I don’t mean to keep hammering at Bitch Blogs for this, but it’s just irresponsible at this point. Earlier today, I criticized an interview with anti-pill activist Laura Eldrige for engaging in unscientific fear-mongering. Well, there’s a part two up. In the first part, there was the pretense that this is about “asking questions” and “broadening the discussion”, a cover story that skeptics like to call “JAQing off”.
JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of “Just Asking Questions”. The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners’ views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are “just asking questions”, albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general.
In my experience, JAQers usually drop the pretense fairly quickly, and that’s exactly what happens in part two of this interview. The pretense that this is about demanding more options and greater variety is dropped, and it’s full-blown demonizing of the birth control pill, complete with characterizing women on it as hapless victims who don’t have control over their lives. If you think I’m overstating it, let me say this—-Eldridge basically says that being on the pill makes you a junkie.
I went to a conference with Barbara in 2007 and a doctor was talking about HRT (which by the way, is made of the same chemicals that are in the Pill but at lower doses) - and I asked her about women coming off of hormone treatments and how they could get, perhaps, addicted to them and she was very adamant that women do not get addicted to these drugs. I couldn’t believe her contention. These are powerful chemicals, and people have the potential to get addicted to powerful chemicals. Many women describe experiences coming off the Pill that sound like addiction. That said, not all women find coming of the Pill or HRT tough – I didn’t have a problem with it.
Oh, good to know she doesn’t think we’re all junkies!
The slim excuse for this hyperbolic language is that she’s talking about physical dependency, but let’s face it. Calling the pill “addictive” is about aligning it with recreational drugs, which is something that I expect from sex-phobic anti-choicers who think we all have abortion parties, but not from a feminist. Using that frame is sex-negative, whether Eldridge intends it to be or not.
That’s the weirdest part of the interview, but it’s far from the only weird part of it. Eldridge mentioned a whole bunch of contraception alternatives in the last post, but in this one, she talks about how she settled on using a diaphragm. Yes, the much-reviled method that was so popular in the anti-feminist 1950s! The one that has fallen out of fashion because it has all the negatives of condoms without any of the positives (STD protection, getting men involved). And as if daring me to call her a crank, Eldridge practically delights in the fact that the doctor thought she was loony for wanting a diaphragm.
In all seriousness, I’m sure the diaphragm is fine. Like Eldridge says, it worked fine for a lot of women in its heyday. According to Planned Parenthood, it has a 6% failure rate if used correctly. Not as good as the pill, but not so horrible, either. And since I’m into vinyl collecting and vintage dresses, I can’t pick on someone who enjoys a little of that retro flair, though I can’t say that it seems very satisfying to have it hugging your cervix. But it’s funny to me that someone who, in her JAQing off phase, bemoaned the lack of innovation in contraception is now applauding a method that hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past 60 years. And while she says it’s easy to use now, the fact that it took her three weeks to figure out how to use it properly doesn’t do much to dissuade me from feeling that Eldridge is working from the premise that sex should be a hassle.
And then there’s the conflation of science and superstition.
There’s a certain amount of superstition that comes in to trying to avoid getting pregnant. You put your faith in one method or another. Being more in control of the process and taking responsibility for what happens can be scary. It’s amazing that we have this one size fits all Pill where someone who is 4’10’’ and 95 pounds takes the same one as someone who is 6’2’’ – that doesn’t seem right.