Need more context? See the original reading list post.
Loretta Lynn telling it like it is (recorded in 1972, released 1975)
First Things First…
Birthgap (Part 1) | A documentary that argues that fertility decline is due to a rise in childless women.
Jody Day, “The lost tribe of childless women” | TedX talk where Day claims that 80% of childless women are not childless by choice but by circumstance.
Random
The book title George couldn’t think of about peri/menopause with the sic non-binary author is What Fresh Hell Is This?
Right Marital Living (facsimile; as text here)
George’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | Of course, preventives to conception are always wrong. And there never yet was a preventive invented which is certain. Moreover, they are all forbidden by law… Most preventives are distinctly injurious to one or both parties at the time; many are said to injure the tissues of the woman later on. If used, they put no check upon passion; and they are, all of them, abominable and degrading.
QUOTE 2 | Nature has so made a woman that it takes her from half an hour to an hour after the entrance of the male organ, to come to her orgasm. This is Nature's indication that the man ought to wait for the woman, and not to hasten through the act, as is too frequently the case. A man who gets through in from three to ten minutes after entrance, not only misses the most intense form of pleasure, but also fails to satisfy his wife properly… Many a case of lifelong and hopeless invalidism in a wife is traceable to the husband's habit of hasty termination of the sexual act.
QUOTE 3 | Another objection which is sometimes raised to the spread of this knowledge is, that if young unmarried people get to know of the possibility of controlling the fecundating power, seductions, promiscuity and illicit unions of all sorts will increase. In reply, I would say that I find that the average libertine is unwilling to try this method, as he considers it "too high for his purpose." In fact, a man who practices this method and who teaches it to the woman (as he is apt to do, in order to increase his own pleasure) will not be a libertine; for the habit of aspiring to union with God (or with whatever else he recognizes as the Ultimate Force of the universe) during the sexual act, and of encouraging the woman to do so likewise, has the curious psychological effect of tending to make him too loyal to that one woman to want to break with her. For this method, while it always satisfies, never satiates a man; and it renders the relation a perpetual honeymoon.
Acton’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | In the marital relation, there are two physiological functions — the love function and the parental function. These two functions are not always exercised conjointly.
QUOTE 2 | For a wife to submit to genital union with her husband when she does not desire it, is to degrade herself so that she has no call to draw her garments aside from the harlot in the street. Indeed, the wife who allows her body to be used as a convenience for her husband has degraded herself below even the harlot. For the harlot leases her body for ten minutes or for two hours or for a night, and she is free to refuse embraces which displease her; but the wife leases her body for a lifetime, and she mistakenly imagines that she dare not refuse any embrace of her husband's, however repulsive to her finer sensibilities. And so, year by year, she coarsens and degrades the holy estate of matrimony.
QUOTE 3 | It is sometimes objected that it is unwise to spread among married people the knowledge which is set forth in the foregoing pages, as they would straightway cease to beget children, and so the human race would die out. This objection shows how little the differences in the mental attitude of men and of women toward the marriage relation are understood. The average woman longs, with all the intensity of her nature, to have a child or children by the man whom she loves, at some time in her life; but it is for her to choose the fitting time. A woman who is made pregnant against her will, naturally resents the outrage.
This is Your Brain on Birth Control (Sarah Hill)
George’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | The brain and the rest of the body are too flush with hormone receptors for the pill not to change women. And it’s not just the areas of the brain and body that are directly responsible for orchestrating your cycles and coordinating pregnancy. We’re talking about areas of the brain that are responsible for things like emotional processing, social interactions, attention, learning, memory, facial recognition, self-control, eating behavior, and language processing. (120, Chapter 4: Hormones on Replay)
QUOTE 2 | This information is worth knowing when it comes to the pill. You can use it to help make you into the version of yourself that you most want to be. (140, Chapter 6: Sex on Drugs)
QUOTE 3 | Most of the research I discuss in this book is focused exclusively on the experiences of heterosexual cisgender women, because they are typically the people who go on the birth control pill. Although some lesbian women, as well as transgendered women and men, go on the pill for reasons other than pregnancy prevention, research hasn’t quite caught up with this yet. If you are a reader who doesn’t happen to fall into the very narrow category of humans that researchers typically study when it comes to the pill, this doesn’t mean your experiences don’t matter. They do. (10-11, Introduction)
QUOTE from “Forever young? The ethics of ongoing puberty suppression for non-binary adults” in Journal of Medical Ethics. In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression (OPS) to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity. We argue that the aim of OPS is consistent with the proper goals of medicine to promote well-being, and therefore could ethically be offered to non-binary adults in principle.
Acton’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | Women's fertility is a cruel and uncaring force. It generally peaks in our early twenties (when most of us still don't have a clue what we're doing and feel like we have no business bringing life into the world) and falls off a cliff right around the time when we finally have our sh** together at thirty-five. And this can be a tricky thing to have to navigate in a world where the age of first marriage keeps getting pushed back… For the first time in history, there are now more women in their thirties having babies than there are women in their twenties or younger having babies. This is remarkable, and worth pausing to think about.
Although the trend of delaying motherhood until educational and career goals have been met has been hugely instrumental in women's success in the workplace, this has been less than amazing for women's fertility. When women delay childbearing, it comes at the risk of not being able to conceive once they're ready for children. And there is little doubt that the pill by changing the age at which women are marrying and having children — has played a key role in the increasing need for the use of reproductive technology in people's quest to become parents… As it goes with the pill, so it goes with IVF.
QUOTE from Marc Barnes, “Marriage is the form of Christian Politics” | Marriage leaps for virtue like a man leaping for a moving train. It takes two people, with their sin, vice, and striving for perfection and binds them together, saying, “You have, up to this point, sinned, and the world has gone on unperturbed; lied, and no one has been reduced to tears; amassed a thousand occasions of wrath, pride, and petty selfishness — and no one suffered for it. Now you will marry. Now all your hardness of heart will knock up against the heart of another; now that tone, the one you do not even realize you take, will ring in the ears of another. Now the demonic horns you grow in secret will poke and prod the one with whom you share bed and bathroom. You are married; you stand revealed, naked, utterly seen through after a few weeks’ honeymoon; your vices now intimately related to a flesh that feels them and a soul that suffers them. Every callous that crusts over your conscience has become so much roughness rubbing against the other — who will protest the fact!”
Marriage makes virtue possible by making it necessary… The married man is not virtuous because he would like to be but because he has freely chosen a situation in which the lack of virtue means — hell! Instant hell. Marriage is a deliberate entering into a state of existence whose continued life depends on continued love. As such, it is a sort of suicide pact: let us, you and I, enter into such and such a contract by which the happiness of each becomes utterly dependent on a gift that neither can assure will, in fact, keep coming — that is, love. Let us increase the likelihood of mutual destruction by an infinite degree. Let us make sin, which once meant nothing, mean hurt, and mean it right away. It is all well and good to preach the virtuous life, but preach the married life, and the necessity of the virtuous life will become as clear as a slap in the face.
QUOTE 2 | Being protected from pregnancy and having a fulfilling sex life should not be mutually exclusive.
"Make Sex Wild Again" from Feminism Against Progress, by Mary Harrington
Acton’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | We must heal our polluted erotic ecologies by rewilding sex. In the field of conservation, ‘rewilding’ refers to practices such as reintroducing apex predators or reducing intervention in a landscape, such that complex ecologies are able to re-emerge and find equilibrium again. In one famous example, reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the United States resulted, via a complex chain of inter-species interactions, in a river changing course.
Applying a similar mindset to our sexual ecologies means a similar willingness to make space for dangerous elements of the natural order. Specifically, we need to recognise that ‘risk-free’ heterosexual sex can only be had at the cost of reproduction. And eliminating that biological purpose takes much of the dark, dangerous and profoundly intimate joy out of sex.
QUOTE 2 | We must acknowledge that for all but the small minority of same-sex-attracted people, desire and reproduction can’t be disaggregated, any more than ‘self’ and ‘body’.
QUOTE 3 | And along with the pro-pleasure, pro-love case for rewilding sex is the pro-embodiment one. Rejecting birth control is the first and most radical step women can take, in healing the disconnect introduced by technology between us and our own bodies, in the name of freeing us from sex difference. As Abigail Favale notes, relying on cycle tracking to manage fertility increases women’s awareness of our fertility cycles, and with it attunement to our own bodies. In this sense of increasing our agency in terms of fertility awareness, and bringing women into harmony with our own embodied existence, rejecting the pill is not less but more empowering.
George’s quotes
QUOTE 1 | In the view of internet historian Katherine Dee, changing attitudes to the pill stand in for wider concerns about the sexual revolution. Many young women from across the political spectrum, she argues, internalised the contemporary ‘liberated’ approach to sex – but have, as Dee puts it, come to feel they were ‘duped’.
Increasingly, such women are blaming hormonal birth control for a slew of side effects. They’re looking for alternatives, too: videos with the #naturalbirthcontrol hashtag on TikTok have been viewed more than 30 million times.
QUOTE 2 | For in de-risking sex, this technology has made it ubiquitous, and in the process stripped desire of anticipation, excitement and mystery: emptied it of eroticism. In its place we’re offered an increasingly coarse, commodified and grotesque landscape of all-you-can-eat lust.
QUOTE 3 | We reactionary feminists must reject the totalitarian sexual–industrial complex. We can reclaim our sexual cycles, our capacity for eroticism, our attunement to our own bodies, and our right to refuse exploitative, loveless and degrading approaches. And in refusing this degraded parody of our most intimate embodied experiences, we can open ourselves to better ones.
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