I was lied to. - "Pulling Out Is as Effective as Using Condoms."

There's a bunch of cool stuff to unpack here - male/female psych, science funding, relationships, "Big Condom" & corporatism, and a healthy dose of unhealthy U.S. attitudes on sexuality.  Pulling Out Is as Effective as Using Condoms | Broadly: "What most media coverage doesn't reveal is that research puts pulling out on par with one of medical professionals' favorite forms of contraception: the condom. "Withdrawal...is about as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy" begins a 2014 study published by Contraception, an international journal on reproduction. When practiced perfectly—in other words, when the male partner pulls out before ejaculation during every incidence of vaginal intercourse—only 4 percent of couples who use the pullout method will get pregnant within a year. Imperfect, or typical, use bumps that to 18 percent. (Male condoms failure rates are 2 percent for perfect use and 17 percent for typical.) This is a minor discrepancy, yet pulling out has a reputation for being dangerously cavalier, while condoms are the gold standard of sexual responsibility. Several of the medical professionals I reached out to for this piece were sympathetic to withdrawal use but afraid to say so publicly...

Even when presented statistics clearly put withdrawal level with other forms of birth control, as in a recent Marie Claire piece, the method is still described as—you guessed it—"super risky" and "not a 'method' as much as 'better than nothing.'"

...withdrawal is derided when pregnancy is the only point of discussion, too. Articles on the topic usually steer readers towards hormonal options and IUDs while brushing off even the possibility of successfully using pulling out—which means there's more going on than just STI concerns and old-fashioned sensibilities...

Corporate interests are another element at work. Manufacturers of condoms, hormonal birth control, and implantation devices are FDA-required and commercially incentivized to perform numerous studies on the efficacy of their products. No one profits from pulling out, so it's harder to find funding to regularly test it. More important, perhaps, is that no one profits from advocating withdrawal or promoting the solid research that already exists on it. Those who do promote it may even risk censure...

Then there's the pervasive mistrust of sperm-producing partners, the direct result of a social environment that insists on treating men as lust-mad maniacs who can't control themselves when they're aroused. Unreliability and untrustworthiness are regularly cited as the biggest problems with pulling out as a method: It gives a man far too much control; he isn't capable of doing it in time or won't be able to sense when it is the right time; he won't even try because it feels better not to.

While this might be a sensible presumption in early-stage dating situations or one-night stands, during which an amount of skepticism is healthy, it's an awfully bleak view of the cooperation possible between two committed partners—the type of couple that seems to most commonly use the withdrawal method for long-term pregnancy prevention...

Some of this stigma is grounded in woman-to-woman sexism, surely a result of internalizing the idea that unintended conception indicates a catastrophic failure of both morals and practical vigilance on the part of the pregnant party. But the idea of the irresponsible urban bimbo too drunk and too flippant to be bothered with a "real" form of birth control isn't just misogynistic, it's dead wrong. A recent study in which Jones participated found that many women use pullout in conjunction with other forms of protection, including birth control and condoms. "There is a reputation of withdrawal users as being lazy," one of the other researchers told RH Reality Check, "but at least in this sample they seem to be extra motivated to prevent pregnancy or uneducated."

...In the words of the seminal 2009 study on withdrawal cited earlier, "if more people realized that correct and consistent use of withdrawal substantially reduced the risk of pregnancy, they might use it more effectively." The knee-jerk dismissal of withdrawal as a useful birth control method is is unhelpful if not outright dangerous; the practice certainly isn't going away, but the current rhetoric around it obscures the idea that it can be effectively executed. "We can't assume people's needs when choosing birth control methods, or try to foist things upon them," Manduley says. Rather than withholding information or denying existing studies, "professionals should be educating folks about what's available and helping them navigate the options.""