I’ve never had a good reaction to hormonal birth control, either the pill or the coil, so stopped using them. When I got together with my boyfriend the year before last I agreed to go back on the pill because he hates condoms and said it’s important for his masculinity/virility that he finish inside me. He was aware of my feelings and previous experiences with the pill but I was glad to do it for him because it seemed so important to him. A year and a half later I was fed up with the weight gain and the abnormal ‘periods’ that didn’t feel like my body. I told him I was coming off the pill for a bit. He was very disappointed but grudgingly accepted. I immediately felt physically better, lighter, and my periods returned to how I felt they should be, I felt like my body was my own again.
We started using condoms, but our sex life seriously declined. Instead he would constantly ask for oral sex, and seemed to think that random blowjobs in the living room was exactly the same experience for me as intimate sex. I told him that it felt like he didn’t want to have sex with me anymore and he just shut the conversation down. I told him how much happier I was not being on the pill, how much healthier I felt and that as a woman over 35 it wasn’t necessarily good for my blood pressure anyway. I asked him if he’d consider a vasectomy given that we don’t want children and condoms are such an issue for him (his issue, not mine). He reacted incredibly negatively, saying it was a totally different thing, surgery, they always go wrong and he wouldn’t risk that. When probed further he also said it would make him feel less virile.
This is a man who is otherwise loving and kind. But it’s so ingrained in his head that it’s normal for the woman to be the one to have to potentially risk her health, to do something to her body she doesn’t want, and the idea that the man should have to do so is laughable. Even though it’s entirely for his pleasure when the condom thing is his issue. I know the pill is a godsend for many women for many different reasons, but the idea that all women therefore should be fine with it, even when it makes them ill, just to please a man, is sickening. The idea that he would rather I do something every single day that I hate, that disconnects me from my body, so that he doesn’t have to wear a condom, makes me want to cry. He doesn’t want kids and doesn’t want condoms, but it’s apparently unthinkable that he’d have a small one off procedure and instead the burden is entirely on me. And if I won’t oblige then we just don’t have penetrative sex and I get shamed for not wanting to replace that with constant oral sex.
Makes me sad.