This article makes a primary complaint of “why isn’t women’s birth control as symptom-free?”.
The difference in difficulty between women’s and men’s reproductive control is like the difference between (respectively) censoring a newspaper factory and censoring a news stand.
The factory has so many different moving parts and a high complexity, which provides many opportunities for intervention. It’s big, so it’s easy to find and work with, but censoring a specific article without destroying the factory’s ability to produce newspapers requires a very targeted approach that does not work with every factory, can cause undesirable knock-down effects elsewhere in the factory, and may even cause damage to one where in another it works perfectly. With that said, the factory’s complexity does make it easier to build solutions for, as there are many, many options available to censor a factory, and with the vast majority of factories you could even stack multiple solutions for extreme effectiveness.
The NYC-style sidewalk news stand, on the other hand, is very simple. It has few parts, with relatively low complexity, which provides only a handful of options for intervention. While this does make solutions much simpler, anything more than the sharpie approach for censoring individual newspapers - which is laborious and error-prone and has very low efficiency - tends to involve a nuclear approach that destroys any functional ability in the first place. As such, creating a reversible censorship solution that can be mass-applied for high effectiveness without permanently destroying publication ability has been fiendishly difficult to find.
This article rubs me up the wrong way because it seems to imply that the standards for male and female contraception are different when really it seems to come down to the time periods involved.
The pill probably wouldn't be approved today and even the modern IUD is 35-50 years old depending on how you count it. It seems to me that the overriding factor is that we just had different standards for what constituted significant side effects back then.
If there were some sort of grand conspiracy to make women suffer then this would be a really roundabout way to do it over just banning birth control or never researching it at all.
I could only make it partway through the article before throwing up in my mouth so I don’t know if they mention that the FDA standards for birth control are balanced against the risk of pregnancy - which of course, men have none.
I do find it absolutely incredible how little women are warned about the side effects though. They go a good portion (or the entire portion of their fertile years) potentially thinking that their sex drive is just that low, having been on it since they were 15 and not knowing any better. Hell, some studies have shown being on hormonal BC might actually affect who you’re attracted to, which is all fine and dandy until you stop taking it…
My wife went on birth control for the first time when I was dating her in college and the first few things she tried basically changed her into a different person, personality-wise. To be blunt, they turned her into a bitch. If that happened when she was a teen I don’t know if anyone would have noticed.
As far as what’s mentioned in the article, I don’t see how they’re getting around the issue of your testosterone levels and fertility potentially not rebounding after being on testosterone replacement long enough. Does that other hormone somehow help with that?
What a strange article, but I guess that's to be expected given that the two participants are both female. Not to dismiss the point that improved, pain-free and easy contraception for women would be of huge benefit, of course I'm fully in support of that.
But there seems to be very little or no mention of the benefits sexual freedom for men - the ability to say "I don't want to be a father, I don't want to risk being on the hook for child support right now" without the risk of failure associated with condoms, or invasive surgery, or abstaining from sexual intimacy completely. Women at least have that choice via the contraceptive pill, and here we are talking about men _potentially_ having chemical choices along the same lines "within the next two decades". The conversation has to be turned around once again in favour of women, rather than discuss the potential benefits of men being able to take easy, non-surgical, reversible contraception for not only their own sexual freedom, and mental well being, but the benefits of introducing less unwanted children into the world as well.
It really appears that to some sectors of society, the thought of levelling the playing field in terms of contraception for men really seems like anathema.
> But there seems to be very little or no mention of the benefits sexual freedom for men - the ability to say "I don't want to be a father, I don't want to risk being on the hook for child support right now"
This is ideologically heretical, in the same way that paper abortions are ideologically heretical. As I have been told straight to my face, “Men should not ever have this kind of freedom, as it oppresses women and is literal misogyny.”
I am paraphrasing - in that second sentence - what several feminists once told me (about two decades ago) during a discussion on birth control. And from what I have seen since then, this is an extremely popular sentiment among feminists.
To experience this yourself, just bring up any positive support for paper abortions for men - which mostly equalizes abortion rights between the genders in places where women can freely abort - and enjoy the anti-male gender bigotry and vitriolic hate being spewed at you.
That's very interesting, I'd never heard of the term "paper abortion" before, thank you for sharing.
I don't know or hang around any radical feminists as it's not a good use of my time and energy, but thank you for having those conversations with them so that I don't have to.
RISUG/Vasalgel has come up on HN before (as far back as 13 years): ( https://hn.algolia.com/?query=RISUG&type=comment , https://hn.algolia.com/?query=vasalgel&type=comment ). My recollection is that studies have mostly been in India so far, but so far have failed to demonstrate reversibility (which is important to many men; otherwise they could get a vasectomy).