麻豆社

Since setting up my little home office (my grandiose way of describing the £39 faux-wooden desk I bought online and the office chair a mate of mine gifted me through pity) to get me through Lockdown, I’ve set up a few trinkets next to my desk to help me focus and stay motivated.

These include a poem about never giving up that my Granny very sweetly printed off for me when I started comedy, one of those grip strengthening devices for when things get stressful ad a photograph of my parents, partly because I love them, partly as a form of motivation, because they’re the poor people that are going to have to remortgage their house to pay my rent if I run out of work.

Today I’m sitting here tapping away at this week’s article on the topic of contraception. But this week, there’s something in my work space, in my eyeline, that is not only distracting, but is really starting to make me think that I shouldn’t be writing on the subject of contraception at all - my unplanned (but very much loved!) child.

In this week’s episode of Jacob Hawley: On Love, I describe how a mix up with contraception resulted in the best thing that ever happened to me and my partner, our daughter. But whilst imperfections with modern contraception have left us with our happy accident (we call her this instead of ‘our mistake’), contraception is a serious topic, and there are massive repercussions when it goes wrong.

I think it’s pretty common but when I was a teenager, contraception felt like a taboo, embarrassing subject even when it was encouraged by adults. I remember my Dad having a brief, awkward yet well-meaning conversation with me about ‘the birds and the bees’ after the first night I’d come home with a stinking hangover from a party that my parents knew girls had attended. Despite him kindly offering to buy me condoms I didn’t take him up on the offer, and instead hid the ones that I had bought myself - hiding places ranged from a DVD case in my bedroom, to the bag I kept my electric guitar in. Looking back it was illogical; my parents had offered to buy them, there was no need to hide them. At the time it felt clever, suave. I basically thought I was a teenage version of Jude Law’s Alfie.

But the problem with contraception being an embarrassing subject for young people is that teenagers are the group that need to be talking about contraception the most - they need the information. A close friend of mine recently told me that when he lost his virginity, partly due to booze and partly due to just not knowing what he was doing, he completely forgot to take the condom off afterwards. He went straight from the encounter to meet friends at a pub, carried on drinking, and then discovered a very messy surprise at a public urinal.

But through the conversations I had on the podcast this week, my thoughts started to move away from the idiocy of my friends to a more widely felt problem with people’s understandings of contraception.

I’ve always known, anecdotally, that young women using the contraceptive pill often report problems with it. I was surprised to hear that in a study run by a contraceptive initiative known as The Lowdown, 78% of women report some kind of negative side effect with the contraceptive pill they are using.

78% of women report some kind of negative side effect with the contraceptive pill they are using."

Why don’t we talk about that more? Why it is still the most prescribed form of contraception in the UK if that many women experience problems with it?

And it's not that other methods aren’t being tested, they are. It’s just that those tests are producing results people don’t like. A trial for a male contraceptive pill to be taken orally was halted as 6% of the men complained of mood changes.

There’s quite clearly an inherent sexism here, a bias and double-standard that is affecting women on a daily basis. Why is it so widely accepted that women should put up with negative side affects and risks from contraception? Why is it so widely accepted that women should bare the burden of being responsible for contraception in the first place? This is why we need to talk about it, we need to open up that conversation. This is an issue affecting a lot of young women and I feel bit of a responsibility to share a serious message around contraception, not just daft anecdotes about my idiot mates.

Although perhaps you might permit me one last daft anecdote. A close friend of mine had a short fling with a girl from Japan who was studying in London for a few weeks. She spoke very, very little English and during their fling they had a bit of a scare. Her and my friend decided together that the best course of action was to seek out the morning after pill. Outside the pharmacy, on a busy London high street, the girl became a bit upset, she was nervous about the process of accessing the morning after pill, so my friend reassured her, told her he would speak to the pharmacist, and repeated - ‘it will be fine, just let me do the talking’. The girl calmed herself, then strode confidently into the pharmacist, stepped straight up to the counter, planted her hands on the table and said to the confused pharmacist - ‘let me do the talking!’.

This week on Jacob Hawley: On Love we’re opening up the conversation about contraception. You can listen here.

Jacob Hawley is a comedian and the presenter and creator of 麻豆社 Sounds’s award-winning podcast Jacob Hawley: On Drugs. The second series Jacob Hawley: On Love is out now.

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