20: Book Review 6, Ejaculate Responsibly by Gabrielle Blair
Overall, the main power of this book lies in its concise and poignant ability to recontextualize the way you look at dynamics of sex, contraceptives, abortion, and patriarchal control in the sphere of women's bodies. I will never look at abortion, contraception, or fertility the same way EVER again. The statistics to back up these arguments may also blow your mind.
I recommend this to anyone looking for a quick read to reset their brain on this topic and potentially reframe their own personal choices regarding their body because, if it isn’t for you, who is it for?
Just to get it out of the way, this is going to be more of an information-dispensing blog post than book review because I believe this quantitative data is far more powerful than anything I can say about Blair’s writing style, choice of jargon, or narrative voice. If you’d like to fact check or further dive into any of these points and more, you can do so in her freely available source list here. I also have chosen to cover each point in the chronological order they appear, though not consecutively.
To start out swinging, “Men are 50 times more fertile than women”(7), did you know that? While “a woman’s body produces a fertile egg for approximately 24 hours each month, from puberty until menopause, “a man’s sperm is fertile every single second of every single day”. It is almost embarrassing for me to admit--as a woman who thought herself fairly well-educated as soon as her early twenties--that I didn’t know about my own menstrual cycle beyond the fact that I bled for one week a month, that I genuinely functioned under the false pretense that I was fertile all the time, like there was just an egg waiting to be fertilized in there like Rapunzel awaiting a prince. I had no idea! How hilariously painful to not learn that until I was 22 years old. I laugh about it now but it is not a happy laugh, it is an angry, I-can’t-believe-it laugh. To think of all the anxiety-ridden days of hoping I was “safe”, to think of the couple times I took a morning after pill with side effects for nothing. Out of pure ignorance based in fear, ignorance that fed off of that fear.
Illustration by Julie Bang.
Is it because I grew up in a public school system that denied me that knowledge so that I could move about a patriarchal world in controllable ignorance? In fear of my own body? In full trust of the men that felt entitled to police it or enter it? Is it because I was raised Catholic and we didn’t talk about any of it? How many other women and people with uteruses (uteri? Why does the plural of uterus look funny and way too close to octopus? I’d argue both are equally alien but that’s another topic altogether) live any part of their lives in ignorance to these simple biological processes happening inside them? How can we better educate each other in solidarity of these unjust gaps?
“Ovulation is involuntary, ejaculation is not”(19). Who is the objectively more responsible party then? Around this point, Blair creates an analogy about how silly it is for us to shoulder all of the responsibility on woman instead of men: If someone were to leave rotting food on your doorstep each day, and another someone left dog poop on your doorstep once a month, who would you prioritize finding and apprehending? Logically, you would go for the predictable perpetrator, the one who comes every single day (wink), not the one who only comes once a month. It is only in the silly and flawed logic of a patriarchal world that one would go after the once a month poop deliverer. The point here is to recontextualize how ingrained these false ideas are into our culture, so ingrained in fact, that they often go unseen, unquestioned, and unrealized until someone points at the elephant in the room. In this case, I am pointing at the elephant, flailing my arms and yelling at everyone to look, then parading it around town with a big sign that says ACKNOWLEDGE THIS IS HERE and awarding anyone who gives it even so much as a nod a free box of condoms and this book. (Of course I would then set the elephant free to live in peace from our human problems).
“Though the risk of blood clot from the Johnson & Johnson [Covid-19] vaccine is less than one in a million, the common forms of women’s birth control come with a much higher risk of blood clots—oral contraceptives triple the risk of blood clots. According to the FDA, the risk of birth control users developing a serious blood clot is three to nine out of 10,000 each year.”
“[Birth control] is prescribed daily without hesitation, often beginning at age thirteen or fourteen (sometimes younger).”
I would be curious to see a venn diagram of people who thought the Covid-19 vaccine was too risky to receive yet prescribed their growing adolescent daughters birth control pills with statistically more risky side effects. I would also be curious to see how that diagram overlapped with people who vehemently point to hormonal therapies or transition processes for transsex or gender nonbinary people as “unnatural”, yet still force their daughters to take hormonal birth control without a second thought. I would be curious.
I digress. I would also like to be clear that nowhere in this text does Blair denounce birth control pills or IUDs in terms of its multitude of medical or socioeconomic benefits. There are numerous ways in which hormonal therapies help solve a lot of issues for many women who suffer from particularly painful menstrual cramps, endometriosis, etc. The point here is not to advocate for people to throw caution to the wind and be wary of modern medicine. The point is to simply shift the focus of sexual responsibility from solely women and to acknowledge the more statistically effective ways we can approach contraception as a country of the Global North/”Developed” world.
“In all fifty states you can even access condoms for free. When used correctly, condoms are 98 percent effective at preventing pregnancy.” Any form of preventative birth control for women requires a prescription from a doctor, whereas men can access condoms or practice the pull out method for free and without any preamble, appointments, or even cost. Free condoms are available at university health clinics and many other public centers.
From Scientific American, 2023.
“[United States] is ranked 56 in maternal mortality—that’s dead last [emphasis added] among industrialized countries. The mortality rate for pregnancy is 17.4 per 100,000 people. The on-duty murder rate for police officers is 13.5 per 100,000 people. Which means a pregnant woman is more likely to die due to that pregnancy than a police officer is to be killed on the job.”
I am just going to let you read that again. Pregnancy is not easy, it is not simple, and it often irrevocably changes a woman's body forever.
It is literally more deadly to be pregnant in America than to be an on-duty police officer.
Think about how bizarre it is that people project this idea of courageous bravery onto police officers (less and less, but still), yet take for granted how mortally dangerous it is to bring another human being into the world. How brutally comical is it that a police officer shooting an entire clip of ammo after the sound of a falling acorn is deemed more brave by virtue of his uniform than a pregnant woman by virtue of the life she’s risking by bringing a baby into the world? She is more likely to die than he is while on duty in this country. Does that not make your stomach hurt?
For a man to get a woman pregnant, all he has to do is ejaculate once within a 5-day sperm lifespan of a woman’s unpredictable ovulation period, and that’s it. The rest is economic or social, there are no other physical implications for a man. The man could literally leave and never see her again and have no idea he helped cocreate a child. That’s how much weight one sexual encounter with a man can have on a woman. Then think of how much of men’s responsibility is universally inherent in the act--close to none.
“According to the Pew Research Center, mothers are the sole or primary provider in 40 percent of households with children.”
“Some might assume that abortions will end in the United States because Roe v. Wade was overturned. There is no data to support that. In countries with full abortion bans, research shows that up to 68 percent of unwanted pregnancies are still aborted.”
Blair makes the point toward the end of this book that “Men cause all unwanted pregnancies”, and that with a stronger emphasis on ejaculating responsibly, we could all collectively benefit.
Thank you for reading, I hope this blog post helped recontextualize contraception, biological processes, and sexual responsibility in a beneficial way.
Gabrielle Giannone
