That’s because hormonal birth control for women takes advantage of existing biological processes to prevent pregnancy.
Men don’t have any known biological processes that can be utilized like that, although it’s been consistently studied for decades.
And there is some progress too afaik
There’s been “progress” every few years for decades. Male birth control is basically the medical equivalent of battery technology.
I’ll believe it when a pill makes it to market.
Just like cold fusion
I mean… you know that you can buy batteries today, and they’re much better than the ones you could buy a decade ago?
The point is that on a regular basis there are articles about some amazing new battery breakthrough, but it never leaves the lab.
Genuinely kinda wonder why that keeps happening
Tech illiterate media writing hype articles. Repeats yearly also with flying cars or vacuum tube trains.
Most progress isn’t made in sudden huge jumps, but small incremental improvements.
When pubsci articles promise a breakthrough, remember:
- it takes a long time to bring such research to market (think ~decade)
- most breakthroughs are only applicable to narrow niches or work under specific conditions
- real-life results will usually be worse than lab results
- startups have incentives to make their research appear as important as possible
But instead of waiting for huge breakthroughs, just look at the progress made in commercially available batteries. There have been many improvements in cost & charge density.
I had thought that another part of it was the levels of harm compared to the problem; getting pregnant is incredibly stressful and possibly harmful, up to and including death as a possibility. A medicine that can stop that but has side affects that are less harmful than pregnancy is a lot more palatable. Whereas, for men, the harm caused by pregnancy is zero, so any harm caused by the pill is weighed a lot heavier.
It’s really frustrating how often this gets framed as sexist, when it’s a totally different problem. I get why people would equate them but they are very different biological processes. Producing a baby is a complicated process, and there’s a lot of steps that we can intervene in to prevent it. Producing a million sperm is, maybe surprisingly, less complicated and it’s harder to target a specific thing and produce easily reversible results.
Men have had vasectomy on the table for a long time now. It’s just more serious than most forms of female birth control, in terms of implementation and recovery, still not foolproof, and not as easy to reverse.
Even more frustrating is that sexism definitely does exist and play a role. It’s just more about the human parts of the process, like dealing with medical staff, dealing with insurance, dealing with local, state, and now federal governments that want to bar access to women. Looking at the pill side is misplacing the anger.
I am pretty sure there have been attempts at temporarily blocking sperm so not having to do vasectomy for decades and it was not yet successful, it’s not like this problem is not being worked on because scientists are sexist or something
Vasalgel, I was signed up for updates, but after about 10 years I gave up on that and got a traditional vasectomy.
There are also medical benefits to female hormonal birth control besides not getting pregnant.
We do have to remember that “First do no harm” is not a universal law of ethics or anything, it’s just the way the powers that be think about things.
I think men should consider the potential harms to their partner in their calculus. If a man participates in causing a pregnancy that results in serious complications or death, I would sincerely hope that he would be as devastated by the loss of his partner as he would by suffering the harm himself. If men can’t empathize with their partner enough to consider the risks to her, then he shouldn’t be having sex in the first place.
Iirc there are trials for pills for men right now
So far, there’s no male birth control pill on the market. But there are two types of birth control pills in the works: YCT-529 and dimethandrolone undecanoate. YCT-529 is a hormone-free male birth control pill that aims to stop your body from making sperm by targeting the vitamin A signaling that makes sperm production possible.
Researchers studied the effects of this male birth control pill on animals. They found that in mice, after four weeks of use, it was 99% effective in preventing pregnancies. In primates, sperm counts dropped in just two weeks of use. Researchers also completed a phase 1 human study to test how safe and tolerable the drug is. Now, they’re recruiting participants for a phase 1B/2A study, but more research is needed before this drug can hit the market.
The other male birth control pill, dimethandrolone undecanoate (DMAU), may also be available as an injectable. This one is a hormonal birth control, meaning it impacts your male sex hormones, causing them to temporarily stop your body from making sperm.
In a phase 1 study, participants took DMAU for 28 days. But the participants weren’t relying on DMAU for birth control, so more research is needed. Even though a phase 2 trial is in the works, it’s not complete.
https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/male-contraceptives
Huh. I thought the trials had been completed, but I guess not. Feels like I remember hearing about them like 4-5+ years ago.
You’ll continue to hear about them every few years for the rest of your life. Its always “just a couple years” away.
Nature is sexist, got it.
Basically. There’s no biological advantage for men to shut down sperm production, so evolution never pressured a mechanism to do so.
It’s been attempted multiple times and every time the effects are non-reversible and have horrible side effects.
It’s essentially all the negatives of hardcore anabolic steroid usage without the muscles.
It sucks but the reality of it is guys are basically too simple to disrupt without seriously fucking everything up but woman are more complicated so relatively minor tweaks can achieve the desired effect.
It’s more that there’s not any reason for the body to have developed a mechanism to stop sperm production.
Success in evolution is largely accomplished by reproducing better than those without your mutation. Shutting down sperm production does the opposite.
So basically it’s like jailbreaking an iPhone?
More like trying to root a Samsung phone with Knox (for men)
Weird how it seems like it’s all for women and safe sex but then criticizes a tool women have to checks notes take control of their sex lives and make decisions about getting pregnant.
Non-surgical birth control options for women tend to come with a lot of side effects and a number of risks that don’t always outweigh the benefit. Hormonal birth control can cause tons of problems for the women taking them and some of them are associated with life-threatening side effects like increased risk of clotting leading to DVTs, PEs, and strokes.
Yes, and male birth control doesn’t solve these problems because the only way to be 100% sure is to be on birth control yourself, especially important with huge chunks of the US banning abortions
It’s not a great option for more casual encounters or early in relationships, but for established couples that already have children and don’t want more or are in a committed, trusting relationship, male birth control opens the possibility for the male partner to ease the burden of birth control effort and side effects.
And it’s their choice to pick that option and it’s not my place to remove that option because I’m done rando on the Internet who thinks he knows better
I’m absolutely not advocating for removing that option. However, increasing the options for male birth control is necessary for a wide variety of reasons, including allowing male partners to take the burden off of their female partner if she isn’t able to tolerate the side effects or can’t find a birth control method that actually works well for her. It is, in effect, another birth control option for women to be able to defer some responsibility to a male partner in a committed relationship.
I just checked and yeah, your comment didn’t say anything about birth control options for men and only talked about the negative effects of the pill.
So you see why one would think that you were trying to say that the birth control pill is a bad thing and that we should remove it.
I not sure I can impregnate 9 women in a day but I’m willing to participate in a scientific study to find out if anyone is doing that.
For nine months.
starts doing warmup stretches
If you insist.
The only people thinking a man can impregnate 9 women in a day are other men, coz they lie to each other
How does this unscientific instagram vomit has 500 votes on lemmy? Are we turning into reddit?
Because it sounds good to people that never made it beyond high school level biology or bothers to search things
This is literally the shitpost community
Always have been. Down to hivemind downvoting in several places here.
Lemmy was advertised as reddit alternative, so it’s exactly what we asked for. I came here during that wave too. So yeah, I’m part of the problem.
I’m not sure who’s she targeting because I know a lot of guys who would love to have birth control pills.
It ain’t like pharma ain’t been trying to make male birth control pills. Lord knows they’d love the extra money.
But it turns out to be damn difficult to get right.
They have made it. Had human trials with effects that killed the trials.
Most of the men in the trials wanted to keep taking it so their partners didn’t have to bear that burden alone.
Source?
They’re referring to this one back in 2016, where the caveat was that it had the same side effects as women’s birth control. Since the patient being prescribed isn’t the one who will experience negative health outcomes without the medications, the harm of those side effects was deemed by researchers (not the patients themselves) to be greater than the risk of impregnating someone else.
Other hornonal options have come out since then, though not on the consumer market afaik, like this hormonal gel and this pill.
More recently (like earlier this year) its been done without hormones by blocking a vitamin A metabolite that signals the production of sperm.
Did you read the actual study or FDA report as to why they pulled the trial? High school level Americans fall for sensationalized articles and journalists report on things they are clueless about all the time
Idk I was 16 when that came out so actually high school level. Feel free to read the study yourself and correct me? Not sure what you’re skeptical about tbh but the belittling is really uncalled for. You asked for a source and I gave one.
The point of sources is so you can see where the person got their information and personally verify what was said, not to unequivocally prove things true or false based on there being a credible source at all.
Yeah I was kind of an asshole. I’m sorry. I’ll work on that when I have more time to show you.
and no sane woman should believe that, because if she will later find the guy was lying, it is not going to be the guy having to deal with the consequences. so it is quite stupid take.
If you’re having sex with random, unknown, untrusted people, you better use a condom anyway, because pregnancy isn’t the worst thing that can happen, so the point is kinda moot anyway.
not every situation is as extreme as you make it and while you have a point, it doesn’t make mine invalid
No sane person should leave something that important to the sole responsibility of someone else no matter who they are.
Eta: Until I turned 30, everyone I knew who had kids was “on birth control”
Those 9 men could prevent women getting pregnant by cumming in me instead.
based
Honey your desperation is showing.
Not everything is a conspiracy against women
I do think that birth control pills having 1 week of sugar pills to force periods rather than 1 week of optional pills to allow skipping periods is pretty fucked up though. The term conspiracy is pretty intense though. But it’s super fucked.
Was curious about the placebos and came across this if you are interested.
https://srh.bmj.com/content/familyplanning/44/3/214.full.pdf
A paper that suggests there is no medical evidence why there should be a break in hormonal pills and that you can simply just start a new pack of pills and continue going on with your life
Yes and your prescription then runs out early, leaving you without birth control for multiple weeks
Sounds like a logistical problem, not a medical problem.
I used the word should.
As in the system right now is flawed and could be better.
What point are you trying to make because I’m not picking up on what you are putting down
Gotcha, I thought you were implying that women on birth control can just skip the placebo pills by starting the next pack each time to avoid having a period altogether. Which is absolutely true, and has been known for decades.
My point was: because of the placebos being factored into the number of days for a prescription, if a woman decides to do that, then she will eventually run out of birth control well before her next prescription is available for refill. Afaik, doctors can’t prescribe an additional pack or 2 of birth control for a specific prescription timeframe, and insurance would likely deny that anyways if they did. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my understanding here in the US.
(Sorry for the slow reply, I’m terrible about checking notifications)
It’s less of a conspiracy and more that it didn’t even occur to society until pretty recently (in historical terms) that reproduction isn’t solely a woman’s responsibility
Well yes. But it also occured to society that stopping 1 egg per month is easier than millions of sperm every day.
This sounds like it would make sense on the surface, but is just not true. You can look up pretty easily that there wasn’t really any research on the viability of male hormonal birth control until half a century after female hormonal birth control became a thing, so it’s not like they made a rational decision based on scientific findings. When they found out how to do it for men, it was roughly comparably complicated, with similar side effects. This too is easy to look up.
It makes sense that the side effects were too much to legalize hormonal male birth control because today’s standards are much higher. Which is a good thing ofc- im glad they don’t allow new medication as easily as they did in the past. Female birth control wouldn’t be legalized if it was invented today, and neither would, for example, aspirin. They get to stay around because they don’t take that stuff back out usually, even if it wouldn’t pass modern standards. That’s a bit of a tangent though.
Many men would LOVE a reliable, non-condom, male-controlled birth control method
Currently for men there are two options — condoms, which are problematic and difficult in several ways, or vasectomy, which is essentially permanent or at least difficult and uncertain to be reversed.
The third method is to take WAY too many TOO HOT baths, but that also has uncertainty and is a real hassle.
As it stands, really for men they either need to use a condom, or trust that your female partner is reliable.
100% agree. The fact that they’re only researching it now has been hurting everyone involved.
Is that why men have been wrapping their dicks in all sorts of weird shit for thousands of years? Animal intestines and bladders to name but a few. Fuck your “in historical terms”, youre talking out of your arse, just like every other sexist who makes hating men part of their personality.
Why is everyone in this thread acting like men are always the ones providing and insisting on using barrier methods? Have yall talked to a woman who’s had casual sex before about what it’s like out there?
Yes, men AND women are both taking responsibility. Just because you can point to few cases of morons, doesnt make “women are sluts who use abortion as birth control” anymore true than the bullshit youre pedalling. But nice try, trying to get out of the “historical terms” bullshit, but shifting the focus to modern day… Doesnt at all make you look desperate to be right, regardless of facts…
Theres bad apples in every bunch. Only a bigot tries to frame that bad apple as the whole bunch.
Ok I’ll ignore the name calling one last time.
I’ll put it super simply, in the hope that you misunderstanding me wasn’t as intentional as it comes across
-
barrier methods have always been, and continue to be, a shared responsibility
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all other non-permanent methods have been purely on women until very recently.
Ignore whatever the fuck you like. Youre bigoted cunt, and thats all there is to it. You dont like being called out? Have you tried, not being a perpetually online sexist piece of shit? Fuck you.
Can you please point out the thing I said that you consider sexist, and why? I’m striving not to be, and like to learn where I can.
-
You say that as if women haven’t been treated like property in nearly every society ever since we learned how to farm
This is one of the dumbest wagons to hitch that argument to in particular.
Dumb. It’s a lot easier to stop one egg a month, than zillions of sperm multiple times a day. Simple as that.
Not if ya snip snip
Exactly. In the case of men, that has turned out to be the most effective method in blocking a literal flood of sperm.
People claim that men wouldn’t use a daily pill, but guys don’t want their women getting pregnant any more than the women do, at least not until they are ready. If it existed, most guys would gladly take a pill that would keep them from 18 years of child support, just like most women do. In fact, having double contraception would reduce unwanted pregnancies significantly, which would also reduce the abortion rate, which might help bringing down the political temperature a bit (no, it won’t).
It’s not us men resisting male contraception, most of us would love it. It’s just not mechanically as easy to do for men as it is for women. It’s a science problem, not a market segment problem. Make it, and there will be customers for it.
Later that night:
More like that:
Later that night:
This is just logically wrong.
If birth control was only made for men, and 90% of men were on birth control, you could end up with far more pregnancies than if it’s for women and 90% of women were on it.
The conclusion is exactly the opposite of the argument.
I don’t understand you logic. Are you saying the remaining 10% of men would impregnate a disproportionate amount of women?
By the logic of the image, yes.
Yes. Because 10% of men is enough to impregnate all the women.
As a guy though, I wish there was male birth control. I do not love that women get to decide if they are going to make me a father or not.
I mean there’s condoms, and there’s not ejaculating inside women. If you don’t want the risk of being a father, those are things you can control.
Not ejaculating inside is risky and not 100% reliable, but it surely gets the odds in your favor indeed
For what it is worth, my son was the result of the mother deciding where I would ejaculate through the use of “in the moment” physical force. So no, it was not really something I could control (though the risk of being there was my doing I understand).
What bejeesus does in the moment physical force mean?
Besides, I believe there have been drug trials for hormonal birth control for men, but they never got approved.
Take with this a mountain of salt though, I need to check my sources. I’ll update later if I can find them again.
Oh I see. In my head, the 10% of men weren’t having sex with 100% of women either way.
I assumed the number of partners they had wouldn’t change.
It’s the woman who’d get pregnant and who doesn’t want to. Should she rely on whether the men took their pills correctly? Taking hormones sucks for many women, but they’re happy to be able to have birth control in their hands.
Yeah, I think people forget why the pill was such a game changer: It allowed women, without the permission or knowledge of their husband/sexual partner, to decide whether or not they wanted to get pregnant.
Should there be an temporary contraceptive for men? Yes, it gives agency to men and also provides an alternative to women who can’t use female contraception for a multitude of reasons.
Will that be preferred by all women? Hell no
It’s called a condom.
It would be great if there was an alternative to them.
For people in trusting long-term relationships who want to have sex without a condom on.
So that the burden of birth control doesn’t default to the woman altering her hormonal balance.Please do not eat the condom.
I don’t understand the downvotes. Condoms are great.
Taking hormones can also be a significant positive, depends on the person.
Yes, but this is not about the poll having positive side effects.
What are you talking about?
The most commonly produced, available, and used birth control method worldwide is the latex condom, used by everyone who has a penis. Try again.
This.
Cumming 9 times a day??
Nowhere does it say you have to limit yourself to that
With 9 different partners each time, dude dick gonna fall off statistically speaking.
Yeah, any more than 7 is tiring.
Don’t forget to hydrate
If you have a plan and put in the effort it can easily be done
This guy definitely owns a milking table. It’s probably homemade.
So hear me out; have the lad cum onto a table, use a postcard or something to divide the subject matter into 9 equal parts, then have the ladies come in and snort it up their pussy.
I’m not a professional in this field fyi.
If the numbers were correct and your aim was to reduce pregnancies, you could prevent 90% of pregnancies by getting roughly 90% of sexually active women to take the pill. Getting 99.95% of sexually active men to take the pill would have NO effect whatsoever on the pregnancy rate, because the remaining 1 in 2000 men would continue to meet and impregnate a woman roughly once every hour for roughly 12 hours a day (with breaks for food and resting his dick a tiny bit) for 9 months straight, with time to visit 430 women a second time in case these miracle impregnators somehow didn’t always impregnate on first meeting a woman. (This would very drastically reduce diversity in the gene pool and the world would be very very very badly interbred within two generations.)
But of course humans don’t behave like the numbers suggest AT ALL, thank goodness.
The Lemmycels are pretty angry at this one, but on the other hand it’s pretty silly to trust dudes with birth control when you’re the one that gets pregnant.
What do you mean by that first sentence?
The whole comment is only a single sentence…
But we’ve had the technology to make it an option for a long time
Sure, but as others have pointed out you’d still just end up with literally everyone on birth control.
Which is fine. Certainly makes random failures less likely.
It’s a reductive argument. It suggests that the world actively decided to harm woman. A man not taking a contraceptive or forgetting to could inflict disproportionate harm on another person. There are many great reasons why it is the way it is.
Also the numbers are all out of whack. It makes sense that some would argue against it.
People who didn’t make it beyond high school level biology think this meme is some sort of hard hitting argument 😆 it is much easier to control terminating 1-2 eggs in a cycle than millions of sperm without causing infertility.
