Sometimes I imagine a world where writers are forbidden for a year from starting from the premise that women are dumber, more irrational, or more emotional than men. The pages labeled "Fashion," "Style," or "Life" in newspapers would change dramatically. The trend-piece industry would quite possibly not be able to handle the shift in focus, and collapse completely. Sexism is the gasoline that fuels it. Exhibit #1: This condescending article about the pill from Vanessa Grigoriadis of New York magazine.

Every hand-wringing article about the pill follows the same formula: Tacit acceptance of the profoundly positive change that reliable contraception has made in women's lives, and then straight to the red meat of worrying that it's not natural, and implying that women, with our wee, silly brains are too full of shopping information to realize that we totally can't have babies on the pill! Wrap it up with a bow of implying that writing the same article that comes out every few months makes you daring, since you're fighting the all-powerful feminist militia, one that's so powerful we can't even get an equal pay bill through Congress. Grigoriadis doesn't veer from the formula one bit. Implying that women are too stupid to realize that delaying pregnancy until your 30s raises your chances of infertility? Check. Implying that infertility is a much bigger problem than it actually is in a country that has a relatively high birth rate for an industrialized nation? Check. Focusing on the complaints of side effects without checking the actual scientific studies on the prevalence? Check. Characterizing the entire female population as being exactly like your free-wheeling fun time friends in their 20s who are the kind of girls who match their pill cases to their shoes, without considering that mothers, the fiercely monogamous, and the totally unfashionable also have a need for the pill? Check. And above all, freaking out about how "unnatural" it is, as if it's somehow more unnatural than every other drug on the market, not to mention air conditioning, latex, television sets, and the wearing of shoes? Check.

If you expanded the ban on sexism to make it a ban on the naturalistic fallacy as well, all that would be left of this article is a recounting of some of Samantha Bee's funnier jokes at the pill's 50th anniversary party. Most of the article involves hand-wringing over how the pill is an "illusion,", as if my belief that I'm totally not pregnant right now is something M.C. Escher came up with, instead of demonstrable reality. Grigoriadis drops terms like "true biological processes" and "rediscovering their bodies," as if going on the pill somehow makes you an Unwoman. (If so, can I get that 25 percent raise and stop shaving my legs?) This sort of thing may sound all fun and crunchy, but it has the unpleasant side effect of implying that women who have hysterectomies, women whose menstruation is so painful it needs to be suppressed, women who used to be men, and women who simply don't like ovulating aren't really women.

But the notion that nature is somehow better, and that women can't know about it unless they tolerate a higher chance of unintended pregnancy, is the real problem here. To be consistent with this argument, you really need to take it out of the realm of guilt-tripping and scaring women about their sexual choices, and move on to actually attacking men for taking drugs they feel they need. Viagra is unnatural, of course, but let's go beyond that. Statins are unnatural, too---Mother Nature intended you to get in touch with your heart attacks, that's why she gave them to you.

And there's one more box that Grigoriadis checked off that is one of my particular pet peeves, which is misinforming the public on how the pill works. She says, "The Pill (and other hormonal methods of birth control, like the patch and the ring) basically tricks your body into thinking it’s pregnant." You'd think the fact that women on the pill don't get giant bellies, swollen feet, and a need to puke all the time would dispel this myth. In reality, the pill mimicks your body's hormone levels immediately post-ovulation to suppress ovulation. Indeed, it was designed to mimic not pregnancy, but the rhythm method that Grigoriadis explains is the hip new thing with the crunchy set. Maybe we just need a new rule requiring that you get the history and biology right before you start to wax on about what's "natural"?

Photograph by Matthew Bowden from Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: birth control pills, fertility awareness method, trend pieces

Amanda, I too was irritated by this week's New York cover story, but what bothered me the most was how derivative it is.

From New York: "The fact is that the Pill, while giving women control of their bodies for the first time in history, allowed them to forget about the biological realities of being female until it was, in some cases, too late."

From a Time cover story in 2002: "Childlessness was more like what one called a 'creeping nonchoice.' ... By the time a woman is married and settled enough in her career to think of starting a family, it is all too often too late."

From MSNBC in 2005: "Priorities with men and women who delay having children often shift to starting a family by the time they're in their late 30s, but by then it may be too late for some."

The too late too late too late drum beat goes on.

I'd also like to add that it's truly not the pill that leads the women I know to delay pregnancy. It's having unstable jobs, or difficulty finding the right person. In fact, there is some evidence that the age at first motherhood is going back down again, after 35 fairly consistent years of rising maternal age. It's possible that the decline is because my generation saw the fertility problems that women were experiencing and decided to make motherhood a priority at a younger age. Whatever the reason, I'm so with you that the idea that we're deluded about our biological clocks is just silly at this point.

Tags: biological clock, the pill

I'd like to make a couple comments on Amanda's criticism of my New York magazine article this week about infertility, which I really don't think was a retread of previous "hand-wringing" articles or followed any sort of "formula"—it was as heartfelt and original a piece of work as I can write, on a topic which I care about a great deal.

In my world, the way that I grew up (the daughter of a feminist artist, a single woman through much of my 30s), I never heard the pill criticized. It was only when I got older that I began to feel that I would have liked to have at least considered different avenues before committing to the pill in my teens. There's nothing cute about a woman in her late 30s or early 40s not knowing when she ovulates, or what cervical mucus is, etc. I am aware that there are other causes of infertility, as Amanda has mentioned, but there's a lot of age-related infertility out there. It's shocking for me to watch so many people I know go through this; for my 38-year-old friend from my childhood to go to an RE after three years of "trying" and find out that she's in premature ovarian failure. She's so despondent that she's wrecked her relationship and almost lost her job. It just sucks.

I see where Amanda thinks my argument is bolstering a quack viewpoint and "naturalistic fallacy," and I'm sorry it came off that way. I meant for it to be compassionate. I do think that feminism needs to take into account that a lot of 30- and 40-something women are losing two or three years (emotionally, financially) in a desperate struggle to conceive late in life. That's not cool, and it's part of what's led to an insane, cloying mommy culture once they are successful, as far as I'm concerned. Women aren't "dumb," of course—it's just that no one thinks infertility will happen to them, just like no one thinks they'll contract some terrible illness. We see stats like "30 percent of women over blah blah age will experience miscarriages" and think we can't possibly fall into that group, because falling into it is just too painful to even consider.

Photograph of contraceptive pills by Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: infertility, New York magazine and infertility