Balls Voyage

Birth control for grown-ups

As I talked about on my podcast

The Mother of it All

last week, my husband got a vasectomy after years of my ambivalence about having another kid. (Was it really ambivalence? Or refusal to acknowledge having a very clear feeling that another could would be a bad idea?? Who can say!).

There was a lot that was lovely about this vasectomy. His friends picked him up from the hospital and took him to a small celebration, complete with a cake that read “Balls Voyage!” and gave him a giant cone of shame and a prop gun that shoots blanks. Now, after he follows a strange, almost unbelievable set of doctor’s orders about expelling his existing sperm, I am done using birth control. We get to sink into the peace of accepting our family as it is, and let go of the big family we both imagined we would have but didn’t end up game/rich enough to have.

But the thing that has struck me the most, post “snip snip," as people sometimes creepily say, is the mutuality of it. I knew I would be caring for him while he healed, I knew it would allow me to take the weird plastic rod out of my arm — the one that hurt for one month after it was inserted, and made me spot for three. But I was surprised by how moved I was, after the fact, that my husband had done something uncomfortable, painful even, in service of our collective family planning. It made me think, what would our relationship be like if it had been this way this all along??

My husband and I have been having sex for over 20 years (not continuously, you pervs). In that time, I have worn an itchy, large birth control patch on my lower back. I have inserted a Nuva ring up my cooch, dealt with the discomfort when it got shoved around in there during all that sex. I have dutifully reported to the doctor’s office every three months to get a Depo shot in my ass (and I HATE shots). There’s the Nexaplon rod. There are the side effects — spotting, gaining weight, being crazy, maybe, it’s so hard to tell. Headaches. And before Obama, MONEY (I still remember the day after Obamacare was passed when I went to pick up my Nuva-ring from the grad student health center and the pharmacist told me it was free and I burst into tears).

That was just the NOT HAVING BABIES work.

I don’t think I have spent much time actively resenting my partner for not having to do these things. What was the alternative?? He has always been supportive, appreciative, even, when we were younger, splitting the cost of birth control bills, taking me to appointments, buying all the condoms we used between other methods.

But all of this work has been lonely. It has positioned me on an island, a pedestal, whatever you want to call it, of reproductive responsibility, away from him.

A recent piece by Katherine J. Wu published in The Atlantic detailed the impending men’s birth control revolution:

This coming slew of treatments will be notable not only for their imaginative delivery methods, but for their target audience: men. For decades, men hoping to manage their fertility have been limited to just two imperfect options—condoms or vasectomies. But in recent years, researchers have taken massive steps toward developing simple, convenient, and effective contraceptive options for men with virtually zero side effects. Soon, women may not be forced to bear nearly the entire burden of preventing pregnancy.

Of course there are so many larger societal implications to this. But I keep finding myself, uncharacteristically, pulling it back to the micro, to the relationships between men and women who sleep together, the distances that our current birth control practices build between us. Men, even those we love (my husband, of course), the ones ones we want to have sex with (the entire roster of the New York Knicks, minus Bojan), even the ones we would have children with (Josh O’Connor, right now, let’s go), still feel like the aggressors, who we have to work, tirelessly, to protect ourselves from.

When he could provide some form of that protection, my husband seemed so grateful to not be on the offense for once. We want to give boys and men different narratives (see

Ruth Whippman

’s fabulous forthcoming Boymom), but when it comes to making and not making babies, even within a partnership, all we offer them are the same old tropes.

This one commercial that keeps playing during the NBA playoffs shows a Modelo delivery guy bringing his boxes of Modelo all day to all the Modelo-needing masses in their various forms, and then rewarding himself at the end of the day with, you guessed it, a Modelo! The commercial tells us he deserves something nice, cause he’s a fighter. Actually, he just did his job and was very thoughtful and persistent, subsuming his own needs for the needs of those who rely on him, almost like, I don’t know, a caregiver?? I annoyingly rewrote this ad for my son. I want him to have a place in caring for whether he makes babies or not. Is that so hard to ask? I think he would want that, too.

Wu points out that, despite our passing eye-rolls about whether men would actually make the sacrifices women do if they’re not the ones who have to bear the pregnancies, men want to keep us company:

I asked Vahdat whether the typical side-effect profile of currently available female contraceptives would pass muster in any of the male methods in trials. “Based on history,” she told me, “I think that it would not.” Several other experts agreed. In 2011, a worldwide trial for an injectable hormonal contraceptive for men was halted when an independent safety-review committee determined that the drug’s side effects “outweighed the potential benefits.” The side effects in question included mood swings and depression, both of which are frequently experienced by women on birth control. And yet, most of the participants who stuck with the study said that they wanted to keep using the injection. In recent years, Nguyen has heard more and more of the men in contraceptive trials cite their female partners’ negative experiences with birth control as reason for their participation. “Many think of risk to their partner as a risk themselves,” he said.

Men thinking of ____ (insert word here) for women as _________ for themselves feels like progress, and maybe a phenomenon that is actually quite common, but the medical industry has to keep up with. Whoever is in charge of PR for hetero men, get on this, please.

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Also, this:

Did I ever tell you I like to bake cakes??? This month, I logged my sixth wedding cake and a pretty batshit butterfly birthday cake, about which a friend lovingly commented “only an ADHD brain could produce this.”

pretty

pretty crazy

I first got into cake-baking when I was caught in the long slog of getting my PhD. Everything dragged on forever. Sometimes a paper would take a whole semester. I wanted to feel productive, to make things I could delight in and then never think about again.

The absolute best cake book I have ever encountered is Sky-High Cakes: Irresistable Triple Layer cakes by Alisa Huntsman (of the Loveless Cafe in Tennessee) and Peter Wynne. Many of the pages of my copy of sticky notes on them with messages to my future self that say things like “+ 1 tsp coconut extract to butt cream” and include my letter grade for the recipe (I don’t give anything below an A-). The Strawberry Shortcake, Southern Coconut Cake, and Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake all have A pluses. In the time before children, I would whip one of these bad boys up for a dinner party or no reason at all.

There is nothing more joyous to me than spending a day or two building a layer cake. These days, I don’t get much a chance to do that, but a girl can dream (and get childcare!).

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My podcast with

Miranda

,

The Mother of it All

, is now on Substack! We’ve got fun extras for Substack subscribers, and you get episodes delivered in your inbox. Check it out here!