New era of male birth control is on its way

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Do you know how hard it is to get a man to wear a condom? It’s so difficult that the Gates Foundation launched a contest last year for people to create a “next-generation” condom to increase pleasure in the hopes that men would actually use it. Planned Parenthood even provides people with a script of thing to say when your partner refuses to wear one.

So you’ll have to excuse my trepidation when I’m told that the next revolution in male birth control doesn’t involve something guys have to wear, but something they’ll happily inject ... and not in their arms.

Instead of the much-maligned condom, men will be able – by 2017, apparently – to ask their healthcare providers to inject something called Vasalgel directly into their vas deferens to quarantine the little swimmers in their testicle(s). And, unlike vasectomies, a Vasalgel sperm-blocker might be easily undone at any time, with just a teeny-tiny second injection. While it’s unclear what kind of dent this scientific breakthrough might make in a man’s wallet, it is a one-time shot, it is reportedly very reliable and it’s possibly reversible – all the makings of a near-perfect contraceptive.

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But the cultural hurdle isn’t just that women are expected to be responsible for contraception and children; it’s that we’re still made responsible for sexuality itself. Sex is largely considered something that men take from women and as the “gatekeepers” of sex; women are still derided as “tainted” by sex in a way that men are not; and – most bafflingly – women are still considered responsible for men’s sexual responses or poor (even criminal) behavior. Consider the ways in which too many people expect young female students to cover their bodies so as to not “entice” or “distract” male students, or how some blame rape victims for what they were wearing, how they acted, or how much they had to drink (for starters).

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