Birth Control and Patriarchy ~~ Spencer Ackerman

 Vasectomies and Patriarchy

I  liked the entire article, but as half was about a very different topic (the "War on Terror"), I wanted to highlight the interested perspective Ackerman offers on an aspect of Patriarchy as it influences birth control.  Imagine if we, as a society, required men to take real responsibility for birth control with a simple and reversible medical procedure- how many unwanted pregnancies could be avoided.  One would think that if  they were at all interested in ending unwanted pregnancies, that the Forced Birth Red states would offer free access to vasectomy as a means of ending unwanted pregnancy.  Haha... like that would happen!  NB   

EVERY TATTOO YOU'VE EVER GOTTEN hurts worse than a vasectomy.

On Monday, following a legally mandated 30-day waiting period, I got a vasectomy. Without getting too personal, it was shocking to discover, even after friends of mine who've already been snipped told me what to expect, that this particular testicular surgery is a painless procedure. I won't lie. Being awake and able to see the doctor take a scalpel to your genitals is not pleasant, and I pretended to read the same couple pages of Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States. (Highly recommended halfway through.)

But I haven't taken so much as a single ibuprofen, because I haven't been in pain. I spent Monday afternoon and Tuesday mostly in bed, per the recuperative instructions I received, but I could have just as well worked. One conclusion, which I won't steer you away from embracing, is that my balls are simply that powerful.

It was hard not to see patriarchy working through my dick surgery. It wasn't just the ability to perfect a painless surgical procedure on a scrotum. It's the fact that we don't teach people with balls, as far back as in junior high school sex ed, that this painless and reversible procedure is a birth control option, and one they should consider, as adults, exercising. You don't need me to tell you about the vast, structural discrepancies between medicine focusing on men and women's pain. You definitely don't need me to tell you that the culture we live in treats birth control as the responsibility of the person who can get pregnant, rather than the responsibility of the person who can get that person pregnant. But as I walked pretty much upright out of the operating room, I thought about how preferable this would be, as a mass social expectation, to the extant alternatives of having people ingest hormones that can do significant damage to their mental health, to say nothing of inserting something into their cervix that resembles a corkscrew. Immediately it was obvious to the point of banality why that social expectation doesn't exist.

I'm not telling you what to do. But if you're a man reading this, and you have sex with people who may become pregnant, and this patriarchal discrepancy in birth-control responsibility bothers you, all I'm saying is you do not have to fear pain from a vasectomy. A friend who's had sex with someone shortly post-vasectomy also informs me that there's a possibility of (also painlessly) jizzing blood, and honestly that's just extremely metal.