Telegraph FAIL: The Pill’s “devastating impact” on women’s lives

Once again, the Telegraph has managed to misinform the shit out of its readers. It’s almost like the Fox News of the UK.

We’ve seen plenty of pieces come out over the last month about The Pill’s 50th anniversary, but none of them were as quite as confused and baseless as this one. (But then again, the Telegraph has a history of publishing inaccurate bullshit regarding feminist issues.)

While the author throws some positive aspects of the form of contraception into the piece at an attempt to convey objectivity, the headline and criticisms are anything but, saying the Pill led to sexual coercion, according to one of their main interviewees, author Libby Purves:

“Before the Pill, you could always use the excuse, however disingenuous, of ‘I might get pregnant’. It was like pulling a sickie, saying: ‘I can’t come in, I’ve got a sore throat’, and it helped women be sure if this relationship really was the right thing for them. Afterwards, it made it much harder for young women to prolong their courtships and to say ‘no’.”

“After the Pill, I remember being pressured for sex. The phrase you always heard was ‘Surely you are fixed up?’. If you weren’t, even if you didn’t have a boyfriend, you were held in contempt. It was like not having a toothbrush – everybody came prepared. I remember a friend being made to feel very dog-in-the-manger by a man, who was a platonic friend, but felt he was entitled to sex and told her ‘Don’t be so foolish, why not?’ when she said no.”

The piece also follows the recent Observer claim of how “selfish” abortion and birth control are by saying women took “the phrase ‘family planning’ a touch too literally” and got so worked up over their liberation from early motherhood that their ovaries shriveled up by the time childbearing was desired:

“Jackie magazine warned us endlessly about taking precautions,” says one ruefully. “Housewife was a dirty word. It never occurred to me I might one day want to be pregnant.”

In short, this piece is using the Pill’s anniversary as a means to scare women out of taking it and demonize women’s sexual agency in the most subtle-but-not kind of way. Email the Telegraph here and tell them so.