Apparently, using contraceptives turns couples into The Lockhorns. Or so this post from CL on Complementarian Loners suggests:
Contraception reduces sex to recreation – ‘fun’ without the deep joy that a mindfully lived life can bring – and thus this percolates through the relationship as a whole. All those little jabs at each other, the passive-aggressive ways of letting the other know that you are hurting, and the hiding are part of this mentality. We’ve all done it, just as most of us have contracepted.
I’m sure many people will think this a stretch, but when we withhold something as central as our fertility from each other, what else do we withhold? Self-censored thought is like contraceptive sex. Married couples are often reluctant to be completely honest with each other and are apt to become defensive with each other, ending up – or even starting out – as adversaries rather than team mates. Since the so-called sexual revolution (think about that term for a moment), women and men have not needed each other the way they used to. Separating sexual intercourse from procreation has also separated us from each other – and from our essential selves – in a real way.
Yeah, it’s probably better for married couples to eschew contraception entirely and have eight gazillion children. And then get a reality show.
I know I shouldn’t be trying to make sense of this, but I really can’t make sense of this. Here’s a comment from CL expanding on her sex-as-recreation thing:
So which is it, selfish pleasure or mutual masturbation? And how is mutual masturbation not fun? Nor unifying for that matter, considering that literal mutual masturbation can sometimes be a good deal more intimate than the ol’ PIV?
@nerdypants, I likewise cannot for the life of me understand the logic of NFP being legit when other birth control isn’t. and this is after being raised by conservative catholics and going to catholic school for 13 yrs. like, at least the quiverfull people are consistent. how is abstaining at your fertilest times not just as unnatural or un-intimate or whatever the fuck as any other method?
seriously, say you’re ovulating- now having sex with a condom is /less/ intimate than turning your lover away because NFP? that seems subjective at best. and if the point is to help god out if he needs to override your method by picking something easy to fuck up, that’s pretty patronizing to god.
I was raised in the Catholic Church, went to Catholic grade school, the whole bit, and I’m so glad I broke away from all that guilt-ridden bullshit when I was 18. It was so freeing to me to realize that MY BODY BELONGS TO ME, I am free to love who I love, and there isn’t some celestial pervert spying on me and judging me all the time. You know, the Church could learn a few things by listening to women. Like how frightening sex becomes when you know it could lead to another child you can’t afford to support or a disease that there’s no cure for (but you can’t refuse your husband). Lots of sensible Catholics just ignore the no-contraception rule because they understand what real life–especially the real life of women–is like.
I don’t mean any offense to religious people or Catholics. I do mean offense to the Catholic Church which perpetuates poverty, disease, and suffering all over the world.
I do wonder if any of the “the best intercourse is potentially procreative” folks remember the pre-Pill trope: “Not tonight dear; I have a headache.” Do they really think it was just squeamishness about sex that “caused” all those headaches? Or maybe just a lack of desire to have YET ANOTHER BABY?
How unitive and “open to life” is exhaustion?
Okay good, so it’s not just me. I mean, I know some people are just batty, but usually people have a reason for their strange beliefs, no matter how odd they seem at first. It’s not real clear to me what the reason for NFP is, but it seems the reasons they give are not the real reasons.
Right. And, to my mind at least, It also suggests that this person actually realises on some level that their God isn’t really the one who controls when they get pregnant.
Of course, there’s little-to-no mention of us women who took hormonal birth control in order to REMAIN fertile, due to endometriosis, PCOS, etc. And funny enough, since it’s covered under the principle of “double effect,” even the Vatican can’t whine (too much). Thank you for that at least, Thomas Aquinas!
But according to this weird-ass theory concocted by celibate men, sex with my husband was somehow supposed to “feel differently” when we weren’t trying to make a baby. I wonder how they manage to gauge this. Do they take polls?
“Somehow it takes all the fun out of it” sounds like it’s coming from a woman with a thing for being pregnant, or who feels a thrill about the possibility. Which is fine FOR HER but not as an imposition on those who don’t share those feelings. Which may, y’know, include the man she’s having sex with, if he doesn’t want to be a father.
Again, it’s funny how the idea of expressing love through sex, through giving and receiving pleasure with the other person, is apparently impossible without BAYBEEEZ as a possible outcome. It’s so much the opposite of my thinking, I can’t even get my head round it.
“It doesn’t require any respect for fertility since fertility is subverted.”
What was that line from Cold Comfort Farm? “Mother Nature is all good and well, but you mustn’t let her make a mess of things.” Or something close.
I’d say about 99 percent of the medical profession is all about subverting nature. Thank god.
Basically, the idea (afaict, actual Catholics feel free to correct me) is that it needs to have the “form” of a procreative act, i.e., an uncovered penis ejaculating in a vagina that has not been made infertile by any artificial means. That’s why elderly couples and infertile couples can have sex, but gay men can’t.
…yes, it’s odd.
I reckon the thought process was this:
1. Person has truly gorgeous sex due to added thrill because they were trying for a baby.
2. All other sex they’ve had has been disappointing in comparison.
But then they leap the track of logic to:
3. Therefore for everyone, the only great sex is when not using contraceptive, and everyone must therefore be persuaded/shamed/forced to only have sex that way
I love Cold Comfort Farm. Never mind Gandalf, Amos Starkadder was Ian McKellen’s finest moment. 🙂
“Well I’ll tell ye, there’ll be no butter in Hell!”
This is a little evil, but maybe that’s the point. I’m reading through CL’s blog, and I found this quote from her:
It sounds to me like she’s saying that contraception, by allowing people to have sex without major risk of pregnancy, it allows people to have sex in circumstances that don’t meet her ideal. She names it as “commitment”, but obviously it entails a lot more in being willing to risk pregnancy, even within a committed Catholic marriage.
I wonder if this ideal is some kind of romanticised notion for her, that she wants a husband that is explicitly willing to cover her even if she falls accidentally pregnant, to the extent that he’ll demonstrate it by willingly engaging in the risky behaviour with her? Maybe it’s a proxy for his willingness to be there for her in other ways? I can sympathise with that, I’d want to know that my partner would back me up if I accidentally fell pregnant/ill/etc. as well. Though asking him to prove it by playing Russian Roulette with my ovaries each month seems a little insecure.
And the whole risk of pregnancy = commitment is such a fantasy, since women being abandoned by men – even, shock horror, their husbands – the minute they become pregnant is hardly unknown from all those centuries of “commitment” and male ownership of women.
So I don’t want babbies, ever, I’d make a terrible father, I still want to have sex though. CONSERVATIVES Y U NO CONSIDER PEOPLE OUTSIDE YOUR NARROW MINDED VIEWPOINTS?
I agree that catholics who adhere to this stuff must find it rewarding on some kind-of-fetishistic level… if you were secretly psyched about getting pregnant, then all this rhetoric about contraception ruining the thrill would make sense.
I’m with you, aworld, though. I don’t ever want to parent. the church’s stance on that is that no one really needs sex, so if we don’t want to parent we should be celibate like priests. (some priests?) they just never offer a good reason as to why this is necessary. (bcuz it’s not)
@The Kitteh’s: Right, and CL has children and has been through a divorce as well, and says that she didn’t use birth control the whole time through her failed marriage, so she knows it’s not the only thing (“Nevertheless…”).
So I don’t know. Maybe I’m completely wrong about it and it is simply that she wants to be a good Catholic and her justifications and reasoning about it is all just after-the-fact.
CL: Sorry, I made a mistake (as I said elsewhere, I’m not at home, the airports not letting me fly home to NYC, something about a storm), and there are two comments at 7:13.
I assumed the one I quoted you in, you were intelligent enough to follow. Let me simplify it.
If one has no boundaries, then one cannot refuse any request of the other; nor any demand. QED there can not be one person who is the final arbiter. If the woman makes a demand, the man must accept it, else he has put up a boundary against her.
Logic 101.
here is some TL;DR about how actually, if you take catholic sexual morality at its word, the ONLY THING you can do in the marriage bed is PIV until the dude orgasms. and if the woman doesn’t orgasm, then tough for her:
http://www.catholicplanet.com/CCSE/marriage-bed.htm
I’m curious as to what this author would even consider acceptable foreplay. In spite of that, I think his analysis of catholic doctrine is sound.
And, at the moment, the airlines are saying we can fly home at an ungodly early hour tomorrow, so I’ll be home, which means I will be AFK for some little while, perhaps all day, or a couple of days.
Zanana: “if you were secretly psyched about getting pregnant, then all this rhetoric about contraception ruining the thrill would make sense”
RIght, though CL hardly ever blogs about her kids except in the context of criticising how mainstream parenting works. I don’t really get that Mummy vibe off her.
Well, I guess now I’m veering off into armchair-psychoanalysing CL herself, so I should probably leave it at that. NFP will just have to remain a mystery to me!
@Zanana PS: Thanks for the link, I’ve bookmarked it for later.
Zanana: That person isn’t a theologian, and says right up front they are disagreeing with actual theoligians; which includes the present, reactionary as all fuck, Pope.
They are an outlier. Sadly there are a lot of, primarily american, catholics, who are more reactionary that he; Tridentines and other idiots. I think it’s a bleed-over problem of the fundie prots being as vocal as they are.
But that’s a really long conversation.
Yes Kitteh, Ian McKellen is so good in the role of Amos that he’s barely recognizable!
CL seems to have a pregnancy fetish. MRA’s would naturally relate this to sperm-jacking, I think. Is she a MRA sympathizer? Huh.
@pecunium, I totally agree. And they are all crackpots. (I am interested to read this Tridentines, though. I love discovering ever further reaches of this type of insanity. U haz link?) But on the crackpot scale, that crackpot with the anti-totality argument made more sense to me than these pro-NFP crackpots: http://newtheologicalmovement.blogspot.com/2011/09/natural-family-planning-with.html
Wait, mutual masturbation is out too?
Well, shit.