From birth, control
Weeks ago, I intended to write about gender dynamics — had even decided the title to be “The feminine expectancy”. This piece would spotlight the intense (and sometimes impossible) expectations for women, I thought; but like falling leaves from a tree, my thoughts didn’t land predictably. While I did draw from personal experience of womanhood, I further turned to other female voices: of friends, in books (e.g. Michelle Obama’s Becoming, Chanel Miller’s Know My Name), in songs (e.g. Taylor Swift’s “The Man”, Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”), from documentaries (e.g. Audrie & Daisy, Hot Girls Wanted), and from current-day events (e.g. victim testimonies during the Maxwell sex trafficking trial). They illuminate the immense strength of women to break down barriers within our sexist society.
How could I blog about female leadership, female hormones + biology, and female beauty standards as standalone topics? I couldn’t really without also addressing male counterparts who — in many situations — literally counter women with expectations/thoughts and physical actions. So I refocused my writing to sexism, sexual assault; and the more I thought about these the more I noticed them pervading everyday life. This is a clear instance of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, aka the “frequency illusion”, because these aggressions towards women aren’t nascent; I’d be ignorant to think they are. Reality check: they’ve been looming ever since we were born and this frustrating, uncomfortable acknowledgement is why I retitled the blog.
Trigger warning: rape, sexual assault, pornography, suicide
Birth Control
I should clarify that sexism — here, the unfair treatment towards women — exists even before a human baby’s born, and I’m not referring to women as childbearers (we have to accept that as a biological premise). This is about birth control options.
Of the eighteen listed on Planned Parenthood’s website, only two (and a half) contraceptive methods are male-leaning:
- Condom
- Vasectomy
- Pullout Method (assigned a half, per Episode 6 of Bridgerton)
And besides “Outercourse and Abstinence”, all the other options impose hormonal or otherwise physical changes in females. Condoms have been the oldest blocker to a sperm and egg uniting, but why do nearly all other contraceptives live in the woman’s body?
We turn to biology again for one key concession: male birth control must reign in millions of sperm created per day whereas female birth control tackles one to two eggs ovulated per month. Probability-wise, the latter’s more effective. But don’t let the numbers mislead that managing fewer gametes has lesser side effects. A 2020 bio-med journal publication concisely titled “Male Contraception” details how clinical trials have unlocked the potential for hormonal male birth control but some participants discontinued because of side effects; the most commonly reported were “weight gain, acne, slight suppression of serum high-density cholesterol, mood changes, and changes in libido.” So yes, altering male hormones has risks — but the most common are no different from what women using hormonal birth control also face.
That journal also cross-cited a study in which the majority of surveyed men “except [in] Edinburgh thought that the responsibility for contraception fell too much on women” and the majority was open to male hormonal alternatives. So ignoring Edinburgh (Scottish ladies, we stand with you!), we can see that more male birth control options aren’t a demand issue. They’re an availability issue and Big Pharma isn’t funding them.
Scanning a Wall Street Journal list of the 25 highest-paid S&P 500 execs in pharma, biotech, and life sciences, they appear to be — drumroll please… — 22 white men, 2 men of color, and 1 white woman (at least what I gauged from their corporate headshots). Isn’t it ironic: a majority of [surveyed] men do want more equal roles in contraception (per the earlier/hyperlinked studies) but the 96% male executives who could have authorized funding and have received up to $38M individual annual comp don’t. If asked, these company leads might support reproductive justice in theory; but the limited resources dedicated to male contraceptive development certainly don’t reflect so in reality.
I was surprised, then, to read a recent headline “‘Testicle Bath’ wins Dyson award as innovative birth control for men” and to learn Rebecca Weiss (a woman!) developed the winning concept (formally named COSO). Her motivation very much builds upon the prior paragraphs — she had a cancer diagnosis related to her birth control pill and set to develop a male alternative once realizing the limited current options. Her winning design was “an ultrasound-based, reversible and hormone-free… device for home use that temporar[ily] modifies spermatogenesis.” So a few minutes of use/testicle-dipping could “de-activate” a man’s sperm for weeks without the usual side effects of changing hormones; but as promising as this may sound, I wouldn’t expect that these little “testicle baths” land on consumer shelves anytime soon.
Why? Because Rebecca Weiss/COSO gained international design recognition but earned less than $40k from the James Dyson Award. Though the average consumer would consider that significant $$, clinical trials and pharmaceutical giants would “crush it like a cockroach” (to loosely quote a common Shark Tank phrase). However, if a step towards reproductive justice is like a vilified pest, then we must also acknowledge that it’s particularly resilient (e.g. cockroaches can live one week without its head, one month without food). I challenge myself (and as many others) to keep challenging, questioning what about our lives is ingrained as “the norm” but rooted in sexism. This way, I don’t read an Onion article (i.e. full-on satire) with three reactions to Rebecca’s invention, laugh at how the last quip is close to what I’ve heard real men say, and then proceed with life as if he didn’t just insinuate he wants to come (yes pun intended) with a high risk of causing pregnancy:
Okay, okay, enough writing on birth control for now (I know the conservative DJs — like the ones who banned Loretta Lynn’s song “The Pill” from the radio — would be relieved). My next topic might be a bit less prickly since, regardless of contraceptives, all earth organisms exist through some reproductive process. In the case of humans, I’m talking full-frontal sex.
Sex and Porn
During my first and only real date of the pandemic (as of my time of writing this), we talked about pornography. I brought up the topic not to be kinky (although the man overhearing us from the other half of the picnic table was 100% weirded out) but because it was a natural transition from our chat on favorite TV shows. This friend of a friend loved to watch Brooklyn Nine Nine. So did I. I loved the character Terry played by Terry Crews. So did he. I have fan-girled Terry Crews since seeing him in my favorite movie (White Chicks) and admire him for defying toxic masculinity over the years. My date was also familiar with Crews’s story: a former NFL player turned actor who’s been vocal about overcoming a porn addiction, building his relationship with his wife and children, and being groped by another man at a Hollywood party.
I then proceeded on that same date to share my own thoughts on porn: that no matter how many studies find that watching violent porn doesn’t cause sexual abuse — or playing violent video games doesn’t inspire real-world violence — I am adamant that it does; that it negatively alters the way men view women and vice versa. During a very recent radio interview, now-twenty-year-old Billie Eilish confirmed this via her own experience of starting to watch porn — especially BDSM — when she was eleven. Some of her thoughts included:
- “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn”
- “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to”
- “I’m so angry that porn is so loved, and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was okay”
Terry Crews said something similar about battling his addiction to porn that started at age twelve:
- “[Pornography] changes the way you think about people”
- “People become objects. People become body parts. They become things to be used, rather than people to be loved”
I didn’t have these exact quotes handy during that first-date convo, but I did add some more thoughts of my own:
The first-ever guy I called “boyfriend” asked me if I was comfortable with him watching porn (I was 23 at the time), and I had answered, “No.” My response didn’t matter though since he later decided that it was his personal decision to continue watching when I wasn’t there; he bet most guys I knew — he said, “Ask any of your male coworkers” — watch porn and likely have been watching since middle school. This was truly shocking to me, yet it also helped me understand — but not justify — why a male coworker had the audacity at a company holiday party that same year to say “spread your legs some more” as I was wearing a skirt, leaning over the pool table, and aiming my cue to win a game of 8 ball.
Even though age 23 was the first time I heard that watching porn was very common, I first encountered an online source for adult content by accident in elementary school. I had meant to type “Google.com” but had my finger on the keyboard’s letter “b” instead of “g”. Disturbed by the home page that popped on the computer screen, I quickly X’ed out; but quick-checking to validate my younger self’s memory, I see that the domain does still exist today. The second accidental encounter in elementary school was when I tried typing the abridged web address for Dick’s Sporting Goods to see their selection of swim goggles. I see that the sports retailer has since bought the domain for Dicks.com.
I recall two times I actually did click into sex videos after news headlines about:
- 1) some woman named “Kim Kardashian”. Why was everyone talking about her, and what made her so famous ?
- 2) a Duke freshman doubling as porn star to pay off her student tuition. Was her off-campus actress job really that controversial? Why were The View hosts questioning her so intensely?
Yes, YES I was incredibly naive at the time. But if the same girl whose mother scolded her (aka me) for sneak-watching The Simpsons as an inappropriate TV show for kids could curiously click into porn on her iPod touch, then unfortunately I can’t be so surprised that Billie, Terry, and so many other children (myself included) have seen porn at young ages.
To better understand the porn industry without having to watch its videos, I recently watched the Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted. The film is named after the Craigslist ad titles that a man uses to recruit young adults (often aged 18–20) to become amateur porn stars. Through the many on-screen interviews, I kept hearing a common theme that people who work in porn aren’t in it for the sex — or at least that’s what they soon realize after getting started. The key motivation is to earn more money than they could at a relatively lower-pay job, such as waiting tables at a local restaurant. Some of the girls mentioned that porn opened up exciting opportunities for them such as flying in a plane for the first time. Many did not tell their parents about their new job in Florida (where the documentary was largely filmed) for fear of the latter’s disapproval upon finding out (which did happen).
I’m not saying that I disapprove of sex workers (their bodies, their choice), but I do disapprove — absolutely detest — the industry that I learned about through this documentary and its follow-up docu-series. An industry that produces videos under categories like “Latina Abuse”, has legal “racial pay” so that the white woman who agrees to have on-screen sex with a black man gets a higher pay rate, and recruits young adults who describe their day as degrading after having a dick slapped around their face… THIS — sexism, racism, and otherwise human objectification — is what I personally cannot support; I feel nauseous, uneasy just writing about it.
The NSFW (…also not suitable for school, family dinners, first-dates (technically), or anywhere really) topics of porn and sexual violence are what enable young people to watch behind closed doors and think that it is okay when it really isn’t. Then some of these same young people grow up and don’t separate what they see from how they act in real life. Then in a vicious cycle, they continue the ongoing supply and demand for objectifying content. As an example, here are some real text messages while I was dating someone who also — when I asked him “Besides my body what do you like about me?” — earnestly but stupidly whispered in my ear, “Your hair”:
In the same Netflix docu-series, Hot Girls Wanted: Turned On, I remember one of the male porn stars chuckled and said something along the lines of “nobody grows up wanting to be a porn star” — he had wanted to be an astronaut. And that’s because we only learn what we are taught or are exposed to. If I were to give my younger self a pep talk, I’d emphasize that consensual sex is not bad but porn does not depict realistic consensual sex. The people (often men) recruiting girls who just turned 18 to the porn industry sell the idea that a body alone can generate money. But — as sappy as this may be — our body, brain, personality, and interests working together can generate money and much more. Consider that last sentence a modern spin on the oft-said “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” At the documentary’s conclusion, one girl featured quit after a few months to become a photographer, another after one month to work at a local restaurant located near her family and boyfriend.
Unwanted Advances and Sexual Assault
Perhaps the algorithm is picking up the headlines and documentaries I clicked into when preparing to write this blog, but every day feels like a new “scandal” where somebody — ranging from politician, investor, actor, athlete, teacher, schoolmate — has been accused of sexual assault, child pornography, and other related crimes. I am not trivializing the gravity of these suspected crimes by quoting scandal but rather am trying to highlight that national statistics devastatingly back the frequency they happen.
Reading through another blog “32 Shocking Sexual Assault Statistics for 2021”, the 13th listed is: “1 in 6 US women will be raped annually in the US ….and 1 in 33 American men has experienced an attempted/completed rape as a child or adult. This disturbing figure has been predicted to rise exponentially over the next three years”; another statistic is that a daily rate of ~70 women commit suicide after experiencing sexual violence. Quite bluntly, we need this madness to stop because behind every number are real lives and immeasurable trauma that gets passed generationally (think John Mayer’s “Daughters”).
I don’t want to write (what will take nearly infinitely more) paragraphs on specific sexual predators in this world — they don’t deserve the non-courtroom airtime — but I did want to emphasize that the victims who bravely come forward with their story and accusation need to be heard. As the statistics would imply, I do know of friends and immediate community members who’ve been raped both recently and years ago; and my solidarity will only ever be a morsel of the disgust and anger that they might have. Or, I can’t know the true numbness that they feel. For if somebody doesn’t immediately react to being violated is it still a violation? My answer is a resounding YES but this seems to be the underlying query of people who doubt Jane Doe’s or Johnny Appleseed’s timing once s/he’s mustered the courage to speak up.
Upon writing, I unearthed a personal memory I’d nearly forgotten but realize is an easy-to-describe thought process of someone in an uncomfortable physical situation —
Once in a hot yoga class, I was excited to have recently learnt headstands and practice these inversions in a studio. The male instructor walked over, stood against my inverted body, then placed his hands on my upper thighs when I was balancing perfectly fine without him. I remember feeling shocked then confused since looking around throughout the remainder of class he didn’t provide such hands-on adjustments to any other yogis on their mats. Being upside down and disoriented to my spatial surroundings was already a physically vulnerable position and I didn’t know how to handle the excess touching. After the class, I so wanted to say something but questioned if it was all in my head, if this was normal, if saying something would cause a scene. That day after class I buried that memory, compartmentalized into a “Not a Big Deal” box alongside other instances like catcalling, randos on public transit, and the viral remix of a news interview to “Hide yo kids, hide yo wife, and hide yo husband cuz they’re raping everyone out here” that normalized teens laughing, singing about the risk of rape. While I don’t speak from firsthand experience, I understand how such seemingly smaller aggressions might build up so that sexual assault victims don’t immediately voice their shock, their pain even if they greatly felt it at the time.
According to the Rape Victims Support Network, there are three broad phases of post-assault recovery: Reaction, Recoil, Reorganization. The first phase includes feeling many emotions and maybe even self-victim-blaming; the second phase is a suppression of those feelings which can lead to mood swings; the third and final phase is when the victim no longer feels defined by the assault and begins to regain a sense of control in life.
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For many years, minorities have fought and continue to fight for a sense of control, their own body, their own voice, their own life — women in the US, for example, can vote since 1919, open their own credit cards since 1974, and maintain job security throughout pregnancy since 1978. Cherry-picking just a few historical milestones in America, I know there are many more achieved and many more to achieve across societies worldwide. Maintaining control over our physical bodies is the one I most focused on in this blog since it’s one of the most fundamental yet longest ongoing battles to this day. I must remind myself that these fights aren’t happening more frequently; more that our collective voice is getting louder.
What feels like the first core of our battlecry is: You don’t touch me and I don’t touch you unless we both want to. On paper, it’s a simple, elementary concept; and in real life, it should be too.
Written in dedication to survivors of sexual assault and rape worldwide. In honor of Audrie and Daisy, two girls and strong voices in another documentary that urged me to write this blog, I’ve donated to SafeBAE (Safe. Before Anyone Else).
Resources for help:
