Buying Condoms For Your Kids Is So 2023
Also vibrators. Yes, it's happening.
Hi there, I’m Mia Freedman and this is my newsletter about pop culture and life. If someone sent it to you, sign up so they don’t have to do that next time.
There is nobody more emotionally invested in condoms than Gen X women. Raised on a steady diet of Dolly Doctor and Cosmo sealed sections, we embarked on our sex lives during a uniquely hellish time called the 80s.
A new sexually transmitted disease named AIDS had arrived and we were told repeatedly that sex without a condom could - and probably would - kill you.
In case anyone wasn’t clear on that last point - and to counter the myth that AIDS was just a ‘gay disease’3 - we were blasted with a traumatising TV campaign depicting AIDS as the Grim Reaper who hurled bowling balls of virus towards mostly women who were knocked over and killed.
It was an invigorating time to become sexually active: could this handjob possibly kill me if he’s not wearing a condom and I get some sperm on my jeans? Who can say!
What happened was we internalised the idea that condoms are the superior form of birth control because not only do they mean less pregnancy but also less death
This seemed a lot like a win-win situation, on that we can agree.
So when Gen X women clocked our own kids entering their sex years, we did something no generation before us has done: we began buying them condoms. Let us add this to the long, long list of things our parents never did for us, along with calling our school to offer to take detention on our behalf and calling our employers to petition for a pay increase. Also helping us source and pay for fake ID.
Buying your kid condoms is in a slightly different sub-category of helicopter parenting, admittedly, and I’m here for it.
To the grim reaper generation who were forced to become very comfortable with condoms very quickly, providing them to our children feels as ordinary as providing tooth paste and sunscreen: they are basic health necessities.
If you’re not among my people, however, you may have rolled your eyes at the storyline in this week’s And Just Like That episode when Charlotte goes out in a snowstorm to buy her daughter condoms after Lily announces she’s going to lose her virginity that day (you can listen to our Outloud recap here)
My friends who have younger kids or no kids thought this was implausible. I thought it was a documentary.
This is how many parents roll in 2023: you buy contraception for your teenager. And maybe also a vibrator? I mean, why not…….
The reality star who had to fight for 14 years to get her uterus removed
Here’s something you may not know.
If you want to have a hysterectomy to help treat debilitating pain caused by a gynaecological condition like endometriosis or PCOS and you’re of child-bearing age, it’s highly likely you’ll be refused.
That’s what happened to Erin Barnett, a reality TV star who had her first of dozens of operations to remove tumours from her ovaries aged just 14.
The tumour weighed 3kg.
As soon as she turned 18, Erin began begging to have her uterus removed. “But what if you want children one day?” doctors would say.
“I don’t want kids”, she would reply. “But I would like to experience even one day of my life without excruciating, unpredictable pain.”
‘But you might change your mind’, they would counter.
And how do you respond to that?
All Erin knew is that she’d never been maternal and even if she was, her life was so dominated by the agony caused by her condition that she knew she wasn’t capable of being anyone’s mother. She could barely function.
In an exclusive interview with Mamamia for No Filter, Erin told me that if a woman wants to get IVF or have an abortion or if she wants to have a baby naturally, there are few medical obstacles placed in her way. Nobody asks “what does your partner think?” and nobody asks her to be certified as being capable of making that decision by a psychiatrist as well as another specialist.
So why couldn’t Erin make her own decision about her body and just get a hysterectomy? Why was her future ability to become a mother the deciding factor for the doctors who repeatedly turned her away because she was too young?
You can read Mamamia’s cover story about Erin’s fight - and the fight of other women including actor Lena Dunham - to have a hysterectomy at age 28 and listen to her talk about it on No Filter this week.