Of promises, pills and playing with freedom

Women's Month is coming up (it starts tomorrow) but the following is really for the men.

There's really a lot to understand about women, which makes being a man quite a challenge in some ways that women probably have not stopped to consider. There's the wonder of intuition. The workings of estrogen-related tendencies. Even the whole concept of window-shopping boggles the mind at times.

That men and women are different is beyond dispute. But is there any human being -- male or female -- that doesn't long to be loved?

With this common ground in mind, I decided to post a piece I saw -- one whose subtitle goes, Love is not love if it doesn’t insist “I am yours; you are mine.”

An excerpt:

If our beliefs are to determine our behavior, they must be grounded in truth and govern the emotions and needs that drive us. Only then will the moral principles to which we give lip service become strong convictions which serve to impose boundaries on our behavior so that we develop real character. Otherwise even the promises of marriage will be little more than “til death do us part . . . or not.”

Love and sex unleash the strongest of feelings. While love and sex without promises are part of the foolish unrealistic imaginings of the post-modern mind, truth has a way of coming to the fore in the least expected places. Never was this more evident than in the movie Vanilla Sky. In a poignant scene, Cameron Diaz’s character frantically tells Tom Cruise’s character that he made promises to her. When he declared that he had made no promises, she replied –– with the strength of absolute certainty –– that the intimacy of their intercourse the night before had constituted a promise. Sadly, though she uttered truth, the movie presented her as a psychopath.

Read more of "Love and Sex without Promises" at Concerned Women for America

Here's another one to ruminate on (hopefully, this'll get women to stop and think more about what's really happening -- personally and as a society). Excerpts:

Packaged as reproductive freedom, the birth control pill has been triumphed for decades as the means by which women were able to rid themselves from the bondage of fertility and be able to enjoy sexual relations for mere bodily pleasure. But, a closer look at chemical birth control suggests that maybe it is more of a burden on women than a redeemer.

The irony is that birth control is almost always a sort of necessary evil for women. In exchange for this "freedom," a woman must remember to take a daily pill, replace a weekly patch or a monthly ring, or otherwise keep up with a regular regimen that suppresses her health and fertility. She must suffer the adverse sexual and medical side effects, and she is usually stuck with the financial expense of the chemicals, devices and doctor's visits. Certainly looks like a burden to me.

From the 1940s-1960s while researchers were developing the birth control pill, there were formulas for making both a men's version and a women's version, but ultimately, the women's version was the only one to hit the market. Men noticed in the trials that their pill had adverse physical side effects. Women in the trials died from their pill. The men's version was discontinued, and the dosage of the women's version was reduced.

Here's some more surprising news. In 2002, several researchers were given a $9.5 million dollar grant by the National Institutes of Health for creating a male chemical contraception. No results yet, and that was my tax dollars at work. I'm not surprised.

That would be a hard pill for any man to swallow. Why have so many women been subjecting themselves to this for so long?

Read "An impossible Pill to swallow" in full at The Revolution