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

Interesting that this thread comes up at a time when there's been roll back in women's rights in the US regarding access to abortion and also the beginnings of a push against contraception esp. the Pill with wellness/alt right/far right messaging about it being bad for women and tech-oligarch Peter Thiel (backer of JD Vance and one of the founders of Paypal and a shadowy version of Elon Musk) backing an alt-right version of Cosmo with similar messaging.

No OP, I don't think contraception benefits men more. It benefits women. Being able to space out our children, choose the number of children we have that we can easily support and care for, or deciding not to have children at all benefits us more than men.

Data has to compare like with like to be meaningful. Women are likely to report being dissatisfied with different things nowadays than in previous decades: with their work-life balance, the gender pay gap and the glass ceiling, with the pressures of raising children in a modern age, with financial stresses, and with things that nowadays we’ve come to accept as our rights, such as free healthcare, state benefits, funded childcare, access to education etc, which women a couple of generations ago wouldn’t have had or expected in the first place to report dissatisfaction about.

Unless you can find data which specifically allows for comparison between women’s happiness about sex and its availability between, say, 1955 and 2025, saying “women are no happier now than they were previously” (which in itself is debatable and not something you’ve provided any evidence for) and trying to relate that back to the wider availability of female-led contraception is pretty nebulous.
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The thing, a lot of these men aren't removing themselves from the father pool. They're just delaying it (to go trekking in Peru, try their own start-up, devote themselves to cycling 100 miles every weekend, going out partying 3x a week, whatever). They very often seem to end up having kids in their late thirties or early forties (I've known a few), and are then excellent fathers. This is fine for them, but it's a lot less fine for the women of approx their own age who they date, sleep with, perhaps even get engaged to - before they admit, aged 33 or so, that they don't want DC for another decade.

It means that the women they dated at uni either stick with them (and potentially never have DC) or have to look elsewhere. I've had a least one friend who stayed with a man of around her own age who kept putting off marriage and children. Eventually they split up and bloody luckily for her, she met someone else a year later, got married and had the time to have DC before her fertility ran out.

So you blame contraception for the falling birth rate? Which is basically saying given the choice women don't want to raise children. Which is an affront to you, because it offends you personally and or has ongoing consequences for the human race... So what do you propose, that women don't have access to contraceptives and are forced to birth and potentially raise children that they don't want? Unless they keep their legs crossed of course.

Also the best thing for the planet would be for us to stop replacing ourselves. I don't have any kids and I won't be having any. I just don't see the point I enjoy my life too much as it is. I've never known anybody have children and say their life got easier lol. It doesn't concern me and I am not responsible for the survival of the human race, entire species die out every day that is nature. I don't care if it happens to people, illegal be long dead why should it matter?

True

But we don't have reliable data on women's life satisfaction levels before the invention of contraception, so we can't compare.

@Macrodatarefiner

You would think women would be reporting greater life satisfaction then. But they're not having such a great time. They're not happier.

Happier about what? Better life satisfaction than when? You've making vague and sweeping statements without any evidence. If indeed women are "not happier" (than when?) where is the evidence this is connected to access to contraception?

Are you suggesting most women would prefer to go back to a world where contraception was illegal? I'm sorry I don't buy that for a second.

And the first point simply isn’t true, either, and it actually makes me cross because too many women seem to forget exactly how far women’s rights have come in recent decades and how much we take for granted. Within our own mothers’ lifetimes – and depending on the ages of some of the responders to this thread, some of their own lifetimes – marital rape was legal. The concept that a married man could rape his own wife was absurd: a married man had the automatic right to sex with his wife, when he wanted, and without a condom if he didn’t want to use one (and condoms not being particularly reliable until well into the 1960s, even if he did want to use one, it often didn’t mean anything much.) “Married men took responsibility for contraception” – did they fuck! Men went as far with their responsibility as they felt like doing, and their wives had no choice but to have unprotected sex if husbands didn’t feel like doing that. If you were a working class married woman in the 1950s, you could anticipate anywhere between half a dozen to two dozen term pregnancies in your lifetime and you wouldn’t have been in any position to suggest your husband “took responsibility.”

@ComtesseDeSpair

We have never had some glorious age where men took responsibility for contraception and unmarried women didn’t want sex, have sex, refused sex, or need to worry about its consequences. What we had was stigma, shame, mother and baby homes, abuse, backstreet abortion, and forced adoption.

This bears repeating. The idea that a return to a pre contraception idyll would force men into moral behaviour and reinforce strong families etc is a fairytale.

Before contraception millions of women were forced into pregnancies they didn't want and couldn't afford, or illegal and dangerous abortions or the shame and taboo of adoption. This is still the case in many parts of the world (and America is rapidly heading back towards that).

There have always been and there will always be unscrupulous or feckless men who will put their desire for sex above everything else. The only difference is nowadays women aren't forced to pay the long-term price for this.

Agreed.

My mum is 1 of 11 children, and was brought up solely by my grandma from being about 5 years old. She was left with 11 children, no means of decent employment, and very little resources to raise them. She died a rightfully very bitter woman. Huge family, I’ve got 24 cousins, but she experienced some real hardship having that family.

You cannot tell me that being able to choose not to have that for yourself is a bad thing.

I think you are absolutely right to highlight that 'free choice' doesn't exist in some sort of bubble, and that what we want - or think we want - is partly shaped by the messages we get from society.

HOWEVER...

An obvious critique of 'false consciousness' theory is that it involves an assumption about what a person's 'real' or 'authentic' or 'natural' desires would be vs what are their 'false', 'socially conditioned', 'unnatural' desires are on the other. No doubt you can see how this arose out of Marxist theory. We end up with judgements like 'You can't be working class and in favour of low taxes' or 'You can't be black and want to lead the Conservative Party'. Anyone who doesn't conform to what we think their 'natural', 'authentic' position 'should' be gets portrayed as a brainwashed sheep.

I don't believe that the only reason that some women seek out or accept pre-martial sex is down to 'false consciousness'. Sure, we can point out that men have more of a biological imperative to sleep around than women do, but this is too simplistic a take on humans. Desire and sexuality are complex things. Women have clitorises as well as wombs. Sex can also fulfil a wide range of purposes for women, I think.

I do have some serious concerns about where social trends have taken us - for example, I agree that there is often pressure on women and indeed young girls to do things we would not like to do, and a tendency for women's self-esteem to get bound up with sexual desirability and performance to a huge extent (which is often a double-edged sword, as men seem to sometimes simultaneously hold the views that 'she's only got value if she puts out' and 'she's a disgusting worthless slag if she puts out', so you sort of can't win).

I just don't think you can boil it down to saying that contraception is good or bad for women overall, though. Casual sex has always been around in society. There has always been prostitution and sexual violence and coercion and pressure - these things were not 'invented' as a result of contraception. Unwanted pregnancies were incredibly damaging to women's lives back in the days when 'purity' was valued, as whether the sex had been consensual or not, those women were seen as 'ruined', so there was a huge amount of stigma, ostracisation, shame and yes, of course, dangerous backstreet abortions. And let's not forget that lot of sexual violence, historically and now, has taken place within marriages, so marriage is no guarantee of safety and autonomy. It wasn't really that long ago that a woman who got married in this country ceased to exist as an independent legal entity; her husband had full control of her money and of any children they had together, and even a high level of violence and abuse from him was very unlikely to enable her to separate from him. Is it better when laws and social norms push women and men to only have sex within the tight bindings of life-long unbreakable commitments? I'm not convinced.

@Macrodatarefiner

There are biological reasons why men have a greater preference for no strings sex than women

That may be true but again I'm struggling to understand what this has to do with your central argument that contraception is better for men than women?

The bottom line is that anything which prevents unwanted pregnancy is a massive, massive bonus for women and has revolutionised their position in society, their economic freedom and their ability to dictate the terms of their emotional and sexual lives.

How men feel about that and whether that allows them to have more sex is kind of irrelevant.

I completely understand that and don't disagree. However, this is largely semantics. Pragmatically, if I have strong convictions about a particular way I conduct my life, I am unlikely to be swayed by people who have expectations of me to lead my life differently.

If I am "conditioned" to condone pre-marital sex, I am free to not date someone who doesn't want to have sex before marriage. And vice versa.

Now, back to the topic of contraception and choice... My great grandfather was an abusive man. My great grandmother did not have a free choice to consent or to refuse having sexual intercourse because refusing could lead to violence. She also did not have access to contraception. This resulted in her, a married woman, birthing 11 children in absolute poverty. 7 of those children died before the age of 2. She also did not have a choice to be educated and died virtually illiterate. My grandmother also did not have a choice of early years education. She was 6 years old when she was pulled out of school to look after her 2-year-old brother alone while her parents worked. The fact that she, a married woman who did not have pre-marital sex, then went on to become a prominent economist in her 30s was entirely due to availability of contraception. Frankly, I find it hard to care about how benefits of men vs women compare when I have stories like this in my own family.

Completely agree read it then read it again. Anyone with enough interest to comment on this thread would enjoy if not agree with it.

@Macrodatarefiner Have you read it? Is this where your question originated?

The latter point simply isn’t true. Between the mid 1930s and the early 1970s, there were well three quarters of a million adoptions in the U.K., with 96% of them being babies under the age of one year, and the vast majority of those babies having living parents. In 1968 alone, the peak year for adoptions, over 24,500 children under the age of one were adopted. Additionally, during that time, over 50,000 older British children were sent to children’s homes and labour farms in the British colonies. The vast majority of those children, too, had a living parent - most often a parent or parents with so many children that they simply couldn’t afford to feed them all.

We have never had some glorious age where men took responsibility for contraception and unmarried women didn’t want sex, have sex, refused sex, or need to worry about its consequences. What we had was stigma, shame, mother and baby homes, abuse, backstreet abortion, and forced adoption.

Before the pill most married couples used condoms and the responsibility was therefore on men. Now it's on women like many other things.

It also makes it much harder for unmarried women to refuse sex.

You can choose to have sex with 100 men every year. You can choose to have sex with only one man in your entire life. In reality, the vast majority of women sit somewhere in the middle of those extremes and will commit to a small or medium sized handful of serially monogamous sexual and romantic relationships over the course of several decades of their adult lives. And contraception gives them the freedom to have that sex without worrying that every time they do so, whoever it’s with, they aren’t risking pregnancy; and they don’t have to commit to marriage with a man just to have sex so as to ensure their financial security if they become pregnant.

All of these things are incredibly, phenomenally good things, that your grandmothers would have bitten their arms off for, despite the additional consequence of relatively risk-free sex changing attitudes around availability of sex.

Perhaps you should focus more on how this applies to your choices and your beliefs rather than presuming false consciousness on behalf of others?

@Macrodatarefiner

Because I won't be long before the consequences of the low birth rate start to bite. I would wager that most people having babies right now aren't thinking about how much harder their lives will be than ours, but these kids will be acutely aware of it, and are thus less likely to have more children. No population has ever recovered from this.

Even if you accept that the argument about the declining birth rate is true (and there are different perspectives on this), I don't understand why contraception is supposed to benefit men as a class and not women as a class? Why should men be comfortable with a declining population and women not?

You seem to be jumping around from positioning this as an argument about women wanting marriage and babies and men not to an argument about the declining birth rate. Which is it?