I wish the decision hadn't been taken to encourage the use of the combined pill as 3 weeks on - one week off. There does not appear to be any good argument as to why women should bleed for one week a month while on birth control.
I've never seen a good argument, maybe some of the better Mecha minds will correct me.
Why can't we just stay on the combined pill all the time and be free of periods while on it?

I didn't know how much it affected me until i had stopped taking it for a few years and tried taking it again and found it intolerable. i can't separate what stress and anxiety i experienced was because of the Pill but it was an odd discovery that made me wonder.

Wilder, i know women who have been going without their periods with full backing from their doctors for a long time now. i was of the impression it was becoming popular amongst people who can take it.

I haven't been on the Pill for well over 10 years. The low dose pill has only become available in Japan in the last couple of years - by which time I didn't really care anymore (being married and er respectable).

I took the pill originally to try and alleviate some of the problems with my period. I also used to take it continuously and only have a few periods a year. The monthly bleeding on the pill is fake.

I never felt like it removed my option to say no. In fact it possibly made me more of a bitch and prick teaser than I was - knowing I could do it without the consequences of pregnancy *if* I wanted.

I can't take it - tried two brands and they both made me horrifically depressed (an excellent contraceptive in itself, I found), and I'm too scared to try again. In general, though, I think it's been a Good Thing.

The pill removed my natural high mid-cycle, where I have so much energy and spirit and creativity it near killed my grades my first year at Parsons.

So I quit, and sure enough my grades soared the next year. I was using condoms anyway. Weird huh?

I still don't want to go on it, I haven't been on the pill in years. It's practical when you're in a relationship and are at it like rabbits because sometimes the condoms do run out before your steam does. But otherwise I do not like anything else about it.

ethylene, good tip and may solve a problem I'm having at the mo!

Dabitch love this!

because sometimes the condoms do run out before your steam does

To paraphrase NWA, Fuck the Pill. Fuck fuck the pill. For every one "yay no pregnancy, goodbye cramps!" story, I seem to hear three "made me suicidal/weep uncontrollably/vomit all day."

Now I need some second waver to come in and wag their finger at me for such blasphemy. Hehe. While I'm at it, Gloria Steinem sucks!

not really I've met her she's quite delightful in person.

I love the pill. I am one of those (I guess) rare women who has never had a single problem with it, and I have been on various combined pills pretty much continuously now for 13 or so years. It didn't make me put on much weight, it didn't make me depressed, it didn't lower my sex drive.

I'm assuming any problems I will have with it will be when I go off it soon and try to get pregnant.

Huh, actually, 15 years now I count.

/feels old.

I used it when I first got married. It totally ruined my sex drive while I was on it. And made me bitchy to boot.

I've been off the pill for a long while, but I never had a problem with it. At one point, I think I blamed the pill for acne. I'm not sure if it was the culprit.

When I first started the pill, my mother would ask if I had remembered to take it. Oh, god. I wanted to strangulate her.

I was scatterbrained, and would forget to take it. If I had a nickel for every time I doubled up the next day...

The pill took away the option to say no (but single women were using diaphragms/pessaries/ sponges before that), but feminism gave it back. The fear of pregnancy might have been taken away, but not that of disease--even before AIDS.

My problem with the pill is mainly related to the law of unintended consequences. Apparently, all of the extra estrogen from the pill entered our lakes and rivers and fish have started developing weird estrogen related mutations.

essexjan, I remember reading similar stories to yours -- about the unbelievable pressure women faced in the "sexual revolution" and how their range of choices hadn't expanded, because now rather than having to say "no" they had to say "yes" -- and that was the moment I suddenly understood the early(ish) feminist argument that most sex is rape, because so much of it was so strongly coerced.

I'm rather glad that most people today find the argument outdated; it means change has happened. (Maybe not enough change, but change nonetheless.)

The conclusion of that article pissed me off. "Women have died, fallen into major depressions, and increased their risk for cancer, but no harm done!" Sheesh.

Heh, I first used it because it was required if I wanted to take Accutane. One of the side effects of both meds was depression, so when I stopped the Accutane, some depression lifted, and I kept on with the pill.

It gave me migraines and it took me about 4 years on the pill to figure that out. They put me on it to "regulate" my period when I was 14, several years before I would even start having regular sex. That was very common back then - everyone should be on the pill! The pill will take away those pesky problems! 14 year old girls mostly don't have regular periods and that's actually okay, I eventually learned. Naturally, I also managed to get pregnant about 2 weeks after I stopped taking it. Sigh.

Still. Whatever. I agree with the article - I think, all in all, that removing that terrible fear of pregnancy is what led to feminism and women's rights and a whole lot more good stuff that I believe in absolutely and am very, very glad for. So go pill. I like the idea that I have control of my own fertility and my own sex life.

Yeah, I went through that "it's rude/uncool/crazy/cockteasing to say no" phase but I don't blame the Pill for that, or certainly not completely. I blame a weird concatenation of circumstances and drugs and generational angst. I think it was a brief moment in history, one of those things that my "generation" (the mini generation who are sort of between the baby boomers and Gen X, or maybe we're the early Gen Xers, whatever) are the only people in history ever to really go through. The total free for all sex period: before AIDS & after contraception & at a time when the old laws just didn't seem to apply & so on. The people I know who feel that way are all within 4 years of my age - older and younger just didn't live through that kind of a time. Although some of the people I know now in their early 20s - not all of them, but some - sure seem to be going through a similar thing.

I love the Pill. I feel great on the Pill, better than I feel au naturel. It alleviates my cramps and makes my skin feel softer. With every other birth control method, I went into anxiety spins if my period was a day or two late, wondering whether it had failed. The pill takes all that guesswork out; things happen regularly, and if they don't, there's a reason.

I can't quite understand saying that the Pill affected the decision to sleep or not sleep with anyone. No one makes that decision but me, Pill or no Pill. I don't think it has impacted my decisions about whom to sleep with at all. Now, my immature mind and confidence issues certainly did, in my 20s, but I certainly can't blame an inert birth control method for making my decisions. My brain made the decisions.

I have also read accounts of times and places during the early days of the sexual revolution when women felt that they didn't have the power to resist unwanted sex, because the Pill had supposedly liberated everyone from fear of pregnancy. That must have been a pain in the ass. But the whole idea is based on an incorrect assumption: the assumption that fear of pregnancy is the only or the main reason a woman might not want to have sex with a particular person at a particular time.

The fact is that there are a lot of reasons beyond preventing pregnancy for choosing to have or not have sex, and the Pill hasn't changed the other reasons very much. If anything, the lack of a reliable, private, and convenient method of birth control prior to the existence of the Pill may have set women up to fail in this area - the cumulative effect of generations of women using fear of pregnancy as the first and most strongly stated reason not to have sex may have prevented them from developing the training and personal skills to think about and state more strongly their other, equally valid reasons for wanting to decline sex or be selective about their partners. That fear of pregnancy, in other words, prevented women from exploring their own decisions about sex from an emotional health standpoint and from developing criteria for individual choice and the assertiveness skills to manage a sex life -- something men's cultural training did encourage them to do. So in that sense, the Pill definitely was a true liberation, allowing women to discover and develop skills in managing other important aspects of managing our sexuality, aspects which had remained hidden while the fear of unwanted motherhood dominated women's thinking.

I loved the pill when I was on it. I went on and off it as lovers came and went with no problems.

I do remember trying one brand in college that made me suicidally depressed. My ob/gym told me to wait it out 3 months. I told her I wouldn't be here in 3 months. She thought I was being a drama queen, but in a lifetime of significant depressions I've never experienced one that violently destructive.

The next one I tried worked fine. A couple years ago my HMO switched me to a generic version and it didn't work as well, though they swore it was identical. Spotting, moody. Bleh. I went off the pill and haven't bothered to go back on.

I did go in last year to get the no-period kind, but they weren't receptive and pushed me really hard to get a hormone IUD. After researching I decided I wasn't up for it.

The only downside to the no-period kind of birth control pill is that I can easily imagine a world wherein young women feel like they HAVE to be on it, because periods are just icky. Which they are. But that's the way of the species, and you shouldn't feel pressured to alter your hormones/ body chemistry just because of it. I hope this mindset doesn't come to pass, but it's actually hard for me to imagine it not happening, especially in high school and early college, when you're so insecure about being a woman.

I should add another reason I love the Pill: it significantly reduces the risk of contracting uterine and ovarian cancers, which struck my grandmother, resulting in a complete hysterectomy, and killed my aunt at age 48.

I've never taken any form of hormonal birth control.

essexjan, I remember reading similar stories to yours -- about the unbelievable pressure women faced in the "sexual revolution" and how their range of choices hadn't expanded, because now rather than having to say "no" they had to say "yes" -- and that was the moment I suddenly understood the early(ish) feminist argument that most sex is rape, because so much of it was so strongly coerced.

I think essexjan and myself must be about the same age; I had the same experience of the social conditions back in the 70s.

I can't quite understand saying that the Pill affected the decision to sleep or not sleep with anyone. No one makes that decision but me, Pill or no Pill. I don't think it has impacted my decisions about whom to sleep with at all. Now, my immature mind and confidence issues certainly did, in my 20s, but I certainly can't blame an inert birth control method for making my decisions. My brain made the decisions.

For me it removed one very good reason not to and allowed me more easily to be manipulated. I had such cripplingly low self-worth that I didn't even know I could say no. If I hadn't been on the pill the fear of pregnancy would, I suspect, have given me an excuse to leave rather than believe I had no option but to sleep with some guy because he bought me a beer.

Ditto to Gaspode. I've been on the pill a good six years ago and it's been amazing. It took me a while to find the right one (tricyclics made me crazy and a few others did weird stuff to my face), and I've found that I can't use generics or I'm nauseous all the time. I'm on Seasonale so I have no periods (or a period every three months, or, more honestly, whenever I decide I want to have a period) and that's also amazing. Without it, about every three months I have periods that have me curled on the floor in a ball of pain; with it, a smudge of blood.

I went off it for three months about nine months ago. My skin promptly turned into a huge mass of deep, cystic pimples.

I love the pill. I honestly can't imagine going off it again unless I'm trying to get pregnant. It makes my life so much better.

I was on the pill on and off from when I was fifteen until I was about 25, at which point I became concerned about the long term effects, what with me being a smoker and all. I changed to the ring. It isn't necessarily much safer than the pill for smokers over 30 (I may break down and get a hormonal IUD then), but I find it lacks everything I hated about the pill- the bloat, mood swings, and my absolute inability to remember to take them at the same time every day. Some people have issues with putting it in and taking it out, but I'm comfortable enough with myself not to mind. It did take a couple cycles to be able to pop the thing in and out easily without having to contort myself to remove it or constantly pop into the ladies room at work to shove it back into place.

I don't really think I've expierenced the issue others have mentioned about not having an excuse to say no to sex, but then, I'm 28, and AIDS has been an openly discussed topic for as long as I've been having sex, so that's always there.

I have fibroids, and hormonal BC keeps those in check, as well as giving me a lighter flow, which keeps my anemia under control. I know plenty of women who hate it, but for me life is better with it than without. I used to take off school when I got my period since the cramping was so intense I could barely walk without holding the wall for support, and I tended to get dizzy frequently. Now, I don't worry about it.

So in that sense, the Pill definitely was a true liberation, allowing women to discover and develop skills in managing other important aspects of managing our sexuality, aspects which had remained hidden while the fear of unwanted motherhood dominated women's thinking.

Yes, now, for the most part. But it seems like there were definitely some growing pains, and I'm hugely sympathetic to the argument that giving people "choices" while at the same time telling them that their opinions and needs don't really matter sets people up for failure, at least short term. And I think it's reasonably important to keep that in mind when discussing gender issues.

Not that you weren't, Miko, it's just something I see coming up a lot in various "But women like to do [insert traditional feminine thing that just happens to hugely benefit men here]!" discussions. Well, yeah, if you create all sorts of societal pressure that makes it really hard to make an alternate choice, then a lot of women are going to choose, for their own sanity, to go with the flow. That doesn't really make it a free choice; it just means women are choosing to make the best of a crappy situation in whatever way they can.

giving people "choices" while at the same time telling them that their opinions and needs don't really matter sets people up for failure

I guess I don't think it's the availability of a new choice that sets them up for failure; it's that the social structures in excistence when the choice arrived were developed in a world with a dearth of choices, and were thus rendered inadequate by the possibilities presented in the new choice. When a women's only answer to 'c'mon, baby' was an easy " I can't, I might get pregnant," there was less need for women to develop and defend reasons other than pregnancy to resist sex. With pregnancy no longer on the table, women suddenly needed emotional 'muscles' that had atrophied or never been developed in the first place.

It's not so much that people told women directly that their wants and needs about sex didn't matter; it's just that people had assumed, beforehand, that women mostly wanted and/or 'needed' sex but could not afford to indulge because they were afraid of pregnancy. Even women assumed this, obviously; it was a deeply held cultural belief that had never been presented with serious challenge. The situation women must have been in around this time reminds me of that faced by people who have undergone only 'abstinence education' today - they've learned over and over how and why to say 'no,' but all that becomes useless the day they finally make a decision to say 'yes.' and they have absolutely no education about what to do then. A simple 'No, I might get pregnant' must have been a lot easier to handle than developing the experience and self-knowledge required to be able to say things like 'yes, sometimes, under the following conditions, unless X, except Y, this behavior OK, that behavior not OK, yes to you and you, and no to you amd you, at least for now.' Boundaries don't get developed without exercising and practicing with them, and the lack of birth control prevented people being able to develop their own, individual boundaires with which they were comfortable.

Definitely there were growing pains, as we needed to respond to the new choices with new sets of cultural agreements, which, in many cases, are still being made. The culture had to catch up to the technological change, which demanded new moral thinking - as all technological changes that meddle in areas of life, death, and health do. It's not so different to the changing attitudes we have about euthanasia or in vitro or cochlear implants or whatever. A new choice arrives, and we have to work things out in new ways. In the end, I certainly believe women are stronger for the culture's development, largely though feminism, of ideas about taking charge of your own sexual life.

Maybe we needed something like the pill in order for women to even become aware of what their sexual"wants and needs" might be, and what the role of solely recreational sex in a healthy and happy life might look like, beyond simply needing not to get pregnant. The Pill's drastic reduction of the possibility of pregnancy required a redefinition of female sexuality that was no longer based on simple avoidance of bad consquences like getting pregnant (or 'ruined'). Instead, it created the opportunity for women to begin looking at sexuality as a phenomenon not necessarily connected to procreation, and gave them a chance to find out that they had wants and needs other than wanting babies or not wanting babies. What I can imagine of a world in which birth control had not advanced beyond 1950s technology makes me fervently grateful that's not the world we inherited.

Agreed.

blame a weird concatenation of circumstances and drugs and generational angst. I think it was a brief moment in history, one of those things that my "generation" (the mini generation who are sort of between the baby boomers and Gen X, or maybe we're the early Gen Xers, whatever) are the only people in history ever to really go through. The total free for all sex period: before AIDS & after contraception & at a time when the old laws just didn't seem to apply & so on.

oh my god, exactly what mgl said. were we switched at birth or something? ::wonders::

count me in the camp also with Miko; for me the benefits of being on OCs *vastly* outweigh any negatives. in fact, for me, there are no negatives. I've been off and on OC for well over 20 years now, without a day's worth of side effects. I even tend to prefer the more 'old-fashioned' higher-dose brands, as the minipill and its ilk allow breakthrough bleeding.

I think the statement that titles this thread is merely another example of blanket generalisations that aren't really valid or applicable to a significant proportion.

I'm so glad matildaben spoke up. I'm happy to know I'm not alone.

The title of the thread is taken from The Times article, LFR.

Okay, first of all I have to say that I'm so delighted that this onversation can exist happily without devolving into "ew! gross" childishness. I love you all.

And essexjan isn't the first person I've heard make these critiques of The Pill. And it doesn't suit everyone. But knowing that my chances of getting pregnant are so slim while I'm on it that it made me able to enjoy sex without fear of getting pregnant.

And I think that teenage sex education should be more about how to have healthy, enjoyable, wanted sex than pressure to avoid sex at all costs. I think knowing how to know that you want to say no should be taught just as strongly to girls as how to tell if she's not really saying yes should be taught to boys.