I'm jealous of your ignorance.

Amanda Hess at The Sexist writes today about some studies that show a large gap between women's and men's knowledge about how birth control works. This gap is pervasive across different forms of birth control, including condoms. Meaning fewer women self-identify as clueless. About condoms. Things that go on penises. Really.

I argue that this ignorance comes from a widespread lack of knowledge about women's bodies, in both hetero men and hetero women. Sidenote: the lesbians I know have better info about women's bodies than any straight woman I know, nevermind straight men. This narrative that a woman's body is a mystery and impossible to comprehend has got to stop. First of all, women are half the population, so things like birth control and menstruation are daily-life realities for roughly 3 billion people. That means they aren't weird or abnormal. Every time a woman's normal bodily functions are portrayed as singular and strange, it's because we consider the default of humanity to be a man, like women are the exception to the rule somehow. Check out the confusion and agony of this young swain, quoted in the article:

“I dated a girl with a NuvaRing, while I didn’t know she had one,” says a 22-year-old Arlington resident who didn’t discover how the couple was preventing baby-making until his penis was already well inside her vagina. “I found out the physical way, when I felt the alien object. I immediately recoiled in fear, asking what was wrong. It was frightening. Then she told me her birth control was a ring in her vagina, which I had never heard of.” He demanded the evidence. “She retrieved it—which is a sight to see—and showed it to me, put it back, and we continued,” he says. “I feel like girls should tell people.”

What a winner. Here we have: 1) fear that a vagina is a scary place with alien objects that are frightening, 2) COMPLETE LACK OF COMMUNICATION between hetero partners about birth control before they started fucking, and 3) no realization that this situation happened because the girl believed she was responsible for her own birth control, a belief the guy shares by depending on "girls" to teach him about methods of birth control.

This belief that women are exceptions to normal humanity has major implications for women's health. The National Institutes of Health didn't encourage including women into clinical studies until the 80's, and it didn't become law until 1993! That same 1993 law, NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, also mandated including minorities in clinical trials. How did white men become the default representative of humanity? Further, when reading about healthcare savings accounts (HSAs), I stumbled on this argument by Ezra Klein about the misogyny inherent in HSAs. Inequality arises because women and men seek health care in different ways, and women's health care costs more. Why does it cost more? Oh because that's the market! It should cost more! Because women use it more! Because the burden of sex and reproduction falls on women. Women have to know all about birth control and buy it. Nearly all birth control for women has to be accessed through a doctor: diaphragms and cervical caps, IUDs, and hormonal birth control of any kind. In order to get a doctor to perscribe her some birth control, a woman needs to have regular pap smears, STI screenings, and sometimes blood tests. If a woman needs an abortion, her health insurance may not cover it at all and the government certainly won't, so she pays for it if she can. In exchange, hetero women and men together can benefit from planning and spacing births, and from decreased instances of maternal and infant mortality. And men aren't just spared from paying for the birth control, they also have the LUXURY of remaining ignorant about it if they choose.