Monday, March 19, 2012

Attention All Penises

A couple using no birth control has an 85 percent chance of becoming pregnant in one year. The Agriculture Department estimates that on average, middle-income couples spend around $12,500 per year per child.
Famous statue showing a penis
To my female readers, this post is not exactly for you except if your significant penis, err other, is one of those dittoheads who believe the consequences of having sex fall solely and squarely on the shoulders and in the uterus of a woman. Hopefully you can pick up a tip or two to better train that penis, err, person.

To my male readers who recognize that family planning is a basic and necessary part of 21st century life, and who support their women, and who believe insurance companies must not discriminate when it comes to women's health care, then I salute you and apologize in advance for any squirming you experience reading this post.

To the rest of you penises: it is proven fact that men's sex drive is far stronger than women's. In my own experience, women most actively seek a sexual partner when they are ready for motherhood.  Women tend to evaluate the men in their life by this criteria: will they make good fathers, good helpers, good providers?  Let's just say that men think about and want to have sexual intercourse far more often and over many more years than women do.

Sperm flow in the million
Here's one explanation. Men can produce millions of sperm cells every month.  A woman of childbearing age produces maybe an egg or two a month.  Right there you have a biological reason for the disparity between a male's and female's sex drive.

There's also a social explanation.  Men seem to have a compelling need to be seen as virile.  Women, on the other hand, have no compulsion to prove they are the flip side of virile.  I can find no equivalent of virility as it relates to women, except for the notion of fertility.  Women don't have to prove fertility, it is assumed.  Men are expected to exude testosterone among their friends and associates in order to confirm and solidify their status as men.

So here we come to the bottom line.  For those penises who believe that it should fall to the woman to regulate her own menses and be solely responsible for her own possible pregnancies, think about this.  If a woman deserves no assistance for planning her pregnancies, then a woman has every right to refuse to participate in coitus. And I'm willing to bet that has a greater impact on men than women.

Missionary style, doggie style, any number of Kama Sutra styles… basically any style that places a dribbling-with-semen penis in proximity to a moist, fertile vagina should be avoided by the woman at all costs unless she is seeking motherhood.  But women and especially men still end up having sex in the absence of a desire to procreate.  So, what are a woman's choices in a world without family planning?  Take the Santorum-sanctioned one-man and one-woman marriage, for example.  Does a woman have a right within such a union to say 'NO' night after night, month after month?  If not, isn't that woman really just a sex slave to her husband's desires?

Heterosexual men, are you ready for a life of sitting in your computer chairs, typing with one hand?  Or being shut down by your wives or girlfriends night after night?  All I'm saying is, think about it.  Unfortunately, being gay is not a choice so you're kind of stuck.

And women, unless you really want a life dictated and dominated by men's spermy urges, it is time to take a stand against the troglodytes who now insist on making it difficult or impossible for you to be in charge of your own reproductive system.  How else to make that statement that we, as women, will not go back to the days before Roe v. Wade, before contraception, than to write it plainly and simply?
It's up to us, sisters.