Charlotte Sometimes

Tag: Sex

  • Access to Female Sterlization (Tubal Occlusion)

    First up – if you’re my mother and you’re reading this? You shouldn’t be. If you’re any other member of my family and you’re reading this? You can also go away. If you want me to block access to my blog where I talk about my sex life from your computer then we can arrange that – it’s why I installed TeamViewer on it.

    Last summer I was sterilized via the method of surgical tubal occlusion. I was 29. It was a long process for me to get there, with many difficulties along the way. I’m writing this blog to help other young women get this treatment. All references within this post are to the NHS in the UK.

    It used to be standard practice to refuse surgical sterlization to all women below the age of 30 unless there was a medical reason to carry it out. While that policy is no longer in existence, the right to decide on a case by case basis is now given to the consultant in charge of your surgery. They are free to make the decision whichever way they feel, hopefully with the patients best interest in mind. I think it’s important to understand and be aware of the fact that consultants are people too, with their own opinions, morals and cultural backgrounds. Therefore the treatment that they give can sometimes be affected by these things, because they are normal human beings. I just want to give advice on how I feel you can get yourself into the best position to get this surgery.

    My experience.

    1. Referral from the GP #1. I had no problems with this one. It was a doctor who has known me since I was a child. He questioned me briefly on why I wanted it, told me he felt the pill was still best for me, but referred me anyway.
    2. Referral to consultant #1. First trip to the gynae unit I met with a junior doctor. I found him deeply patronising and after half an hour he declared that I was a ‘difficult’ case and that he wasn’t prepared to make a decision. I had to have a meeting with his supervisor. (Why they didn’t look at my paperwork, see I was young and childless and reschedule me I don’t know.) Two months later I got an appointment with his supervisor, the consultant. I also found the consultant deeply patronising and quite misogynistic. If I’m honest, I didn’t really want him to operate on me. He didn’t want me to have surgery, but reluctantly agreed after I challenged his ‘no’ in a letter.
    3. Surgery #1. Cancelled after I arrived at the hospital due to other priorities in theatre. Rescheduled for three days later when I couldn’t get myself a lift to the hospital and someone to stay overnight with me. Because I couldn’t make the rescheduled date I was removed from the list and would have to start the process back at my GPs. If I was a cynic, I’d think it was all a bit of a coincidence.
    4. Referral from the GP #2. Was a little more difficult than the first time around. The female doctor that I saw was clearly quite uncomfortable with the idea. Nonetheless she referred me to the consultant.
    5. Referral to consultant #2. Gosh, finally in this process I met someone else who got it. I walked in, sat down, and he immediately said ‘I’m going to give you the surgery’. Then he went through the mental checklist that he had to ensure that I’d covered all the bases with my knowledge. He had to understand that I knew about every different alternative. And that I’d considered why I wanted to have it – and why my lifestyle dictated that I should have it. He was extraordinarily brilliant. Even explaining that ethically he felt some of his team might have a problem with the surgery, and that he wasn’t quite behind it, which meant that he would perform the surgery himself. Top bloke. He didn’t patronise me either.
    6. Surgery #2. Less good. For lots of reasons. Mostly involving people who didn’t believe I should be having the surgery.

     

    Know yourself.

    I know, this sounds deeply patronising. You should really be sure that you want this surgery. I’m going to point it out how (just as many people will point it out to you during your journey) that this is permanent. The NHS will not perform operations to reverse this procedure. You might be able to get a reversal privately, but they have a very low rate of success. I hated people telling me this, it felt like they were insulting my intelligence. But I understand that it’s an important point to reinforce.

    If you have even the slightest amount of doubt, then you will not get through the process. They will pick up on this.

    Arm yourself with knowledge.

    There are several things you need to prepare and learn for your consultations.

    The other different types of contraception that are available on the market. Here’s the cheat sheet:

    Caps
    Combined Pill
    Condoms (Female and Male)
    Implant
    Injection
    Patch
    Diaphragms
    IUD
    IUS
    Rhythm/Natural family planning
    Progesterone only Pill
    Vaginal Ring
    Vasectomy

    You should know exactly why the above options are not suitable for you. You should especially know exactly why you would rather have a sterilisation rather than your partner having a vasectomy. It is medically more risky for you to have this procedure than the equivalent being done to your partner. Additionally, a vasectomy cost could be much less than tubectomy procedures. The recovery time for your partner undergoing vasectomy can be less as well. On the other hand, female sterilization involves giving you a general anaesthetic and stopping your breathing, allowing a machine to breathe for you. This is dangerous. The consultant will want to hear why you are opting for the dangerous option.

    Know why previous methods have not worked for you (or are not working for you now).

    My primary argument for surgery was that hormone treatment had not worked for me in the past. I had an awful experience with the injection and had been through six or seven types of pill to try and find one that worked. LoEstrin was the one that worked best for me, however I still had emotional side effects from the hormones. I was also concerned at the level of protection I was getting because of the fact I also have some food allergies which… lets just say… they sometimes made my stomach empty quicker than it should. On such a low dose of hormones, if I had a day where I had an upset stomach it meant I was likely completely unprotected.

    Really know that you don’t want any (more) children. (Or make the point that you’d rather adopt or foster.)

    I approached this from the point of view that I didn’t want to have children, ever. This would be a very bad thing in my life. I laid out to myself – very clearly in my head – all the reasons why I didn’t want to have children. My most convincing argument appeared to be that I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree and I also had a masters and a PhD to go. Having to take a break out of education for a few years to have children wasn’t in my plan. It’s a shame that ‘I just don’t want them’ isn’t fully supported, but perhaps in time it will be.

    I also argued that as an adopted child (at birth) I see no reason why there should be any desire to get pregnant and push a child out of my vagina rather than adopting a child because their parents cannot care for them. And in fact, due to my social justice warrior leanings, I’d be more likely to consider fostering difficult teenagers anyway if I desperately felt the need to have children.

    Understand arguments for equality.

    I was asked during my first consultation how I would feel if I met a rich man (I was single) and he wanted children. I politely pointed out that I felt the doctor was rather sexist – and if he felt that my morals were so low that I’d change my entire world view just to get a bit of money then I’d prefer that he asked me to leave right now so that I could request a different hospital. He was pretty uncomfortable, the nurse in the corner who was taking notes sniggered a little big. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself. This is your body. You are an intelligent and bright person who is capable of deciding for herself if she wants children in the future or not.

    Know how much you want to tell the consultant, and prepare factual descriptions of your situation.

    I am single, pansexual and non-monogamous. At the time of my consultations I had no nesting or long-term partner.

    I did not tell the first consultant I saw about my sexuality or non-monogamy, I just told him that I was single. When I went for my second attempt at getting the surgery a year later, I had a bit of a ‘fuck it’ attitude and decided to see if that would actually help my case. It did. The consultant praised me for being an informed young woman who had clearly researched the available options and how they applied to my individual situation.

    I toyed for a while with taking a friend to pose as my boyfriend, however I decided I wouldn’t be able to play it convincingly. The second time round I just wanted to be respected for my own opinion.

    Take a friend to surgery. Or your partner. But not a male friend.

    On the day of my surgery I took a very good male friend of mine, who had supported me through the whole process. I felt that he was the best qualified person for things like, driving me to the hospital, seeing me vomit after I work up from anaesthetic, helping me take my clothes off and get in the shower, etc. There was nobody else I really wanted to see me in that state.

    However it concerned a member of staff that I had a man with me who wasn’t my partner, but who I was sure could stay in the room while my procedure was discussed. Turns out that basically they thought he might be my pimp and I was being coerced. I was deeply unhappy at their treatment of me in this case and I made a full complaint to the NHS PALS service afterwards. I just thought it was logical that he was with me after they’d already started drugging me up, so that if I forgot any bit of information he’d heard it too. Also I have no secrets from him. And we’re very open about sex.

    I would suggest – unfortunately – that you take a female friend on the day with you, if you don’t have a male or female intimate partner. It would just make things go smoother and be less stressful.

     

    So that’s it really. Hopefully this will help other young women in my situation get the treatment that they’re looking for.

  • Sex and LRP. LRP and Sex. And some gender stuff.

    I make no secret of the fact that my chosen subject academically is gender studies. Yes, I’m doing it from a history of art and photography point of view, but gender studies is at the core of what I’m interested in. It’s taken me a long time to get to this place, it was only at about 27 or so that I realised this was what I was interested in. That’s because I had to make my own way there through the storm of teenage years and then painful twenty-somethings (that, FYI, feel like you’re pushing a rock up a hill with no end in sight).

    I got here through a convoluted exploration of what it means to be a woman in our society. And occasionally what it means to be a man. I’m pretty liberated on the whole in my approach to life, or rather I like to consider myself flexible. I live a solo-polyamorous lifestyle with a touch of relationship anarchy. I relate to different people in different ways and something that also means sex comes into the fray. I’d also like to add that I think I’m pretty liberated and open-minded in this respect too. Certainly, sex isn’t a taboo in my world, nor are different relationship styles, sexuality, power balances, and all the rest of it. In case it isn’t a taboo in your world too, try to be open to experiencing new things and learning what are pheromones and other ways to spice up your sex life.

    But to be quite honest, I’m so over sex. When it comes to LRP anyway.

    I admit, I’ve only been immersing myself in LRP for a year now. Seven events in total, all of them run by PD. Five Empires and two Odysseys. I’m not going to comment on Odyssey, I know nothing about the gameplay mechanics. What I do know about it is that it’s an adult themed game that deals with adult topics and actually, they seem to be written pretty fucking well in a non-giggly kind of way. But Empire, well, it seems different.

    The first half of 2013 seemed to deal a fair bit with making some people understand that this was a setting where gender or sex wasn’t a barrier to doing things. I don’t know what other systems are like, but from the way some people apparently behaved I can only extrapolate that in other systems it’s ok to stop women being generals, and men don’t do the cooking in camp. Or, with a nod to my beloved Warcraft, ‘healer girlfriends FTW’!

    This sucks. You know why this sucks? Because this is far too much like REAL LIFE.I know there are some people who I will have lost at this point, so this is the basic explanation: You know how if you’re a guy and you go to a fantasy LRP it’s cool because you get to be someone else? You know, if you’re normally a stockbroker who wears a suit to work every day and is oppressed by their boss you get to instead be an AWESOME GENERAL who goes round smiting foes? That’s fun, right? Well you know what’s NOT fun? Playing the same role that you play in every day life. I mean, would you go to a fantasy LRP and play a stockbroker who wears a suit and is oppressed by their bosses? No? Well then, I guess that most women don’t want to go to a fantasy LRP and play their every day role either. So just do me a favour, don’t stop a woman in her goal of doing something cool at an event just because you think that women shouldn’t do XYZ. Maybe she wants a break too.

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    Anyway. That’s not entirely what I wanted to talk about, except for the fact I’m trying to point out that gender or sex is rarely relevant at Empire.

    So you know what blows my mind? The amount of women who want to be prostitutes at LRP. I mean, I get that everyone has a right to play their fantasy game the way that they want to play it. That’s totally cool. And I know that ‘the real world’ is not supposed to have a bearing on LRP’s like Empire and the way it’s played, but the reality is that is does, because you can’t just lose your cultural experiences when you step the other side of a hedge.

    Now, apparently there are male prostitutes in LRP too so it’s all ok and not horribly sexist. However, I find this a little… well… unpalateable. From what I can gather, there aren’t many male prostitutes in LRP. And by all accounts, they’re generally frequented by male characters too. Which means that we have basically just forced an outside world structure of patriarchal oppression into the game. It’s not so much that women are mostly the sellers of sex here, it’s the fact that male characters are pretty much the buyers. I don’t agree that being a seller of sex means that you hold the position of power in the transaction. You can offer to sell your body all day long, but if no one is buying, then you have nothing. Whereas having primarily male characters purchasing another persons body – that gives them all the power in the equation.

    I also understand there is some argument about female empowerment and taking back a role that in the real world is primarily the preserve of male pimps. I can kind of see that, but it still doesn’t sit right. How about we just abolish the idea that sex can be used for power? Because like it or not, the power is pretty much always with the one doing the stabbing. There’s a reason that a metaphor for the penis is the sword, and it’s not because of it’s shape or length (sorry guys…). The penis is the ultimate tool of patriarchal power. Even if you ignore all the other subtle reasons, it can still get you pregnant and put you out of action. Being a female prostitute is a dangerous profession where, on the whole, you’re at the whim of a bigger, stronger person who could take advantage of the situation at a moments notice. There’s nothing empowering, to me, about that situation.

    But guys, it’s ok! Because everyone knows that people are buying back rubs or a cup of tea and not actually sex. I have a problem with that too. Firstly it’s because it’s a naming thing. I’m a sucker for trying to use the right word. You’re not a prostitute or a brothel if you’re not selling sex. What really disturbs me though is that apparently some characters play the role of a prostitute because they want to actually give beauty treatments or massages in the game! I mean, I don’t understand this at all! Is there so much shame in setting up an in game ‘health spa’? Why is it more acceptable to say that you run a brothel rather than a spa? What kind of a fucked up world is that where selling sex is more acceptable than selling a skill?

    On hearing that back rubs are used as a phys-rep for sex in LRP I got a bit worried. I’m quite an intimate person with my close friends. I like to touch, cuddle and yes, even give a back rub every now and again. But that worries me. If a back rub is a phys-rep for sex, there’s far too much of a risk that it could be taken the other way too. By offering someone a back-rub, is that code for offering someone in the game-world sex? I don’t like that at all. I’m quite socially awkward and I would hate to offer one in kindness and have it taken the wrong way. That’s really uncomfortable and brings us back to what I was saying about how it’s really shit being held accountable to real-world crap in the game-world. Surely we LRP to get away from the reality of things like sexism and inappropriate sexual harassment – not unwittingly find ourselves back in the middle of it?

    I think what bothers me most is that we’re trying to shoehorn patriarchal structures into a world that doesn’t make allowances for them. This concerns me. It concerns me that it was written into the game as an *active choice* by the designers. That arguments were made for prostitution being a crime within the empire. Unfortunately this isn’t a satisfactory response either, because it acknowledges that there are *real world* problems with prostitution that can be transferred into the game world. This is one of those occasions where I kind of with people would just leave the subject alone. I admit it could be done *really* well by a player who was super intelligent and able to apply quite highly abstract concepts of gender and sexuality into the game, but unfortunately, I’m not sure that the tales I’ve told reflect that.

    And there are others who tell me that it’s just the way it’s always been and that I should, you know, shut up. Or go back to the kitchen. Or something. And I can’t just shut up and let it be the way it’s always been, because if everyone did that then women at LRP wouldn’t be able to be generals and stuff.

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    I don’t know. I’m pretty blasé about sex. If you want to do it, then do it. If you don’t, then don’t. And that’s about as close as I want to get to it. But you know what? As a liberated person who has more than her fair share of liberated relationships with liberated sex, I just don’t really see the need to push it as part of a game world. That includes playing characters like prostitutes or seeing sex-plot out on the field or having immature character (both PC or NPC) backgrounds that fulfil some weird sexist stereotypes in the real world. We don’t need that shit in the game world as far as I can tell.

    For a while the other day, when discussing sex cropping up in LRP in various guises, I felt extraordinarily prudish. I was the one thinking ‘is this really necessary?’ Because in my world, sex just happens. It’s not ‘a thing’ that needs to be focussed on. Actually to focus on it makes me a little uncomfortable because it’s just so normalised in my world. And I get the impression that perhaps the people pushing for sex to be a part of the setting are maybe a little naive when it comes to talking about sex. There’s this slight vibe of teenage boy comedy movies like American Pie or whatever other shit Hollywood has come out with recently.

    It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it, it’s just that I feel perhaps it’s being given too much weight. Plus at Empire, there’s no nation where sex is A BIG THING. Lots of romance, yes, and presumably lovely sex happens as part of those romances. But in the same way that my friends don’t tell me about their sex lives, the characters don’t talk about theirs. It’s not that they’re ignoring it because we’re prudes, but rather just because it’s so everyday that actually it’s pretty bloody boring.

    And that’s just it. Sex is boring. Well, you know what I mean. Not while it’s actually happening, you hope. But whenever I see some puerile, teenage, sex-comedy film I just role my eyes and get irritated with all the rife sexism, immaturity and general lack of worldliness of the writers and characters. It seems, unfortunately, that LRP is no different.

    To me, there’s just a whole world of more interesting stories to write about. But perhaps that’s my fault for being a bit more on the liberal side of things.

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