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Advice from three of EMandLO.com’s guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Would most guys take the birth control pill if it was available to them? When it does become available, should women trust guys to take it correctly, so it’s effective?” (Two of the guys, completely independently, came up with the idea the pills should taste like beer!) To ask the guys your own question, click here.
Straight Married Guy (David Jacobs): Don’t know about most guys, but I’d certainly take birth control pills. And I suspect I’m not alone. In fact, I can’t recall ever having had a conversation with another guy about the joy of rubbers! Not a big fan myself — and I can’t imagine any other aficionado of the act is either. As to whether we could be trusted to take them regularly — who knows? Probably more of a crapshoot. But most guys don’t want kids and all the entanglement that goes along with them (until of course they do). And most guys can remember to shower, shave, pay their rent and cable bills with regularity, so why not this too? Perhaps they could make them bacon or beer flavored, or add THC. Or here’s a brilliant commercial possibility: time-release Viagra in each dose! Though that might just result in a constant half-staff boner…
Gay Married Guy (Jon Ross): Good question! I have no idea! The second part is easy though — woman should definitely NOT trust guys to take it correctly, and unfortunately they are the ones stuck with an unwanted pregnancy should it occur. Men can be forgetful, lazy, and lie — they will often say anything to get sex, and many wouldn’t hesitate to tell their partners they were on the pill if they thought it would get them lucky. However, I do think many men would be interested in taking a birth control pill, depending on cost and any side effects, of course. Avoiding baby mama drama is often high on a thinking man’s priority list.
Straight Single Guy (Adam): I’m going to make a few assumptions in answering this hypothetical. Assumption 1: The male birth control pill would be equally effective as the female birth control pill. Assumption 2: The potential health risks/benefits of the male birth control pill would be equal to the potential health risks/benefits of the female birth control pill. Assumption 3: Condoms have been uninvented.
I don’t mean to suggest that, from a moral standpoint, these are the things it should take for “most guys” to take birth control pills. It’s just that in order for that to happen in the current world we live in — a world where 80% of women in the United States have already taken birth control pills at least one time in their lives (I looked that one up!), a world where men are viewed, perhaps unfairly, as more promiscuous and irresponsible when it comes to sex and birth control, and a world where condoms exist to not only aid in birth control but to also decrease the likelihood of contracting most STDs and STIs — it would take an enormous cultural shift for the majority of men to start taking birth control pills.
That said, I might take them if they tasted like beer, which should tell you all you need to know to answer your second question.
This article originally appeared on EMandLO.com.
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Em & Lo like to consider themselves the Emily Posts of the modern bedroom. They have co-authored six books on the topics of sex and love: Sex: How to Do Everything, three A-Z guides, Buh Bye, Rec Sex and Sex Toy, the sex manual The Big Bang: Nerve’s Guide to the New Sexual Universe, and the handbook Sex Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen. They have contributed to numerous magazines including Glamour, Details, Allure, Marie Claire, and GQ, and wrote columns for New York magazine and The Guardian in the U.K. They currently post daily on their own blog, EMandLO.com, as well as on SUNfiltered, the Sundance Channel blog. You can follow them on Twitter at #EMandLO.