A few days ago, Miriam at Feministing suggested we take another look at withdrawal as a contraceptive method. Up to a point, she’s right that “it might be a useful method in low-resource situations.” If, that is, we’re talking about the sort of grinding poverty where the partners can’t even afford condoms.
Overall, though, I’m really troubled by this idea. I think it’s setting women up for more unwanted pregnancies than they already experience. (I’m leaving aside the STI issue, not because it’s trivial, but because it’s self-evident that condoms are vastly superior.)
Right off the bat, I’m suspicious of the figures Miriam cites (which come from a Guttmacher Institute report) that portray withdrawal as statistically equivalent to condoms (18% of women became pregnant with “typical” use of withdrawal versus 17% with “typical” use of condoms over the course of a year). First, other sources show a much bigger gap. Planned Parenthood says 15% of women will become pregnant with typical use of condoms over a year, versus 27% with typical use of withdrawal. (Scarleteen cites two other sources that agree on this statistic for withdrawal. Ditto for condoms. Bear in mind that the Guttmacher report is based on a single study, which ought to give us pause right there.)
Now let’s compare the ideal conditions. Even with “perfect” use, the figures are 2% for condoms, 4% for withdrawal. (Both Guttmacher and PP agree on this.) So, for those of us who’re downright obsessive about avoiding pregnancy, that means withdrawal would be twice as risky! I don’t see that as trivial.
Secondly, if we’re talking about truly low resource conditions, it makes no sense to compare condoms and withdrawal. Instead, we should be asking how withdrawal stacks up against other free methods. The various rhythm methods – which Planned Parenthood calls “fertility-based awareness methods” – fail 12 to 25% of women per year. The proposal is to educate people on withdrawal, but honestly, how much needs to be said aside from “it only works if you do it on time, every time”? Where people are too poor to afford condoms, wouldn’t it make better sense to educate women to the point where they could use a fertility-based awareness method and approach that 12% figure? Where poverty is less absolute, condoms could be used on days when conception was more likely. Or scarce resources could be allocated toward fitting women for diaphragms, cervical caps, or IUDs, which don’t require major ongoing expenditures.
But the killer argument against withdrawal, to my mind, is how dependent it makes women on their partners. Much more than condoms, it puts a woman’s reproductive fate totally at the whim of her partner at a moment when he’s not clear-headed. This may not be a big deal in a long-term relationship devoid of abuse, where both partners trust each other, know their bodies, and wouldn’t experience a pregnancy as catastrophic. These, however, are mostly not the couples who need help and education on contraception.
Think about the fifteen-year-old with a twenty-year-old partner. Can she trust him with her future? What about the thirty-year-old mother of five in sub-Saharan Africa whose husband won’t wear a condom – can she hope he’ll more willingly commit to withdrawal? How about any hookup situation, never mind where or with whom?
Even for couples where the power differential is small and the trust is great, using withdrawal effectively requires much more than “good communication.” Miriam at Feministing writes:
But I think we can all agree that we want to promote communication around safer sex.
Yes, and the key word is “around.” By all means, talk about birth control before and after sex. Communicate your desires during sex. Negotiating contraceptive decisions or timing during sex is asking for trouble, however. I wouldn’t want to stake my reproductive future on complete and reliable communication at a moment when my partner (and maybe I) are both muddled with passion.
Can we even hold men wholly culpable when they promise to pull out but don’t? Is anyone fully compos mentis when they’re about ready to come? If you’re doing sex right, the guy shouldn’t exhibit Olympian detachment at the moment of climax. Myself, I wouldn’t want to be with a partner who was having to pull back erotically (and maybe emotionally too) in order to pull out. Condoms, at least, can be donned earlier, before arousal is at its peak, when both partners are still more sensible.
Any method that collides with people’s lived experience is bound to fail, over and again. Sex isn’t a game of Tiddlywinks in which you can change the rules and expect embodied experience – and thus behavior – to follow. Apart from those folks (men, mostly) who’ve internalized porn’s money shot fetish, doesn’t orgasm feel better for most men when they’re inside their partner? Don’t their female partners sometimes feel a loss, too, if detachment has to trump connection at a moment that should be about ecstasy, not calculation? Or if the lovely friction comes to a screeching halt right when she’s verging on orgasm, herself? Can the female partner really relax and enjoy if she’s wondering whether he’ll pull out soon enough? I’ve never relied on withdrawal, personally, but I’m certain I’d find it much, much more intrusive than using condoms.
Of course, withdrawal is a time-honored method. It was the method of choice for many couples in the early twentieth century, prior to the pill. It was quite effective when used with another time-honored backup method: abortion. In Germany during the 1920s, withdrawal was the primary method. Various dodgy douches held second place; all you really need to know about them is that whatever didn’t wash out got forced up into the cervix. So withdrawal was superior to douching. It was also clearly better than nothing. But the abortion rate was estimated at half a million per year – and this in a country of 60-odd million – despite abortion being illegal and often unsafe.
There’s a moment in the film The Abortion Diaries where one of the women telling her story says, “He said he’d pull out. And then he didn’t.” She’s retelling this because it’s the moment that led to her pregnancy. Her words are clipped and bitter. This, too, is a disadvantage to withdrawal: when it fails, someone is very clearly to blame. I have no idea how many other relationships have failed as a result, but the number can’t be trivial.
So I’ve got nothing against discussing withdrawal. And perhaps the Guttmacher authors are right in saying it has a place in providing extra insurance when used with other methods. (Even there, I can’t imagine compliance would be high: if you’re on the pill, will you really feel a need for you partner to pull out, too? If a guy is already putting up with the decreased sensation of a condom, will he be motivated to finish up outside his partner?) Still, there’s no reason to be “sanguine” about withdrawal. And there’s really no good basis for recommending it as a sole method, unless the alternative truly is no method at all.
Update, 5-21-09: This study continues to draw attention from the feminist blogs: Rachel at Feministe is skeptical, while Lynn Harris at Broadsheet gives it a more sympathetic reading. I’d like to repeat that this is just a single study and its findings differ from the existing literature. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it means the discrepancy requires further explanation and can’t just be asserted as the new “truth.” According to the original study by Rachel Jones et al (.pdf), most of the couples using withdrawal were also using other methods (see Nat’s comments below, as she describes the kinds of strategies the researchers also found). It’s not clear to me that you can chart withdrawal on “safe” days against condom use on “less-safe” days and produce a meaningful comparison. These are apples and oranges! I’m having trouble linking the original study (it’s a .pdf) but you can get to it from the Guttmacher summary report. Its strong point, in my view, is its phenomenologically fascinating interview material, in which people talk frankly about how they use this method, how it feels, and how it fits into their lives.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
I always used either condoms, rhythm or withdrawal or a combination of them-condoms on the fertile days, withdrawal on the days I wasn’t too sure of and just regular non-pulling out sex on the days I knew were safe, a couple of days right after my period and right before. It worked fine, no problems. Not because I couldn’t afford other birth control, it’s just what I always used and it worked. Of course when I was, um, sowing my wild oats I used mostly condoms.
After I got married I got fitted for a diaphram (oops, spelling) but the insurance wouldn’t pay for it, so I didn’t bother, just kept up with rhythm and withdrawal. When I wanted to get pregnant we tried and did on the first try. Twice, but they both ended in miscarriage.
We’ve been trying to get pregnant again and it’s not working. I’m seeing a fertility specialist. Now I sort of wonder if the withdrawal and rhythm was actually working for me or my cycle or body was messed up all along. Just my 2¢.
Oh dear. I’m sorry that you’ve met with such frustration in trying to become pregnant. I hope the fertility specialist will be able to help. Infertility and its treatment can both be a tough merry-go-round. Those miscarriages must have been hard, too. I’ll be rooting for you.
I’m curious: did you find withdrawal cumbersome or disruptive, or did it feel natural to you? Because I know that even if my partner were committed to doing it right, if I thought I was close to *my* finish I’d want him to keep going! We used condoms really successfully (and obsessively, but it’s not hard to get it right if you roll it on properly, watch the fingernails, and use lube). I didn’t love condoms either – even if you’re creative about putting them on the male partner, they do cause a break in the action for the female partner, plus they don’t feel as nice internally as velvety-slick skin. But they gave me a break from the pill. I just imagine condoms as the lesser evil, experientially. Technically, they’re definitely more reliable.
“did you find withdrawal cumbersome or disruptive, or did it feel natural to you?”
Well, if I was finished and had enough already, withdrawal didn’t seem disruptive. But it sort of made the act feel incomplete.
My husband was fine with it, but actually on the more fertile days we’d do things other than intercourse, we’d just have oral sex instead or not do anything at all. Now we could go at it like rabbits and I don’t know if I’ll get pregnant or not.
But yeah, it’s a lot nicer to just do it without withdrawing it at the last minute
As for more natural, withdrawal seemed more natural to me than condoms. I’d get very irritated after using them, didn’t matter what type, latex or non latex, I’d feel like a yeast infection was brewing afterward. I can’t even remember the last time we used one. Now we’ll never need to use one again!
It’s very interesting for me to hear what it was like for you, experientially. I agree with you on the texture of condoms. I too found them irritating at times, though not to the extreme you describe. Oodles of lube helped, but too much lube can be, well, too much. In retrospect, knowing what I now know about the physical effects of the pill (its benefits seem to easily match its risks) and how well I tolerated it, I wish I’d stayed on it until I was 35 and ready to consider babies.
I guess my problem with withdrawal would be that once I get in a groove, I want the same motion and friction to continue – unless I’m done anyway. And maybe this is TMI (oh, for sure it is) but it’s not at all unusual for a partner’s last leap of arousal – which I feel both physically and mentally – to push me right off the precipice. (Maybe this makes me horrifically male-identified in the view of certain cultural feminists. Oh well!) Which is why I could very well imagine myself as the saboteur!
I wish you lots of rabbiting but even more, that you’ll get the bunny you so desire. (((((hugs)))))
“it’s not at all unusual for a partner’s last leap of arousal – which I feel both physically and mentally – to push me right off the precipice. (Maybe this makes me horrifically male-identified in the view of certain cultural feminists. Oh well!)”
Would that, then, make a man who was similarly wired to respond to his partner’s orgasm female-identified? (Oh, wait, I can answer that myself: in the view of those same cultfems, it’s a purely hypothetical question because there ain’t no sech animal. Heh – their loss.)
Sunflower
My wife asked that we stop using condoms because she found them too “grabby”. These were normal, garden variety condoms, so so much for the idea of “ribbed for her pleasure”!!!
So we have been (or, rather, had been!) pulling out instead.
She wasn’t enjoying sex for much of this time, so I think she was just as happy to simply get it done and over with.
For me, self control was never a problem. And sexually, yes it was different, but not necessarily worse. I will spare you the graphic details as to why, but one aspect is that it meant that any issues of being over stimulated after becoming hyper sensitive were avoided. (Is that put clinically enough???)
The issue of power and safety is an intriguing one. It is one that men face all the time as they have to have trust in their sexual partner when she says that she is on the pill, or using a diaphragm, or is/is not going to have an abortion.
The male side of this coin is not just a theoretical issue for me, as I have a child (not to my wife, but to another woman before Sue and I got married) as a result of believing a woman who told me she was taking steps to NOT get pregnant, when it later transpired the reverse was true.
It altered the course of my life profoundly and completely.
I hope you will not take this observation about male vulnerability to female honesty as some kind of competitive thing. I am not trying to suggest for a second that “man good, woman bad” or “female problems don’t matter because men have problems too”, or anything else remotely of the sort.
In fact, the opposite is true. My experience of vulnerability to a sexual partner who was dishonest about her intentions with me makes me appreciate all the more the concerns you raise for women who, by relying on their partner pulling out, are placing themselves in the same position of vulnerability that I myself was in.
I look forward to the day that reproduction can be fully mechanically mastered so that it only happens as the full, conscious and consensual choice of both parties. That will be a real moment of liberation for both genders all around the globe.
I have to agree that I never loved condoms, and I know what your wife means. Lube helps. But the truth is that our natural surfaces are beautifully adapted to just the right amount of friction.
The conventional wisdom is that it’s men who object to condoms as interfering with pleasure. Maybe it’s time for more discussion about why women might have problems with them, too. For instance, I really wonder how many of us are using them without any lube.
I’m taking your comment on male vulnerability to forced parenthood just as you intended it. So often, discussions like these are framed as zero sum. I’ve had a number of male students ask why men should be stuck with child support if they don’t have veto power over a pregnancy. It’s (obviously) because 1) it’s the woman’s body at stake during the pregnancy, and 2) once the child is born, society has an interest in making sure it’s provided for. Denying child support because the mother was dishonest amounts to punishing the child.
But that doesn’t mitigate the pain and complications for the male partner. I’m so sorry that this happened to you.
Are you still personally involved in the child’s life? I can imagine that either alternative would be hard – both involvement and detachment have high prices when you can’t really be fully integrated into that child’s life.
On the female side, I think women have some pretty decent contraceptive options, although I realize that some will have problems with side effects from the hormonal methods. Men deserve similarly good options.
Hi Sungold — When I read this post I felt like you were so right-on that I didn’t even know how to respond. Before comments are closed just wanted to give some feedback and maybe bring up an issue.
I am grateful that underlying your post is the idea that sex should be a pleasure for both partners. This seems to get lost in the details during discussions of contraception. If the goal of sex becomes nothing more than avoiding pregnancy, then celibacy is the obvious response. If the goal is pleasure *and* avoiding pregnancy, then we need to take into account things like passion and not be dismissive when one partner complains that some aspect of contraception diminishes the experience.
As a man, I’m particularly sensitive to the way men who don’t like the feeling of condoms are portrayed (as selfish). I’m not arguing for a free “no-condom” pass, just that what people say about their sexual experiences should be initially taken at face value. I’d like to see *all* orgasms, male and female, given great adulation and respect.
Although I bring no data to the discussion, and acknowledge that sex with pulling-out may feel OK to some folks (hi Nat and Mark!), my own experience tells me that pulling-out is a real block to experiencing the full glory of intercourse. Probably more so from the male side, since we are talking about ending the intercourse precisely at the point of male orgasm. (In response to your question “…doesn’t orgasm feel better for most men when they’re inside their partner?” If a significant number of men are wired like I am, and I consider myself, sexually, an average American guy, then the answer is “Hell Yeah!”)
Thanks for touching on the issue of completely giving oneself over to sex, how this is a wonderful, selfless act, but no time to be super-responsible about preventing pregnancy. When pleasure and responsibility clash, pleasure is going to win some of the time. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this in other aspects of our lives, so we should *all* be able to understand things not going as planned during sex. Blaming afterward just adds more suffering, whether it’s the man who didn’t pull out or the woman who didn’t pull off (granted, the latter requires extra communication in addition to detachment and willpower).
I’ll stop here since I’m just rehashing your post. But thank you also for being mindful of and respectful to men in your feminist postings (except, of course, when they’re total douchebags and don’t deserve it). I care about this for two reasons: One is that I think it helps feminism be more widely accepted. The other, well…because I’m a man.
OK, so here’s my issue — Not necessarily in your post, but underlying this whole discussion I sense an assumption that unwanted pregnancy is so incredibly awful that it must be avoided at all cost. Thus the ‘wear three condoms, use a diaphram, and you *are* on the pill, right?’ tone.
Now, I understand that for many women, including a sizable portion of American women, abortion is not safe, legal, or available. For those women, extraordinary caution is justified. However, for a good portion of American women, safe, legal abortions are still available. Absent personal religious or moral objections, isn’t abortion OK as a backstop once contraception is used to bring the odds of pregnancy down to a reasonably low level?
What disturbs me is that this extraordinarily cautious approach to contraception implies that abortion is off the table as an acceptable way to end an unwanted pregnancy. It makes me wonder if, after decades of exposure to the abortion prohibition movement, that movement has on some level won our hearts and minds about abortion, if not the right to it. (When I say “we”, I mean feminist and feminist-oriented men and women who have no explicit personal moral objection to abortion).
After all, if we don’t subscribe to the idea that a human being is created at the moment of conception, and if we acknowledge that legal abortions are a relatively safe procedure, why do we give ending a pregnancy through abortion such weight? For a number of practical reasons abortion is lousy as a first-line method of contraception. But as a backup isn’t it similar in function to other methods of contraception? Why do we treat it as an evil to be avoided if we don’t believe it to be evil? When we treat something as an absolute last resort, we strongly imply that there’s something very bad about it.
People like Obama talk about this common ground where ‘we’d all like to see fewer abortions’. I’m not sure I agree. When children enter the world unwanted, I’d rather see more abortions. When women go through pregnancy and labor for no other reason than avoiding having an abortion, I’d rather see more abortions. When young men and women for years deny themselves the joyfulness of a good sex life, I’d rather see more abortions.
For those of us who support the right to an abortion, aren’t we losing ground here? Don’t things get a little worse every year? Gay folks didn’t make much progress until the slogan ‘gay and proud’ came into common usage. When will we come out of the closet? What’s our slogan? I’d suggest, if not ‘pro-abortion and proud’ at least ‘pro-choice and I just don’t think an abortion is a big deal’. Those of us who identify as pro-choice are strong on the political right to an abortion. It seems, however, like we’re conflicted and afraid when it comes to abortion itself. The prohibitionists are very clear on both.
I would like to see a life-affirming narrative that supports abortion rights and abortion. Life-affirming as in the better life the pregnant woman (and often her male partner) can have without the burden of an unwanted pregnancy/child. Life-affirming as in pro-sex, taking a practical but not fearful approach to contraception.
If we take our cue from the prohibitionists and frame this issue as something that takes place only inside the uterus then it’s just an argument about death or not-death and we can’t win. If we expand our vision to outside the uterus then we are pro-better-life, pro-freedom, and pro-sex. With these values on our side, we will prevail over the narrative of death which the prohibitionists have used so effectively, but only if we have the courage to embrace not only the right to an abortion but abortion itself. And it seems to me we ignore this at our peril when discussing contraception.
EG, I am feeling increasingly frustrated with this idea that we need to be encased in full-body condoms and possibly chastity cages before we start touching each other. OK, I exaggerate, and I think there are good reasons for doubling up with condoms and other contraception if a couple is not monogamous long-term (STIs, plus the man is wise to protect himself from unplanned pregnancy too). But I’m still wondering how we reached a juncture where so many people think of sex almost entirely in terms of risk, to the point that it swamps pleasure. It’s one thing to regard HIV in those terms (pleasure is sort of meaningless if you’re dead).
But pregnancy? I think you’re onto something here with the demonization of abortion percolating into the lives of even pro-choice secularists. I’d like to write something about how pleasure gets written out of the script, but in the meantime I’ve put up the second part of your comment as a guest post. Hope you don’t mind!
I’m glad to hear I’m not hallucinating about men’s general preferences. I can’t think of any former partner whose desires differed – I was on the pill before I ever had sex for the first time, so I never had any reason to demand a partner pull out, and none of them ever expressed a desire to ejaculate in decorative patterns on me either.
Of course it’s fine – and good! – that people’s preferences vary. But it would be foolish to ignore the very substantial number of men who say it feels good to be inside their partner – and not to wear a condom, either. That’s not a sound basis for good policy, or for human understanding.
If I sometimes come across as easy on men (occasionally a man himself will suggest this), it’s because I believe feminism is about undermining sexism, not battling men. It’s because there are many men in my life whom I love. And it’s because one of the guiding principles of this blog, my academic work, and my life is respect for bodily integrity and embodied experience. If I only extended that respect to women and their bodies, I’d be the worst kind of hypocrite.
Thanks for a wonderful, rich comment that I’m going to keep revisiting, I’m sure.
[...] 28, 2009 by Sungold Here’s a guest post by Euchalon Grandy, swiped from my comments section, offered here with no commentary from me just yet except that I agree with almost everything he [...]