The Link Between Birth Control Pills and Sex Drive

Is there data that suggests testosterone would work as a male birth control?

Has broscience gone too far?

My understanding is that one reason for lack of prescription birth control for men is that the side effects of a drug will inevitably outweigh any possible health benefit from avoiding conception, which for a male is of course nil. Birth control is easily justified from a medical perspective for women because pregnancy carries many health risks.

> I'm also surprised that male birth control pills don't exist yet. In my mind it is the easiest thing ever, exogenous testosterone basically solves the problem.

It changes social behavior, including voting patterns, in ways contrary to the desires of our rulers.

There are two problems. The first is while testosterone reduces fertility, it does not reduce it sufficiently without another steroid like progestin. The second is that testosterone must be injected or reliable birth control and self-injection is a problem for many men.

Initially hormonal BC was invented for men, but the side effects annoyed the male doctors, so they transitioned to female BC.

Also all of the plastic

I mean, it’s a “birth control” pill, so the birth rate falling is probably not an unintended consequence

It's likely to have increased divorce rates - theoretically, women will be on the pill whilst single, get married and want to have children and then when they come off the pill, they'll find different people attractive. Unfortunately it's difficult to distinguish this hypothetical effect from social factors which lead to people taking in the pill in the first place, so correlation studies must be almost impossible to do correctly.

EDIT: Looks like I might be completely wrong (although the caveat about hidden variables stands):

"But an even bigger positive is what comes when we look at the divorce rate. Despite the whole my-sex-life-is-meh-and-I-am-not-that-attracted-to-my-partner thing, women who chose their partners when they were on the pill were significantly less likely to divorce than women who chose their partners when they were off it."

https://behavioralscientist.org/quality-sex-relationships-bi...

There's a lot more detail in the link.

You should have been there when teenage girls were first allowed to become ambitious to consume the early formulas, saturating them with much higher levels of female hormones than pills ever since.

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/852807455/how-the-approval-of...

Yes, I also agree there’s a parallel here. Something that affects a major bodily function can’t possibly be free of serious side effects. Reproduction or metabolism- how would it be possible to chemically alter this and not have it affect you in other ways?

I hate to be cynical, but all of healthcare is like this. The focus is on a quick fix for whatever symptom is present and anything that affects people's state and wellbeing is dismissed as in their head for decades until(if ever) the evidence to the contrary becomes undeniable.

Wegovy is not a new drug though. It’s something we’ve used for a while but now it’s being considered for a new purpose.

Lack of androgens is more important to breast development than presence of estrogens is- men already naturally have enough that without the testosterone, they'd develop breasts.

It takes a lot more to cause gynaecomastia despite it, and the amounts that get into drinking water are extremely trace.

It's much more likely to be all the endocrine disrupting forever chemicals, particularly micro- and nano-plastics, and metabolic disorders secondary to all the stuff wrong with people's health nowadays(air pollution, sleep disorders, sedentary lifestyles, gut dysbiosis, etc)