There’s this excellent Twitter thread offering a new take on reducing abortions, first of all. Does anyone actually need to have it explained to them that the most pro-choice of pro-choicers, including those like me who believe in the right to terminate a pregnancy on request up until the moment of birth, are absolutely fine with anything that reduces the need for abortion? Maybe fuck off and don’t come back till you have grown your reasoning powers a bit…) Abortion is sometimes necessary, but a lot of the time it would have been better for that unwanted pregnancy never to have occurred in the first place.
Anti-choicers and woman-hating arseholes often claim that women who don’t want to conceive avoid sex, sure, and ‘abstinence’ sex education is popular among most if not all misogynistic cultures. The fact remains that all contraceptive methods available at present carry risks and may be ineffective, even if used according to all the instructions. However, if you and your partner are horny, and one of you has sperm and the other has ova, but a pregnancy would be a disaster, why not just skip the PIV part? Bring each other off with hands, mouths, toys etc instead.
PIV sex, for cishets, is often not even the greatest source of erotic pleasure: cishet women often report finding it unsatisfactory and cishet men are said to regard oral or anal intercourse as a treat – *better* than PIV, special etc. So where do we get the idea that only PIV is ‘real’ sex and everything else is ‘foreplay’? I wouldn’t be all that surprised to find it comes from the same toxic root as all the other manifestations of patriarchy and cismale ‘supremacy’.
I’m not PIV-shaming, of course I’m not. If you enjoy PIV, if it’s your favourite thing and – most importantly, of course – you do it with partners who enjoy it as much as you do, then go ahead but, unless either a pregnancy is wanted or one/both of you knows you no longer have the physical capacity to make one occur, go carefully…
I’m not a huge fan of the erotica-writing approach where everything has to be a morality tale or a Good Influence of some kind, but more fiction with less PIV in it sounds like it might be fun to try, anyway.