The arrival of a male contraceptive pill is imminent. Scientists at Washington State University have identified the gene responsible for normal sperm production, and a way to block it. Meanwhile, at Weill Cornell Medicine earlier this year, a separate team closed in on a short-term, two-hour sperm blocker that met the same criteria: that it was reversible, and that it didn’t work by hormonal interference.
It’s a bit like the unveiling of a hoverboard: yes, sure, amazing, what a frontier technology, how wonderful to see the future airborne. On the other hand, guys, you’ve been talking about this for so long that it feels dated before it’s even hit the market.
The prospect of a contraceptive pill for men was first mooted in 1957, when Gregory Pincus, co-inventor of the female pill, started exploratory hormonal interventions on men. By the start of this century, it was broadly accepted that men didn’t want their hormones intervened with; the consensus was that testosterone performed roles beyond the mechanics of reproduction, which of course is true, but is also true of oestrogen.
The contrast in perceptions of male and female hormones is fascinating: masculine traits, both positive (vigour) and negative (violence) are so intrinsically linked to testosterone that it’s almost the wellspring of masculinity; to block it would mute the essence of a man. There is none of that romance around oestrogen, whose core brand is that it puts women in a bad mood for no reason – far from encapsulating femininity, it is seen as separating women from our true selves, in which we’re in a good mood.
This isn’t to say that women are immune from primitive associations between biology and character, but womanhood is more commonly located in the womb. The male experience is conceived subjectively – how does testosterone make you feel and behave? – while the female is conceived objectively – is your womb in good working order and what are you likely to produce with it? That’s my hunch, anyway – I’d probably need to be a French feminist to really commit to it.
By the 70s, other routes to contraception were being explored, and a drug on the brink of rollout, gossypol, hit the buffers when it was found not to be unfailingly reversible. The assumption runs across the sexes, that whatever you think about reproducing today, medicine would be doing you a disservice if it didn’t leave the door open for you to think the opposite tomorrow. The lead researcher, Elsimar Coutinho, recalled the World Population Conference of 1974, years later, to this newspaper. That was where he announced what he thought was his imminent breakthrough: “The conference hall was full of women … To my surprise, I was shouted down and booed out.”
Booing is hard to definitively interpret, especially when it happened 50 years ago, but one theme that has emerged in studies ever since is that women don’t trust men to take the pill – a small-scale qualitative study in 2011 found that about half of women thought their partners would forget (only one in six men thought they themselves would forget).
It’s typically presented as yet another injustice of the patriarchy, that women have to assume all the responsibility for birth control, but the obvious and never mentioned corollary is that we get all the control, and might not want to cede it. A larger and more international study 10 years before sought to dispel this myth, and found that women overwhelmingly trusted their partners to take a pill, though whether or not they would trust a guy they’d just met in a bar was left open. The risk in a low-trust environment is that everyone ends up on a contraceptive pill, which might be overkill.
Science and religion have historically been united on one thing, and perhaps only one thing: controlling the body, whether through convention or shame, hormones or genes, is acceptable when it comes to women, and runs a gamut from peculiar to aberrant when it comes to men.
If we’ve finally reached the point where reproduction is considered the equal preserve of men and women, the implications are farther reaching than who has to take a pill every day, and who’s more likely to forget: it reorientates a rarely spoken, but often iterated attitude to the body, where the female is a problem to be fixed and the male is sovereign, not to be tinkered with. It also reframes unwanted pregnancy as a joint enterprise, which could have useful ramifications in abortion discourse. Controlling access to abortion is, rightly, seen as a bid to control women at the most fundamental level of self-determination: if it were recast as an attempt to control everyone’s self-determination, there might be more pushback.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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