Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill
A question was raised last week on the Denialism science blog, and it has all sorts of interesting implications about sexual trust between men and women.
The question: Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?
My knee-jerk response to this question has always pretty much been, “Because the pharmaceutical industry are a bunch of sexist pigs.” But this post — and the fascinating discussion that follows — is making me realize that the question is actually a tad more complicated than that.
For starters, it turns out that there are genuine biological reasons why a pill for men is trickier than a pill for women. What with our reproductive systems being different and all.
But that doesn’t seem to be the main obstacle. The main obstacle to a male pill seems to be that there simply might not be a big enough market for it.
Which, in all fairness, I can understand.
Because this isn’t simply a question of sexist men dumping the responsibility for birth control onto women. It’s a question of whether women would be willing to place the responsibility for birth control into the hands of men.
Or, as Mark Hoofnagle put it in his Denialism post: “Men are liars.”
A bit harsh, but I can see his point.
(And yes, women are liars too. I’ll get to that in a moment.)
If I were in a trusting, long-term relationship with a man, I might be willing to let him take care of the birth control. But if I were just dating and screwing around, the way I used to in my younger days, there’d be no way I’d trust some guy I’d just met at a party or a nightclub or an orgy, who told me, “Don’t worry, baby, I’m on the pill.” That’s way too big a gamble to leave in the hands of someone I barely know.
Besides, I’d want to use condoms anyway — since the pill doesn’t protect against AIDS or other STIs.
But for exactly this same reason, I think Mark at Denialism may be mistaken. I think there might be a real market for a male contraceptive pill.
And it comes back to my earlier parenthetical remark:
Women are liars, too.
If I were a single guy, dating and screwing around, I wouldn’t want to leave the contraception question in the hands of some woman I’d just met, either. I mean, think about it. If, as a woman, I wouldn’t trust some strange guy who told me, “Don’t worry, baby, I’m on the pill” — then why on earth should men trust some strange woman to tell them the same thing? The consequences for men of an unwanted pregnancy aren’t as intense as they are for women . . . but they’re not negligible. (Can you say, “child support”?)
And I think that might point to the real market for the male pill. (Or patch, or injection, or however the drug winds up getting delivered.)
Mark thinks that, even if pharmaceutical researchers could make it effective, male hormonal contraception will always be a niche market, mainly limited to men in committed long-term relationships with women who trust them enough to leave the contraception in their hands. But while I can see his point, I think he may be overlooking another key market: the market of single men who want control of their own damn reproduction, just as much as women do. I think the biggest market for the male pill might well be single men who want the moral equivalent of a temporary vasectomy: a way to guarantee that they won’t get stuck with offspring they didn’t expect or want.
In other words — single men who would want the pill for the exact same reasons single women want it.
The reality is that both women and men have sex with people they don’t entirely trust. They have sex with people they trust enough: people they trust not to beat them up, not to steal their car, not to paint their living room hot pink while they sleep. But both women and men have sex with people who they don’t trust enough to let them handle the responsibility, and make the decisions, about pregnancy and children. I think plenty of men would be happy to take a pill to ensure that their decisions about pregnancy and children weren’t being made by the hot number they met on Craig’s List three weeks ago.
If I were a single man, I’d sure as hell want that.
This entry was posted on Friday, 18 January 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Sunday, 20 January 2008 at 1:42 am ChickenMan wrote:
When I was a young lad I did look into the state of male contraception for exactly the reason mentioned here - I wanted control over my reproduction to be in my hands, not the hands of a girlfriend. The news I found where rather sad - there is pills being worked on for men, but the pills that do work requires in addition to the daily pills a monthly shot from the doc. Having a regular doctors appointment each month would make this too difficult and too much of a hassle, and as such not many would be interested. Especially since the side effects typically are basically the first step of gender reassignment therapy… Not many young single men want to risk their manhood over this.
So, in the end I believe the market you envision do exist - if a viable alternative comes out - but it is too small to be profitable for the amount of research needed. Also, it can be argued that young single men that do not want to be fathers probably wouldn’t want VD either, and thus should use a condom anyway.
on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 11:36 am Nox Loon wrote:
I was privy (after the fact) to two women getting pregnant on purpose in order to trap their boyfriends into long term relationships. One man broke up with the woman and one man married the woman and endured five years in a loveless marriage. The children in both cases suffered for the games the adults were playing.
I have two sons now, and I tell them they are absolutely responsible for their own sexuality, and to never count on their partners for such without at least being aware of the consequences - even if in a long term relationsip. I know young men today could make the male pill viable in the marketplace, but I agree with ChickenMan, it wouldn’t work as he described it.
There’s all kinds of reasons why people have children, and I sometimes wonder if planning them in a mature and responsible way in order to build a family is the least often used reason.
I had kids for stupid, selfish reasons too; never realizing until they were innocently looking at me as though I could solve anything, what I had done. Luckily, they are very fogiving, smart young men.
on Wednesday, 23 January 2008 at 6:13 pm The Eeyore Librarian wrote:
Absolutely! I think TRUE choice (men and women) would go a long way to balancing out this crazy world. There are way to many babies born out of wedlock and too many kids in the foster care service. If every child were conceived only after the question “Do you want kids” was answered affirmatively than we would drastically reduce the number of children that are basically unwanted and effectively abandoned, or simply ignored. This includes children born in wedlock to otherwise indifferent fathers. There would still be plenty of immature idiots around and people duped by ill-intentioned liars, but the volume of unwanted children would be decreased. It’s not like we need extra people on the planet right now anyway. If people choose not to procreate, that choice should be supported. To each his/her own. And paying child support is a HUGE hardship for many men. In many cases they can’t work because they wages are garnished so badly they don’t have enough to support themselves. This is a bad situation for everyone involved. Worse for the kid. Choice is a good thing.
on Thursday, 24 January 2008 at 1:16 pm Joreth wrote:
There was a case on House where a wife was going through fertility treatments but was secretly on the pill and the clash of medications put her life in danger. Her husband desperately wanted kids and she wanted him desperately enough to lie about not wanting kids. Yes, this is fictional television, but it’s an example of how even long-term relationship partners can have different ideas about procreaction and different agendas and it’s not even always motivated by negative emotions.
As my sweetie and I always say when people get upset over our suggestion of pre-nups or not marrying in the first place, every guy who ever divorced firmly believed while standing at that alter that his future wife was sweet, loving, and would not screw him over 5 years from now. And yet, half of all marriages end in divorce, many of them bitterly with one person trying to wrest the entire life-savings (and sometimes children) from the other.
The point here is that, wanting to rely on oneself for these kinds of decisions is not necessarily a lack of trust in the current partner at this moment. It’s an acknowledgement that situations and feelings for people change and an acknowledgement that trust can be broken. Your fiance might completely and totally love and trust you right now and have absolutely no designs on your money. But 5 or 10 years from now, after you’ve been fighting for a couple of years, she might decide she *deserves* your money for her hardship and try to take it when she leaves. Your partner right now might insist that children are not in his immediate plans for the future, but after a couple of years, hormones or emotions might change things, and too many people believe it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. An “oops, sorry, we’re pregnant” is often believed to be forgiveable because “accidents” can happen.
Insisting that I handle my own birth control or that we sign a pre-nup does not mean that I actually think you will try to screw me over (and for reference, I’m female, but I think this goes for guys too). If I am having sex with you or marrying you, almost by definition, that means I do trust you. But wanting my own birth control (or having a pre-nup) means that I know everyone who ever got divorced or got surprised with a kid also trusted their partner at the time.
I don’t like to leave my future in the hands of a fragile emotion. I like to leave it in science and iron-clad legal agreements. It doesn’t mean I don’t trust you, it means I believe in unforseen circumstances and consequences.
on Friday, 2 January 2009 at 11:31 pm meh wrote:
i doubt id want my man to do that.
for the same reasons a man wouldnt want to do that
theres an animal urge to want a man to be potent, from both men and women
i would rather make myself impotent so i could enjoy thinking of him as potent and virile than to think he was doing all that work for nothing.
plus hormones for men… srsly?
on Wednesday, 7 January 2009 at 6:05 pm pepper wrote:
The “impotency” experienced by a man who takes birth control is a temporary state, just as if you went off the Pill, you’d likely be fertile again within a month or less. An animal urge is just that. I would argue that because we are human, we are able to deny those urges for the sake of personal, or greater, good–that is what separates us from the animals.
Besides, “all that work for nothing”?? Are you saying you want to get pregnant every time you have sex, and that procreation is the only point of fucking? From my perspective, HELL no.
He’ll still “cum” on the Pill, if that’s what you’re worried about, just as a man who has a vasectomy still emits fluid. It just happens to be sperm-free.
Plus, hormones only for women? Srsly? Why should we bear the brunt, and the responsibility, of birth control options? Perhaps you should step out of the box of our patriarchal society, the mentality that says that women should be the sole proprietors of virtue…which in this modern age could mean “not getting knocked up.” Men should take charge–after all, don’t men like the whole independent, dominant thing?–of their sperm, show them who’s boss. And maybe this way they’ll stop complaining about condoms, because they’ll actually have a CHOICE of birth control.