10,983,499 Hours of Wanking

Plus Loretta Lynn's Ode to the Birth Control Pill

Some of you may remember the early days of HBO when the same movie would play over and over again, and you would watch it over and over again because there were only four other channels to choose from (one of which was inevitably playing Small Wonder), and you didn’t own an VCR yet.

One of the movies that I watched a million times, give or take, was Coal Miner’s Daughter, the biopic based on the book by country music star Loretta Lynn who died last week at 90. The movie, which starred Sissy Spacek as Loretta and an impossibly young Tommy Lee Jones as her ne’er-do-well husband Doolittle Lynn, focused on her early life in poverty, rocky marriage, and rise to fame. Loretta went on to become a legend, and among her catalogue of hits was a 1975 ode to the birth control pill.

There’s some confusion over the timeline of Lynn’s life. In the book, she says she was 13 when she got married and that she had four kids by the time she was 18, but in 2012 the Associated Press found her birth certificate which made her two years older than she’d said. Asked for a comment at the time, Lynn’s press secretary said she was under strict orders from her client: “If anyone asks how old I am, tell them it’s none of their business!” Either way, Lynn was a young teenager when she got married and quickly became a young mother.

The scene in the movie depicting their wedding night in a cheap motel has stuck with me for all these years. She was terrified of sex and didn’t even want to take her clothes off. Doo basically forces himself on her and ignores her pleas to stop. The next morning when she is too ashamed of what they have done to go to the hotel restaurant, he slaps her. At some point, he tells her she’ll get used to it (meaning sex), and she replies with something like: “I’ll never get used to my husband getting on top of me and sweating like a pig.”  (Forgive me if I’m paraphrasing or misremembering. It has been many years since I’ve seen the movie. There are more than four channels now and no one has to suffer through Small Wonder or rewatch the same move at noon and 8pm.)

I also remember a scene where she walks out of the doctor’s office and sees Doo flirting with another woman. She chases the woman off and tells her husband that the doctor says she’s going to have a baby. Doo—who has been angry at her for being bad at housekeeping, cooking, and sex—says something like “Well, god damn it woman, we finally found something you’re good at.” 

Of course, it wasn’t necessarily something Lynn wanted to be good at as is evidenced by “The Pill.” Birth control had only become widely available a few years earlier with the SCOTUS decision in Eisenstadt v. Baird, and Lynn realized just how life-changing it could be for women like her:

You wined me and dined me
When I was your girl
Promised if I'd be your wife
You'd show me the world
But all I've seen of this old world
Is a bed and a doctor bill
I'm tearin' down your brooder house
'Cause now I've got the pill

All these years I've stayed at home
While you had all your fun
And every year that's gone by
Another baby's come
There's a gonna be some changes made
Right here on nursery hill
You've set this chicken your last time
'Cause now I've got the pill

The song was hugely controversial. Her record company didn’t release it right away and country music stations wouldn’t play it when it was released. According to news reports, one Kentucky preacher devoted a whole sermon to denouncing the song and the Grand Ole Opry held a three-hour meeting debating whether Lynn should be allowed to perform it. Lynn said in an interview that she was surprised by the controversy: “It isn’t as dirty as some of my other songs. I wrote one the other day that is so dirty I have to close my eyes when I sing it.” She also defended the song to Playboy: “If they hadn’t let me sing the song, I’d have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry!”

And she meant what she said in the lyrics. In a 1975 interview she told People, “If I’d had the pill back when I was havin’ babies, I’d have taken ’em like popcorn. The pill is good for people. I wouldn’t trade my kids for anyone’s, but I wouldn’t necessarily have had six, and I sure would have spaced ’em better.” In another interview that year, she said that the song “had done more to promote rural acceptance of birth control than any official medical or social services efforts.”

As a teenager watching the movie in the mid-1980s from the comfort of my middle-class home, I remember waiting for the turning point where Loretta decides she is a successful, grown, independent woman and leaves Doo who keeps drinking, cheating, and generally being mean. (Lynn says she started to stand up to the physical abuse in the 1960s after she met Patsy Cline.) It never happened, not in the movie or in real life; they were married until he died in 1996 and she has credited him with making her career.

Lynn is a study in contradictions in other ways as well. She sang “The Pill” and other songs about women’s empowerment, but she supported conservative politicians, including Donald Trump who certainly doesn’t want to see women empowered. And yet the song remains an ode not just to birth control but to the sexual freedom that followed:

This old maternity dress I've got
Is goin' in the garbage
The clothes I'm wearin' from now on
Won't take up so much yardage
Miniskirts, hot pants and a few little fancy frills
Yeah I'm makin' up for all those years
Since I've got the pill

Pregnancy Complications in the Age of Covid Go Up, Reasons Still Not Understood

An article in the Washington Post this weekend sums up emerging research and anecdotal reports about pregnancy complications that are likely the result of Covid-19. It may be years before we have enough research to explain why and how the virus has impacted pregnancies or even a reasonable estimate of how many pregnancies have been affected, but the experts Ariana Eunjung Cha interviewed for her article (which I do suggest reading) are piecing together the data and have some interesting working theories.

There was an increase in stillbirths among women who contract Covid-19 during pregnancy and some researchers believe that placental injury was to blame. Amy Heerema McKenney is a pathologist with the Cleveland Clinic who examined damaged placentas in cases of stillbirths.  

The placenta gets attention every few years when trends of eating it or planting it next to a tree pop up on social media. It is basically a new organ that develops in the uterus during pregnancy (because pregnant people truly are Transformers). Its job is to provide oxygen and nutrients to the fetus and take away waste. A healthy placenta is dark red and squishy when it comes out after birth.

The ones the Cleveland pathologist saw, in contrast, were scarred, hard, and tan. She noted that the mothers of these stillborn infants had gotten Covid within the two weeks before their pregnancy ended tragically. These cases were similar to some in Ireland where researchers looked at six stillbirths and one fetal death among women infected with Covid and documented what they called “readily recognizable pattern of placental injuries.”

Though no one knew for sure what caused this, experts theorized that the inflammation caused by the virus along with decreased blood flow to the placenta could be culprit. Most of these cases were seen during the delta wave, and this particular complication seems to have stopped once omicron took over. Since research still has not confirmed what caused it, however, we don’t know if it can/will come back with new variants.   

There is another pregnancy complication, however, called pre-eclampsia that seems to still be on the rise with omicron. Pre-eclampsia is a blood pressure condition that affects women after the 20th week of pregnancy. (It can also happen after delivery.) In addition to high blood pressure, women with this condition often have protein in their urine. The condition can put stress on the heart and other organs and can impair liver and kidney function. It can also affect the blood supply to the placenta which puts the fetus at risk.

Early data suggests that pregnant people who had Covid had a 60 percent greater risk of developing pre-eclampsia than those who were not infected. Experts still don’t really know why pre-eclampsia happens in some pregnancies and not others even without Covid, but there are theories as to what the virus might be doing to both the circulatory system (which has to handle 30-50% more blood during pregnancy) and the immune system to increase the number of pregnancies affected.

It will be a long time until we truly understand the extent of the damage the virus can do and how this damage impacts pregnancies, but it is already clear that pregnant people who were infected with the virus were more likely to have complications and more likely to die within six weeks of giving birth.

While we wait for more definitive research, experts’ advice remains the same: get vaccinated and take precautions (like masking and social distancing) to avoid the virus during pregnancy.

Surprisingly Few Brits Are Wanking During Work Hours (IMHO)

Chemist4U, a leading online pharmacy in Britain, surveyed 2,000 UK residents 18 and over about their masturbation habits during the work-from-home day. According to the website, the survey is nationally representative by gender, age, relationship status, salary, region, and working environment.

The survey found that 14% of workers have tossed one off during the workday. While the website seemed impressed with, if not a little perturbed by, how many people are turning work time into wank time, I question Brits’ commitment to Sparkle Motion. I mean, a survey of New Yorkers found 39 percent of remote workers were masturbating on the clock.

Still, the breakdown is kind of interesting. More men (22%) than women (7%), more older people than younger people, more higher paid than lower paid workers, and an almost equal amount of single versus married people spent some working hours bashing the bishop. 

Those who admitted to jerking off (I ran out of British slang so please imagine this said with a proper British accent) on the job said they did it to relieve stress (33%), enhance their mood (24%), or increase their concentration (19%). While it may have done these things, it seems to also be the source of some guilt as only 20% of people said they feel comfortable and unashamed of masturbating during work hours.

Chemist4U seems relatively down on the idea as well. The online pharmacy used the average frequency (2.4 times a week) and time spent (37 minutes) to calculate that UK businesses lose 10,983,499 hours a year to at-home wanking. Oh please, I guarantee they lose more to social media and online shopping even when people are in the office.

There was one stat in the survey that left me at sixes and sevens. It noted that 18% of those surveyed said they used a private browser tab to access pornographic content during work hours. At first, I thought this was 18% of people who watched porn and I started to worry about the other 82% who had learned nothing from Jeffrey Toobin didn’t use as separate browser for the sexy stuff. Then I realized it was 18% of everyone, and had a new question: do the 4% of people who watch porn during work hours but don’t masturbate tune in for the excellent acting, stellar writing, and shocking plot twists? Blimey.

I just realized that this week marks two years of Sex on Wednesday. Yay! In honor of the anniversary, please share the newsletter far and wide.