The Myth of the Pull-Out Method

It’s mid-August-in-the-Bahamas muggy in your bedroom. The sheets on your mattress are tangled and damp with sweat, and the air is thick and humid from the kind of heat that can only be generated when you’re going round for hot and heavy round with your main man (or maybe just your man of the moment). You tussle and tumble, kiss, rub and grope. You grind and lick, moan, grasp and pant. Just as your skin flushes and you feel that familiar tingly warmth, your boo boo stops thrusting, jumps up and finishes off the job in manual, one-man-hand ecstasy. Ah, the trusty pull-out method—the most time-honored tactic for derailing the possibility of pregnancy that still lets the parties involved make sweaty, nasty, funky love in completely condom-less abandon.

Call me a skeptic, call me an overthinker, but best believe you won’t call me a believer in the miracle of the POM. Maybe it’s because so many dudes, desperate to get some nuzzle time between a girl’s thighs, will swear, plead and guarantee in that desperate, whispery, I’ll-say-just-about-anything-like-a-high-school-boy voice that they will in fact pull out before they reach the high of all highs. I mean, they’ve literally been doing it for 2,000 years. Next to the acts of abstaining and withholding, pulling out is the most ancient of anti-baby making methods, dating even back to biblical times. Now what worked for God’s chosen people in the heat of the desert was one thing. But what’s good for hot and hormonal modern-day folks in ambiguous dating situations is a whole other bag of tricks.

Statistically, the on-point version of the pull-out method makes a sound case for contraception. When done correctly, only four in 100 women will walk away with a positive pregnancy test. But for those who get it wrong—which is the majority of pull-out practitioners, mind you—more than 25 percent will join Planned Parenthood’s newest round of clientele. And when you weigh in the number of bigheaded babies running around from Compton to Crooklyn, filling up families like yours and mine because Ray Ray, Peanut and Marquez promised they would slide out just before they came—and didn’t—the success rate for the pull-out method seems too flimsy to put any weight on, particularly your baby wait.

For one, dudes who promise to pull out have to have a tremendous amount of self-control and willpower to abandon the warm, alluring wetness of womandom for the familiar, been-there-do-that-all-the-time briskness of their own palms. Minute men need not never, ever, ever apply to be pull-out artists. Boyfriend has to be in tune with his body to know precisely when he’s going to ejaculate (yeah, that’s right, you remember that formal term from 6th grade health class) and exactly when to get out of dodge before the flood cometh forward. And without the sanctity of a monogamous relationship, pulling out is the least of a couples’ problems when there are so many STDs and other nasty infections to worry about. As far as I’m concerned—and I’m sure a lot of ladies will back me up on this one—the conception of an unplanned pregnancy pales in comparison to the contraction of a case of hepatitis or HIV.

So let’s put this myth to rest once and for friggin’ all: a woman can still get pregnant even before her bay slides his Johnson out, before he cums, before he releases his flood of possible progeny, thereby making the pull-out method as certain as Russian roulette. Even if he backs out of the tunnel of love before he ejaculates, there is enough sperm in pre-cum, the clearish liquid that oozes out when some dudes become sexually aroused, to knock a gal up. I repeat: pre-cum can contain sperm. So if he’s up in you and he hasn’t cum yet, his pre-cum is still liable to contain a few floating little monkeys that can and perhaps will make you a mommy before you’re good and ready. It can also happen if your sweetie’s semen gets on the outside of your love dome. Stranger things have happened than a sista finding herself with child because some random sperm with amazing will and Rigley’s Believe It or Not-like navigational skills managed to funnel in from the outer part of her vaginal area.

So ladies, I implore you: get on some real birth control. Don’t let some horny, hapless boy toy or a panting, pushy boyfriend (heck, even a husband!) make you go against your better judgment. Babies are a blessing, cute and sweet and full of amazing innocence that makes your heart melt and your biological clock tick louder than Big Ben. But you gotta be ready for ‘em and if you’re using the pull-out method as your surefire way of contraception, you better be a little more ready than e’rybody else.