When people used crocodile dung to avoid having babies
And why some modern contraceptives are still using similar tactics.
What follows is an op-ed-ish thing I wrote to promote my book ages ago that got totally dropped/ghosted, because it relates to the most recent episode of my podcast and is also, I think, kinda neat. Speaking of my podcast, today is the last day to get early bird ticket pricing for our August 24 live show! Both live stream and in-person (NYC) tickets are available here.
Whilst scrolling through TikTok a few months back, I came across a pharmaceutical ad starring the beloved Annie Murphy of Schitt’s Creek. As Murphy whacks away at hedges against a pink background—insert lazy joke about her bush—she pitches Phexxi, which got FDA approval in 2020, as the holy grail of contraception. Not only does it not fill you with hormones, she explains, but you only use it when you need it. Just pop in a pre-filled applicator before you get down, and you’re protected against pregnancy.
Annie ain’t wrong. But I couldn’t help but think we’d come full circle. Because Phexxi works by changing the pH of the vagina to make it inhospitable to sperm—which is probably how some of the earliest methods of birth control worked, too. Including the earliest method we know of: crocodile dung.
Around 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, women were shoving crocodile turds up their vaginas in a bid to keep babies at bay. Shocking? Yes. Upsetting? A bit. Laughable? Well, no. Not really. To be clear, this tactic is far from advisable compared to modern-day options. Even so, it’s quite reasonable to suspect this horrifying method sorta kinda probably worked.
The poo in question would have served as a physical barrier between the vagina and the cervix, which would have prevented some if not all sperm from meeting an egg. In fact, the moldable nature of a somewhat dried turd may have allowed for a more comfortable and effective barrier than a ready-made, hard object, such as a piece of wood or metal. We also know that, at least in some cases, ancient Egyptians were not relying on dung alone. They—smartly!—mixed honey (we now know this is a powerful antimicrobial agent, which would have helped keep this contraceptive from causing gnarly infections) with ground-up acacia leaves (these produce the known spermicide lactic acid, which is one of Phexxi’s active ingredients). It sounds awful. But, by god, it makes sense.
While we don’t know for sure how well such a concoction would have worked, the basic recipe of a physical barrier and a sperm-killing additive is a classic combo, found again and again across the ancient world. The Talmud references women using sponges soaked in vinegar: this, like the Egyptian version, would have provided a cervical barrier, while also making the vaginal pH less hospitable to sperm. Other cultures in antiquity used various toxic substances like lead, mixed with oil and honey, or ghee along with rock salt. Elephant dung made at least one appearance. Now, to my knowledge, no one has put these to the test in a modern experimental setting, for reasons I hope are obvious. But the mechanics make sense.
This is not to say that doctors should tear up their prescription pads and send patients wading into the Nile. We’ve come a long way in our pursuit of reliable family planning. To give just the briefest of overviews: Folks tried to sneeze or high-kick the semen right out of them (this didn’t work). They inserted primitive precursors to IUDs that kept their cervixes permanently stuffed with metal or glass (ow). They took various herbs with varying degrees of success (and varying degrees of death). Less than 100 years ago, Lysol was almost literally marketing its corrosive cleaning fluid as a way to keep ones’ uterus spic-and-span and inhospitable to human life.
Hormonal birth control is, in contrast, an absolute miracle. But it’s far from perfect—as evidenced by ad campaigns and apps promising a more “natural” way.
When the game-changing pill was first tested in the 1950s, its fairly frequent and sometimes severe side effects were summarily dismissed as inconsequential. Silly, weak women and their low tolerance for blood clots! Harumph. When developers found it too difficult to keep women from dropping out of their trials, they turned to psychiatric patients who were unable to provide (or peskily withdraw) consent. And when they eventually moved their trials to Puerto Rico, male researchers groused about the “irresponsible” actions of female medical school students who chose to stop taking the drugs due to side effects. They then expanded to a field study among poor farm laborers in San Juan, whose negative outcomes and complaints were easily waved away as being the melodramatic whines of inferior human specimens.
This came, by the by, just a century after gynecologist Horatio Robinson Storer began his crusade against abortion, which had until that point had been considered, at worst, only a somewhat unsavory, but, still, decidedly private affair. Contrary to Supreme Court Justice Alito’s statement on the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the US has a long history of tacitly allowing people to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Evidence of abortion as a common practice dates back thousands of years, and was demonstrably considered a private, personal matter in the American colonies and early in US history.
That only began to change in the 1800s. Storer and other physicians of the time were eager to distinguish themselves from midwives and to elevate formalized medicine over home remedies and community models of care. By lumping seasoned herbalists, trained midwives, and careful folk practitioners in together with the hucksters selling dubiously concocted, often toxic “abortifacients” by mail order, Storer and his ilk set the stage for a world where the contraceptives you could get at the pharmacy were the only options obviously above reproach.
But, as those ill-fated trials in Puerto Rico quite clearly predicted, hormonal birth control can prove to be intolerable, if not dangerous, for some of the folks who try to take it. In a testimonial on Phexxi’s website, Murphy cites such an experience as her reason for becoming the brand’s spokesperson. She recounts being on hormones for years, and being so dissatisfied with the options on offer that she turned to the pull-out method (pro tip: don’t do that.)
But the issue isn’t actually that there’s some blanket problem with commercialized contraception, or with hormonal birth control specifically. The trouble is how we deal with these drugs. Just look at the trials for a “male pill”: When one got cut short back in 2016 due to some unexpected “mood disorder” side-effects, many scoffed at the lily-livered boys seemingly unwilling to put up with the same risks as the women they slept with. But that wasn’t really what happened. The men generally said they found the side-effects to be a reasonable cost of business; it was the researchers who pumped the brakes—and they were right to. If there’s a sudden uptick in a potentially devastating side effect when you increase the size of your drug trial, that’s something you wanna look into before you move on. That’s what should have happened in those initial contraception trials in the mid-20th century, when women in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico alike raised red flags. The problem is that hormonal contraception geared towards people who ovulate has been grandfathered in, and the grandfathers in question were sexist buttheads.
Because time is a flat circle, the pharmaceutical industry has reacted to the changing conversation—that is, an increase in awareness of, and decrease in the willingness to ignore, side-effects—by pushing the most lo-fi methods that still require medical oversight. Copper IUDs, which have existed for half a century, recently got an Instagram-friendly (and heavily autotuned) rebranding that put their lack of hormones front and center; and yes, it’s true that, for people with and without reasons to avoid hormonal contraception, devices like Paragard provide the strongest protection you can get. But many users experience heavy, painful periods while using copper IUDs, so even this drug-free option is far from a perfect or universal solution. Phexxi has its shortcomings as well: You need to use a full applicator before each ejaculation, and it wears off after about an hour. Plus, it works by altering the pH of the vaginal environment—not unlike the crocodile dung suppositories of yore—which means some users may find it causes itchiness or discomfort, or increases infections like UTIs and BV. Not unlike… you get the idea. Even the inherently ancient method of tracking menstrual cycles has gotten a high-tech retooling, with companies spinning up FDA-approved apps that promise to science the shit out of your ovulation. (And, in some cases, probably over promise.)
I’ll pause to say that, for most people with uteruses who are sexually mature, there is some form of prescription birth control or another that is both safe and effective. And given the lack of extensive research into more home-grown methods, in most cases, it is quite risky to switch to something folksier. Today we have a wonderland of options—condoms, pills, implants, inserts—and we can at least be reasonably sure that none of them will burn our cervixes off. But too often we forget that birth control was not invented in 1960. The first oral birth control that was tested and championed by male physicians was released then, and it’s been the model we’ve scrutinized new offerings against ever since. But people have been working to prevent sex from causing conception for at least 4,000 years, if not longer.
Phexxi won’t be the last product to put a new spin on non-hormonal birth control. A German industrial design student recently made headlines for proposing a device meant to temporarily interrupt sperm production by bathing the testicles in ultrasound waves. A 2017 study showed that certain botanical compounds might act as a sort of “molecular condom” by hobbling sperm. Those options haven’t been tested in humans yet, but they offer hope that we’ll have more to pick from soon.
4,000 years from now, if humans are around to laugh at anything, humans will almost certainly be laughing at the pill in the same way we laugh at crocodile dung now. The combination of human ingenuity and horniness is a recipe for constant innovation, and the future of birth control will no doubt be as wild, colorful, and problematic as its past. But in the meantime, I strongly advise you to not put crocodile dung in your vagina.
Rachel’s Recs:
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