‘Cause now I’ve got the pill
By David Futrelle
So I’ve been poking around the BlackPillScience subreddit, where the regulars discuss the latest scientific research that proves ugly dudes have it harder than non-ugly dudes in life and love. And they do, to some extent, but then again there are plenty of ugly dudes who have great lives and get laid on a regular basis, “black pill” be damned.
Anyway, actual scientists do research on this shit and these guys discuss it. But let’s just say that the discussions are a little less scientific than the papers under discussion.
Take this little comment-cum-manifesto posted in a topic discussing arranged marriages among current-day hunter-gatherers.
Listen carefully, women were never meant to control their own reproduction. It’s entirely unnatural and has adverse consequences on culture and the foundations of civilization.
But of course birth control is a-OK if men want to use it.
If a man does not wish to impregnate a woman then all he has to do is wear a condom or pull out at the appropriate time (or both). But at all times it should remain his choice, not hers.
What’s not good for the goose is good for the gander.
People in ancient civilizations used to watch the calendar and only had sex when appropriate. This system successfully facilitated humanity’s rise for literally thousands of years. When a woman has control over her own biology it opens up far too many options that adversely affect us all in immeasurable ways.
If you want to reject all medical technology invented since the ancient Egyptians, feel free to go right ahead, dude.
When women control their own reproduction it facilitates promiscuity, hypergamy, feminism, labor market disruptions, housing inflation, and beta male exclusion.
“Beta male exclusion?” Dude, birth control makes it less risky to have heterosexual sex. This benefits everyone who likes to have heterosexual sex, including so-called beta males.
Beta males are not inferior, they are in essence what builds civilizations and enables the privileges that both men and women currently take for granted.
It would be rather difficult to maintain civilization without the work of women. But yes, the majority of men do the majority of the work that men do.
It is only by forcing an equitable distribution of women among men than this thing we call civilization is maintained in the long run.
Well this is just a tiny bit chilling, huh — even though it’s only a smidgen blunter than Jordan Peterson’s “enforced monogamy.” How exactly would one go about “forcing an equitable distribution of women among men?” You can’t treat women like they’re government cheese.
Here’s Loretta Lynn offering a rebuttal on behalf of married women tired of having no control over their reproductive lives. I’ll take the Loretta pill over the black pill any day.
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91 replies on “Incel Redditor: “Women were never meant to control their own reproduction””
@Cyborgette
I am aware, but thank you for mentioning it for others in the thread who might not know.
Wildly off topic, but does anyone have a good, fairly easy to make vegetarian stuffed pepper recipe? Doesn’t need to be vegan. For some reason I’ve been craving it but have only had it at restaurants.
@WWTH
What ingredients do you have? Stuffing peppers is pretty open ended (pun intended), but if you have specific ingredients in mind I might be able to track down a recipe in my cookbook collection.
Also OT but in a different way:
I think we’ve reached the point where TERFs sound exactly like straw feminists:
https://twitter.com/2damntrans/status/1286733280663011328
The Rot Of The St. Louis Elite Goes Far Deeper Than The “Gun Couple”
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/the-rot-of-the-st-louis-elite-goes-far-deeper-than-the-gun-couple
Well, many have been Straw Lesbians for a while, so it was only a matter of time….
Re: Fantasy contraception
Almost all of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books mention people using anti-pregnancy charms, which consisted of a necklace you can wear until you decide you’d like to be able to be pregnant.
One of her very first books included a scene where the protagonist got her first period and almost immediately went to go see a hedgewitch who gave her the talk and the anti-pregnancy charm. I think it was a pretty cool book to be one of my influences when I was a preteen.
Oops. I asked a question and immediately forgot about it. I was thinking something kind of Greek with feta in it but I don’t know. I have no ingredients but I’m going shopping Sunday so that’s no object. I can just Google around but I thought I’d put it out there in case anyone has anything good. No need to put any kind of effort in!
We do a veggie version of stuffed peppers with basmati rice (slightly undercooked), fine chopped olives, sweet onion, mushroom, a young crumbly cheese – feta is nice, so’s cheshire or wensleydale) chopped parsley (or coriander) and ground black pepper.
Saute the onions and mushroom together. Let cool, then mix all the stuffing ingredients. Stuff the pepper halves. Pop in an oven dish, sprinkle with half a glass of dry white wine, bake at 200C for 30 to 40 minutes.
Proportions: The stuffing is half rice, half everything else.
The everything else bit: equal amounts of onion and mushroom, half that amount each of olives and cheese. Chopped herbs and pepper to taste.
Add a bit of salt if you want to, but it isn’t needed.
It’s simple and gorgeous 🙂
I suspect the Poor Incel doesn’t know this, but even in humans, there are “natural” forms of contraception. Namely, malnutrition and anorexia.
And during the Great Depression, despite women’s lack of access to diaphragms (“decent” women didn’t buy condoms back then, and condoms were kept behind the counter, so even married men often balked at having to buy them), the birth rate still went down. How? Just guessing, but maybe couples simply combined rhythm and withdrawal – or rhythm and condoms. IIRC, the former combination should work 95% of the time IF done correctly, and the latter should work twice as well as the former.
BUT…the birth rate, back then, was still higher than it is today! Contrary to what the Baptist leader/theologian Albert Mohler likes to say about that, it did not prove that any particular baby was wanted back then – or that parents could “afford” them. It merely suggests that the available BC methods were simply not sufficient, at the time!
I wonder. What would most teen incels, in particular, say, if they were offered the chance to move to some country where arranged marriages to strangers are typical? After all, I’d bet that most such countries don’t have marital rape laws. Somehow, I’d guess they’d say no, if only because, according to one Jewish legend, we all would prefer our own troubles to our neighbors’ troubles. (In real life, we probably just prefer to whine rather than to try to solve our problems, but in the legend, the townspeople all STOPPED complaining once they’d made the choice to keep their own troubles.)
Maybe incels wouldn’t be so miserable if their parents made some speech along the lines of “don’t think you can ‘love ’em and leave ’em,’ that’s horribly selfish. Even if you’re convinced you don’t want to get married, you still have to treat everyone with kindness. At any rate, if you’re not going to have children – or act like a dad to the ones you eventually have – you’ll still have to figure out how to support yourself when you get old, so you really should work harder on that and think less about sex.”
Btw, in his 2001 book “Father and Child Reunion,” Warren Farrell complained about how doctors often refuse vasectomies to married men unless the wives give consent. But, Farrell did NOT claim that married WOMEN who want to get their tubes tied in secret have it any easier! So, I trust, even HE understands that the doctors aren’t really being anti-male; they just don’t want to get sued. Besides, there’s almost no way he doesn’t know that the old rule among doctors, even for single female patients, used to be that you didn’t allow a woman to have her tubes tied until her age times the number of children she has equaled…120. E.g., even if she was unwed with three children, she couldn’t have the operation before she turned 40!
Which brings me to my next point…
Thanks for all the mentions of contraception stuff in fantasy books! I remember there was also some herb used for contraception in Maria Turtschaninoff’s Red Abbey Chronicles.
@Moon Custafer
To be clear, I adore all that sort of details in storytelling. My puzzlement with the guy previously mentioned came partly from the fact that (if memory serves) he didn’t give a lot of context for his complaint, and my mental image at the time was a male protagonist getting into a random hookup with a woman, and since I hadn’t read books where there were a lot of details about what goes into where, I assumed this guy just always expected “and they banged” meant PIV.
… but mostly it was just hard to get past the fact that he specifically wanted to know what “the woman” did to prevent pregnancy, like it could never be a point of interest to a man.
An amusing side note about silphium: one of the most likely origins for the ❤ shape is that it’s the shape of silphium leaves. The original connotation of a note with a ‘heart’ on it thus being: Hey, sweetie, I’ve got protection, let’s get it on.
Drat it, I missed the ‘birth control in fantasy’ conversation, but at least Catalpa brought up Tamora Pierce. I always feel a bit sorry for Alanna the day she gets her first period and has to run out of the castle to visit Mistress Cooper (her eventual mother-in-law and also her adopted mother). In the Kel books, Kel has already had the talk from her mother, who is sensible and organised, and Kel has a maid who knows exactly what she needs to do. Kel also holds off on getting a charm until later on because she’s not sure she wants to have sex at all. I think Daine worked it out for herself, what with being a midwife’s daughter. I liked the way Tamora Pierce adapted how each girl would react based on their backgrounds rather than a on size fits all reaction in her teenage girl characters.
Completely off topic, my dogs caught a rat in my kitchen. Three years I’ve lived here and this is the third rodent they’ve chased (but only the second they’ve caught). I have half a dead rat in my garden. I would rather look at half a dead rat than an incel and their blather, any day.
I’ve searched here for mentions of RISUG and Vasalgel and found very few threads (all were at least 5 years old). I suppose that makes sense. After all, why count chickens before they’re hatched?
I don’t just mean that the pandemic is postponing all sorts of medical research right now. I mean that plenty of WOMEN have demanded better methods for men in past decades, but time and again, men haven’t shown much interest. Examples:
Meryl Streep worked for that cause in the 1970s and 1980s, but I haven’t heard a thing from her since then. Chances are she got fed up waiting for men to say “thank you and how can I help.”
Warren Farrell made male BC part of his platform when he ran for governor of California in 2005, but he went silent on the subject as well, after a while. Again, lack of genuine support from MRAs, I suppose?
From a Jan. 2008 McGill University Tribune article by Elizabeth Perle, contributor to the HuffPost (don’t confuse her with the late Yale alumna):
“…In 1976, my mother was involved in a research project at the Margaret Sanger Institute in Boston on the development of male contraceptive methods. At the time, they were investigating two different options. The first was a little implant to be placed under the skin of the armpit, which would secrete enough testosterone, over three months, to decrease the man’s sperm count.
“The second was a male birth control pill. Though the research was more rudimentary, the science was there. This means that a male birth control pill could have been a reality in North America more than 32 years ago.
“The problem? Men wouldn’t take it. There was absolutely no market for oral contraception. The only group it appealed to was men in monogamous relationships, and even then, with the divorce rate so high, this group grew increasingly smaller. In 1980, the research my mother was involved in was utterly abandoned because the institute could not get funding from drug companies or external sources to continue…”
And in 2013, Carl Djerassi, inventor of the Pill, wrote for Wired: “In several hundred lectures on advances in female contraception, I have frequently encountered aggrieved feminist critics asking: ‘Why is there no Pill for men instead of the Pill for women?’ ”
Of course, ever since the child support laws grew real teeth in the 1990s, many here have likely heard of the MRAs who say they can’t wait for Vasalgel to become widely available so that the patriarchy will rise again and scheming gold diggers will be stripped of their livelihoods. BUT…the more famous MRAs never claim THEY will use it. They just want other men to use it. What’s more, they can’t seem to grasp that
1) men in long-term relationships will continue to trust the women they’re with, usually for good reason
2) single men will still be under pressure to use condoms and so won’t be eager to pay for and use TWO male contraceptives at once
3) men who refuse to use condoms are hardly good candidates for anything that involves a needle
4) rock stars and athletes would seem to be good candidates – but if THEY really want it, why has the non-profit Parsemus Foundation (in Berkeley) been struggling financially for years? Why aren’t those rich men eager to rescue them?
So it looks unlikely that Vasalgel will be incredibly popular with unmarried men – or that large numbers of men will get it unless their wives and girlfriends (or parents) BEG them to get it.
On top of that, MRAs have the gall to say that most feminists oppose better male BC. If that were true, feminists would already be trying to stop SINGLE men from getting vasectomies! Duh! Yes, Betty Friedan worried (allegedly) that men would lie about using it, but any MAN with a teenage daughter can sympathize with that fear.
To put it another way, when a reporter asks a woman on the street about a pill or a shot for men and she says “I wouldn’t trust him,” all that likely means is, she doesn’t WANT to get pregnant. I.e., she’s not secretly thinking “no! My clock is ticking! This has to be stopped!”
How is that so hard to grasp?
@Lenona
The biggest reason male birth control isn’t a thing is probably that most men see birth control as women’s responsibility and wouldn’t use it. Or they’d get scared of needles and refuse to do that.
I’ve certainly heard the alpha Marc Rudov say, in effect, that men in LTRs shouldn’t have to think about male birth control at all. (I’d guess he felt he’d paid his dues, as a single man, whenever he had to go through the misery of using a condom. I don’t know if he managed to stay married to his last wife.)
But I’ve heard more lighthearted remarks as well. Maybe ten years ago, I got into a discussion with a young(?) man at RH Reality Check – aka Center for Reproductive Rights, I think – and he said something like “men aren’t clamoring for it for the same reason they aren’t clamoring for immortality…they can’t quite believe that something like that could really become available.”
And, I found a 2005 thread on male birth control from “Stand Your Ground” – it’s way too long and repetitive, but there were a few good quotes. Title: “The male pill beneficail for men?? Are you kidding me??” (The OP’s first language is not English, mind you, but he speaks it very well, mostly.)
dr e: “Warren Farrell calls the male bc pill one of the two most important events for men in the next twenty years.”
Gerard Velthuis (MRA from the Netherlands): “Funny, so do feminists. Somebody will draw the shortest straw.
“You all think like women in the ’60s or ’70s
“AND you all think with your masulistic mind. The average ‘bloke’ doesn’t think like you all do, when do you realise this?? The average bloke will see it as another burden shifted to men at the benefit of women.”
The Gonzman: “It’s an apples and oranges comparison – it’s like saying ‘People will never use a computer in the house’ forty years ago.
“They never had that option before.
“Men have never had an option for birth control that was THEIR OWN DAMN BUSINESS before…”
(end)
At any rate, I’ve heard that there are, in fact, quite a few men in the U.S. eager to volunteer in the human trials for Vasalgel. (Whenever those happen. It turned out to be not so reversible in baboons.) In January, India was all set to make RISUG more available outside its borders This Year – and then you-know-what struck. Too bad.
If it manages to become widely available (even if it doesn’t turn a profit), it’ll be REALLY interesting to see how family judges start reacting to men who don’t want to support their kids. Of course, that’s likely why some MRAs – like Rudov – refuse to talk about it at all. They don’t WANT it available.
Btw, Katha Pollitt pointed out, in 1998, that if an unwilling, unwed father could get off the hook by saying “she lied about being on the Pill, Your Honor,” any man could say that – and it would mean the end of support for out-of-wedlock children. What she didn’t mention was, how long would it be before men started demanding the right to abandon their in-wedlock kids as well? Sort of like the “poor man’s divorce” of the bad old days, pre-WWII?
It amazes me that even most female journalists, these days, don’t manage to figure out what Pollitt did. At any rate, what I’m getting at is, yes, better male BC would be a two-edged sword for men, but it could easily be more useful than some think.
One simple benefit is that in practice, most birth control method have an effectiveness of 70-90% due to human error. If one go pills + condoms + male birth control, then the effectiveness jump to 97-99.9%.
(and that make foregoing the condom less stressful to me. While I believe the complaint about it making the act less pleasureable to be a bunch of trash, I do dislike the amount of trash they create)
@Jenora Feuer: That bit in The Difference Engine is true: condoms were originally made from sheep intestines. There was a woodcut I saw once of Casanova inflating one prior to use to check for holes; apparently, this was something of a party piece for him 😲. AFAIK, they’re still available for people with a latex allergy.
One thing I’m curious about is: Just how often do sex-ed teachers truly emphasize the need to use at least two contraceptives Every Time?
Call it a hunch, but I suspect that most baby boomer women weren’t really taught that the Pill is NOT enough if you’re truly serious about avoiding pregnancy. (According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the real-life failure rate is at least 5%.) Trouble is, merely quoting that statistic doesn’t make the average listener anxious, IMO, so the need for two methods really is important to hit home.
For the record, I belong to that last generation – Gen X – of liberal families that had neither sex ed at school or religious education at home, and I’m GLAD, because I would have considered either one to be a blatant invasion of my emotional privacy. (Of course, privacy for teens was kind of a new post-1960s idea.) Besides, I loved to read, so I got all the details I needed from “Changing Bodies, Changing Lives.”
@Lenona
That’s assuming one had sex ed at all. In the district I went to school in we never had any health/sex ed classes past a fifth grade class that vaguely outlined anatomy. No discussion of sex, contraceptives, pregnancy, STDs, or anything like that. And lest people think I went to a conservative private school, I did not. I attended public schools in a blue state.
I was deeply closeted back then, so I repressed myself a lot as a way of dealing with it. I’m not sure if things would have been better or worse had I had sex ed.
I was born in 1959. By the time I had sex-ed in school I’d had sex with boys and girls and had a diaphragm, gynecologist prescribed.
When I used condoms, starting many years later, I only did so for disease prevention. This is a common pattern in my age cohort.
The reason for this isn’t really that I didn’t trust the boys and men I had sex with. The reason was that I could get pregnant, they couldn’t. I didn’t want to worry.
Naglfar, what decade was that?
@Lenona
That was in the 2000s. My younger sister tells me it hasn’t gotten better since.
I had 3 lessons each about a month apart in middle school. This was during the 1980s.
The first was about the physical changes during puberty. As I was an early bloomer, having gone through the bulk of that and already got the basics of that from my mother, it wasn’t personally useful. I wasn’t the only one, as this is a bit late to be covering that.
The second was the anatomical aspects of reproduction, and a chance to try putting a condom on a banana. And then there was a it of “it’s okay to say no if you’re not ready, also you’re kids, so you probably aren’t ready.” At least they didn’t force the whole “not until marriage” thing. The actual practice of sex was not covered beyond implying that PIV = babies, nor was any other form of contraception covered.
The third was a primer to the economic aspects of running a “family household”, which implied (or possibly pushed) the idea that children could/would come into play very quickly. Also a brief touch on childcare.
In all, the barest minimum, overly heteronormative, and no chance to make up for it if you happened to be sick any of those days. And as I’m bisexual, infertile, and never married, those ended up being the least useful things for me to know. And yet, it was probably slightly better for kids in the US back then than before or since. At least today they have the chance to find good information on the internet. (Only a chance to, I know they don’t always, but that’s something.)
I had a very thorough sex education, over the course of like 9 years of school. I mean, it was pretty lacking when it came to teaching about same sex relationships and gender identity (almost nothing about the former aside from teaching us that condoms were still important for anal sex and I think something about the Kinsey Scale, and absolutely nothing about the latter), but in terms of biology and contraceptive measures, it was exhaustive (or at least it felt that way to me).
I’m not sure if it was a result of being very educated or just me being asexual and tokophobic (fear of pregnancy), but I knew for sure that I didn’t want to have any sex that didn’t involve at least a condom and hormonal birth control/surgical sterilization on my part.
It turned out to be a bit of a moot point, though at least my very limited experiences with sex as a questioning young adult were well protected.
I had no sex education except for a video in the 5th grade (10 to 11 years old) about how the cis female body would change during puberty. Nothing about boys, and the main thing I remember from the video was It telling us just because your body is ready to have a baby, doesn’t mean you are. And there was heavier set girl in the video, insecure because she didn’t look like her slightly more developed friend and her mother telling her she was perfect and growing in her own way at her own pace.
O/T: TERFs have come up with a new argument: that trans* women are not women because…aliens?
Oh, sex ed, I remember that. One of the instructors told us that the fundamental truth was, I quote: “Boys only want one thing, and girls don’t know what they want.” This managed to get me and one of my frenemies on the same side of an argument (against the instructor) for probably the only time ever.
There was also a video on abusive relationships, which was basically about how other women won’t help you, and you have to rely on the protection of male relatives against abusive male partners. I hated it, thanks.
Oh, this was Massachusetts in 2005 or so. Liberal state, 21st century, town that votes 60-70% Democratic. The school also had an “I don’t want to be a statistic” PSA exhorting girls to not walk home alone after dark, and to be accompanied by a boy so they wouldn’t be raped and murdered by strangers. Just a bottomless pit of victim blaming and male protectionism, and this was a “progressive” sex ed agenda.
@Cyborgette
I was also in Massachusetts. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
@Cyborgette
I feel sick for reading into this that it’s somehow better to be raped and murdered by someone you know. Sorry for what you had to endure.
I don’t remember a lot about sex ed, which I’m chalking up to gender dysphoria and trying to not pay attention. I do seem to remember some sort of cartoonish educational video we watched, where there was something about how penises all look different when flaccid but somehow the same when they’re erect. I felt suspicious of that, but now I’m guessing the idea was that small variations don’t affect function or something.
Oh, and we had a board game about pregnancy. Something about spinning a wheel to see if there was conception, and the odds being different at different parts of the menstrual cycle. The downside was that if there was no conception, you couldn’t advance, which had the upside of some boys complaining loudly after the lesson how boring it was. “I didn’t even get pregnant, it was rubbish!”
@Masse_mysteria
Society unfortunately does perpetuate the idea that rape is mainly a risk from strangers when the vast majority of rapes are by someone the victim knows. This is something that really needs to be addressed.
It could also have been in reference to how circumcised penises look different when flaccid compared to uncircumcised but look more similar when erect. Or just to make penis-havers feel better if their penis doesn’t look like others.
@Naglfar
This seems the likelier explanation. The video we watched wasn’t Finnish. It had been dubbed into Finnish but came from some other Nordic country (for some reason I think Denmark? Norway?), but AFAIK circumcision isn’t common in the Nordic countries, so I don’t think that would have been a consideration.
@Naglfar
TBH I’m pretty sure I escaped the worst of it by being male at the time. People acted like I was smoking something when I objected to that stuff, but that’s all they did.
Another example: I was accepted to SUNY Stony Brook, but dropped them in favor of UMass Amherst because (at the time) they had combo locks on all women’s restrooms in the dorms. Nobody seemed to understand why I thought this was stupid, ineffective, and denigrating. For all I know that policy might still be in place there.
@Masse_Mysteria
Oh that’s the thing, male protectionism (IDK if that’s the correct term in feminist theory but whatever) is built on that idea of stranger rape. And racism. So, so fucking much racism.
I’m not gonna ‘splain (whitesplain? AMABsplain?) the whole thing, just. This really is part of the Matrix we live in, and the more you learn about it the more you see it everywhere, and the more nauseating it gets.
@Cyborgette
Can relate. So many times I’d call out a male acquaintance on sexism when he thought there were no women around, and all the men would laugh it off. Especially with men I was related to, like my father or cousins.
Soooo apparently the thing I’ve usually referred to as “male protectionism” is known more technically as a subset of “benevolent sexism”. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambivalent_sexism
It’s kind of horrifying (but also validating) how closely this fits with my own experience TBH, especially stuff like “benevolently sexist men are still likely to blame victims”.
I remember my reaction at 16 year old to “learning” that somehow a female rugby pro was less likely to repel an aggression than a 50kg 16 year old young man. Like, are you serious ?
At the time, I thought it was because of videogames and people thinking that there are roaming monsters to defeat/kill. Actually, it’s probably the opposite, with the cliche of random (bad) encounter in videogames and RPGs coming from the male fantasy of having to protect peoples.
@Ohlmann
Oh my gods. Oh my gods. That. That is such a thing. Media portrays male bodies as made of iron and female bodies as made of tissue paper, and people get all surprised when internalization of those ideas makes men overconfident and women scared to do anything. It’s a complete brainfuck.
People are always shocked by how angry I get about physical gender inequality, especially the murderous rage when I see really big men just soaking up physical blows like it’s nothing. I know now that sexism and misogyny are more complex than that, but it’s hard to forget seeing the damage that invulnerability does – and that belief in invulnerability, founded or otherwise. It’s hard to stop thinking that we’ll never have a truly safe or just world until that strength is cut down to our level, or just destroyed entirely a la 70s radical feminist utopias.
Masse Mysteria:
To quote Anna Karenina, “All happy penises look happy in the same way”
@Cyborgette : well, depend on what you call a truly safe of just world. My idea of it is probably not possible period.
One of the big thing is that tearing down the corrupt system isn’t enough. The roman empire was a big patriarcal clusterfuck, and its fall didn’t help in any way. One also need to steer society in the right direction, too.
Common in Renaissance Italy, among non-sex-workers as well. The Church regularly hollered about it, but middle-class people had a vested interest in spacing children out.
Ohlmann: For me, sex definitely feels way better without a condom *if* I can just have fun.
But I can’t if my partner is potentially fertile. Withdrawal distracts from my fun more than a condom does; also it’s way riskier. Navigating how to get an abortion isn’t much fun at all. And I haven’t tried but it doesn’t seem like the best plan to have a kid before you’re ready.
Conclusion: I usually wear a condom.