhere between the rates for condoms and diaphragms. (Condoms prevent pregnancy 87 percent of the time with typical use and diaphragms do so 83 percent of the time with typical use, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Pill has a 93 percent typical-use effectiveness rate.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/styl ... 778d3e6de3
Saundra Pelletier is marketing a new form of birth control to women wary of hormones.
SAN DIEGO — If you’re a woman aged 18 to 34, you may have seen a Phexxi ad during a commercial break on Hulu. Or you could have come across the product — a non-hormonal contraceptive gel that women can use within an hour before having sex — while scrolling through Instagram, somewhere between a recipe for Paleo bagels and an ode to body positivity.
Phexxi went on sale in September in the United States, after receiving approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Prescriptions for Phexxi are in the low thousands, according to its publicly traded parent company, Evofem — about 17,280. This is puny compared to the estimated 8.6 million women who have undergone female sterilization or the 6.6 million women on the Pill.
But Saundra Pelletier, the chief executive officer of Evofem, is hoping to reach a generation that, unlike their foremothers, who were “liberated” by the Pill, then schooled to insist on condoms, have grown up with hormones as the default birth control option.
“I think it’s insane that women have not had an option like this before now,” she said in May.
The conference rooms in Evofem’s offices are all named after women who left a mark on the world: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rosa Parks, Marie Curie. A stylized Joan of Arc, in hot pink, looms on a screen in the “war room.” In the cafeteria, “feminism” is written on a plaque, along with a definition of the word.
The messaging in Ms. Pelletier’s personal office is even fiercer. In the bathroom, a cup holding a toothbrush and toothpaste on the sink reads: “Tears of My Enemies.” A shower curtain (yes, there’s a shower in her office) proclaims in bold, uppercase letters, “Here’s to strong women/May we know them/May we be them/May we raise them.”
The shower is there because Ms. Pelletier, 51, works a lot. When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, she sought doctors who would accept that she had no intention of taking a break while undergoing treatment.
“If I stop working, I’m going to take pain meds all day, watch ‘The Price Is Right’ and end up in the fetal position in the corner,” she said. So through six months of chemotherapy and through a double mastectomy, a hysterectomy and an oophorectomy, she continued working, even appearing at conferences around the country.
Phexxi is intended not only for women questioning whether they want to take hormones, an increasingly vocal contingent during a boom of wellness culture; it is also for women who are told not to take them. Women with breast cancer, for example.
Phexxi’s mechanism is simple: the gel alters the pH of the vagina to make it more acidic and inhospitable to sperm. The product is about 93 percent effective with perfect use in clinical trials reviewed by the F.D.A., and 86 percent effective with typical use.
That rate falls somewhere between the rates for condoms and diaphragms. (Condoms prevent pregnancy 87 percent of the time with typical use and diaphragms do so 83 percent of the time with typical use, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Pill has a 93 percent typical-use effectiveness rate.)
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/10/styl ... 778d3e6de3
If You Ignore Porn, You Aren’t Teaching Sex Ed
Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room. But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.
While I don’t know the precise content of that presentation, I can say this: Refusing to discuss sexually explicit media, which is more accessible to minors than at any other time in history, won’t make it go away. As far back as 2008 — basically the Pleistocene era in internet terms — a study found that more than 90 percent of boys and close to two-thirds of girls had viewed online pornography before turning 18, whether intentionally or involuntarily.
I’ve been interviewing teenagers about their attitudes and expectations of sex for over a decade. When talking to boys, in particular, I’ve never asked whether they’ve watched porn — that would shoot my credibility to hell. Instead, I ask when they first saw it. Most say right around the onset of puberty. They not only learned to masturbate in tandem with its images but also can’t conceive of doing it any other way. “I have a friend who was a legend among the crew team,” a high school senior told me. “He said that he’d stopped using porn completely. He said, ‘I just close my eyes and use my imagination.’ We were like, ‘Whoa! How does he do that?’”
Curiosity about sex and masturbation is natural: good for girls, boys and everyone beyond those designations. And I am talking about children here, many of whom have yet to have a first kiss; adult porn use is a different conversation. One could also debate the potential for sexual liberation of ethically produced porn, queer porn or feminist porn, but those sites are typically behind a pay wall, and most teenagers don’t have their own credit cards.
The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women. It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest
The clips can also skew toward the hostile. In a 2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women. Black women have been found to be the targets of such aggression more frequently than white women, and Black men are more likely than white men to be depicted as aggressors. In other words, teens are being served a heaping helping of racism with their eroticized misogyny.
Boys I interview typically assure me that they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe. But that’s the response people give to any suggestion of media influence. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psych to know that what we consume shapes our thoughts and behavior even — maybe especially — when we believe it doesn’t. Any troll with a Facebook account could tell you that.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Parents often say that if they try to have the sex talk with their teens, the kids plug their ears and hum or run screaming from the room. But late last month, those roles were reversed: After a workshop for high school juniors at the Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School promoting critical thinking about online pornography, it was parents who flipped out. Some took to the media — The New York Post, Fox News, The Federalist and other like-minded outlets jumped on the story — accusing the school of indoctrinating children.
While I don’t know the precise content of that presentation, I can say this: Refusing to discuss sexually explicit media, which is more accessible to minors than at any other time in history, won’t make it go away. As far back as 2008 — basically the Pleistocene era in internet terms — a study found that more than 90 percent of boys and close to two-thirds of girls had viewed online pornography before turning 18, whether intentionally or involuntarily.
I’ve been interviewing teenagers about their attitudes and expectations of sex for over a decade. When talking to boys, in particular, I’ve never asked whether they’ve watched porn — that would shoot my credibility to hell. Instead, I ask when they first saw it. Most say right around the onset of puberty. They not only learned to masturbate in tandem with its images but also can’t conceive of doing it any other way. “I have a friend who was a legend among the crew team,” a high school senior told me. “He said that he’d stopped using porn completely. He said, ‘I just close my eyes and use my imagination.’ We were like, ‘Whoa! How does he do that?’”
Curiosity about sex and masturbation is natural: good for girls, boys and everyone beyond those designations. And I am talking about children here, many of whom have yet to have a first kiss; adult porn use is a different conversation. One could also debate the potential for sexual liberation of ethically produced porn, queer porn or feminist porn, but those sites are typically behind a pay wall, and most teenagers don’t have their own credit cards.
The free content most readily available to minors tends to show sex as something men do to rather than with women. It often portrays female pleasure as a performance for male satisfaction, shows wildly unrealistic bodies, is indifferent to consent (sometimes in its actual production) and flirts with incest
The clips can also skew toward the hostile. In a 2020 analysis of more than 4,000 heterosexual scenes on Pornhub and Xvideos, 45 percent and 35 percent, respectively, contained aggression, almost exclusively directed at women. Black women have been found to be the targets of such aggression more frequently than white women, and Black men are more likely than white men to be depicted as aggressors. In other words, teens are being served a heaping helping of racism with their eroticized misogyny.
Boys I interview typically assure me that they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Maybe. But that’s the response people give to any suggestion of media influence. You don’t need a Ph.D. in psych to know that what we consume shapes our thoughts and behavior even — maybe especially — when we believe it doesn’t. Any troll with a Facebook account could tell you that.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Can the Left Regulate Sex?
There is a harrowing story in The New Yorker that everyone should grit their teeth and read. Written by Rachel Aviv, it tells the story of how a respected German psychologist named Helmut Kentler decided to foster neglected children with pedophiles, how he ran this experiment with government support for decades after the 1960s, and how it created exactly the kind of hells you would expect.
It seems almost impossible that this really happened. But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.
If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.
All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid. In those years famous French intellectuals petitioned to decriminalize pedophilia, while America had its own squalid forms of predation, whether in rock-groupie culture or Roman Polanski’s Hollywood. But Aviv’s story suggests that the Germans, never a culture for half-measures, took these ideas toward a particular extreme.
That today the readers of an impeccably progressive magazine recoil in horror from that extreme is, among other things, proof that revolutions don’t move in one direction — you can climb back up a slippery slope, you can break a taboo and partially rebuild it.
But in its retreat from the Polanski era, its concession that sometimes it’s OK to forbid, cultural progressivism entered into a long internal struggle over what its goal ought to be — to maximize permissiveness with some minimalist taboos (no rape, no sex with children) or to devise a broader set of sexual regulations that would reflect egalitarian and feminist values rather than religious ones.
This tension is visible all over recent history. The mood in which liberals defended Bill Clinton’s philandering was an example of the more permissive option. The mood of the #MeToo era, which condemned cads as well as rapists, is an example of the more regulatory approach.
The temporary alliance between anti-porn feminists and social conservatives in the 1980s was regulatory, while the rise of “sex-positive” feminism was permissive. The way that same-sex marriage was championed as a conservative and bourgeois reform was more regulatory; the shift toward emphasizing the fluidity and individuality of sexual identity was more permissive.
But if the tensions are longstanding, how they’re worked out is becoming more important, as social conservatism ebbs and progressivism’s cultural dominance expands. Progressives are not quite in the cultural position that Christian churches once occupied in this country, but they are close enough that the question “how should the left regulate sex?” increasingly implicates our whole society.
In general the recent trend has been toward more regulation: The sexual-assault tribunals on college campuses, the changing rules of workplace harassment, the new politesse surrounding pronouns and sexual identity. Part of this reflects a pattern often observed by conservatives, in which certain forms of sexual liberation seem to require more micromanagement than the old “thou shalt nots” — like the rigor required to distinguish supposedly empowering “sex work” from the exploitative variety, or purportedly egalitarian pornography from the misogynist or pedophilic sort.
But this regulatory mood is contested and unstable. Last month there was an internal progressive debate about whether, now that Pride parades are essentially part of a new civic religion, their kinky side should be sanitized for kids, or whether encountering B.D.S.M. is a healthy part of a queer-affirming childhood. In New York’s mayoral race, the allegations of sexual misconduct against Scott Stringer helped derail his campaign but also exposed progressive discomfort with the stricter forms of #MeToo orthodoxy.
I don’t know how long the current period of progressive cultural power can last. But so long as it does, these debates will continue, because the regulation of sex is an inescapable obligation of power.
So progressives will continue to teeter between two anxieties. On the one hand, the fear of turning into the very Puritans and Comstocks they brag of having toppled. On the other, the fear of Helmut Kentler’s legacy, and liberation as a path into the abyss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
There is a harrowing story in The New Yorker that everyone should grit their teeth and read. Written by Rachel Aviv, it tells the story of how a respected German psychologist named Helmut Kentler decided to foster neglected children with pedophiles, how he ran this experiment with government support for decades after the 1960s, and how it created exactly the kind of hells you would expect.
It seems almost impossible that this really happened. But the past is another country, and Aviv explains with bracing clarity how the context of the 1960s and 1970s made the experiment entirely plausible. The psychological theory of the Sexual Revolution, in which strict sexual rules imposed neurosis while liberation offered wholeness, was embraced with particular fervor in Germany, because the old order was associated not just with prudery but with fascism and Auschwitz.
If traditional sexual taboos had molded the men who built the gas chambers, then no taboos could be permitted to endure. If the old human nature had ended in fascism, then the answer was a new human nature — embodied, in Aviv’s account, by “experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies,” or appeals from Germany’s Green Party to end the “oppression of children’s sexuality,” or Kentler’s bold idea that sex with one’s foster children could be a form of love and care.
All this was part of a wider Western mood, distilled in the slogan of May 1968: It is forbidden to forbid. In those years famous French intellectuals petitioned to decriminalize pedophilia, while America had its own squalid forms of predation, whether in rock-groupie culture or Roman Polanski’s Hollywood. But Aviv’s story suggests that the Germans, never a culture for half-measures, took these ideas toward a particular extreme.
That today the readers of an impeccably progressive magazine recoil in horror from that extreme is, among other things, proof that revolutions don’t move in one direction — you can climb back up a slippery slope, you can break a taboo and partially rebuild it.
But in its retreat from the Polanski era, its concession that sometimes it’s OK to forbid, cultural progressivism entered into a long internal struggle over what its goal ought to be — to maximize permissiveness with some minimalist taboos (no rape, no sex with children) or to devise a broader set of sexual regulations that would reflect egalitarian and feminist values rather than religious ones.
This tension is visible all over recent history. The mood in which liberals defended Bill Clinton’s philandering was an example of the more permissive option. The mood of the #MeToo era, which condemned cads as well as rapists, is an example of the more regulatory approach.
The temporary alliance between anti-porn feminists and social conservatives in the 1980s was regulatory, while the rise of “sex-positive” feminism was permissive. The way that same-sex marriage was championed as a conservative and bourgeois reform was more regulatory; the shift toward emphasizing the fluidity and individuality of sexual identity was more permissive.
But if the tensions are longstanding, how they’re worked out is becoming more important, as social conservatism ebbs and progressivism’s cultural dominance expands. Progressives are not quite in the cultural position that Christian churches once occupied in this country, but they are close enough that the question “how should the left regulate sex?” increasingly implicates our whole society.
In general the recent trend has been toward more regulation: The sexual-assault tribunals on college campuses, the changing rules of workplace harassment, the new politesse surrounding pronouns and sexual identity. Part of this reflects a pattern often observed by conservatives, in which certain forms of sexual liberation seem to require more micromanagement than the old “thou shalt nots” — like the rigor required to distinguish supposedly empowering “sex work” from the exploitative variety, or purportedly egalitarian pornography from the misogynist or pedophilic sort.
But this regulatory mood is contested and unstable. Last month there was an internal progressive debate about whether, now that Pride parades are essentially part of a new civic religion, their kinky side should be sanitized for kids, or whether encountering B.D.S.M. is a healthy part of a queer-affirming childhood. In New York’s mayoral race, the allegations of sexual misconduct against Scott Stringer helped derail his campaign but also exposed progressive discomfort with the stricter forms of #MeToo orthodoxy.
I don’t know how long the current period of progressive cultural power can last. But so long as it does, these debates will continue, because the regulation of sex is an inescapable obligation of power.
So progressives will continue to teeter between two anxieties. On the one hand, the fear of turning into the very Puritans and Comstocks they brag of having toppled. On the other, the fear of Helmut Kentler’s legacy, and liberation as a path into the abyss.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/24/opin ... 778d3e6de3
‘Teaching in the middle of a pandemic is HARD’: Jamaican teachers’ conference on Zoom turns into 18+ live sex broadcast
21 Aug, 2021
Professional hardships became a highlight at a Jamaica teachers’ conference, as one of its members was caught getting intimate with a partner while her colleague was talking about “necessary connections” during a public Zoom call.
A recorded multi-member Zoom meeting from the 57th Annual Conference of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) has gone viral. In an almost two-minute-long video circulating on Twitter, one of the call member’s windows showed sexual intercourse recorded by another conference participant.
Two people can be seen apparently having sex in a bedroom while a female voice is delivering a speech, saying: “Teaching in the middle of the pandemic was hard.” She keeps on talking about “how important this profession is” and distant teaching “challenges” – “I’ve never taught online and didn’t know what it was” – while her unaware colleague continues getting intimate with a partner in front of the camera.
A computer voice notification ‘Recording in progress’ can then be heard, with a different conference member screaming out loud “What the hell” and calling out to someone to “stop it.”
“We need necessary connections to keep afloat,” the speaker keeps on talking, as a woman can be seen leaning forward to a naked partner. Interrupting the unintended home video, a strict face of a woman, apparently a conference host from what looks like an official venue, then appears in the window.
The Jamaican teacher is not the first to embarrass herself during a Zoom call which has become a new reality for many amid Covid-related distant meetings. Accidentally revealing more than was intended, a teacher in Colombia was caught lifting his wife’s top and kissing her breast during an online physics class with students. Last year, an Argentinian MP was captured sucking on a woman’s breast amid a virtual parliamentary session. In another instance, a government official in the Philippines lost his job after having sex with a secretary during a Zoom meeting.
https://www.rt.com/news/532716-jamaica- ... -zoom-sex/
Note: Parents be careful about your children on ZOOM teaching, be watchful.
21 Aug, 2021
Professional hardships became a highlight at a Jamaica teachers’ conference, as one of its members was caught getting intimate with a partner while her colleague was talking about “necessary connections” during a public Zoom call.
A recorded multi-member Zoom meeting from the 57th Annual Conference of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) has gone viral. In an almost two-minute-long video circulating on Twitter, one of the call member’s windows showed sexual intercourse recorded by another conference participant.
Two people can be seen apparently having sex in a bedroom while a female voice is delivering a speech, saying: “Teaching in the middle of the pandemic was hard.” She keeps on talking about “how important this profession is” and distant teaching “challenges” – “I’ve never taught online and didn’t know what it was” – while her unaware colleague continues getting intimate with a partner in front of the camera.
A computer voice notification ‘Recording in progress’ can then be heard, with a different conference member screaming out loud “What the hell” and calling out to someone to “stop it.”
“We need necessary connections to keep afloat,” the speaker keeps on talking, as a woman can be seen leaning forward to a naked partner. Interrupting the unintended home video, a strict face of a woman, apparently a conference host from what looks like an official venue, then appears in the window.
The Jamaican teacher is not the first to embarrass herself during a Zoom call which has become a new reality for many amid Covid-related distant meetings. Accidentally revealing more than was intended, a teacher in Colombia was caught lifting his wife’s top and kissing her breast during an online physics class with students. Last year, an Argentinian MP was captured sucking on a woman’s breast amid a virtual parliamentary session. In another instance, a government official in the Philippines lost his job after having sex with a secretary during a Zoom meeting.
https://www.rt.com/news/532716-jamaica- ... -zoom-sex/
Note: Parents be careful about your children on ZOOM teaching, be watchful.
Re: Solutions to Sexual Problems.
‘Who Am I Without Birth Control?’
As social media and wellness podcasters bombard young women with messages about the pill, many are questioning what they’ve long been told.
By Emma Goldberg
Sept. 2, 2025
Ashley Hamrick’s doctor was trying to get to the bottom of something: Why, exactly, did Ms. Hamrick want to get off birth control? “Are you feeling any side effects?”
No, that wasn’t it. Ms. Hamrick, who was 26 at the time, felt normal. No unusual weight gain, no mood swings. But a couple of questions had wormed their way into her mind and lodged themselves there: Who am I without birth control? Will I feel some sort of difference coming off it?
Ms. Hamrick had started taking birth control pills a decade earlier, when she was 15. Now, as she browsed her social media feeds, she kept stumbling on videos of women saying how much better they felt when they stopped taking the pills, content she wasn’t seeking out. The posts typically went like this: a glowing blonde in a workout top — the picture of health! — saying that she had stopped taking birth control pills and immediately felt more clarity of mind. Like an emotional fog had lifted, like she was a brand-new, much happier person.
Ms. Hamrick’s doctor was clear with her. If she wasn’t experiencing any side effects, there was no reason to stop taking birth control. Ms. Hamrick wasn’t so sure. The more videos about the pill she watched, the more skeptical she became, and the more she felt drawn toward experimenting. She was, after all, in a moment of change. She had moved, on a whim, from Indiana to Texas. Soon after settling near Houston she met a guy and they started dating, then looking at engagement rings.
Just over a year since Ms. Hamrick decided to stop taking the pills, she has figured out who she is without birth control: She is a mother. Her baby is four months old.
Three years since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson, birth control has also become a more contested terrain, politically but also socially and culturally.
On YouTube, podcast hosts with followings in the millions rail against hormonal contraceptives, alarming doctors around the country who are now hearing their patients repeat these sentiments.
Alex Clark, the popular Turning Point USA podcaster, has suggested that the way women are prescribed birth control is indirectly linked to “major fertility issues” (because of the underlying health issues it might mask), or that birth control can change who women are attracted to (“*whispers* the birth control pill can falsely make women feel bisexual,” Ms. Clark posted on X), which doctors say is untrue. In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, Calley Means, now an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the medical industry views birth control as “recurring revenue”: “Oh interesting,” Mr. Means said with a conspiratorial lilt. “You can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most of their life.”
ImageA collage of screenshots from front-facing TikTok videos of women with captions like “birth control struggles” and “how birth control RUINED my body forever.”
Search “birth control” on TikTok, and a stream of videos will appear, many of them featuring women venting about what they don’t like about the pill or spreading dubious information about its side effects.
Go to TikTok and look up the words “birth control” and a stream of videos appears showing women venting about the pill. There are videos of women saying that birth control pills lead to infertility. There are also videos of women discussing its real potential side effects: water weight gain, depression, loss of libido, irregular bleeding, all of which can be true for some people.
In one TikTok video, a woman sits in her car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, describing overwhelming nausea under the caption: “My hate for the birth control pill runs deep.” In another, a woman rattles off the pill’s side effects, declaring birth control “one of the most damaging things you can put in your body.” Some women describe getting off birth control to try to lose weight; some say they are now pregnant, adding emojis like a crying face, a laugh-crying face or a shrug.
Earlier this year, a study by public health researchers at La Trobe University found that among the top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health, just 10 percent were from medical professionals, and about 50 percent of creators made comments rejecting hormonal contraception. The top 100 most popular posts on TikTok about birth control had amassed some five billion views.
In more than a dozen interviews with young women of different political leanings across the country, many said these TikTok videos and podcast clips were making them feel at turns curious and anxious, wondering whether to trust their doctors or the influencers promising greener, healthier pastures far from conventional medical guidance about contraceptives.
A 27-year-old in San Diego, Julianna Stein, said that after nearly a decade using hormonal birth control, it “clicked” for her that she needed to know what it felt like to experience her period without it; a 24-year-old in Ogden, Utah, Lindsey Harper, said she went off the pill nearly four years ago and told her 90,000 TikTok followers that she views hormonal birth control as “evil.” (“Obviously I exaggerate,” Ms. Harper added. “On social media you can’t have a lukewarm take.”)
“We are not given full informed consent when it comes to the pill,” said Ms. Clark, host of the conservative wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” in an interview with The Times. Ms. Clark began taking hormonal birth control as a teenager and stopped in 2018, eventually switching to tracking her menstrual cycle on her phone. She said she has used the apps Flo and 28, the last of which was founded by the creators of the conservative Evie Magazine and backed by the right-wing kingmaker Peter Thiel. Both are part of a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar market for women’s health technology.
Ms. Clark insists that her anti-birth control discussions aren’t connected to the pronatalist messaging of Turning Point USA, or her boss there: “The Charlie Kirks of the world are out here being like, ‘You need to have babies and get married younger.’ Then you’ve got me, who works for him, saying, ‘You need to be questioning birth control.’ They’re totally unrelated. All women in general should be questioning the pill.”
Image
Three women smile as they take a selfie. The person holding the phone to take the photo is wearing a red MAGA hat; the woman in the middle is holding a small baby; and the third woman is in all white with long dark tresses.
Chaida Bango Bango, Kate Johnson, and Alex Clark at the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit in June. Ms. Clark has criticized the way women are prescribed birth control on her popular podcast.Credit...Sam Hodde/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
But the deluge of podcasts and social media posts criticizing birth control — and not just on the right — has many concerned about the mounting legal and political efforts to block access to oral contraceptives.
This spring, more than a dozen public health organizations sued the Trump administration, arguing that it had undercut access to health services including birth control by withholding Title X funds. Looming Medicaid cuts, which would leave millions of Americans without health coverage, also threaten to limit access to contraceptives.
Until recently, it hadn’t seemed like this moment — with influencers promising bliss and mental clarity post-birth control — was leading to any change in how women in the United States were using it. But last month, Trilliant Health, a health care analytics company, conducted an analysis for The Times and found a decrease in the use of hormonal birth control pills among some women ages 18 to 44. In 2019, 13.1 percent of women said they used the pill; in 2024, that number fell to 10.2 percent.
Unlike previous analyses by Trilliant, which found a small rise in birth control usage during a slightly earlier time period, this one focused on women with private insurance, which provides coverage for a majority of women in this age group. It is possible that some women are switching from pills to intrauterine devices, which were not included in the pill analysis. Trilliant’s research also showed there were more visits for I.U.D. insertion than removal for that age group during that time.
Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, say they have not seen an indication of a population level decrease in hormonal contraceptive use in their analyses of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Still, reproductive health doctors are worried about the new and growing doubts they are hearing. Dr. Nisha Verma, a physician in Maryland and Georgia, and a senior adviser to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said she often fields questions from patients that seem to echo dubious podcast talking points — about hormonal contraception causing infertility, or even changing who women are sexually attracted to.
Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.”
At the same time, the messaging on social media is resonating with women who feel as if they have been brushed off by their doctors when raising valid worries. Nearly a quarter of women between 15 and 49 either take hormonal pills or have an I.U.D., and many are prescribed birth control before they’re sexually active, to help with managing their periods, acne or symptoms of endometriosis.
“They kind of want to throw birth control on people and not listen to every individual’s concern,” said Jaden Moretti-Leipf, 23, who works as a dog trainer in Rhode Island and earlier this year stopped using hormonal birth control. “I think they cover it up and say take this, and that’s the end of it.”
‘I Want to Be Pure’
Leaving her gynecologist’s office, after first raising the idea of going off birth control, Ms. Hamrick was disturbed. It seemed to her that her doctor had dismissed her concerns. But how could she be so sure? After all, Ms. Hamrick could see that the paper in her oral contraceptive package listed all sorts of potential side effects: nausea, stomach pain, irregular bleeding. She decided she would stop seeing that doctor.
Soon after, Ms. Hamrick sat down with her boyfriend, Ken Contreras, 28, whom she’d been dating for less than a year, and talked about her interest in experimenting with going off hormonal birth control pills, asking him how he felt. They didn’t feel entirely ready for a child. They thought they ought to wait two more years so they could get married, save money and enjoy the end of their 20s.
Still, he understood and was supportive. “I agree with Ashley,” Mr. Contreras said, adding that he had researched the side effects of birth control. “Doctors suggest it, but they don’t really talk about every downside to it.”
“I decided to cut it cold turkey,” Ms. Hamrick recalled, “Which I know they don’t always tell you to do.” Right away, she felt a burst of new energy. Her brain seemed less foggy. She didn’t start a new method of birth control. “We weren’t being the most safe on not having kids,” she said. “From time to time, we used condoms.” Four months later, she was pregnant.
In the early months of her pregnancy last year, from her home near Houston, she read news about the changing reproductive health laws in Texas. Some stories left her sick with worry. She wondered what would happen if she had a pregnancy complication and the physician had to chose between prioritizing her own health or that of her fetus. “I can make another child,” she told her partner. “You can’t have another of me.”
The two debated whether they should temporarily leave Texas and go somewhere with fewer restrictions on abortion, like her own home state, Indiana, or his hometown in Canada. As someone who had always been upbeat, Ms. Hamrick couldn’t understand why she felt so despondent. “Am I depressed?” she wondered. “Do I really feel like this?”
Others who questioned birth control the way Ms. Hamrick did say it’s been a smooth transition for them.
Ms. Moretti-Leipf, in Rhode Island, started feeling a fuzzy sense of skepticism about the pills after scrolling through TikTok videos. She said her doctor tried to talk her out of going off hormonal birth control, but she decided to try tracking her cycle naturally and is still happily off the pill, even recommending it to friends and some of her dog training clients.
Doctors are struggling to figure out what to tell patients who are arriving in their exam rooms consumed by new doubts. Dr. Kimberly Warner, a gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in Denver, tells them there is no one-size-fits-all approach, that she wants to help them find a form of contraception that is right for them, whether that is hormonal pills, condoms or something else.
Dr. Jennifer Peña, chief medical officer for the reproductive telehealth platform Wisp, says she sees dozens of patients a year who come to her with worries often rooted in misinformation: “‘Is an IUD going to make me infertile?’ ‘If I get off birth control, how long will it take to get out of my system?’ ‘How can I do this naturally, with an Oura ring?’ ‘I want to be pure!’”
Image
A millennial pinkish illustration of women in profile spliced with a birth control pack.
“Obviously I exaggerate,” said one young woman who told her followers she thought birth control was “evil.” “On social media you can’t have a lukewarm take.”Credit...Joan Wong
She traces many of these sentiments to wellness influencers. “There’s a cry for identity,” Dr. Peña said. “Social media is becoming the algorithm for education, and once there’s a trend it becomes the norm for topics of conversation inside clinics.”
These conversations on social media are jarring for some people who had a hard time getting contraceptives in the first place, which is how Angel Mayfield, 21, feels. Ms. Mayfield is a student at the historically Black Florida A&M University. She grew up in a Christian household and started taking birth control pills as a high school sophomore after getting a prescription and ordering them online from Planned Parenthood. It was $50 monthly and she paid for it herself, using the money she made working at Walmart. “I didn’t even tell my mom,” Ms. Mayfield recalled. “But she eventually ended up finding out.”
Now Ms. Mayfield is disturbed to hear from friends who seem to think birth control is not worth the side effects. Every few weeks last spring, Ms. Mayfield set up a table in the center of her college campus and handed out packages of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives.
“The biggest thing I see on social media is this earthy, green-girl lifestyle-type shebang,” Ms. Mayfield said. “It’s like a trendy aesthetic.”
‘Me Without Birth Control’
Just last month, Ms. Hamrick finished her maternity leave. She is now navigating a new period of shaky identity as she tries to figure out who she is as a mother. During her leave, she felt isolated as she watched her partner leave for work in the morning while she was confined to home. Sometimes she lashed out. “I was taking it out on him,” she said. “My whole life felt on pause.” Going on antidepressants helped.
“It’s life-changing,” Mr. Contreras said of parenthood. “I don’t think anybody really plans — I mean they plan for it, some people it happens with the perfect timing and some people it doesn’t.”
To Ms. Hamrick, birth control doesn’t seem like a “political” topic. She wants women to feel emboldened to challenge their doctors about contraception, instead of passively accepting being put on the pill as teenagers in order to manage their periods.
Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and author of several history books about reproductive health, views the birth control discussions differently. She said she worried that the “wellness arguments” against birth control echo a strategy that opponents of abortion used — trying to appeal to those who aren’t opposed to it for political reasons but are simply being told they should “reject it because it’s bad for you.”
Recently, Ms. Hamrick went back on birth control pills. “I don’t want to get pregnant again,” she told her doctor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/styl ... e9677ea768
As social media and wellness podcasters bombard young women with messages about the pill, many are questioning what they’ve long been told.
By Emma Goldberg
Sept. 2, 2025
Ashley Hamrick’s doctor was trying to get to the bottom of something: Why, exactly, did Ms. Hamrick want to get off birth control? “Are you feeling any side effects?”
No, that wasn’t it. Ms. Hamrick, who was 26 at the time, felt normal. No unusual weight gain, no mood swings. But a couple of questions had wormed their way into her mind and lodged themselves there: Who am I without birth control? Will I feel some sort of difference coming off it?
Ms. Hamrick had started taking birth control pills a decade earlier, when she was 15. Now, as she browsed her social media feeds, she kept stumbling on videos of women saying how much better they felt when they stopped taking the pills, content she wasn’t seeking out. The posts typically went like this: a glowing blonde in a workout top — the picture of health! — saying that she had stopped taking birth control pills and immediately felt more clarity of mind. Like an emotional fog had lifted, like she was a brand-new, much happier person.
Ms. Hamrick’s doctor was clear with her. If she wasn’t experiencing any side effects, there was no reason to stop taking birth control. Ms. Hamrick wasn’t so sure. The more videos about the pill she watched, the more skeptical she became, and the more she felt drawn toward experimenting. She was, after all, in a moment of change. She had moved, on a whim, from Indiana to Texas. Soon after settling near Houston she met a guy and they started dating, then looking at engagement rings.
Just over a year since Ms. Hamrick decided to stop taking the pills, she has figured out who she is without birth control: She is a mother. Her baby is four months old.
Three years since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson, birth control has also become a more contested terrain, politically but also socially and culturally.
On YouTube, podcast hosts with followings in the millions rail against hormonal contraceptives, alarming doctors around the country who are now hearing their patients repeat these sentiments.
Alex Clark, the popular Turning Point USA podcaster, has suggested that the way women are prescribed birth control is indirectly linked to “major fertility issues” (because of the underlying health issues it might mask), or that birth control can change who women are attracted to (“*whispers* the birth control pill can falsely make women feel bisexual,” Ms. Clark posted on X), which doctors say is untrue. In an appearance on Joe Rogan’s show, Calley Means, now an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said that the medical industry views birth control as “recurring revenue”: “Oh interesting,” Mr. Means said with a conspiratorial lilt. “You can actually convince someone to take a pill for years, for almost most of their life.”
ImageA collage of screenshots from front-facing TikTok videos of women with captions like “birth control struggles” and “how birth control RUINED my body forever.”
Search “birth control” on TikTok, and a stream of videos will appear, many of them featuring women venting about what they don’t like about the pill or spreading dubious information about its side effects.
Go to TikTok and look up the words “birth control” and a stream of videos appears showing women venting about the pill. There are videos of women saying that birth control pills lead to infertility. There are also videos of women discussing its real potential side effects: water weight gain, depression, loss of libido, irregular bleeding, all of which can be true for some people.
In one TikTok video, a woman sits in her car in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, describing overwhelming nausea under the caption: “My hate for the birth control pill runs deep.” In another, a woman rattles off the pill’s side effects, declaring birth control “one of the most damaging things you can put in your body.” Some women describe getting off birth control to try to lose weight; some say they are now pregnant, adding emojis like a crying face, a laugh-crying face or a shrug.
Earlier this year, a study by public health researchers at La Trobe University found that among the top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health, just 10 percent were from medical professionals, and about 50 percent of creators made comments rejecting hormonal contraception. The top 100 most popular posts on TikTok about birth control had amassed some five billion views.
In more than a dozen interviews with young women of different political leanings across the country, many said these TikTok videos and podcast clips were making them feel at turns curious and anxious, wondering whether to trust their doctors or the influencers promising greener, healthier pastures far from conventional medical guidance about contraceptives.
A 27-year-old in San Diego, Julianna Stein, said that after nearly a decade using hormonal birth control, it “clicked” for her that she needed to know what it felt like to experience her period without it; a 24-year-old in Ogden, Utah, Lindsey Harper, said she went off the pill nearly four years ago and told her 90,000 TikTok followers that she views hormonal birth control as “evil.” (“Obviously I exaggerate,” Ms. Harper added. “On social media you can’t have a lukewarm take.”)
“We are not given full informed consent when it comes to the pill,” said Ms. Clark, host of the conservative wellness podcast “Culture Apothecary,” in an interview with The Times. Ms. Clark began taking hormonal birth control as a teenager and stopped in 2018, eventually switching to tracking her menstrual cycle on her phone. She said she has used the apps Flo and 28, the last of which was founded by the creators of the conservative Evie Magazine and backed by the right-wing kingmaker Peter Thiel. Both are part of a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar market for women’s health technology.
Ms. Clark insists that her anti-birth control discussions aren’t connected to the pronatalist messaging of Turning Point USA, or her boss there: “The Charlie Kirks of the world are out here being like, ‘You need to have babies and get married younger.’ Then you’ve got me, who works for him, saying, ‘You need to be questioning birth control.’ They’re totally unrelated. All women in general should be questioning the pill.”
Image
Three women smile as they take a selfie. The person holding the phone to take the photo is wearing a red MAGA hat; the woman in the middle is holding a small baby; and the third woman is in all white with long dark tresses.
Chaida Bango Bango, Kate Johnson, and Alex Clark at the Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership Summit in June. Ms. Clark has criticized the way women are prescribed birth control on her popular podcast.Credit...Sam Hodde/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
But the deluge of podcasts and social media posts criticizing birth control — and not just on the right — has many concerned about the mounting legal and political efforts to block access to oral contraceptives.
This spring, more than a dozen public health organizations sued the Trump administration, arguing that it had undercut access to health services including birth control by withholding Title X funds. Looming Medicaid cuts, which would leave millions of Americans without health coverage, also threaten to limit access to contraceptives.
Until recently, it hadn’t seemed like this moment — with influencers promising bliss and mental clarity post-birth control — was leading to any change in how women in the United States were using it. But last month, Trilliant Health, a health care analytics company, conducted an analysis for The Times and found a decrease in the use of hormonal birth control pills among some women ages 18 to 44. In 2019, 13.1 percent of women said they used the pill; in 2024, that number fell to 10.2 percent.
Unlike previous analyses by Trilliant, which found a small rise in birth control usage during a slightly earlier time period, this one focused on women with private insurance, which provides coverage for a majority of women in this age group. It is possible that some women are switching from pills to intrauterine devices, which were not included in the pill analysis. Trilliant’s research also showed there were more visits for I.U.D. insertion than removal for that age group during that time.
Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, say they have not seen an indication of a population level decrease in hormonal contraceptive use in their analyses of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Still, reproductive health doctors are worried about the new and growing doubts they are hearing. Dr. Nisha Verma, a physician in Maryland and Georgia, and a senior adviser to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said she often fields questions from patients that seem to echo dubious podcast talking points — about hormonal contraception causing infertility, or even changing who women are sexually attracted to.
Scholars worry that the legal efforts to restrict access to birth control will be buoyed by the podcasts and social media posts criticizing it. “If we look at what happened between Roe v. Wade and Dobbs, we see a steady escalation of the stigmatization of abortions, and a steady escalation of legal restrictions on the provision of abortion care,” said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“Those two processes, stigmatization and legal restrictions,” she added, “are mutually reinforcing.”
At the same time, the messaging on social media is resonating with women who feel as if they have been brushed off by their doctors when raising valid worries. Nearly a quarter of women between 15 and 49 either take hormonal pills or have an I.U.D., and many are prescribed birth control before they’re sexually active, to help with managing their periods, acne or symptoms of endometriosis.
“They kind of want to throw birth control on people and not listen to every individual’s concern,” said Jaden Moretti-Leipf, 23, who works as a dog trainer in Rhode Island and earlier this year stopped using hormonal birth control. “I think they cover it up and say take this, and that’s the end of it.”
‘I Want to Be Pure’
Leaving her gynecologist’s office, after first raising the idea of going off birth control, Ms. Hamrick was disturbed. It seemed to her that her doctor had dismissed her concerns. But how could she be so sure? After all, Ms. Hamrick could see that the paper in her oral contraceptive package listed all sorts of potential side effects: nausea, stomach pain, irregular bleeding. She decided she would stop seeing that doctor.
Soon after, Ms. Hamrick sat down with her boyfriend, Ken Contreras, 28, whom she’d been dating for less than a year, and talked about her interest in experimenting with going off hormonal birth control pills, asking him how he felt. They didn’t feel entirely ready for a child. They thought they ought to wait two more years so they could get married, save money and enjoy the end of their 20s.
Still, he understood and was supportive. “I agree with Ashley,” Mr. Contreras said, adding that he had researched the side effects of birth control. “Doctors suggest it, but they don’t really talk about every downside to it.”
“I decided to cut it cold turkey,” Ms. Hamrick recalled, “Which I know they don’t always tell you to do.” Right away, she felt a burst of new energy. Her brain seemed less foggy. She didn’t start a new method of birth control. “We weren’t being the most safe on not having kids,” she said. “From time to time, we used condoms.” Four months later, she was pregnant.
In the early months of her pregnancy last year, from her home near Houston, she read news about the changing reproductive health laws in Texas. Some stories left her sick with worry. She wondered what would happen if she had a pregnancy complication and the physician had to chose between prioritizing her own health or that of her fetus. “I can make another child,” she told her partner. “You can’t have another of me.”
The two debated whether they should temporarily leave Texas and go somewhere with fewer restrictions on abortion, like her own home state, Indiana, or his hometown in Canada. As someone who had always been upbeat, Ms. Hamrick couldn’t understand why she felt so despondent. “Am I depressed?” she wondered. “Do I really feel like this?”
Others who questioned birth control the way Ms. Hamrick did say it’s been a smooth transition for them.
Ms. Moretti-Leipf, in Rhode Island, started feeling a fuzzy sense of skepticism about the pills after scrolling through TikTok videos. She said her doctor tried to talk her out of going off hormonal birth control, but she decided to try tracking her cycle naturally and is still happily off the pill, even recommending it to friends and some of her dog training clients.
Doctors are struggling to figure out what to tell patients who are arriving in their exam rooms consumed by new doubts. Dr. Kimberly Warner, a gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente in Denver, tells them there is no one-size-fits-all approach, that she wants to help them find a form of contraception that is right for them, whether that is hormonal pills, condoms or something else.
Dr. Jennifer Peña, chief medical officer for the reproductive telehealth platform Wisp, says she sees dozens of patients a year who come to her with worries often rooted in misinformation: “‘Is an IUD going to make me infertile?’ ‘If I get off birth control, how long will it take to get out of my system?’ ‘How can I do this naturally, with an Oura ring?’ ‘I want to be pure!’”
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A millennial pinkish illustration of women in profile spliced with a birth control pack.
“Obviously I exaggerate,” said one young woman who told her followers she thought birth control was “evil.” “On social media you can’t have a lukewarm take.”Credit...Joan Wong
She traces many of these sentiments to wellness influencers. “There’s a cry for identity,” Dr. Peña said. “Social media is becoming the algorithm for education, and once there’s a trend it becomes the norm for topics of conversation inside clinics.”
These conversations on social media are jarring for some people who had a hard time getting contraceptives in the first place, which is how Angel Mayfield, 21, feels. Ms. Mayfield is a student at the historically Black Florida A&M University. She grew up in a Christian household and started taking birth control pills as a high school sophomore after getting a prescription and ordering them online from Planned Parenthood. It was $50 monthly and she paid for it herself, using the money she made working at Walmart. “I didn’t even tell my mom,” Ms. Mayfield recalled. “But she eventually ended up finding out.”
Now Ms. Mayfield is disturbed to hear from friends who seem to think birth control is not worth the side effects. Every few weeks last spring, Ms. Mayfield set up a table in the center of her college campus and handed out packages of birth control pills and emergency contraceptives.
“The biggest thing I see on social media is this earthy, green-girl lifestyle-type shebang,” Ms. Mayfield said. “It’s like a trendy aesthetic.”
‘Me Without Birth Control’
Just last month, Ms. Hamrick finished her maternity leave. She is now navigating a new period of shaky identity as she tries to figure out who she is as a mother. During her leave, she felt isolated as she watched her partner leave for work in the morning while she was confined to home. Sometimes she lashed out. “I was taking it out on him,” she said. “My whole life felt on pause.” Going on antidepressants helped.
“It’s life-changing,” Mr. Contreras said of parenthood. “I don’t think anybody really plans — I mean they plan for it, some people it happens with the perfect timing and some people it doesn’t.”
To Ms. Hamrick, birth control doesn’t seem like a “political” topic. She wants women to feel emboldened to challenge their doctors about contraception, instead of passively accepting being put on the pill as teenagers in order to manage their periods.
Mary Ziegler, a legal historian and author of several history books about reproductive health, views the birth control discussions differently. She said she worried that the “wellness arguments” against birth control echo a strategy that opponents of abortion used — trying to appeal to those who aren’t opposed to it for political reasons but are simply being told they should “reject it because it’s bad for you.”
Recently, Ms. Hamrick went back on birth control pills. “I don’t want to get pregnant again,” she told her doctor.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/styl ... e9677ea768