I just want to share my two cents here:

I am a man in my 20's. At the moment, I am seeing people casually, because that's the kind of relationships I currently want and have time for.

I have been wanting male birth control for a while now.

As a guy I feel like a lot of what we are told as teenagers by our parents, and so on is that what ever you do, dont get someone pregnant. It will ruin your life, and probably the life of the child.

I know many people who have had pregnancy scares with people who were keen on keeping the child, without discussing whether the male counterpart felt similarly.

If men had the ability to control whether they could get someone pregnant, it allows them to live their lives, enjoy themselves, and explore without fear of negative life changing repercussions.

I'd imagine the arguments for women's birth control back in the 60's (70's?) were similar, with the added issue of carrying the child.

I'm not sure why male birth control is so controversial here on this forum, and in general, it sounds like the arguments for both sexes are similar, and having control of ones own body is never a bad thing.

It's a hard problem. I think there's a simple observation that helps explain why it's going to be so hard (the article hints at this without saying it): a healthy adult man is, more or less, fertile. At all times. If a adult man is infertile--if him having sex can't result in pregnancy--there's something at least slightly wrong with him.

By comparison, an adult woman is often infertile--three weeks (ish) out of every month, or whenever she's pregnant, she can't get pregnant.

So it stands to reason that it's harder to produce male hormonal contraceptives: we can (at least sort of) fake healthy-but-infertile states of women, but there are no such states for men; we have to construct one from whole cloth, so to speak, and that's much harder.

    > condoms, which have a real-
    > world failure rate of about 
    > 18 percent

That's odd, so I did some research and found:

    > With consistent and correct
    > use, condoms have a failure
    > rate of 2 percent. The 
    > typical use effectiveness
    > rate is about 18 percent

I ... don't understand. Are people putting them on their fingers? Can someone explain?

Contraline, the polymer gel injection covered in the article, is a YC F3 (summer 2016) company. Kevin says he's on the road right now, but he'll be around later to answer any questions.

[0] http://contraline.com

This article makes it sound like WIN 18,446 is a safe and effective male contraceptive and it was abandoned completely just because it has bad interactions with alcohol. Is this actually true? There are lots of drugs on the market that have a bad interaction with alcohol. It's possible to just not drink alcohol.

While I get that you could argue that 'pregnancy is the worst std' with 18+ years-long untreatable consequences, I don't really see the appeal for something that just targets pregnancy.

As a gay male, I would tend to favor condoms and other things that have a chance of reducing std transmission. If anything, the AIDS epidemic taught us that STDs are just as serious as pregnancies.

Ultimately it comes down to not fucking complete strangers and using protection when you do. For long term relationships, there are so many options: pills, IUDs, condoms, plan b, and even abortion.

I'm much more interested in research into how to make condoms more effective and better treatments for unsolved problems, like herpes, HIV, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, etc. (antibiotic resistance is still a thing btw).

A great male contraceptive is already here and it is testosterone injections.

"The two-and-a-half-year study of 399 couples in nine countries found that the injections of the male sex hormone were an effective contraceptive for 98.6 percent of the participants."

https://nytimes.com/1996/04/03/us/testosterone-injections-wo...

Female contraceptive pills have a lot of problems. They are linked to cancer, liver disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, blood clots, high blood pressure, and heart disease.

Taking pills to inferfere with your normal hormonal and bodily functions is not a great idea, when there are other options with fewer or no side-effects. As a man, I would not take pills for contraception.

The article mentions the gel injections that destroy sperm as semen travels from the testicles. Last I heard the Indian company that developed it was still doing trials in Indian and the US (long running trials in India show it effective and reversible for years).

It's more invasive than a pill, yes, but it seems like the most viable reversible solution so far.