Women had to be convinced that sex outside of commitment was greatly to be desired. Up until the introduction of the pill many, if not most, men saw commitment as the price to be paid for access to a woman . To give them credit many men desired commitment as well because of children, emotional as opposed to financial security, etc. some men remained players, they always have and always will, but the system worked most of the time. This is the part that drives me mad - any fool can point out individual tragedies like a Chekhov short story- unfaithful and/or abusive husbands, unwanted children, financial struggles, etc. but most people were as happy as they were likely ever to be and that’s human nature. They destroyed that which promoted the most good (not goods) security of two parents, one mostly at home because homemaking is a time consuming skill, to bring us to the current insatiable sex, consumer goods, madness spiral which shuts almost everyone out from the thing a factory worker with an 8th grade education was able to do - marry, buy a house, and raise an often large family. Of course 8th grade then was probably closer to the second year of university today in what they taught and expected you to learn.
Women were sold two lies- that uncommitted sex and a paycheck would set them free. Both have been disastrous - for women and children above all but also for men who lost their nurturing role as well as the provider for wife and children. Are women less critical of ideas? I am old enough to remember the big change in the 70’s when women entered the workforce in huge numbers. It wasn’t because it was liberating, it was because of the energy crisis and double digit inflation, making it hard to live in one paycheck as had previously been the norm, even for semi skilled labor. Of course working women were glamorized on TV and in magazines but then as now most women were hairdressers, waitresses, cashiers, “pink collar” jobs. To me it always seemed like a step back, the two paycheck family. The big winner was the tax man.
To answer your question about men and hormonal birth control, I think a certain type of man would have taken it if female hormonal birth control hadn’t gotten there first, but not the majority as with the pill. Men seem very wary of interfering with their functions while women seem willing to tinker with their much more miraculous and powerful bodies. It really is a shame.
I've just spent the last three days devouring your book Mary. How I wish it had been written 15 years ago! Also, the book's closing line was absolute perfection. Thank you for what you're doing.
Agree about the health risks of hormonal birth-control, and the hypocrisies around the failure to create a male hormonal-birth control pill (although I'm glad we aren't inflicting more damage to the human populace with a male Pill).
Genuinely curious how you would accommodate a woman with a non-hormonal IUD, a man getting a vasectomy, or the simple use of condoms, into your analysis? Can't intimacy and trust between partners still occur with these birth-control technologies in place?
"Would this cavalier disregard for health cut the other way, if it were borne by men?"
Just to be clear, you're asking if you would find men who would act in ways injurious to their health in the pursuit of sex? Yes.
I jest, of course. The real reason such a plan would never work is that men can think themselves much more free from the consequences of their actions (though the resultant absenteeism is clearly and enormously destructive.) I think, when the dust settles, the accelerating demise of contraceptive pills will be one of the good things to come out of Covid, now that so many people have seen that the pipeline of medical advice goes roughly [marginal research] -> [bold headlines by pharmaceutical companies] -> [nuance-free endorsements by doctors who don't have the time to investigate such things for themselves and figured they were receiving good information.]
I am with you Mary. The way O’Neil writes about “progress” is in its own way “naturalistic”. There is no accounting in the story he tells for the fact that progress is the outcome of millions of decisions by people to “make progress happen” typically for profit. The idea that someone would want to intervene by saying, “Maybe we should decide progress differently because the costs are falling on my side not yours” is treated as anti- progress aka anti the nature of the progress is ridiculous. We don’t have to accept decisions made on our behalf.
Reading this clarified why I gave up on Spiked a few years into the great awokening - to call oneself an "anti-woke progressive" is as self-contradictory as saying "I'm not a racist but". And should be taken about as seriously.
Thanks for writing this. You express so well many of my own similar thoughts after hearing about the results of this study on the effect of hormonal birth control earlier this week. Having been a fairly regular listener to O'Neill's podcast, it's disappointing to hear of his reaction to your book. But it's also not entirely surprising given his (and Spike's) libertarian leanings.
I'd like to suggest another possible consequence of hormonal birth control, however. As numerous studies have demonstrated (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32168194/), there has been a substantial decline in human sperm counts in recent decades. What if, as seems possible, this were at least partly due to the substantial increase in estrogen in the environment due to the widespread use of hormonal birth control? There has been some discussion of the possibility that estrogenic substances, like the BPA found in some plastics, could be part of the reason, yet the possibility that hormonal birth control might be playing a role is conspicuous by its absence. If pseudo-estrogens like BPA could be affecting male fertility, how could the vast amount of actual estrogen entering the environment from hormonal birth control not be implicated as well? And while the explosion of transgenderism in recent years is undoubtedly largely the consequence of ideologically motivated social contagion, it is certainly possible that the build up in the environment of estrogen due to hormonal birth control might be playing a role in the feminization of men as well.
While the consequences for amphibians and fish (along with the host of physical and mental health problems for women) should be sufficient to give the makers, promoters and users of hormonal birth control serious cause for concern, I'd like to think that the potentially calamitous consequences on the future of humanity of declining sperm counts and the feminization of men would cause even obtuse libertarians like O'Neill to reconsider their support for it.
How dare you try to take women back to the dark ages of being forced to bear one baby after another ?! Oh wait, that time never really existed , did it ? That’s just a myth like the “saving women’s lives” via abortion. People are stupid and uniformed about reality. Have you heard Loretta Lynn’s (famous singer) song I’ve Got The pill ? I understand that such stories existed but I don’t believe that they were common. We all know that sales of the pill are worth billions annually. This topic is just a money matter. On another note, I think you’re right that mothers are part of the hated group . Only single or gay women matter now .
The chronically over-educated plague rats of the University have for centuries promised emancipation and freedom while delivering only societal destruction.
I should say Mary that I read your book and enjoyed it a great deal. On your birth control point and how it lead to the sexual revolution- sex without pregnancy- I am skeptical of this formulation in the following way. I am an Arab Muslim. In the Arab world, birth control is widely used and without prescription. You can pick it up over the counter from any pharmacy. And yet there is no sexual revolution. There is little premarital sex which is greatly frowned upon. That tells me it’s not the availability of the technology that leads to sex without consequences. It needs to have an ideological accompaniment. In the West, it was liberalism. Without this third ideological factor, you don’t get the cultural behavior. The Arab world is culturally Muslim and has been able to absorb the birth control pill conservatively: to limit the number of children within the family. Period
When my sister had a stroke in her twenties, the doctors asked no less than five times whether she was on birth control. Ends up there is some data that these pills can cause blood clots.
From a Taoist perspective, the natural way is always preferable. However, skilful means and wise use of practical tools are long esteemed in our tradition. I avoided the contraceptive pill my whole life as my teenage green ethics did not allow the poisoning of aquatic life. So, being practical women, rather than people captured by any ideology, we should be talking about the almost-forgotten cap (diaphragm) and condoms, wonderful appropriate technologies! They require a familiarity with one's own body, and good trust with one's partner, both are a source of humour, sometimes, and joy, eventually. I spent my whole pre-menopausal adult life not getting pregnant at all despite plenty of great sex with men I loved. Please remember simple barrier methods exist... a dam is good enough for a beaver... We need never let ideology - of any kind - get in the way of convivial practicality and natural joy in our relationships.
We pile 'freedom' upon freedom' until ultimately there is nothing left to free. Dancers at the End of Time, our lives emptied of all consequence, what then have we achieved?
Certainly we can "go where we wanna, wanna go....do what we wanna, wanna do....with whoever (sic) you wanna do it with". Heck -- with 'whatever' we wanna do it with. But is that a better life? A more fulfilling life? A happier life? A Godlier life? Have we been, then, in this 'perfection' of satiation, equally ultimately self-actualized and fully self-expressed? Have we become our most authentic of authentic selves in a world without consequence or connection?
When 'Progress' so thoroughly disembodies us... what are we other than appetite and surfeit?
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
The question really is not Pro or Anti Tech. We are not the new Luddites yearning for a Rousseauian Natural Man in a Natural World, munching nuts and berries and wandering lonely as clouds. But equally we do not swallow the latest pill (to make us either larger or smaller)...more or less happy...more or less anxious...more or less thin. We do not 'want a new drug' that promises the elimination of everything but More, more, and more again.
Rather we want our embodied lives, gloriously imperfect, yearning for transcendence. We want the risk & price of consequence because without consequence, there is no meaning to any choice, any action, any kiss. Honestly, we want at some level, in some way to fail...and rise again from that failure: "even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter." Helprin, "Soldier of the Great War"
God save us from those who crave the 'unbearable lightness' provided by the endless/continuous "revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits". There is a choice beyond either Morlock or Eloi.
I find it so discouraging that the impacts of our selfish behavior on other species like frogs and fish are ignored or dismissed. Or worse, they're justified because we're somehow more important than they are. All tremendously foolish and short sighted notions. Dangerous, really. Nature, with her delicate systems and inflexible relationships, cannot keep up with all that we're asking of Her these days. And without Her systems and relationships, eventually our Homo sapiens days will be numbered too.
The progress boner doesn't care about your health
Women had to be convinced that sex outside of commitment was greatly to be desired. Up until the introduction of the pill many, if not most, men saw commitment as the price to be paid for access to a woman . To give them credit many men desired commitment as well because of children, emotional as opposed to financial security, etc. some men remained players, they always have and always will, but the system worked most of the time. This is the part that drives me mad - any fool can point out individual tragedies like a Chekhov short story- unfaithful and/or abusive husbands, unwanted children, financial struggles, etc. but most people were as happy as they were likely ever to be and that’s human nature. They destroyed that which promoted the most good (not goods) security of two parents, one mostly at home because homemaking is a time consuming skill, to bring us to the current insatiable sex, consumer goods, madness spiral which shuts almost everyone out from the thing a factory worker with an 8th grade education was able to do - marry, buy a house, and raise an often large family. Of course 8th grade then was probably closer to the second year of university today in what they taught and expected you to learn.
Women were sold two lies- that uncommitted sex and a paycheck would set them free. Both have been disastrous - for women and children above all but also for men who lost their nurturing role as well as the provider for wife and children. Are women less critical of ideas? I am old enough to remember the big change in the 70’s when women entered the workforce in huge numbers. It wasn’t because it was liberating, it was because of the energy crisis and double digit inflation, making it hard to live in one paycheck as had previously been the norm, even for semi skilled labor. Of course working women were glamorized on TV and in magazines but then as now most women were hairdressers, waitresses, cashiers, “pink collar” jobs. To me it always seemed like a step back, the two paycheck family. The big winner was the tax man.
To answer your question about men and hormonal birth control, I think a certain type of man would have taken it if female hormonal birth control hadn’t gotten there first, but not the majority as with the pill. Men seem very wary of interfering with their functions while women seem willing to tinker with their much more miraculous and powerful bodies. It really is a shame.
I've just spent the last three days devouring your book Mary. How I wish it had been written 15 years ago! Also, the book's closing line was absolute perfection. Thank you for what you're doing.
Agree about the health risks of hormonal birth-control, and the hypocrisies around the failure to create a male hormonal-birth control pill (although I'm glad we aren't inflicting more damage to the human populace with a male Pill).
Genuinely curious how you would accommodate a woman with a non-hormonal IUD, a man getting a vasectomy, or the simple use of condoms, into your analysis? Can't intimacy and trust between partners still occur with these birth-control technologies in place?
To quote someone... "What shall it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your own soul?"
"Would this cavalier disregard for health cut the other way, if it were borne by men?"
Just to be clear, you're asking if you would find men who would act in ways injurious to their health in the pursuit of sex? Yes.
I jest, of course. The real reason such a plan would never work is that men can think themselves much more free from the consequences of their actions (though the resultant absenteeism is clearly and enormously destructive.) I think, when the dust settles, the accelerating demise of contraceptive pills will be one of the good things to come out of Covid, now that so many people have seen that the pipeline of medical advice goes roughly [marginal research] -> [bold headlines by pharmaceutical companies] -> [nuance-free endorsements by doctors who don't have the time to investigate such things for themselves and figured they were receiving good information.]
I am with you Mary. The way O’Neil writes about “progress” is in its own way “naturalistic”. There is no accounting in the story he tells for the fact that progress is the outcome of millions of decisions by people to “make progress happen” typically for profit. The idea that someone would want to intervene by saying, “Maybe we should decide progress differently because the costs are falling on my side not yours” is treated as anti- progress aka anti the nature of the progress is ridiculous. We don’t have to accept decisions made on our behalf.
Of course that's Brendan O'Neill's take.
Reading this clarified why I gave up on Spiked a few years into the great awokening - to call oneself an "anti-woke progressive" is as self-contradictory as saying "I'm not a racist but". And should be taken about as seriously.
Thanks for writing this. You express so well many of my own similar thoughts after hearing about the results of this study on the effect of hormonal birth control earlier this week. Having been a fairly regular listener to O'Neill's podcast, it's disappointing to hear of his reaction to your book. But it's also not entirely surprising given his (and Spike's) libertarian leanings.
I'd like to suggest another possible consequence of hormonal birth control, however. As numerous studies have demonstrated (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32168194/), there has been a substantial decline in human sperm counts in recent decades. What if, as seems possible, this were at least partly due to the substantial increase in estrogen in the environment due to the widespread use of hormonal birth control? There has been some discussion of the possibility that estrogenic substances, like the BPA found in some plastics, could be part of the reason, yet the possibility that hormonal birth control might be playing a role is conspicuous by its absence. If pseudo-estrogens like BPA could be affecting male fertility, how could the vast amount of actual estrogen entering the environment from hormonal birth control not be implicated as well? And while the explosion of transgenderism in recent years is undoubtedly largely the consequence of ideologically motivated social contagion, it is certainly possible that the build up in the environment of estrogen due to hormonal birth control might be playing a role in the feminization of men as well.
While the consequences for amphibians and fish (along with the host of physical and mental health problems for women) should be sufficient to give the makers, promoters and users of hormonal birth control serious cause for concern, I'd like to think that the potentially calamitous consequences on the future of humanity of declining sperm counts and the feminization of men would cause even obtuse libertarians like O'Neill to reconsider their support for it.
How dare you try to take women back to the dark ages of being forced to bear one baby after another ?! Oh wait, that time never really existed , did it ? That’s just a myth like the “saving women’s lives” via abortion. People are stupid and uniformed about reality. Have you heard Loretta Lynn’s (famous singer) song I’ve Got The pill ? I understand that such stories existed but I don’t believe that they were common. We all know that sales of the pill are worth billions annually. This topic is just a money matter. On another note, I think you’re right that mothers are part of the hated group . Only single or gay women matter now .
The chronically over-educated plague rats of the University have for centuries promised emancipation and freedom while delivering only societal destruction.
I should say Mary that I read your book and enjoyed it a great deal. On your birth control point and how it lead to the sexual revolution- sex without pregnancy- I am skeptical of this formulation in the following way. I am an Arab Muslim. In the Arab world, birth control is widely used and without prescription. You can pick it up over the counter from any pharmacy. And yet there is no sexual revolution. There is little premarital sex which is greatly frowned upon. That tells me it’s not the availability of the technology that leads to sex without consequences. It needs to have an ideological accompaniment. In the West, it was liberalism. Without this third ideological factor, you don’t get the cultural behavior. The Arab world is culturally Muslim and has been able to absorb the birth control pill conservatively: to limit the number of children within the family. Period
When my sister had a stroke in her twenties, the doctors asked no less than five times whether she was on birth control. Ends up there is some data that these pills can cause blood clots.
From a Taoist perspective, the natural way is always preferable. However, skilful means and wise use of practical tools are long esteemed in our tradition. I avoided the contraceptive pill my whole life as my teenage green ethics did not allow the poisoning of aquatic life. So, being practical women, rather than people captured by any ideology, we should be talking about the almost-forgotten cap (diaphragm) and condoms, wonderful appropriate technologies! They require a familiarity with one's own body, and good trust with one's partner, both are a source of humour, sometimes, and joy, eventually. I spent my whole pre-menopausal adult life not getting pregnant at all despite plenty of great sex with men I loved. Please remember simple barrier methods exist... a dam is good enough for a beaver... We need never let ideology - of any kind - get in the way of convivial practicality and natural joy in our relationships.
Hmm, so it's not just increases in depression and mood disorders. It's cancer, too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9218393/
More freedom and stuff???
For what?
We pile 'freedom' upon freedom' until ultimately there is nothing left to free. Dancers at the End of Time, our lives emptied of all consequence, what then have we achieved?
Certainly we can "go where we wanna, wanna go....do what we wanna, wanna do....with whoever (sic) you wanna do it with". Heck -- with 'whatever' we wanna do it with. But is that a better life? A more fulfilling life? A happier life? A Godlier life? Have we been, then, in this 'perfection' of satiation, equally ultimately self-actualized and fully self-expressed? Have we become our most authentic of authentic selves in a world without consequence or connection?
When 'Progress' so thoroughly disembodies us... what are we other than appetite and surfeit?
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?” Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
The question really is not Pro or Anti Tech. We are not the new Luddites yearning for a Rousseauian Natural Man in a Natural World, munching nuts and berries and wandering lonely as clouds. But equally we do not swallow the latest pill (to make us either larger or smaller)...more or less happy...more or less anxious...more or less thin. We do not 'want a new drug' that promises the elimination of everything but More, more, and more again.
Rather we want our embodied lives, gloriously imperfect, yearning for transcendence. We want the risk & price of consequence because without consequence, there is no meaning to any choice, any action, any kiss. Honestly, we want at some level, in some way to fail...and rise again from that failure: "even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter." Helprin, "Soldier of the Great War"
God save us from those who crave the 'unbearable lightness' provided by the endless/continuous "revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits". There is a choice beyond either Morlock or Eloi.
I find it so discouraging that the impacts of our selfish behavior on other species like frogs and fish are ignored or dismissed. Or worse, they're justified because we're somehow more important than they are. All tremendously foolish and short sighted notions. Dangerous, really. Nature, with her delicate systems and inflexible relationships, cannot keep up with all that we're asking of Her these days. And without Her systems and relationships, eventually our Homo sapiens days will be numbered too.