I love to read Paglia, but listening to her exhausts me. Has time slowed her down any?

Bravo for Paglia for pointing out, that there are real biological differences between men and woman, and these biological differences are mostly to blame for gender roles assumed by females historically, even in civilized countries.

You cant live your reproductive life "just like a man can, becoming a parent in your forties or fifties, without serious expensive medical intervention, which doesn't always work.

Women should be given this training, that training , this counselling, that awareness session etc etc etc. Don't women have brains? What training is given to men for anything? Aren't they managing better than the women in most cases? And why is divorce, rape, domestic violence law training and awareness not given to men or high school boys and why are they not told to be careful of the girls who will come after them with false cases?

Women do have brains, but most women's youth is spent learning to prevent pregnancy, not obtain it, and many have a hard time making the switch from one to the other.

Red & NicoleK both make a sound point.

For all the things we hear about, if women were counselled, trained, etc etc etc. in all the things people say they should be, then by the gods I don't believe in...they'd never actually get educated in school as they'd be to busy learning how not to get knocked up, raped, beaten, harassed, or whatever the fuck else the paranoid fuckwits assume is a constant danger in a country where poor people on welfare manage to get fat.

On the other hand, few women are taught anything sensible at all even when they do get this instruction.

They're taught how to avoid pregnancy (dear god I can hear Red asking his question about brains again...because shit, how much training does that take)

But...not taught one thing they should be on the subject, how to decide when to make the switch from avoidance to engagement. What the consequences of that will be...and quite frankly of equal or greater importance...how to decide who the hell they should get knocked up BY?

Ever see a 17 year old girl with a thugged out 19 year old? What, you're thinking they're not fucking? Ha! Nobody's taught that girl that she shouldn't be spreading her legs for a guy whose future consists of the words, 'You have a right to an attorney'.

Remember a few years ago that big public outcry when that mother of 6 kids, each from a different drug dealer, was shot by accident during a drug raid on her home for her then current drug dealer boyfriend? People yammered about what a wonderful mother she was didn't they?

Obviously nobody taught any of those praising her, or taught her, that fucking criminals and having their kids is not the best way to be or become a parent.

Many years ago, marriages were arranged between families to ensure best match in property, politics, and resources, marriage was meant to see an entire family unit grow and prosper, not simply fulfill the two being married. While feminists might decry the practice and the control it required, it is fairly said that the current practice of letting untaught & unthinking young girls make the decision on their own absent instruction on considering their future has been an unmitigated disaster.

I do not say we should go back to the arranged marriages of the past, but rather that we should take a lesson from their motivation and use it at a sort of instruction to the young so that they more carefully consider their prospects before dropping pants to impulse.

They fuck it up after that, its on them.

And here lies the fundamental flaw.

Men can no longer support the household. Our society is built on two income families. That is how families make ends meet.

From what I have read it is not just wanting to-but having to. If your spouse looses their job you need to be a competent financial backup.

"And here lies the fundamental flaw.

Men can no longer support the household. Our society is built on two income families. That is how families make ends meet."

Sure they can, and I know at least at least fifty couples, including most of my relatives, who make it or made it just fine on one income. Most families I know with both parents working, cant do math. Most of that second income, is taxed at a higher level than the first salary, and the rest goes to daycare, work clothes, eating out, and another car to get to the second job.

Unless both members of the two earner couple are high paid professionals, like doctors, they can do just as well, especially with young children by one of them staying home.

Do the math sometime on using all the after tax income on a 70 thousand dollar a year job to pay the residual on a nursing home for an elderly parent (as opposed to caring for them yourself) or selling their home and spending the equity at a pretty rapid clip.

You might understand then why prudent people who understand the tax code might chose to forgo a second salary in order to keep the outlays from eating up everything the tax man hasn't taken.

Most people in poverty these days, are single parents. These are the people that cant support themselves and pay the bills on child support, plus that minimum wage job at McDonalds.

Many years ago, marriages were arranged between families to ensure best match in property, politics, and resources, marriage was meant to see an entire family unit grow and prosper, not simply fulfill the two being married.

I agree with this, and would take it a step further. People also did not have children simply for personal fulfillment.

Paglia is great. She really thinks about the larger issues. I agree with Red to some extent about the "training" issue. This is where Paglia and I part company because while I agree young women ought to be trained to think deeply about their choices, that training should come from the home. I am guessing that is where Red is coming from (sorry if I am misreading you Red). This is called parenting and it should be in the home so that you can communicate your values to your children and males and females should get this "training" since they both bear the burden of the outcomes.

I speak to my very smart 14 year old all the time about the choices she will be faced with in life and I let her know why I made the choices I made and I feel those have worked out for me. I think in the past, it was easy to think that babies can wait bc science is there to back us up, but now with infertility so common, I am not sure that is the message that girls are still getting.

And can I just say that infertility affects both men and women. Currently, there is a infertility blog over the NY Times where the woman details her experiences with IVF and it kind of pisses me off bc she talks about it in relation to her dreams and her feelings. We never hear about her sperm donor (I mean husband) and how all of this is impacting him. I would love to hear his reaction to all of this and how it has affected his life.

Anyway, great post Amy!

I do disagree with her that it should happen in schools, but sort of accept her as a socialist and rejiggered where it would happen in my head and didn't mention it when I posted it.

Thanks, Sheep mommy, for noting that.

And great that you point this out to your 14-year-old.

I don't want kids but I think people need to look at the options and decide how to have what they want. (I've pointed this out in columns.)

it takes a really intelligent species to f**k up an instinctive natural process like this.

On top of everything else, women having babies in their twenties isn't quite as beneficial to the babies as some believe. That is, according to one source, "the likelihood that a woman under 30 who becomes pregnant will have a baby with Down syndrome is less than 1 in 1,000" but at the same time, "against popular belief, most children with Down syndrome are born to young mothers: 51% to mothers under 30, 72% to women under 35."

And that's just one birth disorder.

I agree with this, and would take it a step further. People also did not have children simply for personal fulfillment.

Posted by: Pirate Jo at October 27, 2013 7:29 AM
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From what I've heard, the idea that children are "fulfilling" or "rewarding" was a made-up idea that came after the Industrial Revolution - and probably after society started taking child labor laws seriously as well. (There was more than one reason, after all, why rich people have probably always had fewer children than poor people - for one thing, they didn't need anyone to support them in their old age, or to help run the family business, necessarily.) I'm guessing that plenty of parents weren't that happy about not being able to put their children into factories, and they may have asked "if this is now the law, why should poor people marry and have children at all?" Not to mention that kids were likely not always happy about having to go to school - after losing a few fingers and toes in the factories, chances are they just wanted to play, relax, and have enough to eat.

Haven't read all of Paglia's speech yet, but I wonder what she thinks of the statistic that says that the openly CHILDFREE population is definitely higher than ever and growing. Some day, I hope, only the most religious-nut doctors will dare to get nasty with those patients who declare they will not have children, and then we will know that we really ARE a free society - and that adults who have children probably truly wanted them. (There have been quite a few stories of such awful doctors at Bratfree.)

Ever see a 17 year old girl with a thugged out 19 year old? What, you're thinking they're not fucking? Ha! Nobody's taught that girl that she shouldn't be spreading her legs for a guy whose future consists of the words, 'You have a right to an attorney'.

That dynamic always puzzled me.

I know a 26-year-old guy who has no money, no training, no job, no education (drop-out), and zero prospects. He has bench warrants out for him in three counties for unpaid parking tickets, speeding tickets, etc. He has four children by three different women ... and no shortage of women willing to sleep with him. What the hell are these women thinking, if they are?

We, as a society, have taught these women that they don't have to consider the guy's suitability, only their own urges.

And we've taught the guy that he doesn't have to do the work to become a suitable mate since the government will provide money for any children he fathers. He can continue to play video games, hang out with his unemployed posse, mooch off of others, and pretend that he's a man.

Women, whose role used to be holding out higher expectations, thus teaching young men that to get a respectable woman they needed to be respectable men, have abandoned that role.

They're busy "getting their groove on" at Spring Break, making nude selfies and sex videos, sexting, and making sure their whale tails and bra straps show, even in their supposedly business-professional outfits (after all, Cosmo told them they could wear a camisole as a blouse to the office).

Too many women are now willing to sleep with the deadbeat 'cause he's "hot" and then demand sympathy because single motherhood is so difficult (which it is, but it's a difficulty so many brought upon themselves).

Too many people (both men and women) want the joy of having a "cuddly baby" but eschew the responsibility of raising a child.

On top of everything else, women having babies in their twenties isn't quite as beneficial to the babies as some believe. That is, according to one source, "the likelihood that a woman under 30 who becomes pregnant will have a baby with Down syndrome is less than 1 in 1,000" but at the same time, "against popular belief, most children with Down syndrome are born to young mothers: 51% to mothers under 30, 72% to women under 35."

And that's just one birth disorder.

Posted by: lenona at October 27, 2013 10:50 AM

This is statisitcal manipulation. Of course, the majority of Downs syndrome babies, are born to women younger than thirty. Not only are they a demographic least likely to get testing in utero, they are the demographic having the most babies.

The incidence per number of live births is the statistic that matters, not the percentage by age group. And Downs syndrome is only one of several hundreds of birth defects to be worried about.

And it isnt just the risk to the babies that matters. The risks to the mother increase with age also.

Forget the career impact, what about the biological impact?

Waiting increases the chance of fertility issues. Also, pregnancy is HARD ON THE BODY. So, the younger you are (to a point) the faster and easier your recovery. Also, kids have this knack for keeping you up, wearing you out, etc. Easier (in general) when you are younger.

My two cents anyway.

I am guessing that is where Red is coming from (sorry if I am misreading you Red)

thanks for apoligizing since you are misreading(at least I think you are...maybe I am misreading you and sorry if I am). Actually, yes to some extent I did mean that it does not need to be done at school, but then I also wanted something to be done for the boys and young men if so much emphasis is being laid on girls and young women. Call it my version of title IX or whatever, just that if something relevant to girls is so important that it needs to be harped on about endlessly everywhere(school, college, newspapers, tv etc etc), then whatever is relevant to gusy should also be given equal importance and harped on about endlessly everywhere(school, college, newspapers, tv etc etc). If girls are considered so stupid and without common sense that these things need to be told to them at every opportunity, then the boys should also be held to the same low standard rather than the high standard to which they are being held as a matter of fact everyday. Otherwise, it is just plain feminist hypocrisy at work as usual once again

Call it my version of title IX or whatever, just that if something relevant to girls is so important that it needs to be harped on about endlessly everywhere(school, college, newspapers, tv etc etc), then whatever is relevant to gusy should also be given equal importance and harped on about endlessly everywhere(school, college, newspapers, tv etc etc). If girls are considered so stupid and without common sense that these things need to be told to them at every opportunity, then the boys should also be held to the same low standard rather than the high standard to which they are being held as a matter of fact everyday.
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Well, we do hold boys to a pretty low standard. That is, since boys don't seem to use condoms as often as they should, we urge them to, over and over - even in comic strips. (Of course, girls are also now urged to buy them first, just in case.)

Granted, I admit I don't know just how often sex ed teachers talk about the need for TWO contraceptives, every time. (The trouble with pushing the STD angle is that boys likely sense, from society, that it's not that easy to catch a disease from a girl who's definitely infected.)

I don't know if boys would be more likely to use them if they were more aware of how child-support laws now have real teeth. Maybe THAT needs to be more emphasized.

Trouble is, some people, like lawyer Robert Franklin, can't grasp that if girls have to live with the fear of pregnancy and its consequences, so should boys.

https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/20744-teenage-boy-broken-condom-means-i-could-be-screwed-for-the-rest-of-my-life

Not that there isn't a problem with excessive fearmongering in sex ed for BOTH sexes, per se, but still.....

Trouble is, some people, like lawyer Robert Franklin, can't grasp that if girls have to live with the fear of pregnancy and its consequences, so should boys.

Where do girls have any consequences of pregnancy? It is the boys who have to face it. Who ends up paying his whole life for a pregnancy? The boy or the girl. And who gets money her whole life because of the pregnancy? You talk as if boys have no consequences to face whatsoever.

"His whole life"? Don't you mean "20 years"? Sheesh.

Unless the boy immediately proposes marriage to her (unlikely), she accepts and the marriage is a success (also unlikely, if they're in their teens), SHE faces the consequence of having to choose between abortion, adoption, single motherhood, or possibly having to pay child support to HIM if he won't agree to adoption.

Is that nothing to you? No one would refer to any of those choices as living "happily ever after." Last I heard, being single with a baby is no picnic, especially when neither parent has great job skills. (Not to mention that very often, in poor neighborhoods, the boy will BEG the girl to have the baby and raise it so he can feel like a stud - he just doesn't want to pay child support, necessarily.)

And if a boy suffers emotionally when the girl chooses abortion or adoption and his parents make him accept it, is it really as bad for him as for her? I doubt it. Not to mention that those two choices involve little or no financial cost to the boy.

BTW, from what I hear, adoption is far less "popular" for single women than it used to be - that is, before 1970 or so, girls and women used to be forced into it when they would rather have kept their babies, even if it meant poverty. As a birth-mother wrote to Utne Reader in January of 1992:

"....Every time I'm driving behind a car with a bumper sticker on it that says 'Adoption not abortion,' it's all I can do to keep myself from ramming into the back of the car. 21 years ago I, like Diana Selsor Edwards, unwillingly signed relinquishment papers giving up my child for adoption. I am 40 now, childless, and have never really recovered..."

And may I say, once again, that if men are so fed up with unwanted fatherhood, and they keep complaining that condoms are too much trouble to remember to use, they could always be a lot louder in their demand for the near-foolproof RISUG, aka Vasalgel. Plus other male contraceptives. However, I have yet to hear of any such public demands outside of the Internet - e.g., demands on radio and TV. Do they understand that prevention is better than cure, and if not, why not?

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/10/02/better-birth-control-for-men-8-promising-possibilities/

(This includes at least three methods I never heard of. One that didn't get mentioned is Pro-Vas - it's a titanium clip.)

I have so many feelings on this issue. I have friends who want/wanted children but by the time the opportunity or in some cases they made it priority it was too late. I took a break after I graduated from college and had my daughter before launching my career. Her father and I have divorced and I am remarried and pregnant with my second child and will be taking off my career to stay at home with the kids. No family HAS to have two incomes but you HAVE to live within your means. Also you have to PLAN when to have children. No one can get pregnant by accident! Its a consequence of sex if you cannot be responsible for your potential reproductions keep your parts away from the opposite sex's parts. I managed to not get pregnant either time till it was budgeted and appropriate! I disagree that schools need to impart this wisdom to women. Fertility has a window its in biology class! In the age of internet and endless streams of information people need to educate themselves about their choices and plan their lives. If you don't want to do that then you will be the grasshopper from the grasshopper and the ant story. Although I really think the grasshopper should have starved because people should have to accept consequences not get a bail out.

"Do they understand that prevention is better than cure, and if not, why not?"

I am convinced that the average person cannot recognize the same phenomenon twice. They read one article and say, "that's a lie", then read the next one, by the exact same author, and think it's OK.

They think that penalties after the fact make everyone whole in the case of industrial accidents with impaired operators, but say prevention is better than cure in this case.

They think that penalties after the fact make everyone whole in the case of industrial accidents with impaired operators, but say prevention is better than cure in this case.
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Maybe that's because "in this case," there's a CHILD, already born, who needs to be fed and clothed - and unrelated taxpayers should not have to pay for it, when possible?

"Do they understand that prevention is better than cure, and if not, why not?"

So why should this apply to men only and not women? And if women have the choice to abort, why should men not have the choice to walk away from unwanted babies? Again, you are saying that men should use condoms etc etc and you are all pity for women(the boys will literally beg the girls to bring up the kid - wtf) which just shows that you are holding men up to a much higher standard than women. So men should be responsible and made to pay child support while women can be irresponsible and adopt or abort as per your idea of fairness. Does not sound very fair to me.

However, I have yet to hear of any such public demands outside of the Internet - e.g., demands on radio and TV.

Neither have I heard public demands on radio and TV asking for women to use the pill before getting into bed or to have a morning after pill handy and not forget to use it. Women also have a range of options to prevent pregnancy(copper inserts for instance). No public demands asking women to use those either.

So....in summary, you are holding men up to a higher standard than you are holding women.

So why should this apply to men only and not women? And if women have the choice to abort, why should men not have the choice to walk away from unwanted babies?
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See below.

It's also odd that men only argue for the right to abandon out-of-wedlock children - why not argue for the right to abandon unwanted IN-wedlock children? From the child's point of view, what's the difference? (Of course, decades ago, even married men could abandon their families and not get pursued by the law much, but there's a very good reason we no longer tolerate that.)

We Americans decided, years ago, that either the parents (that includes unwilling mothers, BTW) or the taxpayers have to support children, since it's wrong to kick children to the curb, if only because poverty breeds crime. Whenever possible, the parents are made to pay first. Does anyone really have a problem with that, since taxes would go down for EVERYONE, including the unwilling parents?

Besides, it's a safe bet that a man's getting RISUG is far less of a hassle, physically or emotionally, than a woman's going through pregnancy and childbirth - OR an abortion. So it's not much of a "high standard." Keep in mind, too, that female contraceptives can fail and many women are ordered by their doctors not to use hormones, which cuts their options. All the more reason for a couple to use two methods every time.

Lenona, I find your posts disingenuous. The fact you can't get around and can't explain away is that, with the range of options available to women today, no woman ever needs to be a parent unwillingly. Ever. Every single woman in the Western Hemisphere who has children has them because she wants them. Women have available to them a variety of means that guarantee that any woman who doesn't want to be a parent doesn't have to be one.

Men do not have these options. The only sure-fire mechanisms men have to guarantee that they won't become unwitting parents are sterilization and celibacy. And even those things don't guarantee that the state won't arbitrarily designate them as fathers anyway. As for support, it's almost entirely the responsibility of men. A woman who wants to can rape a 13-year-old boy and the boy will be responsible for support of the resulting child.

The fact you can't get around and can't explain away is that, with the range of options available to women today, no woman ever needs to be a parent unwillingly. Ever. Every single woman in the Western Hemisphere who has children has them because she wants them.
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Tell that to women in quite a few Latin American countries - or any American woman who lives in some rural area that is heavily anti-contraception and/or anti abortion and has limited means to drive elsewhere. Russell Shorto wrote a long, famous piece on this.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07contraception.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

As I mentioned, having an abortion is not something women can necessarily put behind them easily - and neither is giving up a child for adoption. Of course, if she keeps a child and raises it, it's likely because she wanted to.
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Men do not have these options. The only sure-fire mechanisms men have to guarantee that they won't become unwitting parents are sterilization and celibacy.
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As I mentioned, this can change soon - if enough men DEMAND more contraceptives for themselves.
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And even those things don't guarantee that the state won't arbitrarily designate them as fathers anyway. As for support, it's almost entirely the responsibility of men. A woman who wants to can rape a 13-year-old boy and the boy will be responsible for support of the resulting child.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at October 29, 2013 8:20 AM

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Who said all THAT shouldn't be changed ASAP? Not I.

We Americans decided, years ago, that either the parents (that includes unwilling mothers, BTW)
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To clarify: I meant mothers who are both unwilling AND noncustodial - that is, when the father has custody.

And regarding those teen boys who, from the start, WANT to be fathers - but who don't want to support their babies: If you want proof of that, read Washington Post's Leon Dash's book "When Children Want Children." Quote (not verbatim):

"With her on the Pill, I couldn't feel like a man because there was no way I could get her pregnant."

(Of course, the girls in those poor neighborhoods want babies from the start too.)

For a nice long FAQ list on Vasalgel (I hadn't realized it's not quite the same as RISUG):

http://www.parsemusfoundation.org/vasalgel-faqs/

You have to click on the questions to see the answers.

We Americans decided, years ago, that either the parents (that includes unwilling mothers, BTW) or the taxpayers have to support children, since it's wrong to kick children to the curb, if only because poverty breeds crime. Whenever possible, the parents are made to pay first. Does anyone really have a problem with that, since taxes would go down for EVERYONE, including the unwilling parents?

First, that poverty causes crime is one of underlying shibboleths underlying state-based welfare programs. The premise is that the cost of anti-poverty programs is off-set by savings in crime prevention.

It's a romantic notion, that somehow the criminal is a noble soul forced into a life of crime in order to eat and put a roof over his head. And the wealthy deserve to be victimized since wealth is theft. "Gee, Officer Krupke." Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is the exemplar of this school of thought.

But it's wrong. The law-abiding poor are legion and middle class criminals abound. Lack of character and lack of social opprobrium for misdeeds breeds crime.

Second, making the generic taxpayer support the children of impoverished or uninterested parents creates no incentive for the impoverished to improve their lot before creating babies or to take steps to avoid pregnancy.

No one reproaches the indigent who produces child after child, often with different partners. To scold the profligacy of the impecunious serial child-producer is to invite a societal backlash amid claims of racism, sexism, or elitism. Instead, we watch as an already overburdened welfare system expands to receive ever more indigent parents and their screaming progeny, slouching ever closer to bankrupting the entire economy.

While private or state-run orphanages may not be the answer, endless welfare paid for by confiscatory taxes on the productive classes is not a sustainable answer either.

People used to have the romantic notion that poverty and suffering were automatically GOOD for individuals - that it "bred character." Given how often poverty could help create domestic violence, I can't help but be glad that we don't believe THAT any more. (IIRC, it's been said that 4 out of 5 violent convicts were abused children - and it might not even be just violent convicts.)

However, self-imposed frugality, living within one's means, and forcing one's children to earn all their own luxuries is another matter altogether - not poverty.

And as Katha Pollitt pointed out, it would make more sense to say that poverty causes compulsive motherhood than the other way around, given the lack of options in poor young women's lives. E.g., many such women think "better to become an unwed mother in poverty than never to become a mother at all."

Instead, we watch as an already overburdened welfare system expands to receive ever more indigent parents and their screaming progeny, slouching ever closer to bankrupting the entire economy.
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Which is precisely why there's more pressure than ever to get fathers (and absent mothers) to pay INSTEAD. Again, does anyone really have a problem with that, if it lightens the burden on the welfare system - and on taxpayers in general?

Which is precisely why there's more pressure than ever to get fathers (and absent mothers) to pay INSTEAD. ~ lenona

And too many of them CAN'T. They don't have jobs. They don't have skills. They don't have education. They don't have a work history. They do have a criminal record. They can earn minimum wage at best.

A guy I know with three kids by two different women can't make more than minimum wage because he has no skills, no education, and no ambition to get either of those things. And when he does work, half of his paycheck gets garnisheed to pay his back child support. He's so far behind now (> $50,000) that he'll never catch up. Not on what he can make.

As a result, he doesn't work. He depends upon his various girlfriends and baby mamas to support him, living off of the very same child support the taxpayers provide for his children.

Getting the fathers to support the children is a wonderful idea. But it only works if the fathers have the means to do so. Far too many of them DON'T. And with the automatic support network of the welfare system, we're creating more of them every day.

"As I mentioned, this can change soon - if enough men DEMAND more contraceptives for themselves."

I can assure you that no such thing will ever get approved in the U.S. Preventing it is a top priority of feminist organizations. You can't even get funding for the research in the U.S. Researchers who are interested in this area have to go to India to get funding, and even then it's coming from private sources, not the government.

"As I mentioned, this can change soon - if enough men DEMAND more contraceptives for themselves."
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I can assure you that no such thing will ever get approved in the U.S. Preventing it is a top priority of feminist organizations.
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Where, exactly, is the proof of that? Jeez. (How much are you willing to BET on it, since the media are finally saying it will arrive in just two years and not five or ten?)

Did it ever occur to you that if the average feminist organization - or the average woman - were opposed to better male birth control, we'd already have heard multiple complaints from them, LONG ago, about the fact that unmarried men over 30, at least, can get vasectomies with little or no hassle?

(Doctors are often reluctant to sterilize patients of either sex who are under 30 since the regret rate can be as high as 1 in 3 - and, of course, they don't want to get sued over that if the reversal doesn't work. Also, I doubt a married woman can easily get sterilized without her husband's knowledge/consent - so it's not just married men who have trouble finding a willing doctor.)

After all, if women were so afraid of men using a male pill “too much,” wouldn’t at least ONE woman interviewed by a reporter on the street say “no! My clock is ticking!” rather than “I wouldn’t trust him to take it”?

BTW, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Meryl Streep was a campaigner for better male birth control, but assuming she's dropped that campaign, maybe she just got tired of working for something that men didn't seem that interested in. (There WAS a male pill in the 1970s, but men wouldn't take it - though I'm guessing it also wasn't too efficient by today's medical standards. Not to mention there were health scares over the female pill at that time, so men would have been naturally wary.)

From the description of the 2003 book: "The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making":

"Oudshoorn emphasizes that the introduction of contraceptives for men depends to a great extent on changing ideas about reproductive responsibility. Initial interest in the male pill, she shows, came from outside the scientific community: from the governments of China and India, which were interested in population control, and from Western feminists, who wanted the responsibilities and health risks associated with contraception shared more equally between the sexes."
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You can't even get funding for the research in the U.S. Researchers who are interested in this area have to go to India to get funding, and even then it's coming from private sources, not the government.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at October 29, 2013 2:26 PM
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Maybe that's because Big Pharma can't help but notice that foolproof methods that last for 10 years (such as Vasalgel) are not going to be as PROFITABLE as pills, which have to be bought over and over? Profit is supreme. Bottom line: Men have to ask for it - loudly - if they really want it. Nobody's stopping them from going on TV and saying "our wives can't use the Pill and we can't afford more kids right now and we need more reliable backups! Yes, we'll happily pay for them!"

While anecdotes SUGGEST that there's a profitable market to be had, an awful lot of MRAs refuse to talk about male birth control at all - and those like radio host Marc Rudov have made it pretty clear that they don't think men in long-term relationships should have to use male birth control of ANY kind, despite the dangers and failure rates of some female contraceptives - so they're not about to help publicize it or help their listeners to get their hands on it. Until their listeners - or average men in general - turn away from such attitudes, big-time, the U.S. has little reason to believe there's a real market. (Men in China are a good market, but that's likely because of the one-child laws!)

Oh, and since even women who don't want to get pregnant have been known to forget their pills or get careless in other ways, Big Pharma can hardly be blamed for suspecting that men would be even more careless, when it comes to the male pill, per se. Not to mention that men might be more leery of hormonal methods than barrier methods - but again, barrier methods would not be as profitable for Big Pharma, even if men greatly preferred them.