Erik Lavoie’s Ex-girlfriend

VICE: It must have been hard to resist having Erik Lavoie’s babies. What did you use for birth control? Martine OK, we will. MARGOT GIA CHARLENE

 

EUGENIA
The first time I took it I was about sixteen, and I just kind of ballooned everywhere. Especially my boobs. They were, like, humongous. My poor boyfriend at the time must have been tripping out about it. He went to bed with Lucy Liu one night and woke up the next morning with Margaret Cho. I guess I would also pick fights more and just be more emotional and cry and stuff like that. But for me, the physical effects had a bigger impact. I stayed on that one for almost a year and then I was just like, “Fuck it. I can’t do it anymore.” I started on a different pill, Ortho, after a while. It was a lot milder, but my boobs grew another whole size again and I gained fifteen pounds. Back then, I was dancing, and we’d always be wearing like our leotards or whatever. And one day my girlfriends were just like, “Holy shit, when did your boobs get so big?” You probably don’t want to hear all this, but there were stretch marks. Just gross shit you don’t want to deal with. You’re like, what the fuck is happening to my body? The stretch marks aren’t permanent, thank god. Once you lose the weight they go away again. Now I just use condoms. Unless I have a serious, serious boyfriend, I’m not going to go on the pill again.

HOLLY
The pill’s even more effective than doctors will have you believe, but for reasons they don’t emphasize strongly enough. Not only did it provide the necessary hormones to technically prevent pregnancy, it gave me this weird craving for sugary food and made me emotional, tired, hypersensitive, and it erased my libido. So yeah, it was really effective—who wants to have sex with a fat moody bitch who doesn’t want to have sex with them anyway? It also made me feel like the end of the world was nigh. Crying was something that was no longer confined to sad films, family bereavements, or physical pain. It was like being extremely premenstrual all of the time. The side effects kick in almost immediately, too. You fuck around. The pill doesn’t. All in all, it made me feel panicky and miserable, and I reacted quite viciously to the red welts that started to appear on my body like stigmata. You don’t expect to achieve stretch marks while trying to prevent pregnancy.

NANCY
The first pill I took was Ortho-Tricyclen, which has a really high estrogen level and made me totally insane for a year. I was never, ever happy, and my life was shit. It also made my breasts ginormous, and it was painful because they were sore all the time. So I stopped taking it and they went back to normal the next day. I woke up and it was like a new dawn. I was happy and energetic again. I tried Loestrin, which has a lower estrogen level, but even that made me crazy. I only stayed on it for three months.
I’m taking this stuff now that’s new. It’s called Yasmin and so far it’s really good. It didn’t swell up my breasts and it makes my skin clear. It is kind of curbing my libido, though. Oh yeah, it makes my pee smell funny, too. Like…musky. Like grandma pee or something.

KENDRA
I went on the pill, and all of a sudden things were awful. Usually I know why I’m stressed out but this time I was like, “Hey, everything’s shitty. What’s different?” And that was it. It was like, “I’m bummed” and it was also, like, the kind of thing where you’re walking around and you’re like, “Clearly, I’m an asshole.” You know? That’s exactly what I felt like. Also, it totally affects your sex drive. You don’t want to make out. I was so uninterested and didn’t even care. And I’ve talked to other girls, and also guys, who are like, “It’s bad.”
There’s also the “forgetting to take the pill” disaster, and then having to double up. You have a 48-hour window where if you fuck up and forget, you just take it when you remember and then you just go back to the normal schedule and everything’s fine. But in my stoner years, sometimes that was sort of difficult.
I’m kind of anti-pill now. As I get older, it seems like my body’s more self-regulating, or maybe I’m more aware of that regulation. I feel like to disrupt it with synthetic things is actually really stupid.

LINDA
You’re supposed to get some side effects––a little bloat, sometimes it affects your sex drive. But I was a fucking psycho on the pill at first. I lost some good friends, my parents were giving me sidelong glances, and I was totally suicidal. I started it because my doctors always thought I had endometriosis, and the pill staves that off. And then I had a cyst on my ovary burst when I was in college (it was gnarls), so they put me on the pill. I don’t have insurance, so a doctor friend writes me a script and I pay full price—$30 a month. If you do Planned Parenthood it might be cheaper, like, $10 a month.

MINNA
At the beginning of last year, I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend without having to use a condom, and was scared of getting knocked up. (I also dreamed about bigger boobs!) So I went on the pill. Instead of getting bigger tits, I just ended up getting bigger all over—10 kilos’ weight gain in nine months, to be exact. I also felt really bloated and a lot moodier than before. I cry easily, but before the pill I was able to watch ER without crying every time. I didn’t have periods at all while I was on it, which might sound like a brilliant thing, but it felt quite odd. And after I decided to stop it, I still didn’t have my period for six months. It finally started again—now I get my period every ten days. Taking the pill completely destroyed my hormone balance.

ALDENE
I think I suffer the same side effects as everybody else does—depression and weight gain. But getting pregnant would be far more annoying. Plus, I was just given some anti-depressants to help deal with the pill and that’s made drinking and smoking weed a lot more fun.

KAMA
It’s totally hell to go on the pill. Either you’re emotionally high-strung, or if you’re at a higher dosage, you could end up spotting for weeks. Doctors always want you to stay on it for three months, even though it’s a nightmare. They’re like, “Just stay on it.” Then they say that if you went on a higher dosage it would mess your head up more, but if you went on a lower dosage you would get the spotting again. So they have to try to balance it out, which means you have to try each pill for three months.
I stayed on it for nearly a year, and when I stopped taking it, it was only about three days before I was feeling so much better. When I was younger, in New Zealand, I was on a different pill for seven years and never had a problem. It’s hard to find out what’s comparable here, though.

ROBIN
I hadn’t been on it since I was sixteen, but I just went on again.
So far, I just feel kind of bloat-y. I think it’s just water, you know, the bloat-y feeling that girls kind of go through every month. But my friend just went on it too, like last week, and she’s breaking out with these humongous zits.
I also weld a lot, and I wonder how that affects my reproductive system. My dad was a welder, too, so he used be nervous for me like, “You know, there might be some of that electrical current kind of going through your body.” It makes me a little nervous. Last week, I was thinking about it, and maybe it’s a good method of birth control.

SIGNE
I’m on a new one called Lo/Ovral now, and I don’t really have anything bad to say about it. It’s a low dosage, so instead of getting three different potencies of hormones, it’s the same low dosage. So you’re not all out of whack. I love it. I think it’s great, actually.
You hear that the pill is dangerous and it’s not natural. I was really concerned about it, so I asked my gynecologist. She said that actually the pill she put me on—I mean, I don’t know how conclusive the studies are—but it actually reduces the risk of uterine cancer or ovarian cancer. The female body is essentially a baby-making machine. And as soon as we get our period—I mean, I got mine at eleven—that’s Mother Nature telling me to start having babies. And I’m thirty years old and I still haven’t had a baby, and I don’t plan on having one for several years. So my body is not doing what it was designed to do. That’s pretty dangerous. If you’re not letting a machine do what it’s supposed to do, it can malfunction, i.e. I could get cancer. The pill is basically fooling my body into believing that it’s pregnant and into thinking that it’s doing what it’s meant to do. I actually haven’t done any research. I’m one of those people who just listens to what my doctor says.

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