please welcome to the stage america's burden
talesofthestarshipregeneration:
women have long suffered the side effects and responsibility of hormonal contraception. Just last month, a Danish study confirmed many women’s long-held suspicions when it revealed a link between hormonal contraception like the pill and depression—though the side effects of hormonal birth control have been documented since its inception. But new research from the University of Edinburgh suggests that men may be able to help to carry the burden of hormonal birth control sooner than previously thought. However, the study was halted due to side effects not entirely dissimilar from what many women using hormonal birth control currently experience.
Men continue to be weak, water is wet
fuck men.
I’m so pissed
Announcement followed by every woman who has ever taken birth control staring into the camera like they’re on The Office.
why is it okay to be loudly pissed off at people making medical decisions about their own heath? (would the feminist thing to do for those men to have been to carry on the trial against their will suffering horrible side effects?)
the point of feminism is not to have men suffer the things women suffer, it is that no-one has to suffer.
making men suffer, or shaming them or complaining about their avoidance of suffering, is not really aiding that goal.
the point of feminism is not to have men suffer the things women suffer, it is that no-one has to suffer
Also, friendly reminder that you don’t have to have PIV to have sex. I realise this is not a universal solution, but it seems better than “let’s pick which ASAB gets depression and go from there.”
A few other points here:
(1) For perspective, there were 320 men in the study in total, and 20 discontinued due to adverse events – about 6%. Most of the adverse events were mild and most did not lead to discontinuation.
(2) Both the men and their female partners were given questionnaires about the method several times during the study. Among both the men and the women, most liked it: in most cases over 80% said they were “satisfied” with the method and that they “would use a method like this.”
Notably, for both questions, and for every time at which the survey was given, men gave approving responses at a higher rate than their female partners (although the responses were generally quite similar). See Table 3 in the full study for details.
(3) The method was tried at 10 different centers throughout the world, and the rate of adverse events differed greatly between the centers, which makes it hard to generalize about either the method or what “men” think of it:
Sixty-two of the 65 reported emotional disorders were reported at 1 center (Indonesia), with all of these AEs at this center rated “mild” (see also Table 2). Similarly, reports of increases in injection site pain and myalgia were primarily reported by men of the Indonesian center (69 of 103 for injection site pain and 65 of 71 for myalgia). Increased libido reports were also high at the Indonesian center (63 of 124) and the Chilean center (34 of 124), with 100% (Indonesia) and 73.5% (Chile) classified as mild. The number of reports of acne was high (147), but these were distributed among the centers. The Indian center reported very few AEs.
[…]
As noted, there appeared to be study site differences in the number of AE reports, including those AEs related to changes in mood, sexual interest, and injection site pain. Although these AEs were not unexpected, particularly injection site pain with a multiple injection dosing regimen, the frequency of the mood disorders at the Indonesian center, for example, was unusually high, as compared with reports of similar AEs from earlier studies (10 - 12). These are considered real differences, given the uniformity of study instruments (AE forms) and training of all investigators
(Unfortunately I can’t seem to find numbers on how many of the participants were located at each center, but no matter what the distribution was, there’s clearly a lot of variance between the centers.)
(4) The method here is hormonal, but it’s not the same as the one used in hormonal contraceptives for women. Here is what the study says about it:
In previous clinical studies, testosterone administration to men demonstrated contraceptive efficacy comparable with modern female methods (4 – 6). However, supraphysiological doses of testosterone had to be administered, with potential long-term adverse effects in healthy men. The testosterone dose can be reduced by coadministration of a progestogen (7); however, only 2 small-scale studies evaluated the contraceptive efficacy and safety of such a combination (8, 9). The present multicenter study was designed to test the contraceptive efficacy and safety in men of a regimen of im injections of a long-acting progestogen, norethisterone enanthate (NET-EN), when administered with replacement doses of a long-acting androgen, testosterone undecanoate (TU), that appeared to be promising in smaller clinical trials for reversible sperm suppression without raising safety concerns (10 - 13).
In other words, an earlier attempt at male hormonal contraception used testosterone, and had unacceptable side effects. This study is about adding a progestogen alongside the testosterone to try to mitigate the side effects, something that had only been evaluated before in small studies.
That is, this isn’t “here’s the male equivalent of the pill; let’s see how men react to it.” It’s “we don’t have a male equivalent of the pill; we know that if we give men lots of testosterone they’ll make fewer sperm, but unsurprisingly if you give men lots of testosterone bad things happen; let’s throw another hormone in the mix and see what happens.”
People’s levels of various sex hormones affects their mood, sometimes in really bad ways; news at 11.
And even if it were, in fact, the case that this were an exact equivalent medically of female hormonal contraception, some women stop using hormonal BC for adverse effects. They are not weak or ‘hilariously fragile’ or pathetic or bad. People get to decide what side effects are acceptable to them. People who decide side effects aren’t acceptable to them are not doing anything wrong.
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