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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2604 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 10, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Pulling out?

I have always been taught that this is not an actually effective method. Was this wrong?

The perfect-use failure rate for withdrawal is 4% compared to 3% for condoms; similarly, within the first year of use, 18% of couples relying on withdrawal will experience a pregnancy, comparable to the 17% of couples using male condoms

Who are these 17% per year getting pregnant with condoms?

But anyways, a bit of googling shows a few sources claiming condoms and flawless pullout technique are pretty similar.

Broken condoms, skipping putting it on when passion is running too high, ”let’s do a bit without and then put it on” type of calculations etc

Essentially every aspect of American sex education is lie from the pull out method not working to heterosexual sex being a reliable vector of HIV transmission. If it came out of your high school health teacher's mouth, it's a psyop.

The funny thing is, we did not really have sex-ed at school as I grew up in Turkey (and have teenage pregnancy rates in very low single digits, go figure m) but a specific biology teacher who considered herself very modern and progressive and did some grad course in the US dumped the American high school sex-ed curriculum on my high school class. A bit ashamed to say that I am personally a rather risk averse person so for years I just kept a condom unless the girl asked for otherwise and never bothered to research much about it beyond this.

Same, and basically everyone bought this story wholesale in the U.S. No shame in it, it's a very human condition.

When they teach kids that pulling out doesn't work, it's 99 percent a lie. They just don't trust people to not fuck up

What you're told in sex-ed that pre-ejaculate fluid contains lots of sperm and will totally get you pregnant is basically a lie, yeah -- my guess is that they're going for a noble lie in that the timing aspect is easy to screw up, especially for teenagers. But yeah, no semen --> no babies if you can pull it off. (out)

I suspect this was used a lot historically -- thus all the fuss about Onan.

At first glance, it looks like the sperm counts in pre-ejaculate range from zero at the median to "same concentration as ejaculate, albeit with much less total volume" in a large minority of cases.

But yeah, I always assumed that the "not actually effective" comes from the difference between birth-control-as-designed and birth-control-as-practiced. The Pill goes from like 99% down to like 90% effective when the typical user forgets to always take it on time, and that's for a method where the time you need to be conscientious and the time you need to be passionate don't overlap.

thus all the fuss about Onan.

It's so odd that "onanism" got used to mean pulling-out and masturbation in general. Maybe the Bronze Age was a more strait-laced time, but surely the guy with a weird (or anti-WEIRD? - that rule spanned continents??) marriage-duty toward his dead brother's widow wasn't the first wanker they ever found to make an example of? And if not, then surely they were making an example out of the "you must fulfill your duty to your brother and your sister-in-law" violation aspect of his actions, not the "every sperm is sacred" violation?

I thought the myth started because if you have sex a second time after ejaculating without peeing in between, then the leftover sperm from the first one can impregnate the woman even if you successfully pull out on the second one. This critical detail got lost, and so people reasoned, "Where could that sperm to impregnate be coming from? I know, even the pre-ejaculate fluid must have enough sperm to impregnate!" and since no one ever checks anything when it comes to education about anything sex, this made its way into sex ed, and then became the Truth.

Depends on your metrics.

The official numbers for 1-year pregnancy rate give around 22% normal use, 4% perfect use for withdrawal, as compared to 13%/2% for condoms and 20ish%/2% for natural family planning. These numbers are a little 'fake' -- they're selecting from a much-more-fertile-than-average demographic, exactly what separates perfect use from normal use varies a lot by method and study, a few methods (esp outercourse) get treated as always-perfectly-used, and there's not really a comparable number for no-contraception-at-all besides a very approximate 80%ish -- but they're still directionally useful.

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