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Friday, March 19, 2010

For starters

Well! This is my first official post on this blog, my new blog "A Perfect Vagina"... not so sure about the name yet, but I suppose I was inspired by the recent vajazzling craze... or maybe it was all this stuff about labiaplasty in the media... iunno. One day, we will look back at these trends and hopefully cringe and laugh awkwardly, until the deafening silence takes over and we go back to reclining in our individualized hovering pods (our inevitable future I suppose). I would like to say that my lady parts are NOT at this moment vajazzled. Neither have my labia been ... plastied (?). I am au naturale, except that I pay a lady $40 a month to wax my pubes off. So, probably not au naturale in the sense of my pubes still being ON my pubis mons...

I think my vision for this blog is hopefully humor, and probably some feministy/socially just stuff as well, sandwiched between healthy doses of cynicism and random tangents. Good? Good! My first topic of Ever is going to be the female condom, because I have been reading about it EVERYWHERE in the BLOGOSPHERE lately.

First of all, I would like to say that I have never used this contraption, and that I definitely think something should be done to encourage people to cover their naughty bits during sex; I am staunchly pro-safe sex. However, I have issues with pushing this responsibility onto the receptive (as opposed to the insertive) partner. The female condom is being marketed as the option for the individual who is saddled with a partner who just refuses to wear a regular condom. WOW!!! That sounds like a borderline rape apology! It reminded me a lot of rape survivors I know who want to go on birth control "just in case someone rapes me again." I think the fact that this is supposed to be a major selling point of the female condom speaks dysfunctional volumes about the product. How can something that you use because your quasi-abusive dick of a partner prefers to bareback it rather than take your safety into consideration ever really be empowering and/or freeing? From this perspective, it's essentially a method self-defense against douchebags. Wonderful.

The other thing that bothers me about the female condom is that it seems to fall in line with the continued medicalization of women's bodies that we see all the friggin time. It's bad enough that women are expected to take hormones that fuck up our body chemistry to prevent unwanted pregnancy (and if, heaven-forbid, a pregnancy should occur... that's right, it's the woman's responsibility to deal with it). Now we're supposed to be responsible for barrier methods as well? Why is it that only the female bodies in the relationship must carry the onus for sex? Most of the sexually active women I know already purchase/carry male condoms with them. We do our part. But I guess that's not enough, because unless my partner's penis is able to feel a gentle moonlit breeze sans latex, his experience with me will just never be complete.

In conclusion, it's hard (hehe, sex pun!) to talk about the female and male condoms without putting it into context. There's this pesky thing called sexism around and it tends to penalize women and trans folks all the damn time. All I'm asking, is that men wear the condoms. Because they don't have to get pelvic exams or have periods or possibly push a baby through their crotches one day. I think that's a good compromise.

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