Know your Contraception Options!
Meet Joanne Cackett, founder of Four Five Oh, a website dedicated to educating women about birth control options.
My Sex Bio: Can you start off by explaining a bit about Four Five Oh? How do you offer support about birth control decisions?
Joanne: Four Five Oh is a website that is a bit like a “Trip Advisor” for birth control. Women share their experience of the methods of birth control they’ve used (anonymously) by filling in a short form where we ask what side effects they’ve experienced and whether they’d recommend the method to other women.
When we were looking ourselves for birth control methods, we saw there was a distinct lack of information about how other women experienced certain methods - and if you think about it, when you’re thinking about changing birth control methods, you usually ask your girlfriends what they’re using and how they like it.
Four Five Oh simply expands your group of girlfriends and asks the women of the world, “How do you like it?”
The information that’s available about birth control is so often affected by marketing budgets of the large pharmaceutical companies who produce the methods, or it’s affected by religious or traditional “beliefs,” or even politics. We wanted to take all that away and build a platform for women to get unbiased information about birth control.
The name Four Five Oh relates to the fact that women have around about 450 periods in their lifetime - we wanted a name that reflected something to do with women and their bodies.
My Sex Bio: What has been the biggest surprise in the process of creating this organization?
Joanne: There have been so many surprises! First, I have been surprised how big the problem is. I’ve had women contact me from all corners of the world, telling me their birth control story: A couple in Ireland told me that their doctor refused to talk to them about birth control because they weren’t married, a woman in Kenya said that sometimes her birth control pill is simply not available. We are so far from being in a place where all women can access unbiased, easy to understand information about birth control; what’s available, what might be suitable for them, and what side effects they might expect. And this issue is really a global problem - it’s not just affecting developing countries.
Secondly, I was surprised at how big the sex, reproductive health, birth control community is. There are so many individuals and organizations out there who are tackling so many of these issues, from sexual identity, to sex education, to women’s health and of course, birth control. It’s a great movement to be part of, and it’s a strong community.
My Sex Bio: In what ways have you seen gender bias playing a part in the birth control industry? For example, the way people have and (more likely) haven't been supportive of male birth control or in the accessibility to birth control.
Joanne: Gender bias plays a huge part in women’s health in the broader sense, not just in birth control.
One statistic that highlights very nicely gender bias in women’s health in general is the fact that researchers conduct five times as many studies into erectile dysfunction (ED) as premenstrual syndrome (PMS), despite only around 19 percent of men suffering from ED and 90 percent of women experiencing symptoms of PMS. (Source: here).
The first studies into the male contraceptive pill were conducted in the 1970s and yet there is still no male contraceptive pill on the market - there were studies halted because the side effects were seen as “deal-breakers” for the men who were participating.
Where there has been some innovation in technology in the last decade (think period-tracking apps, wearable tech pelvic floor trainers, fertility tracking bracelets, etc), there is still a massive lack of data about women and their bodies. Apple’s health tracker, when it was first launched in 2014, was hailed as revolutionary - it could track blood pressure, blood alcohol level, copper intake, but it didn’t have a period tracker. Also, when Siri was first launched, it could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. How’s that for gender bias in women’s health?
My Sex Bio: Are there other areas of the sexual wellness field that you have interest in/would like to explore more or learn more about?
Joanne: I’m really interested in communication. I don’t know anyone who can tell me they had a valuable sex education experience as a teenager. How can we expect adults to be equipped to talk to their children, their partners about sexual health, desires and issues?
I think another area is education about our bodies - we know so little about our bodies, our cycles, our hormones.
How can we know what is healthy or normal for our own bodies if we’ve been taking hormonal contraception since we were 16 and covering up so many vital signs our body creates?
My Sex Bio: Do you have a take on how birth control has changed dating culture? Are there more expectations or assumptions? What else?
Joanne: I’m not sure how it’s changed dating culture, but I think that everyone needs more education about the risks of sexually transmitted infections - I have had many conversations with people who were simply not aware of the risks. One article on our website that gets a lot of interest is “The Condom Conversation” which provides tips on how to respond if your partner doesn’t want to wear a condom. We wrote this article in response to our users telling us that this happens a lot - that there’s often a lot of pressure on women to skip the condom if she’s on the pill, or another method of birth control.
Thank you for talking with us, Joanne! Check out the Four Five Oh web page
