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

[Macrodatarefiner]

And for sure, it is a great liberator to women too. Just on balance, men seem to get the better benefit. AIBU?

I disagree. What is true is that contraception has made it much much easier to avoid getting married both for men and women.

But your post seems to take as read that most or all women want marriage to a man and most men don't want marriage to a woman so it's making it easier for men to avoid marriage and ergo is then bad for women.

It may be true that contraception makes it easier for people not to get married. But contraception offers women two really key benefits: it allows them control over how many children they have which takes them out of a cycle of endlessly having to have and rear children. It also critically allows them to work which reduces their reliance on men in the first place. For me those far outstrip the marginal benefit of it being easier to get married.

So if your ultimate life gameplan as a woman is to get married to be "kept", your assertion is probably true. But that is the case now for fewer and fewer women and I think the benefits of birth control are far more important than this.

I thought I was being clear and succinct and I was doing you a favour by avoiding the waffle. That, and the fact that I'm never going to change your perspective on this so there's no point I writing an essay nobody is going to read.

You said others expectations have no bearing on your choices. I disagree, I can't remember who said this, but "we are never more social creatures than when we are alone". Perhaps the Marxist concept of false consciousness can help illustrate what I'm saying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness "In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation and inequality intrinsic to the social relations between classes. As such, it legitimizes and normalizes the existence of different social classes.
According to Marxists, false consciousness is consciousness which is misaligned from reality. Thus, it is a serious impediment to human progress and correcting it is a major focus of dialectical materialism."

Does the collapsing birth rate worry you at all?

@Macrodatarefiner

Does the collapsing birth rate worry you at all?

It's not near the top of my list of concerns: I think the planet is over-populated.

You're painting this as if this is something men have imposed upon women against their will but it really isn't as simple as that.

There are lots of very rational reasons why many women as well as men don't want to have loads of children. Many of these reasons are economic at the moment due to the cost of living, but beyond that, a lot of women welcome the fact that they have options in life beyond becoming baby factories, not least because they increasingly can't rely on men to provide financial security for these babies.

Why would it be a good idea to reverse that?

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.

@Macrodatarefiner
Please don't make assumptions about my ability to change my mind. I wouldn't enter a debate if my intention wasn't to understand your point of view. If you want to discuss dialectical materialism, that's a slightly separate issue from contraception and freedom of choice it affords. So, perhaps, a different thread is in order.
If you think, it is relevant, please provide concrete examples or, at least, describe in your own words how dialectical materialism ideas impact on someone's choices to abstain or have sex and how it might impact on someone's freedom to not associate with people who have different ideas. Posting Wikipedia citations doesn't really help me to see your point of view.

We know that globally, as women become more emancipated and educated and are given control over their fertility, they choose to have fewer children. Are you proposing that it’s a bad thing that educated women with social and economic freedoms are able to choose how many children they have and how those children are spaced, and contraception is bad because we need women to just have lots of babies whether they want to or not to prop up things like pension schemes and welfare? Because otherwise, it’s unclear what point you’re making.

It isn’t for women to sacrifice their bodies and their freedoms to create new people for a future society.

That may be the case, but if people don’t want babies then they can’t be forced to have them.

I’ve got a lovely family with my partner and stepson, but haven’t contributed to the birth rate in any way myself. Didn’t want to, so didn’t.

Contraception gives us that choice.

@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?

I'm obviously not talking about dialectics, I'm talking about false consciousness. Our "choices" are not our "choices". As I said, we feel as though our desires and emotions and outlooks appear spontaneously in our heads as though we exist in some kind of vacuum. We don't, we are entirely a product of our culture, of our environment. We are shaped in ways we can't begin to imagine. Which is why whenever someone says "it's my choice" I can't help but think - well no, it isn't, where is that choice really coming from? It's a result of conditioning and influences that are the water we swim in.

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

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

What are you actually suggesting? That you want me to shut up and fuck off? I live as reflexively as any of us can. Perhaps you've exposed a new frontier in theory that needs to be explored. How exactly do you propose I do what you are saying? And in what way would my choices be different if I did so? Please share

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.

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.

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.

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?

I did buy but have yet to actually read it! Based on a number of her articles I thought they were so refreshing

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.

@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 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.

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.

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

@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.

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.”