And women are shamed by society for even being or feeling sexual. Female sexuality was always taught as existing for male pleasure. I mean, female masturbation was not something this society talked about or embraced until the 2010's and sex positivity was well underway. (No, you can’t include conversations on fringe…

Funnily enough, I just found out my French great grandmother had my grandmother at the age of 42 in 1923... so even French women born in the 1880s were more fertile than those 200 years prior ;)

Your second option was closest - in the book’s is often commented upon by other characters that the fact that Ned fathered Jon Snow, a bastard, was the one blight upon his otherwise spotless record of being honorable to a fault. Jon was worried about conceiving a bastard and repeating what he perceived as his father’s…

At 16 I was told I’d be infertile by a woman who I now believe to have been an actual witch who snuck into a gynecologist’s office. The realization that this was likely to be total fucking bullshit hit me just in time for that fertility plunge.

In the book he has this discussion with Tormund who is just puzzled as fuck at the concept of a “bastard”, asking if they are weaker or more sickly. After Jon admits they aren’t, Tormund says a strong child would be a wonderful thing and if Ygritte doesn’t want a kid, she’ll visit a woods witch for some Westerosi Plan…

Ygritte was also very upfront about telling him Wildling women who don’t want to be pregnant know what to do if they find themselves pregnant.

Because they didn’t want to be the kind of ‘whores’ who talked to their partners about sex or, God forbid, had premeditated sex and therefore procured birth control themselves, it ‘just happened’ in the passion of the moment.

There’s a lot of wrong-headedness about fertility, from how easy/hard it is to get pregnant and how long your peak fertility lasts. Adam Ruins Everything did a great piece on how our data is mostly derived from French women in the 1600s and there’s usually very little problem getting pregnant at any time into your…

I mean, they’ve got moon tea, which in our world was called “tansy tea” and is an herbal Plan-B analog. Unfortunately, over harvesting by Rome followed by a complete, inquisition-led prohibition on it by the Catholic church in the dark ages led to the plant’s extinction.

I think you’re right. So many girls (esp. from religious families) are trained to deny all responsibility for sex. I used to work with teenage moms and they would all claim that “it just happened, lost in the moment, etc.” even though it was also clear it wasn’t the first time. I think a lot of them did think that…

I get pregnant every time Jon Snow appears on screen. My womb just opens up and a baby hops in. Jon Snow is just that damn sexy.

I was waiting all season for Dany to say that, and I was bitterly disappointed that she never did.

There’s also, I think, the penchant for teenage girls who get pregnant to insist that it was the first and only time they had sex (even if it actually wasn’t) as a way of heading off judgments about their character. This is a particularly common phenomenon with girls who come from families that skew…

Each of my great-grandmothers on my mom’s side had 9 kids. Each of my grandmothers on both mom and dad’s sides had 5. My mom had two, but that was a family planning decision. I’m holding out hope that that super-fertility has been handed down to me, because I’m almost 35 and haven’t had kids yet and it’s making me…

Yugoslavian farmers, man. You needed kids to help run the farm and contraception was hard to come by even if you knew enough to want it. Two didn’t survive past infancy.

I don’t know if this was a book or tv scene (or just my fevered imagination) but I remember Jon was very wary about boning with Ygritte because he didn’t want to leave her with child (wanting to avoid an unwanted bastard situation that he grew up in) except Ygritte was all “the fuck is wrong with southerners if we…

Youngest of 10! Good lord

I think I’m super-fertile, actually. My mom was the youngest of 10, I’m the youngest of 4. My sister had three with one being a surprise. I just assume I’ll be poppin’ ‘em out like Pez dispensers when my time comes.

i had wrongly assumed, upon seeing the headline, that this was going to be an article extolling the mental and physical benefits of masturbation...based purely on jon’s naked posterior in that last, riveting, scene.

If I had a million stars to give you for posting this, I would give you them all to you. My own perception of her throughout my lifetime as it occurred when she was alive (and then for about 2 years after her death) was that the public/media presentation of Diana was either “too much”, “not enough”, or “perfect, just…