Summer in Hamptons which I missed but when I was about fourteen......

There was a book in the house about the "real world" of ballet, this before the show "Breaking Pointe" which I love personally. One knows the drill: anorexia, drugs, pain, more pain, hard work and neck to neck competition. Not to mention at times physical and emotional abuse. I could never make myself barf just couldn't.....the other stuff......ugh. I was slightly chubby but loved dance.....so I read in this book that Baryshnikov approached a young woman dancer of his once saying he saw fat on her thighs, some such thing. She, as she told this writer, said maybe it was the birth control pills she'd been taking. According to her, he then walked away, turned around and said, "Why don't you try taking cold showers instead." He wasn't kidding, she told the writer. Oh.....at the time I didn't understand. I think I'd asked my mother, are cold showers a form of birth control? How do they prevent pregnancy? Similar to watching Gone with the Wind, when Scarlett told Rhett she didn't want more kids.....I'd always assumed that birth control was always available. Somehow didn't put two and two together til recently, or understood why this was such a colossal issue.....in the book he says "You may keep your chastity" in the film it was switched to "sanctity......"