Every tin foil pocket in my month’s supply of Mylan birth control pills had blossomed open, punctured and empty. I was ready to puncture the face of the pharmacist who wouldn’t refill my birth control prescription, two days since my last pill.

“Sorry, we can’t refill your prescription until your doctor gives authorization. We haven’t been able to get a hold of her,” she said.

“Can’t you just refill it while I settle whatever is going on with my doctor? My insurance covers it, and I’ve been taking this prescription daily for the past 10 months,” I pushed.

Her voice hardened, as if I had asked her to spot me an extra supply of oxycontin.

“No. We can’t just give you any prescription. We can’t do anything until a doctor signs for authorization.”

I’ve always been sensitive to hormonal changes. A pimple emerged on my chin and a burnt sienna stain greeted me on my underwear the next morning, both signs that my body was weaning itself off the birth control hormones and settling into the rhythm of its natural menstrual cycle. I hadn’t had a period in 10 months, and its unexpected arrival wasn’t helping my rage.

The Strange Sad Tale Of The Death Of The Diaphragm
theestablishment.co

When I finally got through to my doctor’s office the next day, a nurse informed me that the prescription couldn’t be refilled because of how long it had been since my check-up.

I balked. My last doctor’s appointment had been less than a year ago, and no one had contacted me to say I needed to come in or else say goodbye to my birth control.

Apparently, the doctor decided I needed a pelvic exam and pap smear before she, the gatekeeper to my contraceptives, would give her coveted signature. To be fair, I’d long considered the duo of a pap smear and pelvic exam another necessary burden of womanhood, and made peace with the fact that I needed to be an adult and grit my teeth through all the poking and scraping like my mother had before me. It would be a dreaded annual ceremony, cringingly tolerated so I could keep taking my birth control.

But my last pap smear was a year and a half ago and came back completely normal, and as a woman with the same sexual partner for the last six years, I was not a high-risk patient for a sexually-transmitted infection. There was no medical reason that I needed to get this cervical screening before getting my birth control. This barricade, built by doctors between people with vulvas and their contraceptives, isn’t uncommon. Around one-third of doctors always require a pelvic exam before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives, despite the lack of connection between birth control and pelvic exams.

Around one-third of doctors always require a pelvic exam before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives.
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Requiring people with internal reproductive systems to take annual pap smears can actually do more harm than good. In 2015 the Journal of Research in Medical Science published an article that followed 334 women for two years after receiving an abnormal pap smear. The women received biannual pap smears and annual colposcopy and biopsy exams. Twenty-four months after the abnormal pap result, 308 women had a normal pap smear, leading the authors to conclude that abnormal lesions can spontaneously and naturally regress, and annual pap smears are linked to a high rate of false positives.

That false positive comes at a cost to the patient, who must endure more speculum-spreading interventions.

The U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force, along with the American Cancer Society, considered the high false positive rate when they recommended pap smears occur at an interval of three to five years for asymptomatic women aged 21 to 65. As they wrote in the Annals of Medicine in 2012, “Treatment of lesions that would otherwise resolve on their own is harmful because it can lead to procedures with unwanted side effects, including the potential for cervical incompetence and preterm labor.”

The debate surrounding the benefits of the pelvic exam is a more tempestuous discussion. The American College of Obstetrics recommends a pelvic exam once a year for all people with internal reproductive systems 21 and older. In rebuttal, the American College of Physicians argues against a pelvic exam unless a someone has symptoms of a disease or infection, because more frequent intervention can cause more harm to their health than good. And in the neutral corner, the U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force decided to stay out of the debate completely, citing a lack of evidence necessary to form an opinion for or against pelvic exams.

As recently as 2002 and for decades before then, the American Cancer Society recommended that pelvic exams and pap smears occur at an annual rate to effectively catch cancer. But once a deluge of evidence showed that a majority of HPV infections resolve on their own, they changed their official recommendation in 2012 to a pap smear every three to five years and stopped recommending the pelvic exam altogether.

So why do doctors persist in pushing for annual exams? Sometimes the medical community is slow to accept new findings that change a decades-old process. Some have spent the majority of their professional lives administering annual cervical screenings, and are hesitant to change the habit.

Less altruistically, there’s a monetary gain that may entice doctors to ignore the new recommendations. It would be easier on the doctor to just prescribe and refill birth control prescriptions for their patients. But requiring every birth-control-taking person to come into the office and have their feet in the stirrups guarantees an annual check from each one, either out-of-pocket or from the insurance company.

Why Do We Doubt And Police Those Seeking Permanent Contraception?
theestablishment.co

Even if the intent is not malicious, keeping individuals from their birth control for no other reason than to enforce a screening is inherently coercive, since the two aren’t at all connected.

Withholding birth control harms a person’s reproductive health and stigmatizes the practice of taking oral contraceptives. As Drs. Felicia Stewart, Cynthia Harper, and Charlotte Ellertson explain in a 2001 article published in the Journal of American Medicine, requiring these exams “may reduce access to highly effective contraceptive methods, and may therefore increase women’s overall health risks. These unnecessary requirements also involve ethical considerations and unwittingly reinforce the widely held but incorrect perception that hormonal contraceptive methods are dangerous.”

Suspending a person’s access to their birth control for any reason, beside it being harmful to their health, is backward. The World Health Organization and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree that hormonal oral contraception can be prescribed safely without a pelvic exam. Dr. Anita Nelson, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, calls the practice of only provisioning birth control after cervical screenings “a tragic leftover of the past.”

I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and ‘for my own good’ the test is.
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The point is not to abolish pap smears or tell people to stop getting pelvic exams. In the past 50 years cervical cancer deaths have diminished by 60%, due in large part to the early detection from pap smears. Cervical cancer used to be the number one cancer killer of people assigned female at birth; now it’s 14th.

But whether it’s a screening test for cancer, a swab for sexually transmitted diseases, or my annual dental cleaning, I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and “for my own good” the test is.

If you want to complete a pelvic exam every time you sneeze funny, then I encourage you to, and want people with vulvas to have that choice. But tying the screenings to birth control is unethical and scientifically unfounded. It’s the equivalent to requiring a cis man to undergo a urethra swab and prostate exam prior to buying condoms. It also takes away the ability for those with internal reproductive systems to make decisions about their own health and body.

That’s why I canceled my pap and pelvic exam appointment with my doctor. I couldn’t spread my body open for procedures that were being performed at a frequency unsupported by the science and medical authorities, and fundamentally, I couldn’t support a doctor who would use birth control as a coercive measure for any reason. So I left my doctor permanently. I’m not interested in begging, negotiating, or bargaining with my health care provider in order to obtain my birth control.

What You Need To Know About Reproductive Coercion
theestablishment.co

I was off birth control for a month as I searched for a doctor that would both accept my health insurance and was OK with committing to a cervical screening once every three to five years. Then I found a better alternative. As the issue of “doctors holding birth control hostage” gains more attention, people are finding ways around the in-person doctor visit to obtain prescriptions.

Lemonaid is a virtual doctor visit. It costs $25 out-of-pocket for an online assessment, then a doctor can prescribe your birth control to be mailed directly to you or picked up at your local pharmacy. Lemonaid only operates in 18 states right now, but hopefully more are to come. Similar resources include Nurx, Virtuwell, and Pandia Health.

The pioneer of the pill and Planned Parenthood clinics Margaret Sanger once said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” As long as birth control is “given,” “prescribed,” and “permitted” to us, that sovereignty over our bodies, free from obstruction and coercion, is still on the horizon.

Two days after I signed up with LemonAid, answered a questionnaire, and messaged with a doctor about my medical history, I received a package in the mail. It was three months of birth control, delivered directly to my mailbox. I’d never been so excited to take my daily pill.

When I opened the package the familiar yellow containers fell out, followed by two Starburst candies, and a thank you note. After my excitement settled, I realized that this is how easy it’s supposed to be. The “control” in birth control should be possessed solely by the individual taking it. Their contraceptives should never be a bargaining chip.

Many doctors are denying birth control to those who won’t take cervical screenings — even though it’s not medically necessary.

Monik Markus/flickr

Every tin foil pocket in my month’s supply of Mylan birth control pills had blossomed open, punctured and empty. I was ready to puncture the face of the pharmacist who wouldn’t refill my birth control prescription, two days since my last pill.

“Sorry, we can’t refill your prescription until your doctor gives authorization. We haven’t been able to get a hold of her,” she said.

“Can’t you just refill it while I settle whatever is going on with my doctor? My insurance covers it, and I’ve been taking this prescription daily for the past 10 months,” I pushed.

Her voice hardened, as if I had asked her to spot me an extra supply of oxycontin.

“No. We can’t just give you any prescription. We can’t do anything until a doctor signs for authorization.”

I’ve always been sensitive to hormonal changes. A pimple emerged on my chin and a burnt sienna stain greeted me on my underwear the next morning, both signs that my body was weaning itself off the birth control hormones and settling into the rhythm of its natural menstrual cycle. I hadn’t had a period in 10 months, and its unexpected arrival wasn’t helping my rage.

The Strange Sad Tale Of The Death Of The Diaphragm

When I finally got through to my doctor’s office the next day, a nurse informed me that the prescription couldn’t be refilled because of how long it had been since my check-up.

I balked. My last doctor’s appointment had been less than a year ago, and no one had contacted me to say I needed to come in or else say goodbye to my birth control.

Apparently, the doctor decided I needed a pelvic exam and pap smear before she, the gatekeeper to my contraceptives, would give her coveted signature. To be fair, I’d long considered the duo of a pap smear and pelvic exam another necessary burden of womanhood, and made peace with the fact that I needed to be an adult and grit my teeth through all the poking and scraping like my mother had before me. It would be a dreaded annual ceremony, cringingly tolerated so I could keep taking my birth control.

But my last pap smear was a year and a half ago and came back completely normal, and as a woman with the same sexual partner for the last six years, I was not a high-risk patient for a sexually-transmitted infection. There was no medical reason that I needed to get this cervical screening before getting my birth control. This barricade, built by doctors between people with vulvas and their contraceptives, isn’t uncommon. Around one-third of doctors always require a pelvic exam before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives, despite the lack of connection between birth control and pelvic exams.

Around one-third of doctors always require before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives.

Requiring people with internal reproductive systems to take annual pap smears can actually do more harm than good. In 2015 the Journal of Research in Medical Science published an article that followed 334 women for two years after receiving an abnormal pap smear. The women received biannual pap smears and annual colposcopy and biopsy exams. Twenty-four months after the abnormal pap result, 308 women had a normal pap smear, leading the authors to conclude that abnormal lesions can spontaneously and naturally regress, and annual pap smears are linked to a high rate of false positives.

That false positive comes at a cost to the patient, who must endure more speculum-spreading interventions.

The U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force, along with the American Cancer Society, considered the high false positive rate when they recommended pap smears occur at an interval of three to five years for asymptomatic women aged 21 to 65. As they wrote in the Annals of Medicine in 2012, “Treatment of lesions that would otherwise resolve on their own is harmful because it can lead to procedures with unwanted side effects, including the potential for cervical incompetence and preterm labor.”

The debate surrounding the benefits of the pelvic exam is a more tempestuous discussion. The American College of Obstetrics recommends a pelvic exam once a year for all people with internal reproductive systems 21 and older. In rebuttal, the American College of Physicians argues against a pelvic exam unless a someone has symptoms of a disease or infection, because more frequent intervention can cause more harm to their health than good. And in the neutral corner, the U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force decided to stay out of the debate completely, citing a lack of evidence necessary to form an opinion for or against pelvic exams.

As recently as 2002 and for decades before then, the American Cancer Society recommended that pelvic exams and pap smears occur at an annual rate to effectively catch cancer. But once a deluge of evidence showed that a majority of HPV infections resolve on their own, they changed their official recommendation in 2012 to a pap smear every three to five years and stopped recommending the pelvic exam altogether.

So why do doctors persist in pushing for annual exams? Sometimes the medical community is slow to accept new findings that change a decades-old process. Some have spent the majority of their professional lives administering annual cervical screenings, and are hesitant to change the habit.

Less altruistically, there’s a monetary gain that may entice doctors to ignore the new recommendations. It would be easier on the doctor to just prescribe and refill birth control prescriptions for their patients. But requiring every birth-control-taking person to come into the office and have their feet in the stirrups guarantees an annual check from each one, either out-of-pocket or from the insurance company.

Why Do We Doubt And Police Those Seeking Permanent Contraception?

Even if the intent is not malicious, keeping individuals from their birth control for no other reason than to enforce a screening is inherently coercive, since the two aren’t at all connected.

Withholding birth control harms a person’s reproductive health and stigmatizes the practice of taking oral contraceptives. As Drs. Felicia Stewart, Cynthia Harper, and Charlotte Ellertson explain in a 2001 article published in the Journal of American Medicine, requiring these exams “may reduce access to highly effective contraceptive methods, and may therefore increase women’s overall health risks. These unnecessary requirements also involve ethical considerations and unwittingly reinforce the widely held but incorrect perception that hormonal contraceptive methods are dangerous.”

Suspending a person’s access to their birth control for any reason, beside it being harmful to their health, is backward. The World Health Organization and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree that hormonal oral contraception can be prescribed safely without a pelvic exam. Dr. Anita Nelson, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, calls the practice of only provisioning birth control after cervical screenings “a tragic leftover of the past.”

I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and ‘for my own good’ the test is.

The point is not to abolish pap smears or tell people to stop getting pelvic exams. In the past 50 years cervical cancer deaths have diminished by 60%, due in large part to the early detection from pap smears. Cervical cancer used to be the number one cancer killer of people assigned female at birth; now it’s 14th.

But whether it’s a screening test for cancer, a swab for sexually transmitted diseases, or my annual dental cleaning, I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and “for my own good” the test is.

If you want to complete a pelvic exam every time you sneeze funny, then I encourage you to, and want people with vulvas to have that choice. But tying the screenings to birth control is unethical and scientifically unfounded. It’s the equivalent to requiring a cis man to undergo a urethra swab and prostate exam prior to buying condoms. It also takes away the ability for those with internal reproductive systems to make decisions about their own health and body.

That’s why I canceled my pap and pelvic exam appointment with my doctor. I couldn’t spread my body open for procedures that were being performed at a frequency unsupported by the science and medical authorities, and fundamentally, I couldn’t support a doctor who would use birth control as a coercive measure for any reason. So I left my doctor permanently. I’m not interested in begging, negotiating, or bargaining with my health care provider in order to obtain my birth control.

What You Need To Know About Reproductive Coercion

I was off birth control for a month as I searched for a doctor that would both accept my health insurance and was OK with committing to a cervical screening once every three to five years. Then I found a better alternative. As the issue of “doctors holding birth control hostage” gains more attention, people are finding ways around the in-person doctor visit to obtain prescriptions.

Lemonaid is a virtual doctor visit. It costs $25 out-of-pocket for an online assessment, then a doctor can prescribe your birth control to be mailed directly to you or picked up at your local pharmacy. Lemonaid only operates in 18 states right now, but hopefully more are to come. Similar resources include Nurx, Virtuwell, and Pandia Health.

The pioneer of the pill and Planned Parenthood clinics Margaret Sanger once said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” As long as birth control is “given,” “prescribed,” and “permitted” to us, that sovereignty over our bodies, free from obstruction and coercion, is still on the horizon.

Two days after I signed up with LemonAid, answered a questionnaire, and messaged with a doctor about my medical history, I received a package in the mail. It was three months of birth control, delivered directly to my mailbox. I’d never been so excited to take my daily pill.

When I opened the package the familiar yellow containers fell out, followed by two Starburst candies, and a thank you note. After my excitement settled, I realized that this is how easy it’s supposed to be. The “control” in birth control should be possessed solely by the individual taking it. Their contraceptives should never be a bargaining chip.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/why-we-need-to-talk-about-queer-and-trans-people-and-birth-control-972952542269/ Sat, 02 Dec 2017 17:16:01 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2917 Read more]]>

When we talk about birth control, we need to remember that cis straight women aren’t the only stakeholders.

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By Neesha Powell

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

I ’ve been on and off different types of birth control for the past 15 years. Last year, I got Mirena, an IUD that’s 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and lasts up to 6 years.

While dating cisgender straight men in the past, I used birth control to prevent pregnancy. And although I can’t get pregnant by my current sexual partner, my IUD is still a lifesaver because my periods have become lighter, shorter and less painful.

Queer and trans people of color, like myself, however, are almost never reflected in the visible fight for birth control rights. The poster child of the mainstream reproductive rights movement is usually a middle-class, cis, heterosexual white woman — everything that I’m not.

In the resistance against Pres. Donald Trump’s war on reproductive rights, stories like mine aren’t centered due to myths that LGBTQ+ folks don’t use birth control, get abortions, or have kids. In reality, we do all of these things, and we desperately need better access to them.

Queer and trans people of color, like myself, however, are almost never reflected in the visible fight for birth control rights.

Trans, gender nonbinary,and queer folks experience barriers to culturally-competent reproductive healthcare because most doctors don’t understand our bodies or our sex lives. Legislative attacks on birth control make it even harder for us to get the good care we deserve.

One of Trump’s most recent attacks on reproductive healthcare happened on Oct. 6, when the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules that allow employers to opt out of covering birth control on their health insurance plans based on moral or religious reasons.

This is a part of Trump’s plan to dismantle Obamacare, which made contraception a preventative service and required employers to pay for it. These new rules open the door for future laws that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

When we talk about birth control, we need to remember that cis straight women aren’t the only stakeholders. As a pansexual nonbinary woman, birth control changed my life for the better, yet narratives like mine are missing from the media.

The erasure of LGBTQ+ folks from conversations about birth control is harmful, for a number of reasons. Here’s why trans and queer voices must be centered in the fight for just access to birth control:

1. We need birth control for the same reasons as straight folks: to prevent pregnancy and to treat medical conditions.

This may be a surprise to some, but trans and queer people have the ability to procreate and to engage in sex that results in pregnancy. It’s frustrating that birth control is only marketed to cis straight women when LGBTQ+ folks need it just as much.

Evana Enabulele, a Black queer parks and recreation worker living in Seattle, uses a birth control implant called Nexplanon for both pregnancy prevention and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), which causes irregular periods that are abnormally heavy and long.

She enjoys telling others about her birth control implant because many people think their only option is taking pills. It takes as little as 10 minutes to insert the tiny rod into the upper arm and is more than 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy.

What To Know About That New Study Linking Birth Control To Depression

Being on birth control makes Enabulele’s life more stress-free, not only because she can’t get pregnant, but also because she now gets a regular period. When her PCOS was untreated, she worried about not ever being able to conceive because her periods were so irregular.

Enabulele feels personally attacked by the Trump administration’s new rules allowing employers to deny covering birth control.

ChiChi Madu is a Black queer LA resident working in the startup industry who got an IUD for free at Planned Parenthood 6 years ago when she was low-income. She’s also appalled by Trump’s actions.

“I think it’s downright evil to take away someone’s ability to access healthcare,” says Madu, who got on birth control to prevent pregnancy when she had cis male sexual partners, as well as to regulate her mood and decrease the flow and frequency of her period.

Although she now gets health insurance through an employer that holds progressive beliefs, she knows that other LGBTQ+ people aren’t so lucky.

“I have to think about all these people who don’t have my same circumstance and so it’s aggravating and disheartening. It’s tough to think about, to be honest,” Madu says.

2. There are challenges keeping us from getting birth control when we need it — including fear of discrimination from medical providers and lack of access to health insurance — but not being able to get birth control can have harmful consequences for us.

Going to the doctor is not fun for a lot of trans and queer people, especially when we have to talk to them about the most intimate parts of our lives.

Lucia Leandro Gimeno, the director of Q/tpoc Birthwerq Project in Seattle, says that accessing reproductive healthcare can be an anxious experience for trans and queer people, especially trans and queer people of color.

The fear of being discriminated against by their medical provider is a major barrier. The fact is that most medical providers do not get adequate training in working with LGBTQIA+ folks.

“I think that if you’re white and trans, it’s not easy, but whiteness generally helps you better navigate a lot of systems, whereas if you’re a trans person of color, doctors just kind of look at you sideways,” says Gimeno, who’s an Afro-Latinx queer transmasculine femme.

Most medical providers do not get adequate training in working with LGBTQIA+ folks.

While seeking out reproductive healthcare, LGBTQ+ people are often shamed for our sex lives or treated differently because of our marginalized identities. Even well-intentioned doctors don’t know much about how we have sex and how birth control impacts our bodies.

Additionally, LGBTQ+ Americans have barriers to getting birth control because we’re almost 10 percent less likely than straight Americans to have health insurance, and 20 percent of us are living in poverty.

23-year-old Enabulele’s scared of what will happen if Obamacare’s repealed because she could be kicked off her dad’s insurance plan. Her birth control implant was only $10 under her father’s insurance and would have cost $800 without it.

When trans and queer people can’t access the reproductive healthcare we need, we’re forced to go underground to get it. Some trans women buy hormones on the black market because they can’t get them from a doctor, and they sometimes end up being toxic.

Trans and queer folks deserve access to birth control that is safe and low-cost or free. That can’t happen when we’re left out of conversations about contraception.

3. We’re excluded from the reproductive rights movement, even though we actually have the hardest time getting adequate healthcare.

Our society loves to gender things, which led to “reproductive health” becoming synonymous with “women’s health” — cis women’s health, in particular.

Cis women refuse to prioritize trans women’s reproductive rights because they’re afraid of being forgotten about. But in reality, the reproductive rights movement isn’t winning because they’re ONLY representing cis women.

When we fight for barriers to accessing reproductive healthcare to be removed for trans and queer people of color (POC), everyone benefits, even cis straight women, because they face some of the same challenges.

Doctors Must Stop Shutting Out Marginalized Groups

Furthermore, trans and queer POC are currently leading countless grassroots movements to achieve social justice for us all. It’s only right to center their health and well-being when they’re literally putting their bodies on the line.

Gimeno says that reproductive rights organizations should include trans people of color (TPOC) in leadership and decision-making bodies, build projects that center TPOC and work in coalition with TPOC without tokenizing them.

Reproductive rights organizations should also embrace the values of reproductive justice, which centers women of color, LGBTQ+ folks and other historically oppressed groups and their right to make their own decisions about their bodies and their families.

When we approach birth control access with a reproductive justice lens, we acknowledge that certain groups, including trans and queer people, have a more difficult time getting contraception than others.

Fighting for the most oppressed to have access to birth control is the only way to ensure that birth control is one day accessible to everyone who needs it.

The state of Oregon recently achieved a huge reproductive healthcare victory, passing the Reproductive Health Equity Act of 2017 that covers all reproductive health services (including birth control) at no cost to all residents, regardless of gender identity, income or citizenship status.

It’s going to take a lot of work for similar legislation to succeed in other states, but I believe it can happen if the reproductive rights movement fully embraces trans, gender nonconforming and queer people.

Birth control rights will continue being eroded if our leadership isn’t centered.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/birth-control-reminds-women-of-barren-sex-life-fba5181c3999/ Mon, 29 Feb 2016 19:00:32 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=9129 Read more]]>

By Jillian Richardson

If being alive has taught me anything, it’s that a woman’s worth is equivalent to how much dick she’s getting. Her number one priority should be getting the D. And getting it on the reg.

Unfortunately, some ladies suffer from a chemical imbalance that leads them to selfishly crave other things — like fulfilling friendships and a rewarding job — which they believe can make them happy. In extreme cases, they even want to love themselves for who they are.

During a particularly dark period in my life, I personally struggled with this disease.

I would awake in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat, my hand journaling of its own accord. I’m ashamed to provide the full details, but let’s just say some of the entries involved plans to sign up for yoga, creating a vision board . . . and helping others.

Worse than a foreign desire to understand and better myself as a person, I realized that I had sick thoughts that strayed from P in the V penetration:

I can enjoy my life without sex. I am worth more than my body. I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t shake the idea. I scrawled demented ideas: “I can be fulfilled on my own,” and “I really should think about something other than the sexual approval of men.”

Once, I woke up happy, even though there wasn’t a man next to me in bed. Enough was enough. I made an appointment with my gynecologist immediately.

The following day my doctor my informed me that it’s normal — if troubling — for thoughts of self-love and independence to surface in women from time to time. He also assured me that daily birth control pills could help refocus my thoughts from grad school applications to getting a good, hard pounding. In other words, taking a birth control pill would regularly remind me that I needed to have sex to be happy.

No longer would I be tormented by thoughts of being “my own person.”

After I filled my prescription, the effect was immediate. I would be sitting at my desk, wondering if I should ask my boss for a raise, when my BC alarm would go off. The simple act of placing the pill in my mouth helped me, psychologically, understand that I hadn’t gotten laid in eight days.

I knew that I couldn’t let all of that sweet, baby-blocking estrogen go to waste! Within 20 minutes, I was in the bathroom with that kinda cute guy who wears vests and works in IT. Birth control helped me remember that I needed penetration in order to have a life worth living.

If you ever find yourself thinking about anything other than sex, don’t worry — there’s a solution for you. Birth control. The pill is a daily reminder that there’s only one path to true happiness and self-worth — sex. No profound self-love or devoted friendships can replace getting laid.

So here’s what you do: Just once a day, check in with yourself to confirm that you’re not getting laid. And then do something about it. And by something, I mean someone. It doesn’t matter who. Go get your freak on, ladies. Never forget your priorities again.

Remember, you don’t need to “be fulfilled.” You need to “be filled.” With dick.

***

Lead Image: flickr/ Sarah C