This week, an egregiously terrible advert by Crown Paint has attracted criticism for peddling the narrative that women who don’t want to have children will probably change their minds one day. As a woman who has been very open about the fact that I don’t want kids, and is now rapidly approaching a point where that choice stops being a choice and becomes an inevitability, I thought I’d weigh in.

If you’re keen on having children and are currently struggling with your own fertility journey, you might find this post upsetting. 

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I’m not going to call this a ‘guilty’ pleasure because it’s just a pleasure, but I’m a sucker for problem pages. I adore reading about the trials of other people’s lives, and soaking up the often-very-wise advice they receive. I also enjoy mining them for content, because sometimes I’ll find a letter that addresses a topic I really want to talk about. Or in today’s case, some advice that I want to rip to pieces. Today: an advice columnist berates a woman for destroying her marriage because she’s decided she doesn’t want children! Yay!

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Today’s guest blog is an incredible one to start the New Year with, because it combines all my favourite things: overcoming adversity, smashing preconceived ideas about sex, and enjoying some extremely hot fucks. I’ll keep my intro short and sweet, and let the couple who wrote this post introduce it instead: “To a lot of people, sex – real, adjective-free “sex” – at least for a straight, cis couple still ultimately means a penis going into a vagina. And if that’s how you define sex, then we did not have sex for over 10 years.”

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This week’s guest blogger is doing sterling work filling a gap in the market on advice and info. As he was getting his own vasectomy, he realised that there were far fewer personal accounts of the vasectomy procedure than there were for other forms of birth control – like post explaining IUD implantation, or the side effects of the pill. You do get occasional posts from heroic people who are happy to share their own vasectomy stories, but they’re few and far between (that link is the only one off the top of my head I can think of, someone else linked me to this video on non-surgical vasectomy – share yours in the comments if you have one too!). Having been through the process himself, this week’s guest blogger Big Spoon wanted to share his own experience with you: what it was like getting a vasectomy, the recovery afterwards, and answers to questions that I know blog readers will have like ‘how long until you can wank?’ and ‘at what point after a vasectomy do you find out it’s safe to have unprotected sex?’ Take it away Big Spoon…

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This weekend, the Guardian published ‘A letter to my friends with children’ from a childfree woman who is sad that she sees less of the women she loves when they have children. “Each time one of my female friends has a baby, our friendship changes,” she explained, and a few parents I followed on Twitter understandably rolled their eyes and got a bit annoyed.

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