Call it ironic, but the combined oral contraceptive pill recently celebrated its fiftieth “birthday” of approval by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States in 1960. From a controversial renegade to a commonplace form of birth control worldwide, “the pill” has come a long way, and boy, do we love it. YAZ, a popular oral contraceptive, advertises its product with young women enjoying the responsibility of habitual birth control, and the .1 percent chance of being pregnant. They prance down the street in brightly colored clothing and make sexy quick changes in the back of taxis.

Who’s to blame them? Young college women can be carefree and sexually active, some starting earlier than others. Though sexual freedom varies from person to person, options like oral contraceptives exist for a reason: no more do women feel constrained to a big analogous family at the age of 25.

“Yaz is not for everyone,” the advertisements caution. That’s for sure. Artificial birth control is a moral sin according to some religions, and the especially opposed with make that clear. Consider the opinion of the Catholic Church, conveyed by Pope Paul VI in 1968:

“It is the whole man and the whole mission to which he is called that must be considered: both its natural, earthly aspects and its supernatural, eternal aspects. And since in the attempt to justify artificial methods of birth control many appeal to the demands of married love or of responsible parenthood, these two important realities of married life must be accurately defined and analyzed” (Paul IV, Humanae Vitae, 1968)

Catholic consent relies on giving what God gave women and men, and that’s baby-making bodies. Woman and man become mother and father, and mother and father teach their children their kindred beliefs. But someday, those children will meet other children; they will hit puberty, and suddenly it’s not black and white anymore. How do we, as all-knowing adults, address this “problem”?

Sexual education in the United States varies with the laws of each state, but starting around six or seventh grade most students receive some form. Those who don’t rely on comprehensive sex education fight respond with abstaining from sex until marriage.

Basking in its own glow of conservative methods, abstinence promotes morality and places virginity on a pedestal—something to be “saved,” they say. How are thirteen-year-olds expected to have their own opinion about something they have never experienced, and are only recently equipped to understand? If the logistics of sexual maturity aren’t explained at neither school nor home, adolescents will figure it out for themselves. And misunderstanding effective birth control is the best way to lead to teenage pregnancy.

I speak of this confusion from experience. I attended a private Catholic school for eight years with one session of sexual education in its entirety. Locking up fifty pre-adolescents in a room with a devout Catholic woman and her merry pair of two abstinent young adults, their message consisted only of this: a solid relationship cannot be formed with sex before marriage, so don’t even think about it.

Never having received the proper education, I had no idea how to use birth control correctly, and did all my research on my own via the World Wide Web, some websites more valid than others. “Birth control is awesum,” “U shuld take THIS kind of pill,” in the manner of illegitimate forum posts. To this day, I am still finding out details about contraceptives that I should have known from the beginning.

My method of researching the pill is admittedly dangerous, and I would never recommend it to anyone. But had I received appropriate education in the first place, I wouldn’t be making risky steps like trusting misspelled reviews of Yaz written by anonymous sources.

Religious schools have every right to teach morality and its connection of giving sex its deserved significance, but evidently, abstinence-only education doesn’t prevent teenage pregnancy. Though the pregnancy rate of 15-19 year olds has dropped in the past fifteen years, it is enough to create TV shows based on pregnant teenagers. These adolescents have got it tough now because they weren’t taught correctly in the first place. If sexual education becomes more than an awkward, rushed lecture by a gym teacher, students could receive legitimate education about having responsible sex. If students weren’t discouraged from asking important questions, and had the resources to do so, Americans could avoid unwanted pregnancies in a momentous way.

Over the past fifty years, globe-trotting women around the world, regardless of their moral status, altered their mindset of the “perfect” family, discovering a world of opportunities beyond a family of eight. Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to promote the convenience of “the pill” to us college women, so that we can take advantage of life’s chances now. The more prepared we are, the more prepared the next generation will be. The oral contraceptive deserves its recognition as a revolutionary drug that challenged what we consider the ideal lifestyle.

When my friend Emily and I left the movie theater, it was after eleven. The streets were still crowded despite the sub-zero air that changed with my breath, a visual reassurance to myself and others that yes, we were still breathing. Still alive. I pulled on my gloves, tan leather ones that my mom gave me for Christmas last year, and almost walked into a short, brown-eyed, Hispanic man in a puffy navy coat who stood on the sidewalk outside the old theater doors.

“Please,” he was saying.

We locked eyes immediately, this puffy-coated man and I, and it seemed he was waiting there just for me. As if I had met him, had known him before. Emily and I had been talking lightly about the movie, a biopic that—as always—seemed too neat to be accurate, readying ourselves for our imminent parting of ways. And then there was this puffy-coated man.

“Please, does anyone have a phone I can use?”

He said “anyone” but was looking directly at me, so I touched Emily’s arm softly, suggesting that she stop with me.

image courtesy of flickr.com user D’Arcy Norman “Yeah, sure, here.” I pulled out my cell phone, a bright blue, sleek thing that my brother picked out for me over the summer. My brother had a matching one, but in white. It slid open sideways to reveal a qwerty keyboard, and I often texted him silly nonsenses, mostly about our mother. Sometimes I saw our phone—in blue and in white, and in green too—in Sprint commercials on TV, which was exciting because I’d never had a phone whose company thought it was worth advertising.

“All right, all right, all right, thank you,” the puffy-coated man said. “Don’t worry, I won’t run off with it.”

“Are you walking back home now?” I turned back to Emily.

“Um, yeah.” She seemed taken aback by my split-second decision, unsure how to address it just then. Her tone indicated that I would be hearing from her later. “Yeah, I’m going this way.”

“I’m headed in the other direction anyway,” I explained. “I’m supposed to meet some people at Circus. Karaoke night. But I’ll catch you later?”

“Yeah, have fun.” She didn’t believe me, I could tell, and her eyes searched my face for some indication that I was still in my right mind. She didn’t seem to find it, but I hugged her anyway, resting my chin on the top of her head. She was probably the same height as the puffy-coated man.

“Keep warm, sweetie.”

She paused for a moment longer, and then walked away, leaving me alone in a crowd with the puffy-coated man.

I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I decided that English was the puffy-coated man’s second language. He probably learned it very young, maybe when his family moved here as migrant farmers like so many other Mexicans in southeastern Michigan. Apple picking in the fall, corn in the summer, cherries starting as early as spring. His language had the informality of a native speaker but the distinct shortness, the almost over-precision, of a tongue that is more comfortable talking much faster and filling up all that empty space in between words. In his mouth, English seemed so bare, so insufficient.

“There. Thank you.” He handed me back my phone. “Thank you so much. I was standing out here a long time.”

“Not a problem.” I nodded my head at him, dropped the phone back in my pocket and started heading west down Liberty, toward the bar where my friends were already waiting for me.

Awkwardly, the man started in the same direction.

“Would you like to walk with me?” I asked him, pausing so he could catch up. “Where are you headed?”

“Oh, this guy I met, the guy I had to call on the phone, he’s meeting me on Main Street,” he said. “His car got a flat tire and he said if I could come up half the money to get it fixed, he would give me a ride.”

“Well I’m walking that way, too. I can take you to Main Street.” I had to slow my stride considerably to keep pace with him. I introduced myself.

“Mickey,” he answered.

“Nice to meet you, Mickey. So where are you off to tonight?”

Mickey needed to get back to Canton, to an apartment where he took care of his mother who suffered from PTSD. She was raped years ago, he said, and she has never been the same. She only worked part-time as a waitress—everything was a strain on her condition. He was a comfort to her now, he said, and they ate dinner and watched Jeopardy! together in the evenings. In spite of myself, I tried to imagine his undoubtedly tiny, probably a little overweight mother sitting in a Red Wings T-shirt and black sweatpants, watching TV and nibbling on a sandwich. I reluctantly wondered what this woman thought about while she waited for her son to come home, which shows she was ignoring to worry about him. Half-self-consciously, I let myself get sucked into Mickey’s story. He was a jester juggling for the good grace of the court, a street musician playing for a few spare quarters, a bard singing for a meal. A novelist writing a best-seller—we all have our own ways.

I was pretty certain that Mickey’s story wasn’t true; he gave it away too easily, those little pieces of himself. If it were true, it wasn’t too dear to him, the plight of his mother living in her worst nightmare—maybe he had become accustomed to it, as sad as that was, or maybe it was a part of his past that he didn’t think about much anymore, just used when he thought he needed to. It must be a slippery business, though, singing for your supper. I hoped he had something that wasn’t a commodity, something that wasn’t sad words for a stranger’s sympathies and a few minutes on her phone.

I changed the subject.

“What are you doing out this way then?”

“I got in a fight with a friend,” he said. “We visited some people here, some people who used to work with us—I work at Belle Tire—they had a party, and we came to visit. But then me and him, we got into a fight. It was stupid, but I am very stubborn, and I don’t like people talking…bad about me. You know?”

I did.

“He shouldn’t be disrespecting me like that,” Mickey went on. “I shouldn’t have to be quiet when he disrespects me like that, no matter who’s driving the car.”

The few streets between State Street and Main Street were sparsely lit. There were shops, yes, but most of them looked closed. There were a few university buildlings, but those were dark on a Friday night as well. The street lights reflected unevenly off the torn-up flesh around Mickey’s mouth. His lips were so chapped I could just barely make out the white scar in the top corner. Just like mine, it lighted up an angry white against pink when he smiled or made the long E sound. Just like mine, which I got taking a diving stick to the face at our public pool. I wondered how Mickey got his.

“I can’t believe he just left you here,” I offered when he became less forthcoming about his situation. “Are you going to see him when you get back home?”

“Oh, he better hope not, you know? You can’t just leave someone someplace far away without no way to get back. Man, I tell you, I don’t know what I’m gonna do to him if I see him again.”

Mickey didn’t sound very angry, but the vagueness of his description suggested that we were skirting something truthful here. Something important. His eyes were soothing, black coffee on a chilly morning. Round and cozy and earnest like dark buttons sewn into the head of a child’s doll, set in his bubbly face whose age I couldn’t guess. His eyes reminded me of an encounter in a book I was reading, Saturday by Ian McEwan, whose neurosurgeon protagonist casually meets the gaze of a street sweeper. He feels strongly bound to the sweeper, connected by a string or a seesaw maybe—I couldn’t remember which. I knew that feeling the neurosurgeon had, that discovery of myself in people I brushed past on the sidewalk, in the halls at school, in the movie theater. A million little reflections, like snowflakes capturing moonlight.

Mickey wasn’t going to tell me what his fight was about. Curious as I was, I was relieved about that.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” I said. “My temper sometimes gets me into trouble too. Mostly with my sister. I once stuck gum in her hair, in the back really close to her head so that she couldn’t cut it out without taking out a huge chunk. She has this really long, really straight, shiny, auburn hair. Really pretty. I thought she was going to kill me.”

He laughed, more relaxed now, no longer feigning anger. “Yeah, family can get like that. The first girl I had a crush on, she lived down the street from us and her name was Nicole, she and her sister were always playing pranks on each other. Ripping each other’s dolls heads off and hiding stuff from each other and all that. I would always help Nicole and sometimes she blamed it all on me, but I didn’t care. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. Well, when I was seven. You kind of remind me of her, but you don’t look very much alike.”

“Huh. Funny how that happens,” I said.

“Yeah.” He paused, looking down at his feet for the first time since I met him. Mickey hadn’t intended to include Nicole in his song and dance. I wondered if she had been involved in the fight with his friend who drove the car. “So did your sister have to cut off her hair?” he asked me.

“No. We actually got it all out with cold water.”

“Wait, you helped her get it out?”

I looked at Mickey, realizing for the first time this absurdity in my story. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

“Now that’s funny.” He looked down at his feet again and chuckled into the puffy coat.

Main Street was all of a sudden upon us, and we tried to wrap up the conversation tidily.

“Well, I turn here,” Mickey said. “That’s the car, right up the block. Would you like to walk a little farther?”

I thought about it. “Nah, I’d better not. People waiting for me. You know.”

He did.

I extended my hand toward him. “It was nice to talk to you, Mickey. Good luck getting home.”

“It was nice to talk to you too, Erika.” My glove was lost in his black mitten, but his grip was soft, gentle. He crossed the street to the right, and I watched him from the corner, waiting for my light to change.

**************************************************************************************

“Oh, Erika.” I was sitting at a table in a loud bar on First, munching on stale popcorn and sipping PBR from a bottle. A friend of mine was singing a Billy Joel song on the stage and almost everyone was dancing on the crowded floor. Only the Bens sat with me, my own personal audience of disapproval. “Oh, Erika. Bad idea.”

The Bens were a funny pair. They had both gone to Kalamazoo College with me, two years ahead. I had known the first Ben from the student dance company; the second Ben had grown up in the same town as I did—we were born on the same street—but we didn’t meet until orientation week at Michigan Law. We became fast friends. The second Ben was dark and thin and very odd, prone to getting lost in discussions about Battlestar Galactica. The first Ben was light and a little less thin but just as odd, though he was much better at hiding it.

“No, it wasn’t like that,” I explained to the first Ben, the back-and-forth movement of his freckles making me a little dizzy. The second Ben cocked his eyebrows, twisted up his face skeptically. “He was very sweet, he told me about…”
I stopped myself.

“He told me about his mother who has PTSD. He had quite the sad story.”

“I’m sure he did,” the second Ben said.

“Just don’t do that again,” the first Ben said.

“No, of course not,” I said, trying to smile prettily. The corner of my top lip tugged a little with the exertion, lighted up angry-white I’m sure, but, in the half-light from the karaoke stage, I doubted the Bens could see it.

As a Chicagoan, I am often stopped by tourists for directions to the Art Institute or to the nearest Starbucks. I know where all of these hotspots are and I could walk these lost tourists there myself (they rarely take me up on my offer); however I am horrible at giving directions in the manner that people usually want. Looking for a human-GoogleMaps filled with street names and mileage? I’m not really your gal. But a scavenger hunt-esque list of landmarks to look for on your adventure to guide the way? No problem! Despite different perceptions, all can appreciate the artistry in this multicolored brain.

I hate these moments when I have to walk away from a group of hopeless tourists knowing I have reinforced the age-old idea of women not having a clue when it comes to directions. No woman wants to be responsible for perpetuating negative stereotypes of her entire womankind.

However, after reading the RedEye while riding the el to work one morning, I found that this stereotype is in fact, true. Well, not that women are terrible with directions necessarily, but that men and women observe their surroundings differently, engaging different parts and amounts of the brain when taking note of the space around them or even when looking at a piece of art.

In a recent publication from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, studies show that men and women perceive their surroundings and interpret beauty in different ways. Using magnetoencephalography (a really fancy word to describe an imaging technique that measures the magnetic fields produced by electrical activity in the brain) a group of scientists recorded the brain activity of 10 women and 10 men while they “decided whether or not they considered examples of artistic and natural visual stimuli to be beautiful” (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/02/20/0900304106.abstract).

Results show that male participants’ brain activity differed greatly from that of female participants when designating beauty. Both sexes utilized the parietal lobe, the part of the brain primarily associated with determining spatial sense and navigation. However, women’s activity was bilateral, meaning they used both the left and right sides of their parietal lobe, while men’s lateralized activity only used the right side.

Both men and women start off seeing the larger picture. But when women’s left parietal lobe kicks in, they start to apply meaning, particularly linguistic, to their surroundings, taking note of details and how they relate to one another. Men stick to the right side of things and use a more “precise mode of mental mapping.”

Researchers argue that these differing perceptions of surroundings/beauty were bred in men and women due to evolutionary factors. Back in the day of hunting and gathering, the division of labor also divided the sexes. Men were responsible for the hunt, demanding a skilled sense of direction and distance while women gathered berries and plants, activating their ability to define landmarks in relation to one another.

After patting myself on the back for using both sides of my brain, the (very small) radical feminist part of me wanted to shout, “There you have it! Women use more of their brain than men, thus they are both more intellectual and more able to appreciate beauty around them! Stereotype REFUTED!”

Not quite.

Each perception of beauty and surroundings serve a certain purpose. If you are looking to get from Sears Tower to Millennium Park as directly as possible, according to this study, a man is your go-to. If you’re looking to experience the journey and learn about the origin of the Buckingham Fountain or the inspiration behind the design of the Art Institute along the way, you’re better off asking a woman.

Each one serves its own specific and valuable purpose. How’s that for equality?