Any young woman who has decided she wants to be with men (and some that later changed their minds and wised up to their sexual preferences, whatever that may be) remembers the moment when she went on birth control for the first time.
I’m lucky that I had so many options available to me. I’m lucky that my mother was open-minded and realistic about sex. She never judged me or shook her head at my questions. She was supportive without being nosey.
She patted me on the back for having the foresight to get on the pill and make sure I didn’t end up with an unwanted pregnancy.
I will always be grateful for this. So many girls don’t get it this good. Remember that episode of Teen Mom when Farah puts herself on the Nuva Ring to prevent another pregnancy? Her parents find out and ban her from using it. Look what happened there.
If you are like me, it took almost a year of trying different methods, dealing with weight gain, nausea, more zits, hormonal outburst of total stereotypical bitch-rage and four months of constant yeast infections that continued through my body like that fictional human centipede.
I remember sitting on the floor of my first apartment in Victoria reading through the tiny scripted manual of the latest pill I was on trying to figure out why the hell my body was trying to kick my ass into Lucifer’s mouth.
Birth control sucked at the beginning, but it was what I had to do if I wanted to have sex freely. I had to protect myself against that crazy, wild sperm. I had to protect my big, sitting duck of an egg because she wasn’t going to fight that war herself.
I’ve been waiting forever to laugh in the faces of my boyfriend, “Ha! How’s that pill? How you like it?”
I’ve been waiting for the male birth control pill to be approved by the government and forced into the vernacular about male sexual health. For pregnancy to be something men too have to be responsible for even if they are not in a committed relationship with the woman they are having sex with. Yes, men have to worry about pregnancy, but they do not have to carry the burden the same way women do. They don’t ever have to worry about physically having an abortion, a miscarriage, or a pregnancy. Men don’t have to freak out about cold, medical tools invading the depths of their bodies to rid a child.
Their fear is different. When it comes to the physicalities of sex, it can appear that women have the short end of the stick. (I guess this is the price we pay for being totally gorgeous by nature.)
It feels like every six months, some scientific information is released into the public talking about how close they are to mastering a real male birth control. We get a taste, and then it’s gone, back into the internet hole where it came from. This week was no different. According to Good magazine, researchers in Indonesia may have discovered an alternative to the pill and it’s one that men can take daily. This new pill for men weakens enzymes in sperm that allow them to swim to the egg. Basically, the pill is Tonya Harding’s hit man and the sperm is Nancy Kerrigan’s knee.
But get this: The male birth control seems not that bad of a deal for dudes.
“Overall researchers haven’t seen anything that remotely rivals zits, nausea, sporadic bleeding, and other effects many women endure on hormone-based birth control pills,” noted Bambang Prajogo, the study’s lead scientist. The only “side-affects” were slight weight gain and an increased sex drive. I hate exclamation points, but if I didn’t I would have typed about 50 right there.
Really, I shouldn’t be reveling in the idea of a male birth control pill that turns men’s bodies into walking disasters like the pill does for most of us girls. What’s the point? If a male birth control gets approved by Health Canada and introduced into the public conversation about sexual health, then that’s fabulous. Unfortunately, I find it hard to believe that having a male birth control pill will make men take it when they know that most women are already all over that responsibility.
So, I ask you straight men. If there was a male birth control, would you enroll yourself without being asked?
