Birth Control Pills: Sexual Dysfunction

The famous birth control pill that helped women escape the potential of bearing more children than they could care for adequately - more children than a family could afford to rear, more children than could be reasonably accommodated in modest accommodations that were far more the norm a half-century ago than they are now, when the traditional two-parent family had one wage-earner - has had many effects on society.

For women, it was not only that the hormonal alterations that the pill caused meant they would no longer have to fear yet another pregnancy, it was also that they were more 'regulated' in the sense that menstruation which was so very difficult and often very painful for many women was, with the use of the pill, a distant memory. The relief too that women need no longer fear an unwanted pregnancy relaxed them psychologically.

Which changed, of course, once the world was informed that the chemical constituents of the pill could cause cancer. Leading to a change in the chemical/hormonal formulation, which made the potential for cancer far less likely. But there were other, unanticipated effects of the easy life that the pill gave women. There was a slow increase in promiscuity because there were fewer risks involved.

Women could seek the gratification of untied sex just like men, and that sparked a complete sexual revolution that men as well as women appreciated. It also sparked another kind of revolution; a decrease in commitment between men and women, and a correspondingly obvious decrease in legal marriage. And, more likely, a rise in sexually transmitted diseases.

Accepted social and cultural mores changed gradually and seemingly irrevocably, with common law partnerships or casual 'unions' becoming as common in society as legal marriage between a husband and a wife. Looser commitments corresponded with less security in the relationship. And it seemed that everyone lost something in the transition.

Society had far more single-parent families. And since more of these single-parent families were headed by women, struggling to make a life for themselves and their offspring, sans supporting partner/husband/father, poverty among such families became endemic. Marking an increase in the number of children living below the poverty line.

In the same token children were being raised by a single parent, and there was no male-female balance in their lives, no patterning opportunities, no total sense of comfort and security, where single-parent children were left with a curiosity about full families of two parents and their offspring. Clearly, their lives were missing something.

Now we discover, as a result of recent research, that women using birth control pills and other types of hormonal contraception may also be at high risk for low libido and arousal problems. Not that much of a problem, actually, if they're single, and prefer to stay that way, but then they wouldn't be on the pill to begin with.

This is one crazy world. We're socially dysfunctional, that's the problem. Tampering with what nature has presented us with because it's inconvenient, then realizing that we've turned our world upside down.