Coming up over the horizon again... again... again...
A male pill could be on the horizon after early trials showed a once-daily tablet was safe and appeared to work, according to researchers.
Lo, this is a claim I have been seeing for nearly half a century now*, and we still have not seen the thing in practice.
I do not entirely concur with this column: Women have had enough of the pill. So why foist it on men?, because I think she grossly overestimates the extent to which women are likely to go over to those apps that tell you (with, evidence suggests, rather less than optimum accuracy) when you are/are not fertile. Rather than the extent to which women are choosing a range of other contraceptive options which don't necessarily involve taking a pill every day.
The thought of which, having perhaps been reading rather too many online advice sites lately, makes me think of all those sad sagas involving men who are either completely feckless and disorganised and unable to get themselves together, or else gaslighting abusers, neither of which is a category one would trust with contraceptive responsibility.
Though I also noticed during the past week a piece on male infertility that pointed out that this is a lot more common than people think: I knew that, and I am still very sceptical about the baseline for that 'decline in the past 40 years' in sperm counts: I am much more actually thinking 'throughout the whole of history' for this one.
Also, I think, historically, one can 'accuse the male masses of feeling “unmanned”, unable to handle the truth of their infertility, because they’ve barely had the chance to contemplate it', if we look at how doctors dealt (sometimes still do) with infertility by doing all sorts of investigations on the female half of the equation and nary a sperm count for the male. And the confusion, documented in medical textbooks, between sterility and impotence....
*I am so not doing that set of questions on age at which encountered various modern technological phenomena that is going around, because *hysterical laughter*. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2741804.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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