Kate Belgrave-
At the risk of cementing an already fairly solid reputation for going home with anyone and a fast turn around once there, I’d like to talk today about sex.
Substantial work in the field on your behalf has left me with the kind of expertise
it’s only fair to share, and in light of a rather grim national abortion record,
and perhaps a tendency for some of us to address matters prophylactic a little late
in the carnal piece -
Certainly women are finding themselves pregnant when they’d rather not be and the agonies they face make the situation a real concern.
As an alumnus of the state education system, I can say that the argument that New Zealand simply doesn’t give its children enough contraceptive information is true to a substantial extent. But I’d like to suggest there is a bit more to it, especially after you are about 20.
After all, plenty of us did get the fertility lowdown early on in the picture and I’d argue the pervasiveness of the technological age means by the time you are 20 or so, you’ve seen enough movies, soaps and magazine articles to know how babies are made.
I think I could probably deliver one.
So what’s wrong? Certainly, part of the difficulty is gaining control of the wheel.
Everybody knows there is a time in early adulthood when your physical person prefers
answers to dialogue, when trips for two to the movies keep turning into voyages of
anatomical discovery -
Coupled interestingly with this is the fact that it’s genuinely hard to conceive of conceiving. You know you’ve been given a female body so some champ can fertilize it, but the thing seems utterly infeasible.
Mostly though, AI think we sometimes quietly choose to overlook the facts. Sex and commonsense tend not to operate simultaneously, but sex and optimism do, and this seems a difficult alliance to break.
I will be shot for saying so, but it is fairly easy to veer into slightly risky sex because it carries that belief we all have in extraordinary excitement.
It potentially carries a lot of other things as well, which is why I must make clear I am not condoning unsafe sex, but sometimes the line begs to be crossed.
Joan Didion once wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live; possibly; in a world obsessed with safety, we tell ourselves stories in order to breathe.
“Actually, it’s quite hard to get pregnant,” a medical student friend once gasped in my ear.
Actually, it’s not, but convincing yourself is hard. Unfortunately, women ware the dare.