Was in a discussion about this over dinner last night. My GF has like a dozen options: from pills, to implants and patches. I can either wear a condom or have surgery. I feel like there is always some male pill on the horizon that never manages to come. Why is it so hard to develop something for men but so easy for women?
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I talked to a a very good doctor about this. I don’t know about some of the explanations here (maybe they’re right that it is “easier” to make hormone pills for women). But according to her (my doctor), much that has to do with the treatment of different sexes also has to do with old ways of looking at things like sex and genders. Today, doctors are both men and women, but they still live in societies that thinks in certain ways about sex, and about men and women. For instance, this very good doctor thought it was very dumb to vaccinate young women against viruses called “Human Papillon Viruses” (HPV for short). This was a new vaccine then, that worked well against this terrible virus that cause cancer with women. Men do not get sick from it, so doctors had always treated women for it, not the men. But this virus always start in a man. Men are the carriers of such viruses, not women. Women can only be infected from a man, not from another woman (unless that woman has kissed a man).
So, my doctor said, vaccinating all young women instead of all young men is like peeing upstream and then trying to sort it out downstream, instead of stopping someone from peeing in the stream. It doesn’t make sense, but everyone involved is too deep into thinking in a certain way about the problem to see it.
I don’t know how much of this applies on birth control. But when I read about the history of pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, I noticed that traditionally (both socially and in big politics) “bad women” have always been seen as the reason for all sexually transmitted diseases. Also, women were often blamed for getting pregnant, not the men. Over a hundred years ago, all politicians and doctors where men, and women couldn’t vote or become doctors. When these politicians and doctors talked about pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases to come up with solutions in their very big and important buildings, they discussed prostitutes as if they were part of the sewer system. The politicians wanted the sewers to be there for all men, but not be seen. The only trouble was that prostitutes sometimes got pregnant and also spread diseases. (In fact, men like these politicians were the ones making them pregnant, and often infecting each other with sexual diseases that women only could pass on, not carry).
So for over a hundred years, the solution to any problem regarding pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases had to do with treating women, not men.
That is most probably a big part of why science and the men of science never bothered to invent pills and birth control for men to begin with, which is not impossible at all.
Another reason is that men do not want the same side effects that women has had to endure since the revolution of the birth control pill in the 1960’s. Here is an article about it:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230216-the-weird-reasons-male-birth-control-pills-are-scorned
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