minoanmiss (
minoanmiss) wrote in
agonyaunt2022-06-01 12:52 pm
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How To Do It: Swearing off PIV for awhile due to politics
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My husband and I currently live in a relatively rural part of the Deep South in a state with a trigger law that will basically ban abortion entirely if Roe v. Wade is overturned. I have a medical issue that means I can’t take hormonal birth control, and we’re having a really hard time finding doctors who will do sterilization surgery for me or a vasectomy for him (we’re both childfree and in our mid-20s). We are certain we do not want any children. We live several hours from the nearest Planned Parenthood and only have one car that we need to share. Our goal is to move away (hopefully to New England where we have some friends) when we can, but we don’t make a lot of money, and saving for a big move will take time.
Our plan is to basically just stop having any penetrative sex/do anything that could result in pregnancy. I’m just not comfortable with the risk, and condoms are only 85% effective in real life without a backup. Could you give us some advice on ways to have satisfying sexual experiences without PIV sex? We’re relatively young, were both raised in purity culture, and feel a little out of our depth here with the exploration.
—Stuck in the South
Currently, Roe v. Wade has not yet been overturned. The situation does look pretty grim though, so let’s go ahead and talk about your options.
You said that you live several hours from the nearest Planned Parenthood. I’m still wondering whether they would be willing to give you or your husband a sterilization procedure. It’s worth calling to ask—if you haven’t yet—and considering how to make it happen. If they’re willing, and you’re able to figure out how to get there without jeopardizing your jobs or financial situation, that would help take a huge load of worry off of y’all’s shoulders.
Before you take penis-in-vagina activity off the table entirely, you might consider condoms (which are, yes, according to Planned Parenthood only effective 85% of the time) plus the pullout method—where your partner pulls out of your vagina long before he ejaculates. This does rely on your partner knowing when he’s close to orgasm with enough time to remove his—condom sheathed!—penis from the vicinity of your uterus.
One thing that might help is to define satisfying sex for the two of you. Dr. Ian Kerner’s So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex is a great tool for thinking through the sex you have and fostering the qualities you value. The book has a whole chapter on outercourse, which is the term for all the rest of sex outside of PIV, that might give you some ideas. You also might give Barbara Carrellas’s Urban Tantra a read for her perspective on full-body sex, and a considerable amount of suggestions for how to touch each other.
Oral sex can be a great way to give each other orgasms, as can digital sex—also known as sex with fingers and hands. Take your time, and engage your sense of play. What feels like it might be fun to do? Will tickling his shaft with the backs of your fingernails tickle or turn him on? How about him incorporating his nose into cunnilingus? Would it be too silly? Does finding out sound exciting? Take note of what you each like, and continue to try new things. One important warning while you experiment; do not blow air into your vaginal canal.
You might explore areas you don’t immediately think of, too. Grinding against a thigh, or having an erection thrust against the back of your knee can be an experience. Get weird and laugh about it together.
Intimacy is another important factor in satisfaction, and while you’ll likely get some from non-penetrative sex, take care to spend time engaging in other forms of physical intimacy like cuddling, massaging, gently scratching, or anything else that works for the two of you. Good luck.
My husband and I currently live in a relatively rural part of the Deep South in a state with a trigger law that will basically ban abortion entirely if Roe v. Wade is overturned. I have a medical issue that means I can’t take hormonal birth control, and we’re having a really hard time finding doctors who will do sterilization surgery for me or a vasectomy for him (we’re both childfree and in our mid-20s). We are certain we do not want any children. We live several hours from the nearest Planned Parenthood and only have one car that we need to share. Our goal is to move away (hopefully to New England where we have some friends) when we can, but we don’t make a lot of money, and saving for a big move will take time.
Our plan is to basically just stop having any penetrative sex/do anything that could result in pregnancy. I’m just not comfortable with the risk, and condoms are only 85% effective in real life without a backup. Could you give us some advice on ways to have satisfying sexual experiences without PIV sex? We’re relatively young, were both raised in purity culture, and feel a little out of our depth here with the exploration.
—Stuck in the South
Currently, Roe v. Wade has not yet been overturned. The situation does look pretty grim though, so let’s go ahead and talk about your options.
You said that you live several hours from the nearest Planned Parenthood. I’m still wondering whether they would be willing to give you or your husband a sterilization procedure. It’s worth calling to ask—if you haven’t yet—and considering how to make it happen. If they’re willing, and you’re able to figure out how to get there without jeopardizing your jobs or financial situation, that would help take a huge load of worry off of y’all’s shoulders.
Before you take penis-in-vagina activity off the table entirely, you might consider condoms (which are, yes, according to Planned Parenthood only effective 85% of the time) plus the pullout method—where your partner pulls out of your vagina long before he ejaculates. This does rely on your partner knowing when he’s close to orgasm with enough time to remove his—condom sheathed!—penis from the vicinity of your uterus.
One thing that might help is to define satisfying sex for the two of you. Dr. Ian Kerner’s So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex is a great tool for thinking through the sex you have and fostering the qualities you value. The book has a whole chapter on outercourse, which is the term for all the rest of sex outside of PIV, that might give you some ideas. You also might give Barbara Carrellas’s Urban Tantra a read for her perspective on full-body sex, and a considerable amount of suggestions for how to touch each other.
Oral sex can be a great way to give each other orgasms, as can digital sex—also known as sex with fingers and hands. Take your time, and engage your sense of play. What feels like it might be fun to do? Will tickling his shaft with the backs of your fingernails tickle or turn him on? How about him incorporating his nose into cunnilingus? Would it be too silly? Does finding out sound exciting? Take note of what you each like, and continue to try new things. One important warning while you experiment; do not blow air into your vaginal canal.
You might explore areas you don’t immediately think of, too. Grinding against a thigh, or having an erection thrust against the back of your knee can be an experience. Get weird and laugh about it together.
Intimacy is another important factor in satisfaction, and while you’ll likely get some from non-penetrative sex, take care to spend time engaging in other forms of physical intimacy like cuddling, massaging, gently scratching, or anything else that works for the two of you. Good luck.
no subject
With a pill: are you taking it at about the same time every day, without missing a day? With a condom: Are you checking it's not expired? Do you know how to put it on correctly? Does it fit okay? Are you using lube? Are you putting it on before penetration and taking it off before losing an erection? Are you checking for breaking, slipping, or leaking? Are you using one every time? With pulling out: Has the person with sperm peed since their last ejacuation to reduce risk of sperm in precum? Are you pulling out well before ejaculation and ejaculating away from the other person's genitals? Are you doing it every time?
If yes, you're likely getting very close to the perfect use numbers.
And yeah, pulling out takes motivation and communication and body knowledge and judgment and trust and people need to be able to gauge whether they have those things to make it work. But honestly, I think society/the medical system devalues it because it doesn't trust people to use their bodies and their judgment (and there's no money in it for big pharma), the same way it devalues fertility awareness methods--you hear that same "you know what they call people who use x method" joke for the rhythm method all the time, right? But fertility tracking methods can be extremely effective for people who use them consistently, and fertility awareness methods and pulling out have a couple of other really important factors in common: they're free/cheap and available without medical intervention or equipment.
no subject
Point the first: the LW specifically mentioned that she and spouse both came out of "purity culture". Now, I am not an expert on all forms of purity culture, but one of the things I have noticed is that the forms of it that I have encountered in the wild seem to include the idea that, to put it really really mildly, cismen have little to no control over their sexuality. Like, we're talking about people who think that if a grown man sees, e.g., a woman in leggings, he's going to be uncontrollably aroused by that. So my point here is that depending on the particulars of LW and husband's form(s) of purity culture, getting a dude from that background to the point where he understands that he can control his body when he's actually at the point of orgasm, much less to the point where he can do it reliably, is... probably going to take a lot longer and a lot more work than doing things that involve sharing orgasms without PIV will, and in fact doing a lot more of those things will probably help with that. And your below comment seems to play well with that notion, in fact, so, yay.
Point the second, a lot of the aspects of "perfect use", whether it's using oral contraceptives or the rhythm method, involves people with occupiable uteruses having to... pretty much organize their lives around keeping that organ unoccupied. Whether it's making sure that you can always take the pill at the same point in the 24-hour-cycle, no matter what else is going on in your life or what your natural circadian rhythm is (not to mention that you have a whole entire rest of your endocrine system which can throw that all to hell no matter what you do), or having to fucking think about your uterus every goddamn day for the rhythm method, it's... making people with occupiable uteruses pay a lot of damn attention to the fact that they have occupiable uteruses and really, there are a lot of us for whom that is... varying degrees of very not okay. So some of us "devalue" that method because we feel devalued as people by having to expend constant effort on not reproducing that people who never had an occupiable uterus don't have to. And also the fact that no matter how much time and attention you spend on tracking your menstrual cycle (that you could have been using for literally anything else), that effort can all be undone by a person with a penis who ejaculates inside you, whether or not you had any say in whether that penis was inside you, at the wrong time.
no subject
And yeah, birth control in general puts a disproportionate amount of work/expense/time commitment/mental capacity/scheduling/pain/side effects on people who can get pregnant. And society doesn't support people with sperm to take up a proportionate amount of responsibility nearly enough. And (possibly because of that) lots of people with sperm, let's be realistic, mostly cis men, are not reliable puller-outers, and are not incentivised to be good at it (because they are not the ones who are going to get pregnant, because they have insufficient empathy for what that means for their partners, because they are used to their pleasure being more important than consequences, whatever). We can totally talk about those things. But "lol what do you call people who use the pull our method? parents!" doesn't communicate any of those things, it just shames people who use the method and takes away people's knowledge of an option that may not be the best for everyone but is often one of the only options left where options are limited.
no subject
no subject
I'd still recommend that people who absolutely positively don't want children (at this time or at all) use other forms of birth control if possible. But if it's not possible, NFP and pulling out work better than doing nothing.
no subject