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?

@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.

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

True

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?

We have for a few decades though. Is it improving

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.

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.
**

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.

What's the alt-right version of Cosmo?

A couple of generations ago ? Women having children today's mothers were born in the '60's and 70's ( although I did meet a grandparent with a 1992 birthday recently). Their mothers were born in the 40's/50's, these women would have had child allowance, milk vouchers and nursery schools available to them.Just how far back do you want to go ?

The health service is 78 years old, there is virtually no one alive who has adult living memory of the time before the NHS.

Somethings are better, some are worse. The second half of the 20th century until 2008 ( in the wealthy West) is generally considered to have been a pretty fantastic time to be alive.

That’s a tough one for me.

If women are set on having children, and have a deadline by which they’d like to do that - stick to it and don’t stay with the guy if he isn’t in agreement as you’re approaching that deadline.

Otherwise, I don’t believe men have to give us children, we’re not owed them if they don’t want them. It’s for us to set boundaries around our expectations on that.

Perhaps I didn’t phrase my point clearly enough - which was to counter the OP’s stance about whether data showed women nowadays being happier than women in previous decades and linking this to availability of contraception. Women may more or less dissatisfied now than previously, but their dissatisfaction nowadays is going to be around different measures of happiness, so there’s no way of measuring women’s happiness around contraception making sex more available unless you have those specific data sets.

There's an undertone to this whole narrative that suggests men have somehow been led astray from the true path by contraception and the permissive society and that pre contraception men were rushing to settle down and have children.

It's a complete fantasy. There's always been a fairly sizeable subset of men who didn't embrace the idea of fatherhood and family. It may be more respectable these days for men not to get married and settle down. It's more acceptable to go trekking in Peru etc than it was in the 50s etc. But that doesn't mean that the men in earlier eras were more committed husbands or better fathers.

The pre-permissive society approach of early marriage with no break clause was not in any way a pro-female model. Marriage was basically the price for having sex so everyone got married to pretty much the first person they were attracted to. They were then stuck with this person for life unless they wanted to face the stigma of divorce and most women became financially dependent on that person. It was a huge lottery and one which the woman rarely had any control over. If you ended up with a happy, stable and secure marriage you were extremely lucky. As PPs have pointed out marital rape was legal until my lifetime. In many scenarios women weren't allowed to work or to have their own bank accounts. And they had no control over their fertility.

It's not a zero sum game. Men having greater freedom over sex and fertility doesn't have to come at the expense of women.

But what does this show? We have had accessible contraception since the sixties and other, less reliable forms for far longer, so recent data does not prove your claim that contraception is the cause of any changes in happiness levels. It just doesn't.

Not the person you're responding to but possibly Evie magazine? I don't read it but have heard about it. It seems to be tradwife-adjacent content but for a slightly younger audience. The Peter Thiel link is to a period tracking app which he funded (the magazine is supportive of women doing natural cycles type tracking instead of hormonal contraception).

Oh and by the way, happiness / life satisfaction levels are strongly linked to expectations. I think it likely that women today have on average far higher expectations than in most, if not all, previous generations - expectations of workplace opportunities, exciting leisure activities and downtime, relationships where they have respectful equality and don't get abused, the chance to have a family if they want to, disposable income, fulfilling sex lives, autonomy over their lives and decisions. There are all sorts of reasons that these expectations are often disappointed by the realities of our society and our economy (indeed, some of the expectations probably clash - the old 'can we really have it all?' question.) But the contrast here is clear: a century ago most women did not expect most or all of the things on this list.

People - men and women - being free to see the world, follow their dreams, get fit and have fun is only a positive. I actually know more women who've done variants of those things instead of parenthood. In fact give or take a few details that's basically what I've spent the most two decades doing.

I don't think men should lie to their partners or lead them on, but equally I think people should be free to change their minds about what they want in life over the course of their 20s and 30s, and I also don't think men owe women children.

I don't think there's a widespread epidemic of women who want to be mothers being left in the lurch by this though. My social circles are heavily slanted towards people who've opted out of the conventional nuclear family route - child-free, LGBT, poly and so on - and I'd still say that the majority of straight couples I know have had children in their 30s, and it was something both partners wanted.

Indeed. The birth rate talking point was a bit of a giveaway. That's a drum the alt right have been beating, particularly when it comes to the falling birth rate among white, middle-class women in the west.

I can't say I'm concerned in the slightest by it tbh.

A classic - “You don’t know your own mind or what you really want, but I do!”

Complete with a massive oversimplification of biology.

Contraception is not ‘new’ - reliable contraception, however, is. Women have always utilized methods to limit births to the degree they have been able to. From unreliable and dangerous contraception, to illegal abortion, to straight up abandonment and infanticide. It’s easy to look at the past as an idyll, safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to live it (or you can pick at choose the parts you like to cosplay).

https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/ss/slideshow-birth-control-history

@gannett

People - men and women - being free to see the world, follow their dreams, get fit and have fun is only a positive. I actually know more women who've done variants of those things instead of parenthood. In fact give or take a few details that's basically what I've spent the most two decades doing.

I don't think men should lie to their partners or lead them on, but equally I think people should be free to change their minds about what they want in life over the course of their 20s and 30s, and I also don't think men owe women children.

Hear hear. I loathe the whole trope that women are all basically waiting around to be proposed to and have to use any means necessary to cajole, seduce or trick men into settling down with them.

If contraception allows a way out of that hateful narrative so much the better.

It doesn’t need to. That’s the beauty of freedom - it doesn’t have to look the same to everyone. You can choose to express your sexuality in the way that best suits you, and others can do the same for themselves.

Actually I think there is an epidemic of the unintentionally childless have a look at Gateway Women.

I feel completely unremarkable for not having children.

Like it honestly isn’t a huge deal in any way, and I’m genuinely surprised that that website even exists.

The only place I ever really feel like it requires justification, is here. I honestly don’t feel stigma for it anywhere else.

I think though there have always been a percentage of women who never marry (and so in the past never had kids). Obviously not always by choice.

I think men think it would be worse for them which is why they were so interested in enforcing monogamy - helps the average man to have a woman except after wars then there are not enough men for each woman. But look at the men's loneliness epidemic or incels... most men feel entitled to family life or a woman whereas women are likely to endure it silently and be mocked for it too.

Should people be having kids so that capitalism can survive and we can produce more wage slaves? Serious question.