{"id":19768,"date":"2020-08-14T09:24:19","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T03:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=19768"},"modified":"2020-08-18T13:11:51","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T07:41:51","slug":"i-may-have-called-you-baby-but-it-doesnt-mean-i-want-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/i-may-have-called-you-baby-but-it-doesnt-mean-i-want-one\/","title":{"rendered":"I May Have Called You Baby But It Doesn’t Mean I Want One!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a New York sitcom, I\u2019d never sit at the edge of my bed, head cupped in my hands, saying, \u201cI\u2019d like you to get tested for STIs,\u201d and hesitantly add, \u201cDid you do this on purpose?\u201d Kids, <\/span>Ted<\/a><\/span> actually met your mother because his condom broke during a one-night stand. On a tangential note, in a Delhi sitcom, I\u2019d probably give birth to triplets just as a seductress, who can probably make money off uploading eye makeup tutorials on YouTube, murders my husband.<\/span><\/p>\n

On a sultry night in July, my date and I looked into each other\u2019s eyes. \u201cAh,\u201d he fumbled, \u201cthis has never happened before!\u201d He gestured frantically towards the torn condom he was still wearing. \u201cWhat do we do now?\u201d It wasn\u2019t a question as much as commiseration. Obviously, I would take the emergency pill and still spend the week preceding my period stomping around my house, bugging my very patient flatmates, \u201cWhat if there\u2019s a bun in my oven?\u201d With the situation at hand, a part of my brain wondered if he\u2019d tampered with the condom, and another rummaged through the memory of an absurdly painful menstrual cycle when I previously took the emergency pill. As scared as I was, I was more grateful \u2013 it is a privilege to be able to walk to the nearest (or even farthest for that matter) pharmacy and ask the man at the counter for the 72-hour pill without<\/span> being murdered to preserve family honour<\/a><\/span>; nausea, bloating, dizziness, and bleeding are minor inconveniences in comparison. Despite being available over the counter, emergency contraception is not widely advertised or<\/span> stocked<\/a><\/span> because of government policies. These policies were further<\/span> tweaked in 2019<\/a><\/span> to mandate a doctor\u2019s prescription for the sale of birth control pills such as Saheli<\/i> and Apsara<\/i>, a step counter-intuitive to accessibility as well as de-stigmatisation of women-dealt birth control. It doesn\u2019t reassure one either that these pills are usually named in a manner that fuses agency with alarm \u2013 Unwanted 72<\/i>, iPill, Take Action<\/i> (steering clear of which Pregnon<\/i> evokes the figure of a bearded French musician nibbling on a baguette). <\/span><\/p>\n

But sometimes<\/span> Plan B<\/a><\/span> isn\u2019t too bad. Especially when you\u2019re spared Plan C \u2013 an unnecessarily bloody and painful abortion; unnecessarily bloody and painful because if scientists focussed on making it less so, we\u2019d have got there, but they\u2019d rather use money and resources to make an A.I.-backed <\/span>blowjob gadget<\/a><\/span>!\u00a0 Well, anyway, as a sexually active woman who doesn\u2019t want to get pregnant, I can still pop birth control pills, shove a hormone-secreting plastic ring up my vagina, cover my cervix with an unfashionable silicone cap, insert a copper-releasing device into my uterus, irreversibly tie my fallopian tubes, and so on and so forth, so what am I complaining about? Unsurprisingly, the Pill\u2019s conception is yoked to women\u2019s emancipation \u2013 it is after all a discreet tablet handing you control over your body. Its hormonal constitution when it was introduced in the market<\/span> exceeded by over five hundred percent<\/a><\/span> what is manufactured today. At the time, the Pill allowed women to finally dissociate sex from procreation, enter the workforce and gain economic independence, and explore personhood outside their<\/span> primary responsibility of home-making<\/a><\/span> as well as exponentially increased their\u00a0 susceptibility to severe medical conditions, including heart attack and stroke. Win some, lose some.<\/span><\/p>\n

We are told we pay a fair price for the freedom contraception affords us. Don\u2019t want to have kid after kid because you care about your career but don\u2019t know how to bring it up with your Anti-Choice cis male partner? Don\u2019t worry. Most birth control methods you can avail of will not impact him in the least!\u00a0 Some nights I worry that if<\/i>\u00a0 birth control for men is indeed released, clinical trials of which were<\/span> suspended<\/a><\/span> in 2016 as its side effects, incidentally <\/i>the same as what women have been dealing with for ages, were just not worth it<\/i>, it would be named Fuckboi<\/i>. At present, two birth control methods exist for men \u2013 condoms\u00a0 and vasectomy. However, because conception occurs in a woman\u2019s body, it is assumed to be her responsibility to prevent it when it is unwanted. <\/span><\/p>\n

Science and technology aren\u2019t outside the purview of hetero-patriarchy. As we grapple with a pandemic at a global scale, biases in medicine and healthcare have further come to the surface, particularly when we consider whose wellbeing is privileged and over that of whom, manifest in instances ranging from the US <\/span>monopolising<\/a><\/span> COVID-drug Remdesivir to the direness\u00a0<\/span>of how the response to COVID threatens <\/span>women\u2019s and girls\u2019 sexual and reproductive health and rights\u00a0<\/a><\/span>(SRHR) as well as the <\/span>health and economic security of LGBT people<\/a><\/span>, and revealing and making more profound\u00a0 inequalities of gender, class and caste, race and even that between the First and the Third World. As we think more than ever before about safety, we have an opportunity to look at it, in context of contraception, beyond preventing unwanted pregnancy and as affirming bodily agency and integrity. <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A sundry collection of birth control methods are available (some more readily than others) but isn\u2019t it odd that only condoms also protect against STIs? In fact, apart from being pretty ineffective at what it\u2019s supposed to do, spermicide may actually increase the risk of contracting such <\/span>infections<\/a><\/span>! The suffix -cide means \u2018killer of\u2019. Apart from being used in dull Geography lessons where we drew tables to compare manure and pesticide, -cide finds itself a part of rather ominous words such as genocide and infanticide. Spermicide certainly could have been named better, not only because it doesn\u2019t quite match up to the \u2018-cide\u2019 but also because it signifies violence, the intention to\u00a0 attack<\/i> and kill<\/i> rather than to prevent<\/i>. As mentioned earlier, science is by and for our world and is thus, not immune (even though it is held in high regard as an \u2018objective\u2019 and \u2018hard\u2019 institution) to its politics. Many a time, the militaristic attitudes of States are reflected in the language we use to describe what\/who we perceive as an outsider. I doubt Paracetamol would sell at all if it says, \u201cSit down and have a cup of tea with your flu before bidding it goodbye!\u201d but how might innovation alter if the discourse of medicine focused on healing<\/i> instead of <\/span>kitanu ka khaatma<\/i><\/a><\/span> (the <\/span>extermination of germs)?<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, from intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and abortion pills to HPV vaccines and PReP drugs, science has transformed the way we engage with the world and one another. My parents often dramatise the arduousness of earlier times. \u201cWhen I was young, I had to eat everything that was put on my plate!\u201d with an implied, \u201cLook at you, such a picky eater!\u201d, or even \u201cWhen I was pregnant with you, I had to wait two hours just to get through to Papa (who was at work in another state at the time) on call. Imagine if I’d suddenly gone into labour!\u201d Quite unlike the world they grew up in and knew, my world grew bigger and bigger with me. With the Internet, we could watch the sun set in a previously remote and unheard-of town, eavesdrop on conversations between whales, find validation for who we were, especially if we didn\u2019t quite fit in in \u2018real\u2019 life, and build community with anyone anywhere in a click, regardless of time and distance.<\/span> Despite all this, science has not expanded our contraceptive choices enough. A cursory Google search for upcoming innovations in contraception yields woefully disappointing results that I am convinced only cis male authors can call\u00a0 \u2018exciting\u2019 in headlines. A hormone-releasing implanted microchip, intrauterine devices that may be \u201c<\/span>better tolerated<\/a><\/span>\u201d and creams may prevent pregnancy but don\u2019t help in building a sustainable and sexuality affirming environment for people of all sexual and gender identities and sexualities. Options like the male birth control pill, reversible inhibition of sperm under guidance (RISUG) or a <\/span>gel<\/a><\/span> that doesn\u2019t completely mess up one\u2019s hormones neither receive adequate <\/span>funding or attention\u00a0<\/a><\/span>nor appear urgent in technological imagination. As we try to understand and recalibrate our patriarchally organised world, we need to find better and safer ways in which we can delight in sexual expression without fearing the possible unwanted consequences: a pregnancy or STIs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Cover Image: Unsplash<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some nights I worry that if birth control for men is indeed released, clinical trials of which were suspended in 2016 as its side effects, incidentally the same as what women have been dealing with for ages, were just not worth it, it would be named Fuckboi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":19796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2308,8],"tags":[2328,1371,49,97,173,2315,2326,2309,1001,2187,123,2327,2324,2310,408,2325,441],"class_list":{"0":"post-19768","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-categories","8":"category-innovations-and-sexuality","9":"category-voices","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-birth-control","12":"tag-condoms","13":"tag-consent","14":"tag-contraception","15":"tag-covid","16":"tag-emergency-pill","17":"tag-innovations-and-sexuality","18":"tag-lgbtqia","19":"tag-safe-sex","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-sexual-and-reproductive-healthcare-and-rights","22":"tag-sexually-transmitted-infections","23":"tag-sisa-spaces","24":"tag-srhr","25":"tag-sti","26":"tag-technology"},"menu_order":299,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19768"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19840,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19768\/revisions\/19840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}