Every twenty-eight days or so, I find myself standing on the sidewalk in front of my neighborhood drugstore, taking deep cleansing breaths and thinking good karmic thoughts so that I don’t blow my stack and tell Patel to get bent. Patel works at the prescription counter; Patel works every hour of every shift of every day. I go in the morning – Patel. I go in the afternoon – Patel. I sneak in ten minutes before closing – Patel. Even when I walk into the store and see Rina standing at the counter in the back, Patel will spot me from his lair in the feminine hygiene aisle and hurdle several boxes of Centrum Silver in order to reach the counter at the same time that I do. Patel seems to fancy me, you see, and furthermore, Patel has an extremely irritating habit of looking at my scrip for Loestrin Fe and saying “ah yes, birth control pill” while wiggling his eyebrows at me in a clumsy way reminiscent of the kid behind Molly Ringwald when she first sits down on the school bus in Sixteen Candles, as if I’ll wiggle my eyebrows back at him and say, “Oh, you know us oral-contraceptives girls – we’ll do anyone. Want to come up to my apartment?” and I suppose I should just tell him it’s none of his damn business, but unfortunately, he works in the pharmacy, which makes it his damn business. I could really do without having to repeat this exchange every damn month, but I don’t feel like hucking two blocks over to the next closest drugstore when this drugstore already has all my information in their computer, so each month before I go into the store, I try to achieve a Zen-like state of inner stillness in which I do not fantasize about introducing Patel’s eyeglasses sideways into his nostril. As of this writing, I have not succeeded, and I usually wind up clomping out of the store, rolling my eyes and vowing to bring another, more off-putting item like mustache bleach or Monistat 7 to the counter with me the next time so that maybe Patel will get grossed out by me and finally quit it with the “good morning, little schoolgirl” routine.

I remember reading a few years ago that researchers had discovered an unexpected side effect to a certain heart medication, namely that it stunned the sperm of the test subjects into complacency (clearly, I’ve done a bit of paraphrasing with the medical jargon). Apparently, they planned to send the drug into clinical trials as a male birth control pill, but I haven’t heard a peep about it since. What happened? Where did it go? It probably got killed in committee by a guffawing assistant director: “Ha ha ha ha haaaaaaa! Oh, ho ho. Oh, that’s a good one. ‘Male birth control pill,’ heh heh heh. I’ll have to remember that one.” But it sounds like a good idea to me – a great idea, in fact. Let the men gain that twenty pounds if they don’t want to deal with condoms. Let the men watch their boobs swell a full cup size for a change; let the men listen to the dismaying “ffffshooom glug glug glug” of their sex drives disappearing down the nearest toilet. Let the men remember to take the stupid thing at exactly the same time every day. Let the men face off against Patel. No? Well, of course not. Of course men don’t want to do those things, and I certainly don’t blame them, but we’ve got to come up with better birth control options than the ones we have now, because the current alternatives don’t cut it, and as it stands, women wind up dealing with almost all of them. I’ve got no problem with that; biologically speaking, we’ve got more to lose if the birth doesn’t, you know, get controlled. But I think a lot of us have gotten tired of remixing our bodies’ hormonal cocktails, or tying ourselves into pretzel knots in freezing-cold bathrooms trying to insert various uncomfortable barrier devices. We’ve got to find a better way.

The pill is a perfect example. It’s the best, most convenient option for many women, but it’s still not that great, and it’s still not terribly convenient, and you’d think after several decades on the market, the pharmaceutical industry would have calibrated it a bit better. Well, think again. In college, I decided to get modern and go on the pill. The first brand I tried turned me into a sobbing mess, so, because nobody had instructed me otherwise, I went off that pill mid-cycle, an even bigger mistake that had me twitching like a feral cat and pulling a Ms. Pac-Man on every salty snack in sight, so I tore myself away from a Costco-sized jar of Planters peanuts and went back to the clinic, and the nurse practitioner told me she’d put me on a different pill to recalibrate my system. I have no idea what she thought this pill would do, but I turned up at the clinic again in a month, my sideburns neatly trimmed, to request a new prescription, because my system had recalibrated to that of a forty-year-old Australian men’s rugby player. The nurse practitioner wrote me a scrip for a third variety of pill; evidently, this pill prevented pregnancy by giving me my period for the entire month, thus turning me off the idea of sex completely, and by giving me a facial breakout so severe that I looked like a three-hole punch had attacked my face. The nurse practitioner just shook her head and wrote me yet another scrip, and this one put twenty pounds on me in six weeks, but it didn’t turn me into a psycho, a genetic male, or an Italian entrÈe, so I thought I’d better stick with it even though I felt like I’d wandered into a funhouse version of my own torso. Birth control pills have their benefits, I must admit – for years I’d suffered with a long, unpredictable cycle of roughly forty days between periods and seven days of utter hell, but the pill chopped that down to a manageable twenty-eight day cycle with two days of bleeding, and my uterus will think about cramping and then decide to let me off with just a twinge. A lot of women report that their skin clears up magically with certain pills, and if you use the pill correctly, it’s very reliable. But finding the right pill can take months, and going on and off the pill gets pretty rocky, what with the mood swings and the spotting and the fluctuations in weight. And they’ve got to do something about the decreased-sex-drive problem. Mine always bounces back after a few months, but whenever I’d start a new pill, the current boyfriend would celebrate by stripping down and hopping into bed all happy that he didn’t have to use jimmy hats anymore, and I’d sigh and tell him to go on ahead and not mind me, I’d just lie there and read a book while he did his thing – I had absolutely no interest in having sex, which defeats the purpose of taking the damn thing in the first place.

I’ve tried other methods in order to avoid the pill, but I would not deem these experiments successful, unless “successful” has become synonymous with “black comedy.” My brief and tempestuous relationship with the diaphragm began, ignominiously enough, with a diaphragm fitting. My gynecologist at that time did not know the meaning of the word “gentle” or even in what zip code “gentle” resided, so the fitting consisted of her snapping a seemingly unending series of small rubber domes in and out of my body while I clutched the sides of the examining table and prayed for this ungodly game of cervical tiddlywinks to end. At long last, she dispatched me to the pharmacy with a prescription for a diaphragm, a novella-sized pamphlet of instructions on the use of the diaphragm, and a jumbo tube of spermicidal lubricant, regrettably named Gynol. A few hours later, the moment of truth arrived, and I marched naked into the bathroom with my diaphragm and my tube of Gynol, feeling very retro and Erica Jong about the whole thing. “Okay,” I whispered aloud, “apply spermicidal lubricant and insert. Nooooo problem.” Ah, foolish youth. I bent the diaphragm in half as instructed and attempted to insert it, but the lubricant had made the little bastard quite slippery indeed, and the diaphragm shot out of my hand and into the bathtub. I fished it out, rinsed it off, reanointed it with Gynol, and tried again; again, it darted out of my grip, this time ricocheting off the bathroom mirror and whizzing back towards me, and when I threw up my hands to defend myself, I accidentally swatted the diaphragm into the kitty litter. Fished it out again, rinsed it off again, reanointed it again, all accompanied by the unmistakable sound of snoring now coming from the bed. Before the third attempt, I closed the lid of the toilet as a precaution – and a good thing, too. Over and over again I prepared the diaphragm for use, and over and over again it escaped, and when I finally got the unruly thing to behave, its intended beneficiary had long since gone to the land of Nod. Then I had to set my alarm in order to get up precisely six hours later and take the diaphragm out, and if you think I had a hard time putting it in well, the less said about removing the diaphragm the better, I imagine, so I’ll just tell you that it involved a headstand, a pulled hamstring, and a great deal of colorful language. After a few weeks of this, the diaphragm landed on its side and rolled right out of the bathroom on a merry lint-collecting expedition, and as the strains of “Born Free” swelled in the background, I stormed after it and yelled, “Fine. FINE. You WIN already. I GIVE UP,” and I made a command decision to go back on the pill. I still have the stupid thing; I briefly considered winging it out my window Frisbee-style, but I didn’t want to give it the satisfaction.

So we kept using condoms for a little while longer. I can tolerate condoms, but I won’t lie to you – nothing warms my heart like the “let’s get tested already ’cause we’re monogamous and I loathe those things” talk. First of all, we have what I like to call The Service Interruption Factor. Second of all, for all the bitching I do about all the bitching men do about condoms, I know what they mean; rubbers don’t exactly enhance sensation for women, either. And finally, if they ever get around to handing out medals for fine motor control, you won’t see me on the podium. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard “you do know that it’s upside-down right now, right?” and “[snap] okay, ow” and “maybe not so much with the nail part of your finger, hon” – pitch darkness and my innate clumsiness don’t make for such wonderful, er, bedfellows. And those things get cold, people. I haven’t had sex at the equator while lying next to a space heater, or in a pizza oven, but I’d bet American money that the nonoxynol-9 wouldn’t budge a degree.

Medical science has got to find more efficient ways to handle birth control. I mean, putting what looks like a smaller version of the business end of a plunger over the cervix? How does this qualify as an advancement? Putting a sponge up there – what the hell? Sponges have holes. Millions and millions of holes. Doesn’t compute. Condoms? No. A condom is squishy and cold and numbing, and I don’t want to get overly graphic here, but once a condom has served its purpose um, when removing the condom the inadequacy of the average receptacle tip can prove okay, do you see what I mean? It’s just so primitive and ridiculous. And so-called modern birth control ideas like Norplant and Depo Provera have the same problems as the pill, but farther up the chain of command, and frankly, I just don’t feel comfortable with the idea of walking around like a pregnancy-preventing replicant with rods of synthetic estrogen beaming my location to a faraway space station or something. I guess we’ve come a long way from the days when courtesans used spiderwebs as a contraceptive, but not that far. Birth control in the twenty-first century is just as uncomfortable, icky, inconvenient an affair as ever, for both sexes – it’s the information age, and we still put latex mittens on men’s penises. It almost makes me glad I don’t have much sex these days.

I said “almost.” Pipe down.

My nemesis.

Ortho Tri-Cowflop.

Prophylactic screensaver, anyone?

Contraception au naturel.

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