Ever notice how sometimes the deeper one digs the more interesting some news tidbits become?

In a news-roundup post, Beth Saunders of RHRealityCheck.org passes along with insufficient comment a tidbit from an anti-choice website that...

Twenty percent of British women used emergency contraception in the past year, according to a survey by the Co-Operative Pharmacy.

Source: RHRealityCheck.org

If you go to the site itself (LifeSiteNews) you get a little more background... but obviously you also get more anti-choice slant (emphasis mine)

A Co-Operative Pharmacy survey of 3000 people found that 20 percent of women aged 18 to 35 took the “emergency contraceptive” pill last year. The same group said they had typically used the drug, which only acts as a genuine contraceptive in some cases, when they had had sex after using drugs and/or alcohol.

The poll further found that up to 250,000 women had used the drug two or more times during the year. One in fifty 18-21 year-olds said they used the MAP as their normal form of contraception. One sixth of the women surveyed said they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

Source: LifeSiteNews

And if you go to the actual Co-Operative Pharmacy press release you get the same core information minus (shock, gasp, surprise!) mention of "only acts as a genuine contraceptive in some cases."  Which is good because, of course, that would be factually incorrect.  Here's the straight story from the source.

Thousands of women risk waking up on New Years Day with more than a hangover as over one in five blame partying with drink or drugs for not using contraception with a new partner, figures* reveal today (1 January 2011).

The Co-operative Pharmacy, part of The Co-operative Group, questioned 3,000 people about contraception and found that one in five women aged 18 to 35 years old have used the morning after pill in the last 12 months. One in six women admitted to having had a sexual disease.

The research also revealed that the preferred method of contraception for almost half of all women was the pill and two out of five favoured condoms. 250,000** women have used the emergency contraceptive three times or more and more than one in 50 of those aged 18 to 21 said they preferred to use the morning after pill as a regular form of contraception.

Source Co-Operative Pharmacy

I don't feel qualified to comment on on-the-ground experiences (feel free to chime if you know otherwise) but it sounds like most pharmacists don't agree that EC is all that great on one's system.  From the Co-Operative press release:

Mandeep Mudhar, Head of NHS Development at The Co-operative Pharmacy, said: “Our research shows that some women are taking unnecessary risks with their health. The morning after pill should be a last resort to prevent an unwanted pregnancy after having unprotected sex or if another method of contraception has failed, such as if you have forgotten to take one of your contraceptive pills.

“However, the emergency contraceptive pill does not protect against sexually transmitted infections. Pharmacists provide free accessible advice about contraception but we would always urge people to use a condom, particularly with a new partner, as it offers the greatest protection.”

That sounds about right.  I'd just add, though, that the key word above would be "particularly with a new partner."

Few young single people have "Jersey Shore" style lifestyles where they're prepared at every moment to be ready to fall into bed with someone new.  Instead, most young single people, women as much as men, tend to go through sexual "boom and bust" relationships.  And for people for whom hormonal contraception is an option (obviously only women so far, darn it) it often doesn't feel worth the hassle and often the discomfort of staying on a medication you may expect to need only a few times a year.

To that extent that most women who report using emergency contraception as their "primary contraceptive" are almost all still using it only once a year we're not necessarily talking about a giant epidemic of "irresponsibility" here.  Nor, I would add, does that suggest epidemics of "promiscuity" either.  Unless by promiscuity you mean "once last year."

The EC/STI connection is a little more problematic.  First of the STI question seems to have been about lifetime experience with STIs whereas the rest of the survey reports about annual experience with contraception.  I mention this only to tidy up the numbers, not to minimize the actual risk.  Second, by focusing on the EC angle the story almost necessarily underplays the story of very large numbers of people using no protection for first-time sex.

Proposal: I know it sounds counterintuitive but I think it occurs to  me it might be a very good idea to encourage manufacturers and/or pharmacists to include a condom in every package of EC.  It's counterintuitive because one tends to view EC as something you take after the fact.  And indeed it is.

EC is not, however, always purchased after the fact.  I expect it's a lot easier to remember that if you've already Backed Up Your Birth Control it might be easier to remember you've also got at least one backup condom.  And even if not?  Well, you've still got a condom for next time.  Even if, as those survey numbers suggest, next time also happens to be next year.  And one way or other, knowing there's a condom in the box "puts the idea into consciousness" as the new-agers say.

Extra credit if the condoms have the retro-20th-Century "for prevention of disease only" motif!

Following up on my personal story in my previous post. In that post I mentioned that when I was what amounted to a wandering wastrel, often homeless, perpetually jobless, hitch-hiking endlessly and aimlessly hoping to find work, or more often parties I was hooking up for sex with two and sometimes three partners a month. Occasionally two in a weekend.

Which I’m pretty sure most people who think in terms of “seed spreading” and “track records” that would be considered a pretty good one.

You know what’s funny though?

It’s funny in a highly indicative way.

Because I believed hook, line, and sinker in male sexual scarcity, the Two Rules of Desire and the whole dominant paradigm of women as the“no-sex” class I didn’t think that was very good at all.

In fact I was miserable!

I thought I was a sexual loser.

Because…

Because in the dominant paradigm it’s not how many women you’re partners with.

It’s how many you aren’t.

And how hard it is to find them.

And how much work it is to get into their pants.

And how if someone has dark hair you think you’d be better off if they were blond.

And how if someone has blond hair you think you’d be better of if their hair were red.

And how if they’re tall and willowy you think it would be better if they had bigger breasts.

And if they’re busty you think it would be better if they had long legs.

And so the whole time you’re a happy, healthy, sexually active man with on the order of dozens of generally highly intelligent, attractive, often adventurous, and generally highly-compatible partners…

You’re conditioned… even if only conditioned by yourself… to believe you’re a loser.

Because (to borrow pickup-artist parlance) there are “higher status” guys out there — rock stars, or millionaires, or playboys or… something — with even more partners than you.

You know what’s really funny though? Once I started to “settle down.” Meaning I’d found myself a job, and an apartment, and stopped freewheeling around the country, I started making up all sorts of stories about how nobody would go out with me. Because I didn’t have a car. Because I only worked in a pizza place. Because I wasn’t well-enough dressed. Or not a good enough musician.

This hadn’t been a problem before. The people I’d hooked up with while, say, hitch-hiking through Washington D.C. or north New Jersey or central Virginia hadn’t worried “hmm, he doesn’t have a car so I don’t want to be talked to, romanced, kissed, held, undressed, made love to.” They thought “mmm, I want to be talked to, romanced, kissed, held, undressed, made love to.”

But once I got it into my head that I had to be materially successful… where I was the one defining what success meant… I didn’t even give them the chance. I cut myself off.

Of course I assumed it was the women I had crushes on. The women I “knew” wouldn’t give me the time of day. The women I tried to be “nice guys” around.

Want to know another funny thing?

I run into some of those women every now and then. And in retrospect I’m… pretty sure they’d have been happy to go out with me. If I’d let them… if I’d let myself.

In other words it wasn’t so much them as it was me.

I could have turned into an MRA, easy as pie. One of those guys who’s so fueled with bitterness at his “low-status” condition he… well… creeps virtually all his potential partners. Fortunately I’d had a healthy dose of experience, of partners who were into early 70’s feminism — not always pleasant (sometimes not at all) and so while I was sequestering myself, and really clueless about how the whole thing was working out, I didn’t blame individuals in particular or women in general.

Instead I kind of bumbled along, chilled a little, got a little more integrated into my community, figured out where to start hanging out, and started meeting people, some of whom became sex partners, more of whom became friends. Then a few years later I moved out West, went to college (in my mid-20s) and meeting those same kind of progressive women I’d had such great encounters with years before. And while I was never as wild again as I had been I had some great relationships. Again some sexual, others not.

It wasn’t till just recently though that I finally figured out who’s fault it was that I was never getting “enough.”

It was my fault. For buying into a whole heaping pile of dominant paradigm.

Another funny thing? I’m pretty sure I could be a lot more sexually active these days. With a fair number of partners — maybe more than I ever was partners with in my wildest days.

But you know what? The last funny thing?

Even if I couldn’t I probably wouldn’t mind.

Know why?

Because now I know that’s not the only way to measure my worth.

Because I know it wouldn’t be about “getting lucky” or “scoring” or talking anyone into something she didn’t really want to do. Because she was turned on when she was around me. Because she knew I got turned on being around her. And because that’s how good sex really works.

In no small part I’ve got feminism to thank for finally getting that.

2nd wave feminism. Especially 3rd-wave feminism.

Even, the more I come to understand what they’re really talking about, a lot of radical feminism.

Pretty cool.

A lot of men could have that too.

They just have to open the doors of the prisons they construct for themselves and the people around them.

And walk out.

Megan of delivers the goods on the story that gendered promiscuity/monogamy is genetically determined.

The idea that men try to impregnate as many women as possible while women try to hold on to a provider is derived from fruit fly behavior. Its applicability to humans is becoming increasingly questionable.

There’s a ton more here. Go read it.

Bottom line: the sociobiological/ev-psych model of promiscuous men and monogamous women holds up quite well in (very contemporary in evolutionary terms) locations where… well… promiscuity in men and monogamy in women are either tolerated or encouraged. In other locations not so much.

If you’re an adult you can click for a possibly not-safe-for-work image.

Em and Lo of Daily Bedpost have a nice Q&A feature where they ask three different men, usually a single straight man, a single straight man, and a committed gay man, for their take on a question. Their take on the question “Do you think guys cheat more than women?” was pretty interesting.

The straight single respondent, “Max,” said men are just lousier than women. Also, succumbing the dominant women as the “no-sex” class ideology, he adds

A girl, on the other hand, is more likely to be satisfied with the attention and flirtation alone. She doesn’t NEED the physical confirmation to get an ego boost.

Read all about it here.

“Matt,” the straight married respondent, also bashes men, blaming what he sees as more cheating as a result of poor impulse control. He also says “variety is a more constant drive” for men. Also, without considering, say, this point by Audacia Ray he says (emphasis mine)

They would sleep with someone different every day—maybe even several times a day. I just don’t believe that would be appealing to most women over the long term. (I’m not talking about on occasion here, I mean different partners every day, for years. If you offered women the choice between that and a daily massage, they’d take the massage.)

And, getting closer to what I think the real answer might be, adds

This inherent desire for variety is a constantly suppressed impulse for pretty much every guy I know—even the ones who would never, ever stray.

Hmm… really? Wonder if anyone besides men has to spend time suppressing impulses?

Finally, though, “Terrence,” the gay committed man, brings up the most interesting points. (Emphasis also mine.)

Do men cheat more than women? My intuition is screaming yes. But I also think our perception of men as cheaters feeds their cheating behavior — which is another column entirely.

...

[I]f we’ve got to look at it in absolutes, then I believe yes, technically, men cheat more than women. But with life’s continuous chaos and change, I’d rather stick with a partner who may have some random shags here and there if he’s consistently emotionally monogamous with me.

Actually I’m with Terrence on the cheating question. Sure, men cheat at… rates only a little bit higher than the rates women cheat.

What’s the difference then? Why do men (at least Euro/Anglo men) get the label? I think Terence touches on that but doesn’t land square.

There are any number of kinds of intimate relationships where sex isn’t involved at all. Think lifelong platonic friendships, family ties, and partnerships in intensely competitive and/or adventurous environments. Conversely, sad to say, in many monogamous relationships the partners themselves can be quite distant from each other.

What (heterosexual) monogamy does have going for it is a guarantee that men’s family’s property will be inherited by the “right” person’s offspring. For most of the history of marriage, in virtually all history-leaving cultures, that’s been the biggest consideration behind virginity, abstinence, fidelity, and monogamy. (Compare the meanings of the words “adultery” and “adulterated” for instance.)

Anyway, in cultures where men and their families have tended to control economics, and where it matters to their families that offspring really is “theirs,” and where women have been kept completely economically and even legally dependent on men (even here their fathers “give them away” to their husbands at wedding, remember, a vestige of what used to be cold, hard, Common-Law legal truth) the deck has been substantially stacked against women who cheat (stoning, anyone?) and… stacked pretty flipping indifferently against men who do.

Anyway, since the rules of monogamy were initially created to protect men’s interest in women as their property (“thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife… no his house nor cattle nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s!) you’d sort of expect to see two things: first, that men wouldn’t see much wrong with collecting a little extra “property,” or even that they’d judge each other’s status by how much “property” they could accumulate (unless, of course, they were married to that “property” in which case it would be “theft.”) And second that as the metaphorical, and sometimes real property even when women did cheat they’d have to be a lot more circumspect — the consequences, at least of being caught, (stoning, divorced, faced with raising children on their own) have tended to be way, way, way higher for them.

Anyway, I think all that adds up to explain why men have the greater reputation for cheating… and the statistically significant but not that much higher actual rate of cheating than women. A difference, by the way, that’s therefore more cultural and not nearly as “natural” as Matt and Max suggest. Take away those cultural different consequences, and throw in more legal and economic parity, and I’m pretty sure the statistical difference largely disappears, with men not feeling sex with multiple partners is a status builder, and women not seeing fewer partners as a survival mechanism.

I happen to think, by the way, that if we could get closer to real economic, social, and legal parity we’d wind up with Terence’s position: perhaps a little more sexual “cheating” (which might not even be considered cheating) but a lot more room for intimate and emotionally monogamous partnerships inside relationships.