A friend sent me this link yesterday to yet another story promising male birth control that’s been promised for years and has yet to come. (Interestingly, none of thes articles seem to ever mention RISUG*, which is something that’s already growing in popularity in many places.) The abundance of these articles always puzzles me, since the likelihood of any male birth control pill hitting the market any time soon doesn’t seem to justify their frequency. But reading this article clued me into one possible factor—articles about a male birth control pill are a prime opportunity for a writer to lazily advance stereotypes about men and construct masculinity as inherently anti-woman. Articles about male birth control are dominated by the idea that men cannot be bothered enough about their sexual partner’s health and the prevention of pregnancy to actually take measures to help her out, even though half a million American men a year get vasectomies, which strikes me as solid evidence that men aren’t so monolithically opposed to the concept of taking responsibility as they’re supposed to be. But screw the facts, there’s an opportunity to write about how bitches ain’t shit afoot!
Trope number one of using the hope of male birth control to convince women that it’s useless to ask men to care about them—imply to your readers that men are only too happy to let you do the dirty work they themselves are too good for.
Forty-year-old Scott Hardin says he’s glad that men may soon have a new choice when it comes to birth control. But, he adds, he would not even consider taking a male hormonal contraceptive. Hardin is like many men who are pleased to hear they may have a new option but are wary of taking any type of hormones.
“I would rather rely on a solution that doesn’t involving medicating myself and the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy,� says Hardin, who is single and a college administrator.
Taking hormones is women’s work, in other words. Imagine if he’d said something similiar about housework, “I would rather rely on a solution where the house gets cleaned by me snapping my fingers, instead of dealing with problems like loss of time and boredom that women have with housework.” You get the idea. What I find funny about this is the subtle reinforcing of the erroneous idea that all women who take the pill suffer from massive side effects (but of course they just have to suffer it, being women). My friend sent me this article because he noticed that the main ingredient in male hormonal methods in the testing stage is testosterone, so we were cracking jokes about how convenient it is that the male birth control pill will actually rev up your sex drive. Not all side effects are bad, you know. There’s a ton of possibilities for how to take articles like this, but the author picked the “I can’t take hormones like a woman” opening that conveyed that men can’t be bothered to give a shit about something important to women. However, the problem with this particular line of attack on these articles is that despite the overwhelming belief that men simply don’t care about birth control, the drug companies are in fact spending a lot of money on research, which implies that they think there’s a real demand. How to get out of this sticky situation and stay on the “bitches ain’t shit” message?
At this point, the author has no other solution but to suggest that men have to take birth control because women are such deceptive, untrustworthy creatures. Yes, it’s mean, but what other choice does the author have—to write something crazy like men might actually care about women and having healthy relationship? Don’t be hasty now.
Brown, who is married and has three children, hopes his kids will one day be able to benefit from the new technology. His would like his son, who is now 17, to one day have the option of taking a male birth control pill. Brown believes many men will see “their pill� as a good idea and will want to use it.
“It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans,� says Brown. “Some women are out there to use men to get pregnant. This could deter women from doing this. An athlete or a singer is someone who could be a target and they could put a stop to that.�
Because poor, suffering men have had no method whatsoever to protect themselves from the herds of semen-sucking succubi.
Oddly enough, I read a book some time ago on the history of birth control that had some interesting posters and fliers in it that anti-choice groups of the 60s would pass out to men suggesting to them to look through their women’s things to make sure they weren’t secretly taking the pill. The story’s changed a little now, and the urban legend is of hordes of women who are secretly not taking the pill. In terms of functionality, the latter is probably a better urban legend for promoting misogyny because it implies that men are the prize and that inferior women are desperate to grab at them, where the old one was a little too revealing of the way that pregnancy is more of a problem for the ones who can get pregnant than the ones who can’t.
This article and ones like it that promote the notion that real men don’t care about women and that women are desperate and grabby for male attention, so men should be strenous in their efforts to hate on women make me once again think about Austin’s post from Sunday, with this succient observation:
Violent, brutal behavior becomes a fetishized replacement for normal, healthy sexual interactions between men and women. For fascists, violence exists for its own sake and is a necessary component of male life. Only women and the weak eschew the glory of violent, decisive action on behalf of the national interests.
When you see articles, TV shows, movies, etc. promoting the idea that caring about women is a sign of weakness in men, it’s time to wonder what greater purpose could such a thing serve and are men actually benefitting or are they being alienated from their own interests to serve a violent state?
On the subject of alliances or warfare, Chris Clarke has a neat poem up.
*The fact that RISUG isn’t even on the radar in America tells you way more about the interests of drug companies than the relationship of men with birth control. It’s inexpensive, lasts 10 years, and effective. Inexpensive is why you won’t be seeing it here any time soon.
36 Responses to “Spinning alliances as warfare”
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Amanda:
Indeed. Who does benefit from this caring is weakness meme? Or is it just laziness on the part of the media that prefer to deal with comfortable stereotypes? What’s the matter with Kansas? Where’s the book: What’s the matter with men? That explores how men’s attitudes are hurting them.
And if succient isn’t a word, it damn well ought to be.
Once again, feminists are the only people to treat men with a measure of respect.
I will say this, however, in defense of wariness towards male horomonal birth control: while it will have gone through the FDA gamut, it won’t have had the decades of proof that the Pill and condom have had. In this respect there’s more likelihood that there are going to be some side effects - though if, like the Pill, it had some beneficial side effects as well, it could be enticing.
Nefarious plans? What an interesting choice of words.
I’ve always found it interesting that the whole argument about contraception is one which is couched in terms which imply that women are the only ones affected. Men aren’t supposed to be bothered by it at all - they’re supposed to be allowed to spray their semen all over the place like a firehose. It’s up to the women to avoid it landing somewhere dangerous. If a man *does* take precautions to avoid becoming a father - any precaution at all - he’s supposed to be feted and lauded over as though it’s some kind of heroic sacrifice.
Let’s look at the current readily available masculine methods of birth control, starting with the most obvious: saying no. This one is probably the least popular on a cultural basis, simply because it’s a cultural trope that *all* red-blooded males are absolutely gagging for sex, and need it on a regular basis. A man who abstains from sex is either extremely holy (eg Catholic priests) or he isn’t a “real man” and is probably a (shudder) homosexual.
The next step up is the “withdrawal” method, otherwise known as “yes, I’ll pull out in time dear”. This one is based on the notion that when a man is at the point of ejaculation, he should withdraw from his partner’s vagina, and instead ejaculate somewhere else. It’s a more accurate description of the sin of Onan, and I believe that the best commentary on it comes from Billy Connolly, who stated something along the lines of:
“When I’m at the point of ejaculation, it’d take a team of wild horses to make my arse move backward” [This is *not* an accurate quote].
Next up is the condom, famously described by any number of men as “taking a shower in a raincoat”. The condom (in both the male and female formats) is unique when it comes to contraceptive devices in that it is also capable of preventing sexually transmitted diseases. The big “disadvantage” to both the condom and the withdrawal method as far as the men see it is that they’re sacrificing their pleasure in order that us poor womenfolk won’t get pregnant, and they therefore deserve to be “rewarded” for this, or at least respected.
The vasectomy has two advantages in this respect. On the one hand, the chances of failure are extremely minimal, so one can point out the great sacrifice which has been made on some woman’s behalf. On the other, it gives an opportunity to slump around the house for a couple of days feeling very sorry for oneself and playing for sympathy that way. It’s a win-win situation, really.
The notion that the masculine contribution to contraceptive behaviour could be reduced to taking one pill each morning takes all the fun out of it. Taking a pill each day is dull. It’s boring. And it certainly can’t be turned into something heroic.
Taking a pill each day is dull. It’s boring.
Besides, you know, hormones. It’s such a womanly word, unless you’re talking about testosterone, which you almost never are. What, are they going to make a male tampon next?
I had a vasectomy several years ago because my partner in life would be endangered by a pregnancy. It was the best option and I don’t feel like any less of a man because of it. Had male hormonal birth control been available I probably would have gone that way as we both would have preferred that to surgery.
Who wants to bet that if they do ever come out with a “birth control for men” that insurance companies will be all to happy to cover it. My experiance with havig Insurance and having to take birth control…It was never covered….I always had to pay full price.
“their nefarious plans”
While I certainly believe that there are idiots who think they are such hot shit that da beyotches would get themselves pregnant, I wonder about this Brown guy. Who the hell ever uses the word ‘nefarious’ in earnest?
The whole article seems to be based on some weird zero-sum game. Enlightened self-interest, mutual benefit? Fuck that. It’s all about keeping women in their place.
“What I find funny about this is the subtle reinforcing of the erroneous idea that all women who take the pill suffer from massive side effects (but of course they just have to suffer it, being women).”
The pill has come a long way since the sixties and has improved greatly since then. I was first prescribed the pill because of my freakish mentrual cycle that was so debilitating that I was put out of commission one day a month. We’re talking cramps so bad that I’d spend a day lying in a fetal position in bed because it even hurt to walk or stand up straight. I was sixteen years old and missing way too much school. The pill regulated my cycle and my cramps are maybe one tenth the strength they were. My side effects from the pill were beneficial.
I understand if men would feel wary about a new drug because the pill itself had some problems when it first arrived on the scene. They’ve been tinkering with the hormonal levels for decades. But the idea that birth control is solely within a woman’s domain because *she’s* the one who should be worried about pregnancy is just bullshit.
I have to agree that I don’t think that the guy who’s wary of hormonal contraception for himself necessarily has a “But it’s her job to take a pill” attitude. Sounds like it’s more of a reaction to the whole HRT scandal, where it turned out that the hormones were actually causing heart attacks in women rather than preventing them.
And, let’s face it, it took a couple of decades to work the bugs out of the Pill and figure out the right level of hormones that would cause the fewest side effects and the lowest risk of cancer and stroke.
As one of the 1/2 mill who got a vasectomy this year, I have to say it was the smartest thing I have ever done (probably - I don’t want to set my sights too high). We now save the money we were spending on my wife’s birth control pills & condoms. And the “guilt free sex”, as my friend says, is wonderful. I know all the fundies think people without kids shouldn’t be having sex, but ever since we made the decision to not have kids, we’ve talked about one of us getting “fixed” and it is WAY easier for a man that it is for a woman.
This, BTW, does not qualify me for hero status.
Real men jog home from their vasectomy.
There is no slumping “around” when your nuts are swollen to the size of grapefruits. One slumps upon the couch in front of the TV with an icepack on the nads for a couple of days. The sympathy was nice though.
I’m not sure if I would have gone with a hormonal treatment instead if it had been available given that it was the pill’s effect on Jo’s blood pressure (and mine ain’t great) that motivated me to get snipped and that I already take some wicked strong medications for my psoriasis. Would have been nice to have some other option, short of tubal ligation, though.
I might be wary, but as long as I have a good sense that a hormonal pill won’t kill or sicken me to the point of incapacitation, I’d be willing to try it. That way I don’t feel like I have to worry whether or not she’s on birth control (and not because I think she’s “trying to trap me” or some such bullshit as that).
Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I prefer to use condoms. Not only do I feel more assured by the additional layer of prevention, but I’m pretty sensitive (to the point where orgasms sometimes hurt), so a condom actually helps me.
****”…hormones. It’s such a womanly word”****
Whore. Moan. That’s why he doesn’t want to take them.
If there was any non-surgical mail birth control equivalent to the pill, I for one would absolutely *jump* at the opportunity. My wife currently uses the pill, and really doesn’t like it. But her doc doesn’t think she’s a good candidate for an IUD, and neither of us wants surgery. (She doesn’t want it, because it’s a pretty big surgery for a woman; I don’t, because I’ve had very bad experiences with surgery before, and swore never to have any non-life-saving surgery ever again.) If I could relieve her of the problems of taking the pill, I’d do it gladly.
(Alas, the RISUG thing wouldn’t do me any good even if it were available in America; the implanatation procedure would be a very big problem for someone with some of my medical problems. Pills are great, normal injections are fine, even daily injections would be OK. But the kind of semi-surgical injections that typically cause inflammation - sorry, no. Anything involving non-trivial inflammation is a big problem for me.)
Frozen peas are good for post-vasectomy comfort. So’s getting it done before the youngest child is old enough to jump on dad’s lap.
I had never even *heard* of RISUG.
One possible problem with male contraceptive pills that no one’s commented on yet: it will require a very high level of trust on the part of the woman, because she doesn’t know whether her partner is being honest with her if he claims he’s on the pill, or if he’s been careful about taking the correct dosage at the correct time. I suppose the converse is true with men, and I guess the fix would be to only use male pills if you’re in a committed relationship where each partner trusts the other–which would be a good idea anyway because the pill doesn’t protect against STDs.
I had a vasectomy 2 years ago. It was no big deal. Much less invasive than a tubal. The surgeon was hilariously brusque–when I met with him before The Procedure, his first question was “does your wife know you’re here?” and the second question was “what happens if you divorce and remarry and your new wife wants kids”? I didn’t object to either question at all. The Procedure itself lasted 15 minutes and I was sore for about 3 days. It wasn’t agonizing pain, just a dull ache that you might get several hours after being kicked in the nuts.
The 3-month wait to verify that I was, in fact, shootin’ blanks was a little annoying, and it felt weird dropping off sperm samples at the doctor’s office. But overall, The Procedure was no big deal, and as far as my sexual performance goes I have noticed no vas deferens.
(ducks, runs away)
“‘the problems women have had with hormone therapy doesn’t make me anxious to want to sign on to taking a hormone-type therapy…” Taking hormones is women’s work, in other words.”
One of these is not like the other one.
I dunno, Amanda. While the quote from Quentin (nefarious women) Brown made him sound like a bumpkin I didn’t read anything ominous in Scott Hardin’s words. If he’d said he’d rather continue letting women take all the risks you’d have a point. I’m guessing that like a lot of other men are no less anxious (rightly or wrongly) about hormonal contraceptives for their partners as they are for themselves. As a long-time advocate of vasectomies (I got mine just before my 21st birthday) I’ve heard a fair number of stories from men who undertake the surgery so their partners can go off the pill.
The point being that a lot of people haven’t recovered from stories of complications from back in the 60s and early 70s when pills were still strong enough to block ovulation in horses. I remember friends in nursing school joking about “sitting in the shower praying for a (pill-induced) clot” on test mornings because they’d partied instead of studying. True, doses nowadays are miniscule, and tremendously more safe, and have been since at least the 1980s. But if you look at the number of web users who are still paranoid about browser cookies it’s pretty clear that old habits — even mistaken ones — die very, very hard.
The point being that the article didn’t contain enough information to determine Hardin’s position on women and hormonal contraception. Given your earlier, excellent point that ” half a million American men a year get vasectomies, which strikes me as solid evidence that men aren’t so monolithically opposed to the concept of taking responsibility as they’re supposed to be” I’m more inclined to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
—
On the other hand, WTF is up with Brown and his nefarious women thing? My biggest concern, one that I’ve addressed in my own posts, is that *women* might not be willing to trust partners — especially short-term ones — who claim they’re taking contraception, but in reality I’m guessing that most people are both more trustworthy, not to mention trusting, than Brown suggests.
—
Finally I could be radically mistaken about this but I’m guessing that most men will be willing to adopt non-vasectomy/non-condom alternatives to male contraception, even hormonal ones, as long as it’s not too much hassle (before snorting consider how many women stick with the pill despite its relative unreliability compared with higher-hassle injectables.) And while I think it would be best if *both* parties used contraceptives since it would dramatically reduce the consequences should one contraceptive fail, I think it’ll make a big difference for those couples who worry about women taking the pill.
figleaf
p.s. Another reason I think it’ll be best if contraceptives become available for by *both* genders is that, while no doubt sweet-sounding at first, guys saying “I’m the man, let me risk the hormones” is no less macho than “you’re the woman so you risk it.”
I understand if men would feel wary about a new drug because the pill itself had some problems when it first arrived on the scene.
Blitgal - didn’t stop em re Viagra, did it? Not even when it turned out to cause a small number of heart attacks!
British women have had a method of male birth control for years - big knickers.
I suppose vasectomy is OK for guys like me who stop at two, but there are still men out there who love to run around fathering children they’ve no intention of ever being Dads to.
Problem is, the ones who should not be allowed to breed will never accept birth control.
Seems to me like:
male on HBC (if he has no bad side effects)
+ female on HBC (if she has no bad side effects)
+ condom (for STD prevention)
= a lot fewer “oops!” pregnancies. No trust need be involved, especially for non-monogamous scenarios.
Male contraception: old myths die hard…
Kudos and boos to Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon this morning for her overall pretty cool post about the journalistic evergreen of “male contraceptives are just around the corner.” A friend sent me this link yesterday to yet another story promising male…
I read that Scott Hardin’s quote as caution about taking a new medication and not as something anti-woman. In fact it read to me that he would rather use condoms than use medication. I would expect the majority of people would take a cautioius approach to a new medication until it had been out for a while and demostrated safe and effective by the early adopters, since it’s not a life saving drug. It will probably take a few years to really catch on. I wasn’t around for it but imagine the original birth control pill had a similiar reception.
Condoms prevent STDs.
Condoms prevent STDs.
Condoms prevent STDs.
I love condoms.
I have noticed no vas deferens.
bahahaha.
*throws something*
no, really, good one.
Why shouldn’t men want the same kind of control over their reproductive lives that women have? Really, the more birth control options for everybody the better.
So’s getting it done before the youngest child is old enough to jump on dad’s lap.
Ouch.
Why shouldn’t men want the same kind of control over their reproductive lives that women have?
You know, this would seem obvious enough, but I guess if you’re coming at this from the point of view that men either can’t trust women and need to protect themselves from the sperm-stealing bitches, or that men in relationships with women are pussy-whipped if they can’t get women to do every annoying thing they don’t want to do, it might complicate the issue.
Ironically, I just found this article today.
I understand that the posts here don’t necessarily reflect opinions about the readers here, but seriously, as a man, I prefer to take care of the birth control myself, and it would be great if I could lose the condoms. And I guarantee I’m not alone. This debate is happening on an abstract level right now. When the pill is available for men, the debate will be over. It will be amazingly popular. It will dominate news cycles. Features will be written about troubling or positive social trends resulting from the male pill. Old people will take it to regulate testosterone. Fathers will secretly take their sons to Planned Parenthood. Dobsonites will complain that teenage men are more promiscuous without the fear of pregnancy. The one thing no one will be caring about is if men and women are equal partners in birth control. Amanda might pound out a few occasional posts on it, but the debate will be effectively over. It only continues now because no one has given us the pill yet. If women don’t like the pill, that’s cool. Give us the pill and we’ll jump on it. Guaranteed.
I have to agree that I don’t think that the guy who’s wary of hormonal contraception for himself necessarily has a “But it’s her job to take a pill� attitude.
Well, I have to admit that that was my *first*, off-the-cuff response. My second was to ask why the hell I should expect any partner to take all the risks. I’d probably use ‘em if they were available and I was in a relationship.
- T.
Why shouldn’t men want the same kind of control over their reproductive lives that women have?
Holy shit, who said that men shouldn’t have control over their reproductive lives? I want this person produced so I can rip him a new asshole. We already have a bunch of morons out there who think feminists don’t want men to have control over their own lives, we certainly don’t need any random weirdo bolstering the impression.
I’d take a male pill in a heartbeat. The focus of the tiny amount of reproductive research that gets done on the female side has always driven me nuts. The female reproductive system is an order of magnitude more complex than the male system! It doesn’t make any sense to focus all attempts to interrupt the process on the more complicated component!
It will be interesting to see social attitudes towards male pills vis a vis the female one. It’s a testable lite version of the “if men could get pregnant…” aphorism.
I sent the article to a friend and suggested attitudes towards it would make a good boyfriend filter.
Yeah, I don’t know that I would have necessariy trusted some guys in my past to actually be really, really, faithful about taking a pill at the same time every single day — but in the long-term serious relationships, I can’t see why I wouldn’t trust someone to want to avoid my pregnancy as much as I want it. (The question then being why I ever slept with anyone I didn’t trust on that level… and yeah, good question. But I did. Young and dumb.)
That having been said, I had the same instinctive reaction as some others: if a hormone pill came out, I’d actually want to stay on my nice NuvaRing and keep getting the ovarian cancer prevention benefits for a while, and wait to see what sort of kinks show up in the new male pill. Those 1960s pills sound like scary shit, frankly, and I would be worried about what Big Pharma might have covered up before releasing the new drug onto the market. I think the wariness is warranted.
RISUG is too early in development to make a big fuss about yet. That’s why you haven’t heard much about it.
I used to work in drug development. A lot of things which look promising at early phases turn out not to be too wondrous in later stages.
When you read the malecontraceptives.org website, the RISUG appears to be at a relatively early stage. They haven’t proven reversibility yet in humans, for example. So the main thing that differentiates RISUG from a vasectomy is still not proven. (and of course there aren’t many tst subjects yet, either). There are also other issues.
It may well be feasible, but other prmomising drugs fall flat when subjected to more rigorous testing. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on RISUG just yet.