I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog, a rethinking about the science, the economics, and the gender politics of the question, "Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?" The piece is titled, Sex, Lies, and Contraception: The Male Pill, and here's the teaser:
The reality is that both women and men have sex with people they don’t entirely trust. They have sex with people they trust enough: people they trust not to beat them up, not to steal their car, not to paint their living room hot pink while they sleep. But both women and men have sex with people who they don’t trust enough to let them handle the responsibility, and make the decisions, about pregnancy and children. I think plenty of men would be happy to take a pill to ensure that their decisions about pregnancy and children weren’t being made by the hot number they met on Craig’s List three weeks ago.If I were a single man, I’d sure as hell want that.
To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!
Good post. I often wondered why men didn't have the equivalent of a pill and I always put it down to basic sexism: make it the woman's responsibility and if she's careless enough to get pregnant, she had it coming to her, anyway, dumb broad.
In the past couple of decades, however, as society has seen fit to enforce child support more rigorously and DNA/paternity tests have become more reliable, it's not so easy for men to leave women holding all the baggage. There probably is a sizable market for a guy's pill or similar product.
Posted by: the chaplain | January 23, 2008 at 06:10 PM