Is this such a bizarre concept? From a male perspective, without having made a lifelong commitment to a person, doesn’t overlooking the possibility of impregnation that comes with coital sex seem more than a little risky, even irresponsible? If the relationship ends but the woman is impregnated and chooses to carry it to term, the man is automatically stuck with 18 years of child support, and the child is stuck with a broken family that may not be financially prepared to raise it.
Is my thinking warped? I just think if a man is not prepared to be a father, financially or otherwise, coital sex should be out of the question.
I realize I may be indirectly calling many here irresponsible, but please come set me straight if you disagree.
If she’s on the pill and he wraps it up, the odds of impregnation are really pretty low. With my 10 years of sexual activity on and off the pill and even questionable condom use in my youth, I’ve never gotten knocked up. A few tiny steps can make the whole act perfectly safe on all fronts.
I am not a prude by any measure but I agree with to a large extent. The main problem is that a strict abstinence until marriage stance doesn’t work for many people. However, it does seem like it swings to far in the opposite direction sometimes. When I got to college, sex suddenly switched from something only questionable young people did to a pure recreational sport according to comedic classroom demonstrations of condom usage and it is often portrayed that way in the general media as well.
I think males do get shortchanged on the long-term implications and consequences if things go wrong. Programs that focus on that type of thing are almost all female centered partly because males don’t have any legal options at all when a condom fails or she lies and stops taking her birth control pills. Any male with half a brain should be able to see that they are playing with fire in an oil refinery but you could assume the same thing about females and they do have lots of support in that area. If you are male, it just becomes, you fucked up, suck it up, and now pay up and many people can’t understand the long-term implications of that.
I think that fathers are supposed to be the ones to pass on the horror stories to their sons but not everyone has a good one or any male role models at all. It helps to get little tips like it is more cost effective to drop $100 at a strip club for a guaranteed good time with a good looking girl even if you have to take matters into your own hands rather than get desparate and hook up with the last girl left standing at the end of a long party. There is no shame in that and the numbers work out greatly in your favor.
Not perfectly safe. You can only say that because you are female but females lie sometimes. Men don’t usually like condoms and they are often willing to trust their girlfriends that they are taking their birth control pills. Just ask my 37 (almost 38!) year old best friend who is a new grandfather. Some lessons don’t get passed from father to son.
Please reread my first sentence. I’m not advocating for the man who whines he can’t cum with a condom on or the woman who is a space cadet and takes 1 pill every three days-- those people are idiots.
I suppose if you want to be pedantic, the OP is right that the only thing that is “perfectly safe” is abstinence, but the reality is that with proper (and frankly minor) precautions, the chances of impregnation are incredibly low.
It is always an assumed risk, but the risk can be reduced to near zero. Not quite zero, but close.
Look at it this way - every time you drive a car, you have statistically non-zero risk of being killed by a drunk driver, but the risk is low enough that most of us assume it every day.
I do think it would be stupid to take a woman’s word about the pill if you don’t know her very well, bu I also think the number of women looking to trick men into knocking them up is exaggerated around here. If you play for the NBA, or you’re a rock star, that’s a risk. For most guys, it isn’t.
You want me to spend 3 month’s of paycheques on a ring and legally bind myself into risking half my money/assets, custody of my future children, etc. and blow a ton of money on a wedding/honeymoon, and legally cut myself off from sex with any other woman in the world…
…WITHOUT knowing if she’s a starfish during sex? Or if she doesn’t like the same positions I do? Or if she won’t take it in the pooper? Or if she doesn’t have the same sex drive as me and I’ll end up forced into a miserable sex life for the next 30 years until I finally escape through the sweet release of death?
That gamble seems a LOT riskier than a pill/condom combo! I’mma pass.
Ya but going down on eachother isn’t the same as having actual sex. I mean, it’s fun, but some people’s junk doesn’t fit inside other people’s junk well depending on the size/shape/tightness/etc. Or maybe the couple don’t have the same rhythm, one likes it fast/hard and the other likes it slow/gentle, etc. There’s lots of little things that you can guess at but not really tell until you’re going at it and discover “man, this just doesn’t work with us”.
I don’t know how frequent it really is because it often goes unreported but I grew up in a poor part of the country and it was about as rare as getting killed in a car wreck. We had a lot of guys who liked to get liquored up and then either race or screw so that isn’t saying much.
It may very well be one of those urban legends, but when in the military I was told to be very wary of local girls, wherever you were, because they’d love to snag a guy to where they’re stuck paying child support for the rest of their life.
oh haha I thought it was the “pre-nups aren’t valid in the UK” thing. Ya, we throw a bunch of q’s and u’s in our stuff in Canada. Colour and all that jazz.
There was a thread on here where a guy’s friend was re-using condoms to save money (I don’t think they were off the floor and washed out or anything, just like if they didn’t finish he’d pull out but leave the condom on and they’d fool around some more and he’d just stick it back in instead of throwing on a new condom).
I wonder if people like that, and situations where like, you pull out but don’t hold onto the rim of the condom and it slips off, etc. factor into the 85%?
Either way if I’m not in a serious relationship, even with her (hopefully responsibly) taking the pill and me using a condom, I’ll still pull out before finishing.
And if she seems crazy it’s off to the sink to wash the condom out before tossing it because of that urban legend where the chick fishes the used condom out of the garbage after the guy leaves and uses it to get preggers haha
Yeah, that’s what my mom thought…
Teasing. 4 kids, 4 different types of birth control; after the 4th, they offered her a tubal, and she said “Only if you cut and cauterize, none of this ‘tying up’ shit”.
What’s funny is I wouldn’t be surprised if she used those exact words. But yeah; nothing’s 100%.
There is a side-effect of waiting until marriage that includes going way overboard in any relationship because the desire for the sex is so great that marriage seems like an awesome idea!! My second engagement was like that; I broke it off when it was apparant <to me, anyway> that the relationship itself was what he wanted, not me in particular. I believed then, and now, that if he hadn’t been so eager to finally get laid, that it wouldn’t have been more than a month-long fling.
Ok, maybe two or three. But NOT marriage material.
Would you believe that I can’t find a good answer for that? True. All these books and the whole wide internet, and all I can find is guesses. Seems no one’s interested in resaarching combo failure rates in vivo. So I’ll have to figure this out myself. Apologies if this is all wrong, but I’ll explain my thought process so we can figure out precisely how I’m an idiot.
With typical use, the condom failure rate is 21% - if 100 women have sex for one year using condoms as their contraceptive method, 21 of them will get pregnant. (So it’s not quite the same thing as saying that every time you have sex with a condom, you have a 21% chance of conceiving. Certainly most of the month, you have 0% chance of conceiving, since she’s not fertile. So all the condoms that fail were used during a minority of a woman’s cycle. I’m not sure how to work out the math there, but it makes it seem to me like the condom is a pretty crappy form of contraception, but it’s good for STI prevention, so we should be using them anyhow, right? ;))
Anyhow, so if we take that 21% of women who had the potential to get pregnant from the condom’s numbers, and now we point out that The Pill has a failure rate with typical use of 8%…oh dear, here’s where the math comes in. Multiply, right? 8% of those 21% could still get pregnant? 0.08 * 0.21=0.0168, or 1.68% So, in one year of sex, 2 out of 100 women who use both the condom and Pill will get pregnant.
Are 2% of Americans killed by drunk drivers every year? 13,846 people were killed in 2010 in “alcohol-related fatalities.” No good information as to what that means (does it include alcohol overdose? Falling off a ladder when you’re drunk? Drunk drivers killing themselves, or drunk drivers killing other people?), so let’s be generous and assume ALL of them were killed by drunk drivers. The 2010 Census found 308,745,538 people. So 0.0048% of Americans were killed in alcohol-related fatalities last year.
It’s far more likely that you’ll get pregnant or get someone pregnant, even if you use a condom and The Pill, than that you’ll be killed by a drunk driver.
But yeah; nothing’s 100%.