As a female who doesn’t want to have children, it’s always been my responsibility to ensure that I’ve taken the necessary precautions to avoid unwanted pregnancy. For over ten years I’ve endured injections, daily pills and foreign objects inserted into my body in the name of hormonal adjustment, resulting in sudden weight gain, lethargy, and general fucking inconvenience – just so that I can avoid pregnancy. The only other alternative? Condoms. Which for one-night stands are totally vital, but in a long-term committed relationship with a trusted partner, completely ruin great sex.

It’s frustrating that responsibility lies with the female for non-condom contraception.
Even more frustrating is that there have been plenty of male contraceptives developed over the years, but pharmaceutical companies have abandoned them all due to – get this – “unwanted side effects” to the tune of abdominal pain, nausea, weight gain, moodiness, headaches, depression and thrombosis. Because it’s totally fine for women to have to endure all of those things, but expecting men to? Oh hell no.

Women’s contraceptive options started out in beta phase and got better over the years – and frankly, I find it gross that pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t dare put men through the same thing.

If contraceptive companies weren’t run by old white men, there’d be no problem today – there would be SO MANY male contraceptives on the market, and there’d be more funding for research. But sadly it’s a man’s world – what other reason would there be for the fact that women are just expected to put up with shitty contraception that has barely changed in the past 60 years?

Thankfully, Indian biomed engineer Sujoy Guha has developed a long-lasting, easily reversible male contraceptive called RISUG (Reversible Inhibition of Sperm Under Guidance). A polymer gel is injected into the sperm carrying vas deferens tube in the scrotum, damaging sperm tails and heads and rendering them infertile. Administered with local anaesthetic, it has a short recovery time and is completely reversible with a second injection.

540 men took part in testing, and the contraceptive’s effectiveness was found to be 98% effective – around the same as condoms. Lasting 13 years, it’s a no-brainer that a man should be able to have this injection and save his partner from years of imbalanced hormones.

Let’s hope that male contraception starts to gain more funding and is taken more seriously – for both sex’s sake.

Love, Akika xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxox