Give Men A Chance To Try Options
Men take a lot of flak for our reluctance to use condoms, and some of it’s deserved. But women also would hesitate, I suspect, if their only choice to prevent pregnancy during intercourse was to cover their genitals with a film of plastic.
For many men, condoms don’t just hinder sexual expression. They transform the experience. Condoms serve as a separator and desensitizer in an activity that is performed best in a spirit of no-holds-barred.
Not that sex with a condom is inherently bad. For millions of men, it’s clearly better than abstinence. These days, anyway, we need condoms not only to prevent pregnancies, but to protect against AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
But what about monogamous men, or those who have no sexual diseases? Why is there no option other than that quasi-reliable, semiuncomfortable sheath, first devised by an Italian physician in 1560? What have our reproductive scientists been doing?
Mostly, they’ve been working on contraceptives for women. Until the early 1970s, the production (and upkeep) of children was considered a woman’s domain, and virtually all research money went toward developing products for her, including the pill, the diaphragm and the three S’s: shields, sponges and spermicides.
In 1972, the World Health Organization (WHO) finally decided men had a compelling interest in controlling their sperm. But 23 years later, despite some progress, no new male contraceptive is even close to making its way to the shelves of our local pharmacies.
Biology has been a big stumbling block, says Dr. C. Alvin Paulsen, the University of Washington researcher who headed the original WHO committee on male contraceptives. It seems that stopping the daily production of millions of sperm requires much higher doses of chemicals than rendering one egg infertile each month.
Paulsen’s own research, for example, recently showed that injections of extra testosterone can fool a man’s brain into shutting off sperm production - but only if he gets a shot every week. “That’s not a product,” Paulsen says. “No one’ll buy it.”
Another obstacle has been the lawsuit. Drug companies, Paulsen says, are running scared from the whole contraceptive arena following their legal wranglings over the IUD and Dalcon Shield, not to mention “wrongful life” (when a contraceptive fails). The high doses needed in a male contraceptive make the companies even more gun-shy; they know more chemicals mean a greater chance for unpleasant side effects.
But even if a safe, low-dose contraceptive were developed for men, many companies would remain skittish. Dr. Pat Saling of Duke University found this out recently after she and her colleagues isolated a protein in sperm that could lead to either a male or female contraceptive. The reaction from drug companies was uniform. They wanted to pursue the female variety.
Saling, who’s done reproductive studies for 20 years, says the companies have long-standing market research indicating that men won’t buy a contraceptive that affects our hormones. We’re afraid, apparently, of growing breasts, getting zits and singing falsetto - in short, of becoming a teenage diva.
Frankly, though, I think we’re ready to sing. Men are being sued by the thousands these days to support children we fathered by mistake. A male pill would give us more control over our reproductive lives and, for at least some men, usher in a glorious era of sex without plastic.
Male call Men: Would you buy a male version of the pill? Men and women: How can you have good sex with condoms? Send responses to VoiceMale, P.O. Box 8071, Lexington, Ky. 40533-8071, or to e-mail address nchetaol.com.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Neil Chethik Universal Press Syndicate