To think contraception has been a greater liberator to men than to women?

@Neurodiversitydoctor

"yes look at Prince Andrew"

What?

How is that analogous to a 17 year old being in a relationship with 23 year old man?

OP, what a insanely bizarre thing to say.
For hundreds of years, women have had to deal with the dire consequences of having to give birth of unwanted children. Millions of them died because of this.
Contraception has put an end to this.
What on earth are you talking about????

If anything, it was changing attitudes towards sex which eventually drove full legalisation of the pill, rather than the other way around.

Sexual attitudes until well into the 1960s weren’t particularly liberal: majority public opinion, in the UK at least, was still against sex before and outside of marriage - if not that it was wrong, that it was undesirable - hence the unavailability of the pill for unmarried women until much later. The “swinging” moniker is often assumed to refer to sex when it actually referred to a much broader youth counterculture movement of fashion, music, and optimism and economic recovery from post-WW2 austerity. Sexual attitudes were gradually changing, particularly among young people as part of that youth culture, but real sexual liberation was still a fairly long way off - and in non-urban areas, and particularly outside of London, took even longer.

yes look at Prince Andrew. ComtesseDeSpair whatyou say is very interesting eg: that the sexual revolution actually predated the wide availability of reliable contraception and that the second was perhaps a function of the first rather than the other way round as reactionary feminists suggest.

I do find your time lune interesting for all the free love of the swinging sixties it was only with reliable contraception and legal abortion it's less glamourus sister that women were able to achieve equal pay, maternity rights etc.

But Marianne Faithful did live before reliable contraception. The pill may have been legalised in the U.K. in 1961 - but that was for married women only. In 1968 legislation was brought in so that it could be prescribed to some unmarried women in exceptional circumstances (and even then, doctors of a more old fashioned persuasion would often refuse to prescribe it to them), but it wasn’t until 1974 that it was legalised for all unmarried women. The pill certainly wasn’t driving her sexual activity at 17.

Between the early sixties to mid-late seventies, the period you’re referring to, she didn’t have free access to reliable contraception. So whilst you’ve raised her as an example of a woman you think would have been better off before contraception, she’s actually a perfect example of quite the opposite: women didn’t abstain from sex when they didn’t have any contraception. They had sex. And when they had sex, they often got pregnant. And when they got pregnant, they had one of two things: babies, or abortions, often illegal ones. And the older men she was having sex with clearly weren’t abstaining from sex with her because of a lack of contraception, and they clearly weren’t taking responsibility for it themselves. So she ended up having five terminations, two of them illegal. Can you not acknowledge the illogical argument you’re making?

"She was 17 when she started her relationship with the rolling stones- today that would be considered child sexual abuse"

Would it?

The benefit to men: maybe getting more sex.

The benefit to women: not having their health and their careers ruined by ceaseless childbearing.

So you want a method of contraception whereby women have 100% of the benefit and men have 0%

Right. Got it.

I still consider that she was a victim of the permissive culture of the '60s, men exploited her used her as a sex toy and repeatedly abandoned her. She was 17 when she started her relationship with the rolling stones- today that would be considered child sexual abuse.

I’m not sure it’s many people’s. Children are both parent’s responsibilities, and I don’t believe mothers or fathers should carry any more of that weight or importance than the other.

Thank god that's not my culture.

Considering her three miscarriages and the five terminations she’s been open about having had - two being when abortion was still illegal in the U.K. - in her youth, the latter because she didn’t want babies to be born into heroin addiction, I suspect that access to reliable long-acting contraception would have been her preference.

Just wanted to come on here to say on the death of Marrianne Faithful that she was absolutely a victim of the sexual revolution and might have had a happier life had she lived before reliable contraception.

Certainly - I have several friends who wish they had only wasted "months" rather than "years"!

Probably a mixed bag for children - I agree probably better, assuming that they do get to remain in a stable 2-bio-parent setup, but there'll be more children who now don't get that (if you buy the "contraception > less social commitment pressure > more separated families" argument, which I find compelling)

I recently listened to this, it was interesting.

One of the problems has been adequate clinical testing: because of the potential for it being ineffective or failing, to participate in some studies, candidates have had to be in committed relationships, and actively open to having a baby. But nobody really wants to chance a pregnancy whilst testing a sperm-altering drug, because of the unknown foetal health implications.

Isn't the thinking get the children when there's an advantage to it? So the Victorian father got custody if his kids as they could work. Now they don't and mothers pretty much always get custody.

The question is why don't more men get the snip. That would solve so many issues around feckless men.

Maybe, but that would involve having that conversation from the off - which isn’t something I’d be up for personally.

I think the separation between sex and pregnancy is big enough, but that may be because neither myself nor my partner intend on having children.

I don’t want a man to take responsibility for my contraception, and don’t see it as a huge burden. But I do involve long term partners in the discussion around the use of it - I’d never have come off it without saying, for example.

How far off?

There has been "one under development" since i was a teenager. Im 52 this year

It wasn’t ‘designed’, and pregnancy isn’t the sole purpose of sex. It can be an outcome of sex, whether desired or not.

Due to biology women have always born the burden of pregnancy.

I’m not saying anyone is proposing that, the point is that the reality is that the desire to prevent pregnancy has always been a fact of life, and a world without reliable and freely available contraception isn’t a pleasant one for women in particular.

That the birth control revolution has benefited men does not negate the greater benefits for women. Men haven’t died through lack of access to birth control. Women have, and indeed still do.

You could argue that it benefits children the most. It makes it more likely that at least the mother wanted them. And it makes it more likely they will be part of a smaller family unit and get more parental attention rather than having loads of siblings.

Men’s fertility is less limited than women’s, which is where men may benefit in this scenario or indeed where women are perhaps at a disadvantage. Yes it’s great that women can enjoy casual sex through their 20s and onwards but when they find themselves wasting months with men who are just really after the odd booty call when they are looking for a life partner it means that their window of fertility is reducing.

Fair enough, but perhaps men who don't want children shouldn't be having sex with women who do. Imo there is too much of a disconnect between sex and pregnancy, one was designed to result in the other. So many men seem unwilling to take responsibility for contraception, yet they often seem shocked when pregnancy happens, and usually blame the woman.