Thanks!

(Aside: yes, I know, there are always condoms and you’d think that ought to be enough. But for whatever reason, for both men and women, condoms seem to be to contraception what city buses are to public transportation: sensible, practical, economical, reliable, and… underappreciated compared to, say, subways or single-occupancy vehicles. In other words it’s inexplicably dumb but, for condoms and buses both, shouldn’t be taken as evidence of universal hostility to their respective ideas.)

As for reliability of the birth control pills themselves, and reliability of men’s use thereof, I’ve always said it would be really, really great to see a companion product like home-fertility kits or blood-sugar test strips that men and/or their partners could use to confirm its effectiveness. Possibly ironically, it’s easier to determine male fertility than it is female fertility in humans. So that would be a double bonus contraceptives-wise.

Another thing about pregnancy risk with male contraceptive, if one is at all serious about avoiding unplanned, unwanted pregnancy I still think it’s always, always, always critical to use double contraceptive methods rather than just one. So I’d never recommend that a woman stop using her methods of choice just because her partner adopted a new option. (Exceptions would be surgical sterilization and possibly IUDs since they’re the only once that can be considered 99% reliable when done correctly.) So anyway, I’d see a male pill as another form of suspenders to go with the belt one should already be wearing rather than as a substitution for wearing no belt at all.

As for side effects, I think that might be a bit of a red herring as well. Yes, the “side effects” of pregnancy are such that “logically” women should be willing to endure more side effects of contraception. But men (like women) often take remarkable health risks in order to have sex anyway, and I’m pretty sure that if men thought it would help improve either their frequency or enjoyment of sex they’d probably put up with possible side-effects just as women do.

I ought to mention that unlike condoms male pills wouldn’t offer STI protection, but add that the same is true when a couple relies instead on the woman using the pill.

Thanks, Chingona,

This is why I’m so encouraged that it’s AskMen readers who responded. In market-demand terms it doesn’t matter why men would want to use a pill. It’s only important that there’d be enough of a market to make it worth bringing such pills to market.

That irrational MRA fear, by the way, is one more reason I think the ground would shift on the male-responsibility angle: once there’s a pill MRA types, frat boys, and, well, AskMen readers will mock, scorn, and otherwise peer-pressure men who weren’t using the pill when their partner becomes pregnant. Instead of “oh us poor men” sympathizing, which is the status quo, it’ll be “it’s your own fucking fault for not using the pill.” In other words even reprobate men will start holding themselves and each other responsible. And that’ll make a huge difference.

Thanks, Ozymandias,

Nightfall’s right. It’s not who was being polled, it’s the reliability of the polling method. Internet polls are notoriously unreliable because even when the questions are well-designed the respondents are self-selected instead of randomly selected to produce a real sampling of the total population. In this case it’s ok that it’s just self-selected regular AskMen readers because that’s a population (younger hetero men who either are or wish to be sexually active) that too many policy makers assume wouldn’t take responsibility for contraception if the could.

And yeah, I think most men in your age range really are interested in more male birth control options. And I wish people would quit trying to insist otherwise. And speaking of which, even if you internet-polled stereotypical male Planned Parenthood members about interest in a male pill you still wouldn’t get a much different number than the 68% of AskMen readers who said yes.

Thanks,