Tuesday, March 14, 2006
Shock the Monkey
To me, the most wonderful thing about computers is how easy they make it to store old things. My desk is heap of partially read papers shuffled together with barely legible notes from seminars. The pile is dotted with post-it notes that have long since fallen off their original papers, which is a shame, since useful information like "ubx == wing gene?! bullshit!" is now lost to humanity.
My computer is organized in the same way, but while I periodically shovel the flotsam covering my desk into a recycling bin and hope that there wasn't anything important in it, I can just copy my hard drive onto a few CDRs and throw them in a desk drawer. Which means that I have pretty decent collection of snapshots that describe the chaos of the past.
The whole point of this extended intro is that a few days ago, I was looking through my old journal entries and found a college era entry bemoaning the fact that I'd not heard a shocking statement about sex for a long time. That's right, folks. Despite my tender age, I was a dreadful sophisticant, so well read and cosmopolitan that I had Heard It All. You can imagine my delight at finding this bit of teenage ennui, but here's the thing. Just a week before I dug that chestnut out of the ashes of a previous computer, I had someone tell me something shocking about sex. A decade older and a few days wiser, but I was still shocked.
He and his wife were using "the rhythm method" for birth control.
We were discussing this at a party; and those of us in our little huddle must have looked a bit taken aback because he hastened to explain.
"You see, the way that they used to do it was just counting days on the calendar, but the new way is based on body temperature and other cues --"
"--Like viscosity of cervical mucus," I interjected, perhaps a bit too loudly. Words like "cervical mucus" tend to carry more than you expect, and I have a gift for saying them at those odd moments when everyone simultaneously stops talking. No matter.
"Right." He proceeded to explain how a woman carefully takes her temperature (and presumably palpates her cervix to determine if it has "risen slightly" and if the mucus covering it is more slippery) at the same time every day and records it. After the basal body temperature has been elevated for four days, ovulation has occured, the fertile period is over until next month and you can go at it like little bunnies with no fear of getting knocked up (my words, not his).
He paused slightly.
"So you see, it's scientific."
It sounds very logical and straightforward, doesn't it? And since my high school health class wasn't terribly clear about which "rhythm method" they gave failure statistics for, I started doing a little research. Because, you know, this sort of thing is important to know when you're entering a betting pool as to when said couple are going to become proud parents.
A few things struck me when I was poking about on the web. First of all, there are plenty of web pages which are advocate use of the rhythm method, but it's a devil to find the failure rates on them. When I did find them, they were always set up something like this....
1% failure for perfect use
3-15% failure if couple doesn't follow the rules perfectly
Gosh, well, if you follow the rules, that's pretty good.
Now, Planned Parenthood has been on my shit list for continuing to endorse Joe Lieberman (despite his embarrassing attempts to simultaneously fellate Sam Alito and position himself as pro-choice) but they get major points for spelling out the ways that "the rules" of the rhythm method can be broken. Read that page carefully, folks. You're going to be looking for a body temperature change of .1 to .5 degrees F. And look at the list of ways that your body temperature can be affected. And the ways that consistency of cervical mucus can change. I'll bet that "following the rules" is more of "not having any of those conditions that can mess with your temperature/consistency of mucus" and less of "we're really horny, so let's go for it."
Regardless, down there at the bottom of the page is the real heart of the matter. It's the likelyhood that a couple will be pregnant in a year with "typical use.*" And that's the number that really measures how effective a birth control method is.
*On an interesting side note, the failure rate for condoms is almost as high as the rhythm method, at least in the typical use category. This boggles my mind, since the rules for "perfect use" of condoms are simple and straightforward. I have no good explanation for this, but will say that you should use condoms religiously (pardon the expression) in non-monogamous relationships, since they do a good job at minimizing STD transmission. But obviously, with a failure rate pushing 15%, make sure you back 'em up with another birth control method.
My computer is organized in the same way, but while I periodically shovel the flotsam covering my desk into a recycling bin and hope that there wasn't anything important in it, I can just copy my hard drive onto a few CDRs and throw them in a desk drawer. Which means that I have pretty decent collection of snapshots that describe the chaos of the past.
The whole point of this extended intro is that a few days ago, I was looking through my old journal entries and found a college era entry bemoaning the fact that I'd not heard a shocking statement about sex for a long time. That's right, folks. Despite my tender age, I was a dreadful sophisticant, so well read and cosmopolitan that I had Heard It All. You can imagine my delight at finding this bit of teenage ennui, but here's the thing. Just a week before I dug that chestnut out of the ashes of a previous computer, I had someone tell me something shocking about sex. A decade older and a few days wiser, but I was still shocked.
He and his wife were using "the rhythm method" for birth control.
We were discussing this at a party; and those of us in our little huddle must have looked a bit taken aback because he hastened to explain.
"You see, the way that they used to do it was just counting days on the calendar, but the new way is based on body temperature and other cues --"
"--Like viscosity of cervical mucus," I interjected, perhaps a bit too loudly. Words like "cervical mucus" tend to carry more than you expect, and I have a gift for saying them at those odd moments when everyone simultaneously stops talking. No matter.
"Right." He proceeded to explain how a woman carefully takes her temperature (and presumably palpates her cervix to determine if it has "risen slightly" and if the mucus covering it is more slippery) at the same time every day and records it. After the basal body temperature has been elevated for four days, ovulation has occured, the fertile period is over until next month and you can go at it like little bunnies with no fear of getting knocked up (my words, not his).
He paused slightly.
"So you see, it's scientific."
It sounds very logical and straightforward, doesn't it? And since my high school health class wasn't terribly clear about which "rhythm method" they gave failure statistics for, I started doing a little research. Because, you know, this sort of thing is important to know when you're entering a betting pool as to when said couple are going to become proud parents.
A few things struck me when I was poking about on the web. First of all, there are plenty of web pages which are advocate use of the rhythm method, but it's a devil to find the failure rates on them. When I did find them, they were always set up something like this....
1% failure for perfect use
3-15% failure if couple doesn't follow the rules perfectly
Gosh, well, if you follow the rules, that's pretty good.
Now, Planned Parenthood has been on my shit list for continuing to endorse Joe Lieberman (despite his embarrassing attempts to simultaneously fellate Sam Alito and position himself as pro-choice) but they get major points for spelling out the ways that "the rules" of the rhythm method can be broken. Read that page carefully, folks. You're going to be looking for a body temperature change of .1 to .5 degrees F. And look at the list of ways that your body temperature can be affected. And the ways that consistency of cervical mucus can change. I'll bet that "following the rules" is more of "not having any of those conditions that can mess with your temperature/consistency of mucus" and less of "we're really horny, so let's go for it."
Regardless, down there at the bottom of the page is the real heart of the matter. It's the likelyhood that a couple will be pregnant in a year with "typical use.*" And that's the number that really measures how effective a birth control method is.
*On an interesting side note, the failure rate for condoms is almost as high as the rhythm method, at least in the typical use category. This boggles my mind, since the rules for "perfect use" of condoms are simple and straightforward. I have no good explanation for this, but will say that you should use condoms religiously (pardon the expression) in non-monogamous relationships, since they do a good job at minimizing STD transmission. But obviously, with a failure rate pushing 15%, make sure you back 'em up with another birth control method.
// posted by nerodia @ 4:16 PM 
