Browsing Tag

rape culture

Feminism

why purity culture doesn't teach consent, part two

wedding dress

I occasionally subject my partner to readings of my posts– when I first started, it was nearly every day, but now it’s only when I feel that I’ve been particularly brilliant. Yesterday was just such a post, but, thankfully, I’m married to someone equally brilliant, and he had a few ideas that I didn’t talk about yesterday but need to be said.

There isn’t any one single reason why those who advocate for purity/virginity ignore consent. I think it’s important to talk about the underpinning ideas, the assumptions and presuppositions that drive purity culture, but it’s just as important to talk about the things that purity advocates would openly admit if you asked them about it.

My partner suggested that if you asked someone who wants everyone to stay a virgin until they’re married why they don’t teach consent, one of the possible answers you might get is because it doesn’t matter.

That … struck me. I sat there and stared at him with my jaw hanging open because it took me a second to wrap my brain around it. What do you mean it DOESN’T MATTER?! This is the matter-ing-est idea of ALL TIME! But then I realized he was right, because for the people who are teaching that everyone must save their virginity for their, of course, heterosexual marriage– consent is for people who aren’t married.

Der.

I obviously disagree with that sentiment– violently disagree, in fact– but it is quite common for Christians to talk about sex in marriage as a guarantee, or a requirement. There’s a whole gamut of views on this. There’s Debi Pearl telling women that it is our duty to have sex whenever he wants it, and if we don’t he’s going to watch porn or cheat on you, and no, there isn’t a legitimate reason to refuse. Then there’s Mark Driscoll who explicitly says that women are biblically required to perform any and all sex acts, no matter if we find it personally degrading or uncomfortable. In fact, we should “repent” of our lack of interest and get down to the business of servicing him.

The middle ground view is probably that getting married means you’re consenting to have sex with that person– and, no, you don’t have to have sex just because the other person wants it and you can say no sometimes, but you should be extremely careful about how and when you say no. So careful, in fact, that it’s probably better just to never say no. Just to be safe. Because who knows what could happen if you say no! Sex is an essential part of any healthy marriage, and it’s just something the husband needs. Women, you may not need sex the way he does, but, really, it’s the only real way he knows how to say “I love you.” Men are going to feel emasculated and unloved if you don’t have sex with them.

So, while the “middle of the road” people would probably say of course you can say no! it comes with so many threatscautions that it makes it almost impossible for anyone to say no and feel ok about it. This, friends, is a huge problem because it contributes to something called coercion. If you are allowing someone to have sex with you not because you want to have sex because yay sex is fantastic! and instead because if I don’t then I’m responsible for my husband’s sin or what if he leaves me or this is my obligation then what’s happening isn’t enthusiastic consent, it’s coercion.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that every single time someone has sex with their partner even though they’re not enthusiastic it’s rape. I’m not arguing that. However, the standard we should be pursuing is enthusiastic consent, and accepting anything less should make you uncomfortable. Why have sex with someone who doesn’t really want it, but is willing to tolerate it because of X reason?

And for anyone who isn’t married . . . well, you’re not supposed to have sex. Period. End of story. No consent for you. You are a sex-crazed beast, but you’re not supposed to be having sex with anyone and talking about consent is just going to muddy the whole thing up. Why bother teaching an idea that’s not necessary?

To me, the biggest reason why it’s important to teach consent and sexual agency is so that people of all genders can recognize the difference between consensual sex acts and sexual assault or rape. I had no clue for almost three years that I had been raped because I believed in the myths that purity culture had taught me– that “men will only go as far as you let them” and that men are tempted by women being impure– dressing immodestly, behaving sensually . . . that I must have done something to tell him that I was willing to have sex with him, or he wouldn’t have done it, even though I was begging him to stop and telling him that he was hurting me the entire time.

Concepts like bodily autonomy are important for a whole host of reasons, and they are absent in many areas of Christian culture. Children are forced to hug or kiss people even though they do not want to; they’re taught that nearly all of their wants and needs are subject to the whims of “authority.” They don’t have the basic rights to think for themselves, to hold opinions on their own in contradiction to their community, to have things that they want to do for no other reason than they want to do it. Young adults struggle to find themselves, and are forced into the cookie-cutter molds of their church’s or parent’s expectations for their morals and beliefs. This isn’t universal, of course, but it’s common. Common enough, at least.

Consent should not only be the cornerstone of how we have sex, but how we engage with our children, our parents, our communities, and our churches.

April 4, 2014 by
Feminism

why purity culture doesn't teach consent

cherry blossoms

[This is part one of a two-part series. You can find part two here.]

I’m a Star Trek fan, and yes– it’s related. I grew up watching Star Trek loyally, and I’m pretty sure Captain Kathryn Janeway is one of the few reasons why I managed to be somewhat normal. So, when Enterprise began airing, I watched every single episode, and Phlox, a Denobulan doctor, quickly became one of my favorites. “The Breach” is one of the few episodes dedicated to his character, and it explores an ethical dilemma: he has been ordered by the captain to treat a patient even though this patient has repeatedly refused to be treated. To the human captain, it’s a simple matter of saving a life, but to Phlox, it was far more complicated.

As I was watching the episode, I realized there was something rather awesome about Denobulan culture: it is based entirely on consent. To treat a patient without his or her consent would violate everything Phlox believed about ethics and morality. I turned to my partner and announced that we were moving to Denobula, physics and reality be damned.

If there is a single idea that I desperately want to communicate to every single last person on the planet, it’s this one: Consent.

Western culture understands consent inside a few limited contexts– but even in most of those contexts, consent can be overruled if the circumstances are right. One of the areas where consent seems to completely fly out the window is when we’re talking about The Sex, although that is very, very slowly improving. However, in environments that encourage Purity in the form of Virginity, consent . . . just doesn’t show up. The only time I’ve heard consent mentioned has been to mock the very idea– “the world says that sex is fine as long as it’s “consensual”– but we know better than that, don’t we?” complete with obligatory scare quotes around “consensual.”

I’ve been struggling, trying to figure out why it seems so difficult for evangelical purity advocates to talk about consent, why the idea is mocked when it’s presented, and why no one seems to care about consent when it seems, at least to me, absolutely foundational when it comes to sexual interactions. Why does it seem to be more typical for those who teach purity to advocate for the opposite of consent? Why do some of them actively pursue the idea that marital rape is impossible– that being married is automatic consent? Or, if they’re not intentionally teaching against consent, why does it never seem to get mentioned?

Well, and I’m positive I’m not the first person to think of this, but I had an epiphany this morning.

They don’t teach consent because teaching consent would undermine one of their basic assumptions about people. Namely, the assumption that every single last person– most especially men, but also women– are basically nymphos who are straining at their leashes every single second of every single day and if you let that sex-crazed beast out for even just a moment then BAM it’s all over and you’re not a virgin anymore and that’s horrible because now you’re a half-eaten candybar or a cup full of spit.

This is why the “how far is too far?” question is almost unanimously answered with “you can’t do anything that might get your motor going, because the second you’re aroused– at all– there’s virtually nothing you’ll be able to do to stop yourself from having sex.”

To them, consent is always guaranteed. There’s no such thing as a person who would say no to an opportunity to have sex. Ever. The only thing you have to do to give consent is be alive.

If you start walking around teaching the idea that some people may not want to have sex with you and you need to ask first, it completely undoes everything they’re teaching about human sexuality. If you remove the ominous boogeyman of your inner sexual demons, then suddenly it might be ok to start exploring your pants-feelings. Because you can decide whether or not you want to do . . . well, whatever you want to do. Or not.

And it’s the “or not” part that would render most of what they teach almost completely useless. If people are capable of saying no, I don’t want to have sex with you, then teaching people that they cannot ever be alone with someone is sort of pointless. So are all the ridiculous conversations about hand holding and kissing and (God forbid) “heavy petting.”

Purity culture actually strips away empowerment, and agency, and autonomy. And the most horrifying thing about this understanding of human sexuality is that it makes rape non-existent. No one can be raped because we all want it all of the time.

Continue on to part two.

April 3, 2014 by
Feminism

that "dating your dad" thing

purity balls

If you’ve been hanging around here for a little while,  you’ve probably heard me talk about purity culture a time or two. And, if you grew up in evangelical Christianity, you’re also probably a little more than familiar with it. If you’ve read Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye, raise your hand.

What’s interesting to me is how purity culture is becoming a “thing” outside of Christian culture. I recently read The Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti, and while she focuses on abstinence-only education in the US, she does more than casually allude to evangelical purity culture. There’s been a number of documentaries come out about it recently, and ABC’s Nightline Prime is doing a special on it tonight (I have it set to record). I’ve seen a few articles show up in newspapers and newsblogs, and I have to admit to some amusement when I see reactions to these pieces.

Yesterday afternoon, Cosmopolitan writer Frank Kobola wrote a very short piece: “Teen Girls are Dating their Dads to Save their Virginity.” It was short on substance and long on incredulity, and I think that reflects an attitude I’d like to address.

Most of the reactions I’ve seen mirror Kobola’s. Disgust. Disbelief. Then, usually, mockery. To many people, it just seems so obvious that this entire “purity ball” concept is pretty dang creepy. The fact that there’s many thousands of people in this country who don’t find it creepy at all just seems a little impossible.

So, when they hear someone say something along the lines of “I’m going to take my daughter out on a date, show her how a man should be treating her,” it’s a little hard for them not to immediately start talking about it in pedophilic terms. And when someone like Ron Johnson says:

You keep this [ring] on your finger and at this point you are married to the Lord and your father is your boyfriend . . .

Kobola says lol wut? and then writes an article about it mocking the entire idea. Predictably, the evangelical response is along the lines of “it’s not like that! You’re twisting it into something it’s not! You just don’t understand what we’re trying to do!“

And, I think the evangelicals in this case are probably right. Kobola probably doesn’t understand what it is he’s seeing in the slightest. So it makes it difficult for people like me– people who actually do understand — to talk about purity culture. Because I know better than to mock it.

Something that dangerous shouldn’t be mocked.

Purity balls are not a “prom for your hymen.” They are an incredibly public event about something that should be intimate and private. They force fragile girls into taking a vow– in a room full of old men– of chastity, to keep themselves pure for God. This extremely public event, disguised as a celebration, is a tool used to cajole girls into keeping their virginity. It is an annual reminder that their cultural value is predicated on whether or not they’ve had sex.

And yes, this is the kind of thing that “grown-up daughters discuss in therapy,” but not because their father was a pedophile or molested them, but because they have been ripped apart from the inside out when they were shamed by their entire communities, ostracized by their families, for not being able to keep a promise that the vast majority of people can’t possibly keep.

Sometimes, we end up in therapy because we were raped and we have no idea that’s what happened to us until we’re sobbing in an office when someone for the very first time says what happened to you is not your fault and we can’t believe it because, no, it is our fault. We’re the daughters of Eve. We are the temptress, the seductress, the succubus. We were dressed immodestly. We gave our heart away. We didn’t keep ourselves pure, like we swore to our fathers and before God that we would.

Purity culture needs to be exposed for everything that it is, everything it teaches, and everything that it does to the women and men growing up in it. I understand the you have GOT to be kidding me reaction, but this is not something that can be so easily dismissed.

It’s not a joke. It’s an ideology that destroys lives.

March 22, 2014 by
Feminism

PCC starts backtracking

pcc sign

The day my guest post “God is Done with You” came out, I was contacted by a lot of people trying to find out more about what I’d described. One of them was a radio show host, who managed to accomplish what I could not: to get PCC to go on record. Their reaction was about what I’d expected– “categorical denials” and accusing those of us who have come forward of “victimizing and harassing” the college.

Their first statement came out last Wednesday–on March 12. Yesterday, March 18, President Shoemaker read off a statement during chapel. I have an audio clip of his announcement, which Dale Fincher uploaded. I encourage you to read both the official statement and Dale’s response– I think Dale addressed some significant problems with how PCC has handled everything so far.

I’m not going to go over every line of the statement, but I would like to point some things out.

Through the years, the Lord has protected PCC’s students, faculty, and staff; reports of harassment in any form have been quite rare. However, in today’s world there are increasing incidences of sexual violence, assault, harassment, and abuse. I imagine that in a student body as large as this, some of you have had to deal with these terrible issues.

Shoemaker is far from alone in this line of thinking. It seems typical, at least in my experience, for American evangelical culture to turn a blind eye to the harsh reality of abuse today. That attitude probably isn’t that far off from American culture in general– I think we’d all prefer to believe that abuse is rare, so many of us decide to believe that it is. Shoemaker is choosing that option here when he says “some of you” when the horribly reality is that it probably is many of you. Using the most reliable statistics we have, up to 37% of PCC’s student body has probably experienced some form of sexual abuse.

When he says that PCC has been “protected” because “reports of harassment . . . have been quite rare,” he is dismissing  the basic premise of my article– that reports of “harassment” are rare because students are terrified of reporting. From the research I’ve been doing with the Escambia County records department, I don’t think “rare” is a good word to use, either, but I’ll know more for sure when I have all the records from the past 12 years in my hands.

Also, in this speech and in the Pathway, the word that they’ve chosen to describe sexual violence is “harassment.” That happened in David’s story– when he was interrogated by the Assistant Dean of Men, he was asked if he’d been “harassed.” What had happened to David is legally defined as aggravated rape, and the Dean asked if he’d been “harassed.”

That is a problem, because PCC has chosen to use soft, minimizing language. I know that words like rape can be intimidating, but as long as we describe the brutal horrors of rape as “harassment”— and treating sexual harassment as inconsequential by putting the idea inside parentheses– they are handicapping victims. They are saying you’re getting upset over nothing. It’s just harassment.

Reports of sexual abuse can be made without fear of recrimination; and no student is punished for being the victim of wrongdoing.

No, instead they’re punished for being fornicators and liars.

It is the responsibility of any student who believes that he has been the subject of legitimate harassment (not frivolous or groundless allegations) to report the incident immediately to a representative of the Student Life Office who will follow the College’s due process in the investigation of the alleged harassment.

That is one of the quotes from the Pathway that Shoemaker used. I think this passage is especially important, because it highlights the unhealthy attitude that PCC has. If a student has been “legitimately harassed,” it is the responsibility of the student to report it immediately.

There are multiple problems with this policy (“legitimate rape,” anyone?), but the primary problem with this is that it has enabled victim blaming. That might seem like a stretch, so bear with me.

What this policy has done, in practice, has made it possible for victims to be at least partly blamed for what happened to them. It has to be “legitimate” (with zero explanation as to what constitutes “legitimate”), and the report has to be made immediately. I’ve talked to a lot of people about their experiences, and one of the common patterns has been the administration asking them “why did you not come forward sooner?” and then using their delay as evidence that the victim was not really a victim. A true victim would have reported it immediately. Since they didn’t report it immediately, they must have “wanted” it.

The college employs four counselors credentialed by graduate degrees in counseling, and a fifth credentialed by over 40 years of counseling experience. These trained counselors are equipped to provide biblical guidance and confidentially assist students with a variety of concerns include sexual abuse.

I’ve talked about “nouthetic” or “biblical” counseling before, and I believe that PCC is on the extreme end of the spectrum as far as their views on “biblical counseling.” While I was a student there, the only textbook required for the class Educational Psychology was Why Christians Can’t Trust Psychology, and everything I learned about the “pseudoscience of psychology” while a student there was that it is evil, corrupt, humanistic, and anti-God. Given that this was their attitude (at least, in 2009, but I don’t think much has changed), I find it extremely unlikely that their counselors are “equipped” to “assist students” with any form of abuse, much less sexual abuse.

Anyway, while this statement is “better” than the one they released on March 12, it still is illustrative of larger problems at PCC. They act on the belief that abuse is rare– when it is not. They have policies in place that reflect some of the dominant myths about rape. They minimize the suffering of abuse victims by calling it “harassment.”

In short, I stand by my original statement: that PCC is not a safe place for victims.

March 19, 2014 by
Feminism

this is what victim blaming looks like

[trigger warning for rape apologia, victim blaming]

When I announced rather publicly to the internet that I was going to be writing an article on how Pensacola Christian College has treated sexual abuse, assault, and rape victims, I expected to face some pushback. For the first couple days it was rather mild– all along the lines of “you’re sowing strife among the brethren” or “I can’t believe this could happen at PCC” or “PCC is a good school! How dare you!” It wasn’t really anything bad.

But, starting last night and continuing through this today, I’ve been  inundated with comments and e-mails.  I’ve blocked people here, in the comment section, for violating my comment policy. I will not ever tolerate rape apologia or victim blaming. I put up with a lot of stuff– sexism, racism, ableism… but only to a point. I believe in allowing people the opportunity to learn. That’s all I’ve been doing since I was a racist homophobic misogynistic ass, so I try to make sure that growth can happen here. I also love it when people disagree with me– as long as they’re not attacking my character. Disagree away, it’s fantastic.

So, while I will never allow someone to openly victim blame myself or any of my readers, I do want to take this opportunity to show everybody what victim blaming looks like. Normally I do not use comments for blogging fodder– I think that would make it more difficult for new readers to comment, and I don’t want to do that. However, two of the comments I got last night are a textbook example of what victim blaming looks like in real life. One I did not publish, the other I did (although I warned the second that what she’d done is called victim blaming. Since you can reply to her comment, please do not harass her. She’s been corrected already).

The problem with victim blaming is that, ultimately, it sounds perfectly reasonable, even common-sensical. Hopefully you’ll understand why it isn’t by the end of this post.

On to the first comment:

I went to PCC and the rules at that school make it nearly impossible to even get yourself into a situation like this. The school tries VERY hard to prevent it. You aren’t allowed off campus without other girls being with you. You can’t go to the beach without other girls with you. You sleep in a dorm with no one but girls. Guys are not allowed in the dorms. You are not allowed to be in any location with a guy alone; meaning you must be in a chaperoned area at all times, or you are breaking a rule. Cameras are everywhere. Motion sensors are placed on the fences. You scan in to leave the campus, you scan out to leave the campus. Your parking spot is checked by security guards every hour. Security officers patrol every empty building on an hourly basis. You are not allowed to touch members of the opposite sex. You are not allowed to talk in the unlit areas after dark. You are not allowed to stand around with members of the opposite sex after dark.

So I’m highly suspicious of this. And I think the faculty had a right to be somewhat suspicious, especially if the reputation of another person was at stake–and possibly a criminal investigation. So my plea to you would be to be very careful about casting a stone if you yourself are not at fault for bypassing one of these guards that the school put in place for your protection.

That said, the world is a wicked place and I would not be surprised if legitimate rapists attended that school. And I am not saying your story is not legitimate, but I think you owe it to the school to make share everyone gets the whole story here.

Let’s not pretend that PCC does not try to prevent this from happening. I cannot think of any other educational institution that goes out of its way to protect women like PCC does.

First off, his first paragraph is a pretty good summation of how crazy PCC is, which he rationalizes as good because it “protects” people. Some of these rules have softened in recent years, but most of them are still very much enforced exactly like this. It also completely ignores the reality of male-on-male, or female-on-female rape (which also, in an overwhelming majority of cases, has nothing to do with sexual orientation and everything to do with power, aggression, and dominance).

And while PCC is a fundamentalist college, how this person views the functions of PCC’s rules is not any different from how rape culture functions. The same exact argument is constantly made about rape victims in secular contexts. Were you drinking? What were you wearing? Did you lead him on?

The point of this line of questioning is: what rules did you break? And it’s all based on the assumption that Good Girls don’t get raped. Good Girls follow the rules. Good Girls obey the expectations of the culture. Only girls who break the rules get raped. It’s all over his comment, in how it’s “impossible to get myself into a situation” if I was following the rules like a Good Girl. And, since I obviously wasn’t a good enough girl or I wouldn’t have gotten raped, I owe it to the school to tell the “whole story”– the “whole story” including the part of how I am not a good enough girl. And, since I wasn’t a Good Girl, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to suspect whether or not I’m telling the truth about being raped. Good Girls don’t get raped. Only Bad Girls get raped, and Bad Girls deserve it. If I was stupid enough, or slutty enough, to break the rules, then I stepped outside what was put into place to protect me– so what else could I expect? Duh. Of course I got raped. I broke the rules.

Second comment:

It’s true that bad things happen and positive experiences don’t change them – you’re right. But do not forget to give the benefit of the doubt on both ends.There’s often much more to the story than “They were kicked out because . . .” I know because I have had friends who worked in Student Life who had to deal with situations that were severely misconstrued and turned into hateful gossip. The people at PCC love the students, and they do everything in their power to protect them and do what is right for them.

I can guarantee you that if a girl went to Student Life immediately after she were sexually assaulted, but had been obeying the rules of where she could go during what times with the correct number of friends (all rules set up for her protection), they would not expel her. I also know of people who were sent home to recover from situations, but people who did not care for PCC always referred to them as being “kicked out.” Remember that it’s easy to “tweak” a story so it sounds to be more in our favor – I’ve had to learn this many times even through friends, and constantly remind myself not to do it myself.

This is the same exact argument. If she obeyed the rules. If she told someone immediately. If she were a good girl. If she met with this person’s– or, in this case, Student Life’s– approval, and only then would a rape victim deserve not to be treated like a Bad Girl. If she did something, broke the rules, went anywhere alone, then she deserves to be expelled because she wasn’t a good enough girl. Bad Girls — and, by this definition, all rape victims are Bad Girls — deserve to be treated like garbage. Bad Girls don’t deserve help and comfort. Bad Girls don’t deserve justice or vindication. Bad Girls get expelled.

These arguments both ignore the reality that rape victims are raped because rapists rape them.

February 21, 2014 by
Feminism

let's talk about drunk people and sex, take two

alcohol

Back in November I wrote a post laying out some of the biggest questions I have about the “having sex while intoxicated” question; mainly that “how drunk is too drunk?” is a fundamentally flawed question and what we should be examining is “isn’t it predatory for people (usually men, not always) to target intoxicated people (usually women, not always)?” and “why isn’t enthusiastic consent the standard?” Neither of those questions are rhetorical, and I highly encourage you to check out the discussion in the comments– I think it was one of the best conversations I’ve had on my blog to date.

At the time I wrote it I was sort-of-not-really responding to the Emily Yoffe disaster, but yesterday something else started cropping up in my various news feeds: James Taranto essentially making the argument that if a drunk man rapes a drunk woman, there’s no crime (link is to an analysis, not original). In his view, both people– the rapist and the victim– should be held equally responsible, or not responsible at all. I barely managed to make it through Taranto’s Washington Post column; it took me a couple of tries to get all the way to the end.

So, I’m going to be responding to this general idea, but not really Taranto in particular, because it’s the narrative that makes his argument believable to people that concerns me.

Taranto compares rape to two drunk drivers who get into a car accident. This is not a new comparison, at least not to me– and if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard it trip glibly off the tongue of someone who is hilariously uninformed . . .

There is a premise backing up this statement, and it is a premise that a horrifying number of people– of all genders– believe. It is the idea that women who say they were raped while intoxicated are actually lying about having sex because they regret it. You can easily stumble across this argument almost anywhere– in living rooms, in bars, on the internet. This argument only exists because there is something even more insidious hiding beneath it, and this is the real problem with how Americans, at least, think and talk about sex:

Women only say no to sex because they are supposed to; it is the man’s job to do whatever he can to override that no. Women actually want to say yes, even when they are saying no.

That is the belief that allows us to believe all of the others– that the woman’s only job is to be the chaste, asexual gatekeeper, and men are the lustful, lascivious animals who are willing to go to any length– coercion, deceit, force — to achieve the ultimate goal of The I Had Sex with Her Trophy. It is the underlying rape-culture idea behind songs like Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.”

Another fact that Taranto seems to be completely unaware of is that rapists are not just “people who are too drunk to realize what they’re doing and stop.” Rapists are predators. People who rape– and they are usually men, but not always– are a rather small slice of the population (3%-10%), depending on the study you read and the country you’re in. However, all the studies reveal a common pattern: predators and rapists target specific victims with only one goal in mind: to get away with it.

  • They spend time identifying vulnerable people.
  • They use cultural narratives in their favor. They find people who, by cultural standards, “deserve” to be raped– gay people, trans people, drunk people, alone people, “slutty” people . . .
  • They become acquaintances– or even friends– of the victim. They insinuate themselves into the victim’s group and deliberately communicate an image of being a “nice guy,” someone who is trustworthy.
  • They use whatever circumstances they can– making sure the victim is seen “flirting” with them, making sure their victim is drunk. . .
  • They do whatever they can in order to make sure their victim is discredited.

Remember, the ultimate goal is that no one believes their victim and that they get away with it. Rapists are not stupid. This is one of the reasons why so many rapes are linked to intoxication on college campuses: alcohol has become another weapon in a rapist’s arsenal– just like roofies, just like coercion, just like threats,  just like violence. They can use alcohol in order to get away with raping someone, because they know campus officials and police officers will ask “were you drunk?” and then dismiss anything else their victims say.

~~~~~~~~~~

Before we get into the discussion, I’d like to circumvent a few possible questions.

There is a gray area when we start talking about sex and alcohol. I’m not dismissing that. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when we talk about rape by intoxication.

First, if a person says “no” or “stop” or “I don’t want this” even if they have engaged in other sexual activities, anything that follows that “no” is rape. End of story. There is no other explanation, no surrounding circumstances, nothing. If they say no, it does not matter how drunk they are, it does not matter if they have been making out with you for an hour or just gave you oral, it does not matter. It’s rape.

Second, if a person is unconscious and you engage in sexual activities with them, you are raping them. That should be obvious, but thanks to things like Steubenville we know it’s not. It’s beyond all sense and reason that I even have to say this, but this is the world we live in, apparently.

Thirdly, the fact that they didn’t say “no” doesn’t mean they consented. Rape is sexual behavior that the other person did not consent to. Them “not saying no” doesn’t count. It’s insane that the only time we think of “consent” as being “they didn’t say no” is when we’re talking about sex. If some company dumps poison into my water supply, they can’t walk into court and say “welp, they didn’t say don’t dump poison into our water!” and get away with it. The same principle applies to sex: if they did not consent, then, legally, it’s rape. Consent is “yes, I want to have sex with you.”

And here is exactly where we run into the gray area, because consent can sound like and look like a lot of different things depending on the people involved in the situation. My partner and I don’t give verbal consent like that because we don’t need to– we know each other well enough where body language is enough. If you don’t have a trust-based relationship with the person you’re about to have sex with, make sure you get explicit, verbal consent. This is why I’m such a fan of enthusiastic consent— and why I’ve talked about it so much.

I want to address, specifically, this concept that people have sex, wake up in the morning, regret it, and then claim that they were raped. I’m not going to make the case that this never ever happens, but we do know beyond all doubt that it is incredibly rare. People have sex when they’re drunk and then regret it the next day all of the time. People have sex when they’re not drunk and then regret it all of the time, too. People make mistakes. They do things they regret. They also don’t usually wake up in the morning and say “I’m going to go accuse this person of rape for no reason!”

When a woman, especially, accuses someone of rape, it is an excruciating process. She is frequently ostracized and isolated. Her friends abandon her. The police intimidate and frighten her, and frequently accuse her of being a liar or an attention whore. She is slut-shamed, victim-blamed. Her entire life can be destroyed. Coming forward and saying this person raped me usually comes with so much risk and danger that most rape victims never report their rape.

There are probably a hundred other circumstances we could talk about concerning sex and alcohol, and they’re worth the conversation. I’m not going to say that having sex with a drunk person is always rape, because it’s not. Plenty of people have sex while intoxicated and it’s perfectly ok. However, and this is so important I’m going to be shouting about it the rest of my life, if you want to have sex with someone, get their clear consent. It really is that simple.

~~~

This is a moderated space. Please read my comment policy.

February 12, 2014 by
Feminism

why believing matters: child sexual abuse and rape

sparklers

[trigger warning for rape, rape apologia]

This has been a brutally hard week for me in more than a few ways. It’s gotten to the point where it’s not just emotional and mental pain, but physical. Yesterday’s post, on being hopeful, was one of the weakest posts I’ve ever published because as much as I actually do believe in everything I said, writing it yesterday was . . . difficult. I was hoping that if I put those thoughts into words that they would be a little easier to believe.

I had a personal encounter last Thursday that . . . I honestly don’t know how to describe it. Troubling, I guess. One of the things that came up was a comment he had made in an earlier conversation– that the statistics on rape (1 in 5 women are forcibly raped) are “nonsense” and “bullshit,” and he made this additional comment on Thursday:  “I could understand if you were mad at me if I was denying the Holocaust or something, but I’m not doing that.” What he said was true, in one way. The Holocaust is an event in history unlike any other, and the memory of every person slaughtered– Jew, gay, Christian, political prisoners, the disabled– deserves the honor and respect of not trivializing what happened to them.

But, in another sense, his position that the American rape statistics are “bullshit” is a denial of horrific and ongoing tragedy.

The problem is, he’s not alone. His perspective– that rape is rare, that most accusations are lies, and that rape victims are at least partly responsible for what happens to them– is the one American culture believes. If any week could have driven that point home with a sledgehammer, it was this one, after Dylan Farrow published her letter on Saturday.

Reading her letter broke my heart. What tore it open and left it shattered was the response that came next– Weide’s Daily Beast article (I used donotlink.com), the countless comparisons on twitter to lacrosse teams, all the claims that Dylan’s mother is a lying whore, so Dylan’s probably lying, too. All the comments on facebook stating that they want “objectivity” and “they’re not going to take sides,” the endless stream of posts on how to “separate art from the artist.”

I want to crawl into the deepest, darkest, most obscure hole on the planet where nobody could ever find me and say any of those things to me, ever again.

~~~~~~~~~~

When my abuser and rapist broke our engagement two months before the wedding, the reason he gave me was that I “wasn’t submissive enough.” It took me little over a month to figure out what he was referring to, especially since I’d spent almost three years bending over backwards for him in every possible way. When I realized why I was “not submissive,” I got angry. Furious, actually. It was because, a month before he dumped me, he tried to call me a goddamn fucking bitch and I told him that no, he didn’t get to talk to me like that and he could call me later when he’d calmed down. It was because, when he expected me to service him sexually, I told him no. It was because, after three years, something deep inside of me said no, I am not his bitch.

After he broke our engagement, all of our “mutual” friends instantly pulled away from me. Women who used to shout my name across campus and hug me for no reason refused to look me in the eye or return my hellos. People started declining my invitations to lunch and dinner, and I began eating alone. When I did my best to reconnect with friends my abuser had separated me from, our “mutual” friends told them that “she is such a bitch, you have no reason to be her friend any more, she’s nothing but a waste of your time.” Most of my ‘friends’ made it clear that they would never, ever, speak to me again.

The only person who would pay attention to me, except for three people, was my abuser. He would follow me all over campus, into the cafeteria, into classrooms, at sporting events, in church– and it was always the same. Why won’t you talk to me? I just want to talk to you! And he would keep this up until I would snap. After ignoring him for a solid twenty minutes, he would call me a bitch and something inside would break and I would spin around and scream at him until the cafeteria manager asked me to leave. After pestering me for an hour, continuously, at a soccer game, I finally understood what it meant to see red – and one look from my band director told me everything I needed to know. I left.

I spent countless hours that semester in soundproof practice rooms sobbing, and I didn’t find out until a few months ago why all of that happened. Why everyone withdrew. Why he did his dead-level best into provoking me.

He’d convinced everyone that anything I could possibly say would be a lie. That I was actually crazy, and not worth believing. He successfully did what all abusers and rapists do: he manipulated any of the people who mattered into disbelief. And when I sought counseling for the first time, the only thing anybody said was “well, what did you do that you need to seek forgiveness for?”

~~~~~~~~~~

When I first started dating him, I knew that his previous relationship had ended badly, that she was hurtful and manipulative, that she frequently lied. When her best friend tried to reach out to me and tell me how dangerous John* was, I refused to believe anything they said. It was just another manipulation.

When he called me in the middle of the night, two years into our relationship, obviously drunk and sobbing, to confess something he’d done, I refused to even hear what he was actually telling me. It was her fault. It wasn’t rape. She’d provoked him. Just like I had. What could either one of us expect? I forgave him for “cheating” on me, and tried to forget her.

When he broke up with me and two months later was going out with another girl, I thought about warning her of what he was like, but everything inside of me screamed no! there’s no point, she won’t believe you anyway. When she contacted me a year later and told me what he’d done, I desperately wished I could have gone back and done something, anything, to protect her from him.

~~~~~~~~~~

Now, my rapist is a youth pastor. He’s “just fucking fine.”

Now, I am going through the excruciating, traumatic process of figuring out what I can do– with the bone-deep knowledge that anything I do will make no difference, that the most I can even hope for is that when he does rape someone again, that people will know that this is a pattern, that he’s a rapist and an abuser, that maybe, just maybe, that his next victim will be believed.

February 5, 2014 by
Feminism

let's talk about drunk women and sex

enthusiasic consent

I just want to ask a quick question, because it’s something that I wonder every time I’m a part of a conversation about consent.

I am a huge, sign-waving fan of enthusiastic consent— also known as “yes means yes.” But, as Elfity noticed, many people seem either wholly skeptical of the idea, or they’re suspicious and downright antagonistic– and this reaction isn’t limited to Male Rights Activists (MRAs) and the red pill crowd (and no, no links. If you’re honestly curious, google. I won’t grace any of those places with traffic from my blog).

The basic difference between the “yes means yes” model and the “just say no” model is the difference between passive reception and active participation. One of the biggest proponents calls the “yes means yes” way of approaching sex as the “performance model.” You don’t waltz with a woman by dragging her marble  statue body around a stage. You don’t perform in a band where the other people are stone-faced automotons that don’t create the music with you.

When I have sex with my husband, “I don’t just lay there, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Sometimes, I initiate. Sometimes he does. We rely mostly on physical cues– if he can tell that I’m not feeling well, he doesn’t push, and I do the same for him. Sometimes, though, if I haven’t been feeling well, he gently initiates something– slowly and tenderly, and always pays close attention to my response. He can tell, because he’s watching, that yes, I want sex, or no, rubbing my back is really nice, please keep doing that. We’ve established trust, and we know each other, and we can read each other. There are all kinds of ways that we can identify consent.

Anyway, when I talk about consent– here on my blog, in real life, on other internet spaces– I frequently bump into something that honestly, at this point, I find incredibly disturbing. The internet has exploded about this topic in particular, and I  just want to throw something out there.

Lots of people are asking about sex and alcohol. And, something that I’ve noticed a lot is that men have a problem with being told that having sex with a woman too drunk to consent is either a) a horrifically bad idea or b) rape. I think this issue is worth talking about, and I don’t have a hard-and-fast answer. I just have a question:

Men, why do you so vehemently defend your desire to have sex with unresponsive women?

Why is it that this comes up so much? What is it about having sex with a semi-unconscious woman that’s so damn appealing? What is it about having sex with a woman who won’t remember who you are the next day, or her memories of her experience with you are vague and non-specific?

Why do you want to have sex like that? Doesn’t that seem really predatory to you?

To me, this demonstrates that men seem to be much more interested in shoving their penis into someone–anyone’s– vagina a couple of times than they are in having a mutually pleasurable experience. One night stands where you never see each other again, one night stands that lead into something more– whatever, that’s up to you. But what is it about sex with women who are so drunk that you’re not entirely sure if she wants to have sex with you but hey, she’s not saying no, so let’s just have terrible, terrible “sex”? Why is that something you so vociferously defend?

Is there something about having sex with a woman who is enthusiastic about having sex with you that’s a turn off? Why isn’t having sex with women who want to have sex with you something we’re not framing as a really fantastic, awesome goal? Why does it seem to be the goal to get women so drunk that they are “willing” to have sex with you that they wouldn’t be willing to have with you sober?

I’m genuinely confused about this. Why is the bar so incredibly low?

I’m not comfortable with calling every single sexual encounter a person has with an inebriated person rape. I’m still wrestling with this issue, and I think that “it depends” is going to be as close an answer that I ever arrive at. However, I don’t think that focusing on “when is it rape?” is really the most productive thing we can be doing. I think we should be re-framing the entire conversation. I think we should be encouraging people to have amazing sex. I think we should be encouraging a model of sex where the participants are involved, and interested, and having a fun time.

I think that as long as we keep trying to hammer how “how drunk does she have to be in order for it to be rape?” we’re going to be running in circles. Instead, why aren’t we asking the question– isn’t it predatory behavior for a man (or woman) to target drunk women (or men), regardless of whether or not it’s rape? Because that’s what it comes down to for me. Having sex with someone who can’t be an active, interested, enthusiastic participant is a bad idea. And yes, that includes the fact that it is very often not just terrible sex, but rape.

Just to be crystal clear: the law defines rape as including the inability to give consent to sex, and that removes any possibility for a woman to give consent to sex while intoxicated. Legally, having sex with someone incapable of giving consent is rape. Period. Full stop. That is the legal definition of rape, and that is how the law prosecutes rapists.

Whether or not the woman involved feels that it is rape and decides to press chargers– entirely up to her. If she decides to press charges, though, it does not matter what the man thought about her consent the night before. If he had sex with an intoxicated woman, in the eyes of the law, he raped her. This is called rape by intoxication. Look it up.

However, I still think it’s important to talk about this issue as not necessarily that black-and-white. The law is black and white. People are not. We have to make decisions in the day-to-day, and that means that things are going to occasionally look gray. So, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: why do men want to have sex with women who wouldn’t consent to having sex with them sober? Why is it a socially acceptable goal for men to get women drunk in order to have sex with them? Why is this behavior that we encourage? Why do we think this is ok when what we’re encouraging is really horrible, terrible, one-sided sex at the very best, and rape at the very worst?

And why do we defend their “right” to do this? And no, “because men are horny” is not a good enough answer. Women are horny, too, women want sex, too, and women are having just as many one-night stands as men are, so don’t give me that bull. Straight men are having sex with straight women every single time they do it, so this is just really basic math.

Our culture is built on men being predators, and this seems to be something we do our dead-level best to defend. Why?

~~~~~~~~~~

I am very interested in having a conversation about this. I hammered this out really quickly, so I’m open to you taking issue with my wordings as well as my argument. Show me I’m wrong– from either point of view. Maybe I’m being to permissive about intoxicated sex. Maybe you think the opposite. Let me know.

November 12, 2013 by
Feminism

First Kiss: why rape myths are so dangerous

silenced

Trigger warning for child abuse, sexual assault, and victim blaming.

Alena wrote her story in a comment on my post “future husbands: your future wife does not belong to you.” Reading it moved me to tears, because her story is very much like my own– and it is very much like the countless stories I’ve heard in the past four years. For women raised in the conservative evangelical “purity culture,” our stories have similar patterns. I hope that Aletha’s story can bring comfort, understanding, and healing to women who carry the same stories inside their hearts.

A few weeks into my relationship with my now-husband, he shared a funny story about our first kiss, commenting on how sweet and special he thought it was that we had each been privileged to share our first kisses with each other. I was confused, at first, wondering how he got that idea — and then remembered back to the kiss: we kissed, and he smiled at me and asked if I had enjoyed my first kiss. I had said yes, and he said, “Me, too!” It was a very sweet moment – and one I had misunderstood. I thought he was asking if I enjoyed our first kiss, when he was actually asking if I had enjoyed my first kiss—ever.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal to fix the misunderstanding, but I was eaten up by guilt. One of my girlfriends, who was with us at the time and knew that not only was my kiss with Nick not my first, but that there were a lot of other “firsts” he didn’t know about—“firsts” I’d had with my previous boyfriend, R*. She took several opportunities in the months that followed to tell me that I owed it to Nick to be honest and come clean about my sins, and that he deserved to get to choose whether or not to forgive me before he actually married me. If he didn’t want to marry a woman with a “sexual history,” he needed to know so he wouldn’t be “stuck with me forever.”

I already carried a great deal of regret about not coming to my marriage a virgin—since I was sexually abused as a child—but Nick knew all about that and repeatedly assured me that I had nothing to be ashamed of, and he had nothing to forgive. I had trouble accepting that, because many people, including my girlfriend, said that I was guilty because I did not “fight back” enough. It didn’t matter that I was 3, or 12, and that I had tried to tell my mother what had happened . . . I was responsible because I hadn’t fought ‘til my dying breath. Nick telling me something different was difficult to believe. The fact that he didn’t know about what I’d done with R* made it all so much worse.

Months passed, and guilt was practically eating me alive. Despite our mutual goal of virginity on our wedding night, we messed around more than we wished we had (although, to be clear, we don’t beat ourselves up about it). Every time we did something, however, I had intrusive and vivid flashbacks to my time with R*, my ex . . . but rarely did I have flashbacks about my childhood abuse. Finally, a month before our marriage, I couldn’t stand the guilt. Nick seemed so happy with all of our “shared firsts” . . . so I confessed to him about R*, in the middle of his mom’s front yard, at one in the morning, in the rain. I was sobbing, he was shocked and confused. When I told him he didn’t have to marry me, he became angry and took me in his arms, and told me that he loved me, that he still wanted to marry me, and that he forgave me. I went home and then we entered the madhouse of the last three weeks before our wedding in another state and all that entailed.

We got married, and everything seemed like it was going to be ok.

Six years later this whole thing came back to us again.

Over the first six years of our marriage, I was repeatedly assaulted by intrusive and vivid flashbacks of my time with R*, to the point that more than once I broke down crying in the middle of sex. I frequently felt dirty and unworthy of the love of my husband. Never once did Nick ever give me reason to feel this way, and since I refused to talk about any of it most of the time, he rarely even knew who the flashbacks were about, and assumed they were about my father, who had abused me as a child. But . . . I was having flashbacks about both. Sometimes they were mixed, and that was frightening.

One day, I started seeing a new counselor, and for some reason I brought up my relationship with R*. She asked me a lot of questions that were very baffling and scary at the time, and then shocked me to my core by telling me that she believed that I had been a victim of sexual assault in that relationship.

What? What the– ? Could it? No – wait, but . . .

I started remembering.

I thought back to our first kiss, which began as a romantic moment. It was the first and only time I’d ever seen the Northern Lights, and I can’t even describe how beautiful they were. But his kiss quickly turned confusing and scary when he deepened it to a full French kiss that lasted for several minutes, despite my attempts to step back. It was . . .exciting . . . but I had only known him for a couple of days, and earlier that evening had told him I was saving my kisses for when I got married. I was afraid—excited, but afraid– but he took control, ultimately, because he was a bigger than me, and I was more afraid of making a guy mad than I was of being kissed against my will.

I told him, the next morning, that I was not okay with being physically intimate before marriage, and that I was sorry that we had kissed. He was quick to assure me that kisses weren’t that big of a deal. From there, it escalated quickly. I won’t go in to detail, but I will say that he initiated every single physically intimate thing we did, and overrode my protestations each time with charm, insistence—or just by sheer size. He did what he wanted, because he could.

I never saw anything that happened as anything more than me being incredibly weak willed, until I spoke with my counselor about it.

After all, I didn’t scream. I didn’t call him names. I didn’t claw his face, or kick him where he’d hurt so I could get away.

He never verbally assaulted me, ordered me around, or physically abused me.

When he held me down, I was confused, even cried and begged him to stop, but. he would keep going, He would try to coerce me, saying things like “don’t you like this?” I was weak in my protestations, speaking softly, trying to explain why I wasn’t okay with his actions even as he ignored me and did whatever he wanted. He drew reactions from me I couldn’t control, and that robbed me of the ability to think clearly. I judged myself weak and wanton, because he made me feel things against my will. . .

It was very healing to talk and cry about it, especially after my session with my counselor. I spoke with my husband about it, too, and that was an eye opening conversation! You see, it turns out that all those years ago, when he held me in his arms, assured me he still wanted to get married, and forgave me…? He was only forgiving me for lying by omission. When I told him what the counselor had said, and for the first time elaborated a little bit on what had happened with R*, and my actions in those moments, he agreed with her completely that it had been sexual assault, and six months of abuse.

Those conversations took place less than six months ago. I am still processing things, though a family crisis this summer superseded everything to the point that I haven’t really thought about it for months, until reading this post. I haven’t had any flashbacks since then, though I can feel them lurking in this moment, after writing all this.

Until reading this, I didn’t realize that it all went back to the patriarchal attitudes with which I was raised, but it makes so much sense. Had my friend not applied so much pressure and condemnation to confess my sins to Nick, had not brought up what had happened to me when I was a child and insisted that I was not “sexually pure” because of it, had not tried to convince me that I had sinned against Nick because of what my father had done and what happened later– I would have likely told him right away that there had been a misunderstanding, though I know that I would have still felt a lot of misplaced shame over my relationship with R*, because of the unresolved issues there. I certainly wouldn’t have considered calling off my engagement at the last second because I felt that he deserved a virgin, had I not been heavily influenced by the concept of “future-husband ownership,” or by the teaching that “losing” my virginity—however it was “taken,” consensual or not—makes me less valuable as a woman, as a person.

September 5, 2013 by
Feminism

how I learned to stop worrying and love the Pill, part two

pill

Put in incredibly simple terms, hormonal birth control works thusly:

Step 1 : it prevents ovulation.

“Ovulation,” for the uninitiated, is when a mature egg is released from the ovary and become available for fertilization. “Prevents,” in this case, does not mean that the pill stops the egg from peaking its little head out of the ovary. It prevents because no egg develops to maturity. Simply put, there is no egg to come out of the ovary in the first place. This is one of the most important parts about hormonal birth control options, and something no one seems to pay attention to.

This is also the most important part for me. PCOS means that I get too many cysts developing at the same time, or they never stop developing, and I never experience a menstrual cycle. Ovarian cysts are normal– an ovarian cyst is where the egg matures. Hormonal birth control works to treat PCOS because it does not allow ovarian cysts to develop. An additional part of this process is that even if an ovarian cyst develops, there’s another chemical block in place that stops an egg from forming inside of it.

No ovarian cyst, no egg, nothing mature enough to be fertilized.

But, in the exceedingly rare case (if it wasn’t rare, it would be useless as a treatment for PCOS) where there is a cyst and an egg is developed, we move on to–

Step 2:  eliminate the possibility of fertilization

This is pretty straightforward, and it comes in two steps. The progesterone in hormonal birth control options thickens the cervical mucus– makes it insanely more difficult for the sperm to reach the egg, which is already difficult– and it makes the egg harder to fertilize. So, even if a cyst develops, and if an egg develops inside of the cyst, and IF the sperm makes it up through the thickened mucus and all the way up the fallopian tube, when it reaches the egg, it’s going to have a hard time fertilizing it.

At this point in the process, the possibility of an egg being fertilized is so vanishingly small it’s not even really worth talking about, but I’m a-gonna, because it’s where the pro-life movement starts lying their little tooshies off.

“Supposed” Step 3: prevent implantation

At this point, the egg is a zygote, which is just the technical term for “fertilized egg.” For a lot of people this is where “conception” happens (which, problems), so this is where people start thinking that hormonal birth control is Just the Most Evil Thing those Evil Doctors have Ever Invented.

The most frequent term you’ll find in information about how this works is that the uterine wall is “hostile” for the egg. This is a misnomer. The uterine wall is exactly the same as it ever was, just  thinner (hence, lighter periods). There’s no study that shows that the uterus becomes “hostile”– in fact, the scientific studies show that hormonal birth control options do not alter the uterine lining in any significant way except for making it slightly thinner, and are incapable of contributing to zygote failure (which I’ll explain).

This is the part where the pro-life movement lies. Because, at this point, they claim that this where the Pill murders babies. Literally starves them to death. Because it takes a baby (zygote), and then refuses it the opportunity to grow. It never grows, the woman’s body never receives the signal that she’s pregnant, and then the uterus expels the zygote and the uterine lining: therefore, MURDER.

Ok, folks, this is where I have All the Problems.

Let’s talk about the zygote, the supposed “great red herring” of the pro-choice movement.

The zygote is a single-celled organism, which through mitosis goes through stages (blastocyst, then embryo). Over fourteen days, it has to develop into an embryo, and the embryo has to develop the conceptus in order to attach to the uterine lining. The uterine lining, at this point, must transform from the decidua to the placenta.

Hormonal birth control methods are incapable of terminating a viable pregnancy. They are designed, in an unbelievable number of unnecessary steps, to prevent fertilization from ever occurring. Not by turning the uterus into a baby-killing machine. That’s patently false, and a bald-faced lie. If a woman’s body develops an egg, the uterine lining is unchanged. If there aren’t enough of the synthetic hormones present to prevent ovulation, there’s not enough of the hormones present to affect the uterine lining. If there’s no egg, then the uterine lining is thinner, possibly, and that’s the only real difference.

It’s a complete misunderstanding that in the case of supposed “breakthrough ovulation” that the uterine lining is still thinner. It’s not.

Here’s what the pro-life movement also refused to discuss:

All the medical studies I could scrounge up reveal that 60, 70, maybe 80% of all zygotes fail to implant on the uterine wall, when the woman is trying to conceive and is not on hormonal birth control.

Let me say that again: as many as 80% of all “babies” never implant in the uterus completely on their own.

For those that do manage to make it, another 30% don’t survive the first few weeks.

Let’s do the math again: 72% to 86% of all zygotes, which the pro-life movement refers to as babies, “die” without any outside interference whatsoever. When a woman is not on the Pill, zygotes fail.

When a woman is on the Pill, there’s rarely ever a zygote, and when there is one, it faces the exact same rate of zygote failure as a woman who isn’t on the Pill. The upside? When a woman is using hormonal birth control, there are less zygotes. Somewhere in the ballpark of 98% less zygotes.

Let me make this more clear: if zygote failure is “murder,” and hormonal birth control options drastically reduces the number of zygotes, the number of failed zygotes (i.e.: “murder”) is also drastically reduced.

Tell me again how the Pill is evil?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Edit*

I wanted to include some information I have that might clarify my basic argument in this post: that hormonal birth control options don’t interfere with implantation. I’ve already made it clear that hormonal birth control doesn’t make the uterus as “hostile” place for the zygote, but I thought it might be helpful to explain why, biologically, this is so.

A menstrual cycle is just that: a cycle. It goes through three steps, or stages. The first is the follicular phase, where the uterine lining is thin. Thin, in the same sense that it is thin while a woman is on hormonal birth control. It is not capable of of allowing the conceptus to attach.

However, part of the ovulation phase is that ovulation releases a trigger for the uterus to begin the luteal phase, where the lining becomes thicker and the conceptus is able to attach.

If a woman on the Pill ovulates, this releases the hormonal trigger, and the uterine lining thickens because it enters the luteal phase. If she does not ovulate, the uterus does not receive the trigger, and the uterine lining remains exactly the same as it ever was.

You can read about this on wiki. Seriously.

June 20, 2013 by