The male birth control pill, for decades the holy grail of sexual parity, is back on the radar screen thanks to some
newly published Chinese research.
Actually, it’s a shot. Of testosterone. In a 2-year test, more than 1,000 Chinese men were given monthly injections of the male hormone to make them, paradoxically, temporarily infertile. The shots proved to be 99% effective, giving them parity with birth control pills.
It’s conspicuous that just about all the bloggers and commenters getting excited about this breakthrough around the web are women, not men. It’s women, not men, who find the subject of not getting pregnant the most compelling—duh—and it’s certainly women, not men, who find the idea of sharing the burden a turn-on.
Women mostly met the news with skepticism—not about the injections, but about whether men could be trusted to get them (“Most men can’t even take a Tylenol unless you hand it to them!”) or be honest about whether they got them (“Don't worry! I’m on the shot!”).
The big question is whether men—or what men—would go near the things. Messing with steroids is one thing if you’re hoping to get a home-run record out of it, and quite another if all you’re going for is a condom vacation. Or generously giving your wife a break from dosing with female hormones. Those thousand men in the study obviously took the bait, but they all had their regulation one child each, and Big Brother looking over their shoulder. Big pharma, on the other hand,
hasn't been persuaded that the market is there.
The shots sound reasonably harmless: extra testosterone in the bloodstream from an outside source apparently tricks the testes into shutting down sperm production. And they don’t seem to have side effects—bulking up or down, werewolf tendencies, master-of-the-universe delusions. But would men be too creeped out by the connotations of “low sperm count” to feel the thrill of condomless birth control they could control?
That would, of course, be the real incentive: freedom from worry that the woman (or women) in your life may not be as scrupulous as you might wish about taking the pill. No more risk of being “trapped” into parenthood. You can just picture the
beer-commerical-style ads that scrupulously avoid the word contraceptive: “Choice for men!” It’s a lot more 21st century than equal responsibility for unwanted offspring.
But speaking of equity, if men were popping contraceptives along with women, maybe insurance companies could finally be shamed into covering them—ending the ridiculous double standard in which they cheerfully subsidize Viagra and other sexual performance-enhancers, but won’t pony up for the birth control that allows women to have some fun, too. Even the Obama administration, which is very gung ho about preventing, rather than aborting, pregnancies, would be up for that.
