More than a decade after watching it, I still get twitchy thinking about “White Bear,” an early episode of Black Mirror that stands as one of the most discomfiting installments of television I’ve seen. A woman (played by Lenora Crichlow) groggily wakes up in a strange house whose television sets are broadcasting the same mysterious symbol. When she goes outside, the people she encounters silently film her on their phones or menacingly wield shotguns and chainsaws. Eventually, trapped in a deserted building, the woman seizes a gun and shoots one of her tormentors, but the weapon surprises her by firing confetti instead of bullets. The walls around her suddenly swing open; she’s revealed to be the star of a sadistic live event devised to punish her repeatedly for a crime she once committed but can’t remember. “In case you haven’t guessed … you aren’t very popular,” the show’s host tells the terrified woman, as the audience roars its approval. “But I’ll tell you what you are, though. You’re famous.”

“White Bear” indelibly digs into a number of troublesome 21st-century media phenomena: a populace numbed into passive consumption of cruel spectacle, the fetishistic rituals of public shaming, the punitive nature of many “reality” shows. The episode’s grand reveal, a television staple by the time it premiered in 2013, is its own kind of punishment: The extravagant theatrics serve as a reminder that everything that’s happened to the woman has been a deliberate construction—a series of manipulations in service of other people’s entertainment.

The contrast between the aghast subject and the gleeful audience, clapping like seals, is almost too jarring to bear. And yet a version of this moment really happened, as seen about an hour into The Contestant, Hulu’s dumbfounding documentary about a late-’90s Japanese TV experiment. For 15 months, a wannabe comedian called Tomoaki Hamatsu (nicknamed “Nasubi,” or “eggplant,” in reference to the length of his head) has been confined, naked, to a single room filled with magazines, and tasked with surviving—and winning his way out, if he could hit a certain monetary target—by entering competitions to win prizes. The entire time, without his knowledge or consent, he’s also been broadcast on a variety show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen.

Before he’s freed, Nasubi is blindfolded, dressed for travel, transported to a new location, and led into a small room that resembles the one he’s been living in. Wearily, accepting that he’s not being freed but merely moved, he takes off his clothes as if to return to his status quo. Then, the walls collapse around him to reveal the studio, the audience, the stage, the cameras. Confetti flutters through the air. Nasubi immediately grabs a pillow to conceal his genitals. “My house fell down,” he says, in shock. The audience cackles at his confusion. “Why are they laughing?” he asks. They laugh even harder.

Since The Contestant debuted earlier this month, reviews and responses have homed in on how outlandish its subject matter is, dubbing it a study of the “most evil reality show ever” and “a terrifying and bizarre true story.” The documentary focuses intently on Nasubi’s experience, contrasting his innocence and sweetness with the producer who tormented him, a Machiavellian trickster named Toshio Tsuchiya. Left unstudied, though, is the era the series emerged from. The late ’90s embodied an anything-goes age of television: In the United States, series such as Totally Hidden Video and Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape drew millions of viewers by humiliating people caught doing dastardly things on camera. But Tsuchiya explains that he had a more anthropological mission in mind. “We were trying to show the most basic primitive form of human being,” he tells The Contestant’s director. Nasubi was Tsuchiya’s grand human experiment.

The cruelty with which Nasubi was treated seems horrifying now, and outrageously unethical. Before he started winning contests, he got by on a handful of crackers fed to him by the producers, then fiber jelly (one of his first successful prizes), then dog food. His frame whittles down in front of our eyes. “If he hadn’t won rice, he would have died,” a producer says, casually. The question of why Nasubi didn’t just leave the room hangs in the air, urgent and mostly unexamined. “Staying put, not causing trouble is the safest option,” Nasubi explains in the documentary. “It’s a strange psychological state. You lose the will to escape.”

But the timing of his confinement also offers a clue about why he might have stayed. 1998, when the comedian was first confined, was a moment in flux, caught between the technological innovations that were rapidly changing mass culture and the historical atrocities of the 20th century. Enabled by the internet, lifecasters such as Jennifer Ringley were exposing their unfiltered lives online as a kind of immersive sociological experiment. Webcams allowed exhibitionists and curious early adopters to present themselves up for observation as novel subjects in a human zoo. Even before the release of The Truman Show, which came out in the U.S. a few months after Nasubi was first put on camera, a handful of provocateur producers were brainstorming new formats for unscripted television, egged on by the uninhibited bravado and excess of ’90s media. These creators acted as all-seeing, all-knowing authorities whose word was absolute. And their subjects, not yet familiar with the “rules” of an emerging genre, often didn’t know what they were allowed to contest. Of Tsuchiya, Nasubi remembers, “It was almost like I was worshiping a god.”

In his manipulation of Nasubi, Tsuchiya was helping pioneer a new kind of art form, one that would lead to the voyeurism of 2000s series such as Big Brother and Survivor, not to mention more recent shows such Married at First Sight and Love Is Blind. But the spectacle of Nasubi’s confinement also represented a hypothesis that had long preoccupied creators and psychologists alike, and that reality television has never really moved on from. If you manufacture absurd, monstrous situations with which to torment unwitting dupes, what will they do? What will we learn? And, most vital to the people in charge, how many viewers will be compelled to watch?

Some popular-culture historians consider the first reality show to be MTV’s The Real World, a 1992 series that deliberately provoked conflict by putting strangers together in an unfamiliar environment. Others cite PBS’s 1973 documentary series An American Family, which filmed a supposedly prototypical California household over several months, in a conceit that the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”

But the origins of what happened to Nasubi seem to lie most directly in a series that ran on and off from 1948 to 2014: Candid Camera. Its creator, Allen Funt, was a radio operator in the Army Signal Corps during World War II; while stationed in Oklahoma, he set up a “gripe booth” for soldiers to record their complaints about military service. Knowing they were being taped, the subjects held back, which led Funt to record people secretly in hopes of capturing more honest reactions. His first creative effort was The Candid Microphone, a radio show. The series put its subjects in perplexing situations to see how they’d respond: Funt gave strangers exploding cigarettes, asked a baker to make a “disgusting” birthday cake, and even chained his secretary to his desk and hired a locksmith to “free” her for her lunch break. “With the candid microphone, we are at the beginning of the Age of the Involuntary Amateur,” one critic wrote in 1947. “The possibilities are limitless; the prospect is horrifying.” Sure enough, a TV series soon followed.

For all that critic’s revulsion, Funt was earnest about the potentially revelatory power of his shows. He was seemingly influenced by two parallel trends. One was a sociological school of thought that was trying urgently to analyze human nature following a wave of real barbarities: the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s great purges. The other was an interest in art that captured the contours of real life, in an outgrowth of the naturalist movement that had come out of the late 19th century. Émile Zola, one of its practitioners, argued in The Experimental Novel that fiction writers were essentially omnipotent forces dropping characters into realistic situations to consider how they might respond. Literature, he argued, was “a real experiment that a novelist makes on man.”

The invention of television, as the academic Tony E. Jackson has argued, offered a more literal and scientific medium within which creators could manipulate real human subjects. This was where Candid Camera came into play. Funt’s practical jokes—setting up a subject in an elevator in which every other person suddenly turns their back to him—tended to consider the nature of compliance, and what humans will go along with rather than be outliers. Candid Camera was considered so rich a work that Funt was asked to donate episodes to Cornell University’s psychology department for further study.

Funt was also highly influential to Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist who turned his Yale studies on conformity into a documentary titled Obedience. The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, asked members of the public to inflict fellow subjects with electric shocks—faked, unknown to them—when ordered to do so by an authority figure. Inspired by the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and the experience of his own family members who’d survived concentration camps, Milgram tweaked the Candid Camera model to more explicitly study how far people would follow orders before they objected. As the film professor Anna McCarthy has written, Milgram paid particular attention to the theatrical elements of his work. He even considered using recordings of humans screaming in real, rather than simulated, pain to maximize the authenticity of the subject’s experience. “It is possible that the kind of understanding of man I seek is an amalgam of science and art,” Milgram wrote in 1962. “It is sure to be rejected by the scientists as well as the artists, but for me it carries significance.”

This studied interest in human nature continued in PBS’s An American Family; its presentation of ordinary life up close, the anthropologist Margaret Mead once argued, was “as important for our time as were the invention of the drama and the novel for earlier generations—a new way for people to understand themselves.” Throughout the later decades of the 20th century, television was similarly fixated on exposure, although shock value quickly took priority over genuine curiosity and analysis. During the ’90s, on talk shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and Maury, people confessed their most damning secrets to anyone who cared to watch. Series including Cops and America’s Most Wanted offered a more lurid, voyeuristic look at crime and the darkness of human nature.

[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]

By the time Tsuchiya had the idea to confine a man to a single apartment to see whether he could survive the ordeal, the concept of humiliation-as-revelation was well established. “I told [Nasubi] that most of it would never be aired,” the producer explains in The Contestant. “When someone hears that, they stop paying attention to the camera. That’s when you can really capture a lot.” As an organizing principle for how to get the most interesting footage, it seems to stem right from Funt’s secret recordings of people in the 1940s. Tsuchiya appeared to be motivated by his desire to observe behavior that had never been seen before on film—“to capture something amazing … an aspect of humanity that only I, only this show, could capture.” And extremity, to him, was necessary, because it was the only way to provoke responses that would be new, and thus thrilling to witness.

The reality-show boom of the early 2000s was intimately informed by this same intention. When Big Brother debuted in Holland in 1999, it was broadly advertised as a social experiment in which audiences could observe contestants under constant surveillance like rats in a lab; the show was compared by one Dutch psychologist to the Stanford prison experiment. (Another called the show’s design “the wet dream of a psychological researcher.”) The 2002 British show The Experiment even directly imitated both the Stanford setup and Milgram’s work on obedience. But although such early series may have had honest intentions, their willingness to find dramatic fodder in moments of human calamity was exploited by a barrage of crueler series that would follow. The 2004 series There’s Something About Miriam had six men compete for the affections of a 21-year-old model from Mexico, who was revealed in the finale to be transgender—an obscene gotcha moment that mimics the structure of Candid Camera. Without a dramatic conclusion, a nonfiction series is just a filmed record of events. But with a last-act revelation, it’s a drama.

Contemporary audiences, blessedly, have a more informed understanding of ethics, of entrapment, and of the duty of care TV creators have to their subjects. In 2018, the British show Love Island spawned a national debate about gaslighting after one contestant was deemed to be manipulating another. There’s no question that what happened to Nasubi would trigger a mass outcry today. But reality TV is still built on the same ideological imperatives—the desire to see people set up in manifestly absurd scenarios for our entertainment. The Emmy-nominated 2023 series Jury Duty is essentially a kinder episode of Candid Camera extended into a whole season, and the internet creator known as MrBeast, the purveyor of ridiculous challenges and stunts, has the second most-subscribed channel on all of YouTube. What’s most remarkable about The Contestant now is how its subject managed to regain his faith in human nature, despite everything he endured. But the ultimate goal of so many contemporary shows is still largely the same as it was 25 years ago: to manufacture a novel kind of social conflict, sit back, and watch what happens.

Researchers have been hard at work on a number of male contraceptives, some of which could hit the market in the next couple of decades. Options include a hormone-free birth-control pill, an injection that accomplishes the same thing as a vasectomy but is easily reversible, and a topical gel men can rub on their shoulders with little in the way of side effects. There is a recurring theme in the research on male contraceptives: easy, convenient, minimal side effects.

“From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra- close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?” says staff writer Katie Wu, our guest on this week’s Radio Atlantic. In fact, one trial was halted in 2011 because a safety committee decided the risks outweighed the benefits. The side effects included mood swings and depression, which, if you are a woman who has ever been on any form of hormonal birth control, will definitely shift your mood.

What changes in a future in which male contraceptives are readily available, and a routine part of men’s health care? For one thing, the dreamy nature of these options might inspire researchers to innovate on women’s options as well. But a lot of cultural conversations could also shift: around whose job is it to be vigilant about pregnancy, who can have sex without consequences, and what we think of as traditionally masculine.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Katherine J. Wu: ​It’s intuitive to think, you know, you need two people to conceive a child. And currently—

Hanna Rosin: Wait, what?

Wu: [Laughs.] And currently our contraception options are almost entirely limited to one biological sex: people with ovaries and a uterus.

[Music]

Rosin: That’s Atlantic staff writer Katie Wu—and when she puts it like that, yes, the math is so obvious. It takes two to make a baby. And yet when I say “birth control,” we mostly think of one: the one with the ovaries and the uterus.

I mean sure: condoms, vasectomies. But the whole complicated apparatus of birth control—decades of hormones and doctors’ appointments and implants and worry, the costs—that’s something mostly women have to deal with.

But of course it doesn’t have to be that way. Why didn’t I realize that sooner?

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And today—the rapidly advancing science of male birth control.

As a science and health reporter, Katie’s followed this research for years. When we spoke, I was curious—maybe even hopeful—to see if the impetus for the research was to ease the burden on women. Here’s Katie.

Wu: There’s a couple motivations, like certainly just having a little bit more equity in this whole world of family planning. If there are two people participating in the conception of a child, if the goal is to actually prevent that, why shouldn’t multiple parties participate? It would certainly ease the burden on women, who are the primary people having to deal with the logistics of contraception, the side effects of contraception, paying for contraception, accessing contraception—even stigma around certain contraception, especially in parts of the world where contraception is not necessarily widely socially accepted.

But also to this idea that tackling something from two different vantage points— sperm and egg—is going to make the whole endeavor a little bit more successful, right? Combining two methods of contraception: that’s not a bad way to go about it if you really want to be sure that you are accomplishing your goal.

Rosin: That’s interesting. And the scientists say this? Like, the scientists working on this say, Yes, we’re doing this partly for equity reasons?

Wu: Oh, absolutely. I think there is this growing feeling that the burden of contraception, preventing pregnancy, and taking on the risks of doing that has really fallen unfairly on women. And it’s time that we spread that around a little bit more. There are actually male participants in trials for some of these birth-control methods—for male contraception—who say part of the reason that they want to participate is they watch their female partners go through the side effects and the hassle of taking birth control, and they feel guilty, they feel frustrated, they feel like, Why can’t I be doing more to help out?

Rosin: I’m a little speechless and a little…I don’t know, I’m just heartened to hear that. It never occurred to me—maybe I’m just too cynical—but I’ve been so accustomed to thinking of birth control in the current political context that it just never occurred to me that in science there was this decades-long effort to make this whole process more equitable. It’s really nice to hear.

Wu: It is, though of course I have to jump in here with a little bit of cynicism, right? It certainly has not been perfect culturally. And I think, as encouraging as it is to hear that a pretty decent contingent of people do feel this way, of course there’s been pushback on that idea—and there’s certainly reasons why it has taken so long to get to the point where we’re on the cusp of having widely available male contraception beyond condoms and vasectomies.

Some of those reasons are definitely scientific, right? We’re dealing with a totally different reproductive system. But I think we also do have to acknowledge that people are just a lot cagier about asking men to take on extra risks, extra burden, when the viewpoint has been for decades: “We don’t have to. The women have that covered.”

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. I really want to get into that, but before we do, let’s just have some basic understanding. What are the methods people are looking at? Like, what can we expect in our local pharmacy in the men’s contraception section soon, in our near future? What is it? What are they?

Wu: Yeah, so I will caveat this to say that not all of the things I’m about to mention will necessarily be on pharmacy shelves. Some of them will have to be maybe sort of roughly akin to having an IUD placed. It will require you to go to a doctor’s office.

But there are a bunch of different options. Probably the one that is furthest along is this topical gel that has been in trials for several years now, that men can basically smear on their shoulders. And it’s this hormonal concoction that really, really dramatically plummets their sperm counts.

And if they apply it regularly, it’s a pretty great and almost side-effect-free way to control their own fertility—and totally reversible.

Rosin: Wait. That sounds comically easy. Like, you put basically like a gel on your shoulders, and it has no side effects?

Wu: Okay, it doesn’t have zero side effects, but I certainly am comparing this to a baseline of like, the typical side effects we see with female birth control. Mood swings and depression.

There is almost none of that that is being reported in trials. Men actually sometimes experience increased libido, and the investigators have been really surprised to see like, Oh, you know, there’s really not much going on here in terms of the typical side effects we see with female birth control.

Rosin: Mm hmm. Why is this irritating me? Okay. You know what—

Wu: Oh, we’ll get to it. I promise.

Rosin: Okay. All right. So keep going. What are some of the other methods?

Wu: Yeah, so another that I think is super interesting is what I sort of liken to a really easy, reversible vasectomy. So, you know, traditional vasectomy: You have this quick surgery where you go in and you’re messing with the vas deferens, which is the conveyor belt for sperm.

That is a surgery, but this new method that researchers are experimenting with, they’re basically plugging up a tube with a gel that can either dissolve or be removed at a later date. So that, you know, it’s pretty easy placement—it’s just plugging a hole, like a stopper to a sink that you can remove.

Basically capitalize on the convenience of having sperm so readily accessible, like right there in the testes, which hang outside the body. A lot harder to reach eggs that are hiding out in ovaries: deep in the abdominal cavity sometimes.

Rosin: Wait, you’re saying it’s easier? Like, biologically, the male contraception is an easier proposition?

Wu: Certain parts of it are. Others aren’t. As you can imagine, some of the more challenging things is there are so many sperm being produced constantly, and so many sperm in, you know, every attempt at conception that it can be hard to get them all. But on the flipside of that, we only have to reduce sperm counts to a certain degree, not to zero, to make someone effectively infertile, even if only temporarily.

Rosin: Right. Okay. I’m seeing a theme here, which is: quick and easy.

Wu: Absolutely. And I think about the diversity of options. I mean, I’ve only named two, but we’ve already covered something that is super long-acting and reversible—the set-it-and-forget-it kind of method. One is hormonal. One is non-hormonal. And there are others still that could be a pill that you may only have to take occasionally, rather than every day, to, like, stop your sperm from being motile.

Rosin: And how plausible are these things? Definitely a train that’s coming into our station? Like, this is definitely going to happen at some point?

Wu: I think some of these methods are far enough along—probably that topical cream, especially—that, you know, researchers, even ones who aren’t directly involved with the trials, are pretty optimistic that, yeah, maybe sometime in the 2030s, this will really become a reality.

I think even just having a couple options for men on the market will be a big step toward equity. But there are also some kind of frustrating things about how exactly that’s going to manifest.

Rosin: What do you mean? Why?

Wu: Oh, right. So I think we have both noticed, as I’ve been talking through these options with you, that these sound pretty great. Obviously some unexpected hurdles could arise, some unexpected side effects could still crop up, but so far it really is looking like we’re fast approaching a reality in which men are going to have easy access to super-convenient, super-effective birth control that hardly gives them any side effects at all.

While in the meantime, millions of women are like: Oh no, I have terrible acne again, or I have extreme pain because my IUD is doing weird stuff to my body. And that just seems like we could be doing better.

And I mean, this is not an accident. And I think that is one of the most frustrating parts of this. From the get-go, the researchers involved in developing male contraception have paid extra-close attention to: Can we develop products for which there will be almost no side effects? And can we be extra vigilant about this, so that these products are going to be basically the most convenient, easy things ever, with almost zero risks?

Rosin: Okay, now I’m speechlessly infuriated. So, okay, just to summarize: You’re just saying that what’s on the table, what they’ve been very vigilant about, is: Let’s make sure this is easy. Like, it doesn’t have side effects, and it’s easy. And they didn’t really worry about that too much with women.

Now, what I was hoping you would say is that, scientifically, it’s just too difficult, too hard to devise birth control for women that is that free and easy. But you’re not saying that. You’re just saying it just wasn’t a priority—we don’t know if it’s easy or doable.

Wu: Absolutely there have been different sets of standards for men and women. And the argument for this, over the years, has been one that—depending on who you are and how you feel about a bunch of different things—you may find reasonable or not. This idea that, yeah, it’s the woman who gets pregnant, the woman who must bear, literally, the risk of pregnancy.

And so, she has more to lose if the contraception doesn’t work. And so she should be willing to take on more risks with contraception that she takes, because she’s weighing that against the risk of pregnancy. For men, you’re taking contraception inevitably to prevent pregnancy in someone else.

And so, it’s not: Am I going to get this headache? versus—become pregnant.

It’s: Am I going to get this headache? versus—nothing.

Rosin: Right; the incentives have to be extra strong. Like, it has to be extra easy to get men to play along with this.

Wu: Yeah, I think it’s both a marketability thing, but they also do have to contend with these kind of independent safety boards. And those safety boards have certainly been stricter about saying, “Well, if we really are doing the risk-benefit calculation of every step along this clinical trial, we’re going to do the math a little bit differently, because we know what the risks are in Scenario 1 and the risks are in Scenario 2.”

And so, like, it’s kind of funny, because there have been trials for male contraception in the past that were paused by these independent safety boards because they were thinking, Oh my God, the math is not working out. The risks to men are so great. And meanwhile, participants in the trial that was paused were actually like, “Actually, I would have kept going with this if you’d let me,” so… [Laughs.]

Rosin: Wait, but were those a question of safety? Or what was the challenge there?

Wu: Right. So this was a trial that was stopped in 2011. Basically, this independent safety committee determined that the drug side effects outweighed the potential benefits. But the side effects were mainly mood swings and depression.

They were experiencing side effects that I would certainly say a lot of women go through with their own birth control—even nowadays with our updated methods.

I will freely admit that I was pretty frustrated when I learned about this. At the same time—and maybe this is the cynical part of my brain speaking up—it didn’t shock me.

I think, at face value, this illustrates the double standard that is absolutely still going on with birth control. And at the same time, it also is almost sickly validating. Because for anyone who is sitting here wondering Why don’t we have these options yet?: This is it. This can help to explain a lot, and I think this illustrates what has to be overcome.

Rosin: So we’re edging toward the scientific breakthroughs, but it sounds like we still have cultural barriers to overcome: notions about masculinity, responsibility, promiscuity—all that. After the break.

[Music]

Rosin: Alright, we’re back. Katie, we’ve been talking about equalizing this burden between men and women. What gets in the way of that? In the past, what’s stopped that from happening?

Wu: I think we struggle to reconcile some of the common side effects we associate with birth control with our modern conceptions of masculinity. Is it especially not okay for a dude to take a drug and have his sex drive go down? To undergo mood swings and get really emotional? To break out with acne in his 30s? We have, for whatever reason, socialized that to be normal and acceptable for women, but this is not a norm that we’ve been taught to accept for men. And I think there may be an additional struggle there.

Also, certainly anyone who has a problem with female contraception right now in today’s world is going to have some concerns about male contraception and, you know, the implications of that for promiscuity. How we think about sex for the purpose of, you know, not conceiving, but just having sex.

I mean, God, I would love to see people re-conceptualize this as like, “Who’s allowed to have a sex drive?” Right? We’ve been so cagey about men losing their sex drive for x, y, and z reasons, to the point that this is a prominent concern in trials for male contraception. If that can help inspire more enlightened thinking about how important it is for women to maintain a sex drive—and for them to even have a sex drive to begin with, and for that to be culturally okay—that would be fantastic.

Rosin: Yeah. Hear, hear. Okay. So, we understand now that the pill was a massive cultural revolution. We can see that now. From everything you’re saying, there is a possibility that we’re on the brink of another moment like that.

Like, there could be—maybe you’re laughing inside—but, could we, if male contraception, if they figure out how to message it correctly, if it starts to show up slowly and then be accepted in the mainstream, is there a possibility that it helps build a sense of genuine shared risk and responsibility for sex and having a baby?

Wu: I hope so. I mean, I certainly see this future playing out in gradients rather than a switch being flipped. And any step in the direction of more equity I will take it. I do fully anticipate that there is going to be pushback against male birth control. I mean, there already is. I think if you go into the darker corners of the internet, you will see that people are freaking out about the fact that these trials are even happening, and like—“Why bother? The women already have it fixed.” Blah, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine the sorts of things that people are already saying.

Rosin: Because why? Because it destroys masculinity? Like, I don’t actually know what the cultural, even if it’s the dark cultural resistance…

Wu: I will admit it’s hard for me to get into this space, as someone who has never felt this way. And I also, I am not a man. But I do think there are some concerns about masculinity. The production of a lot of sperm is very tied up in traditional notions of masculinity, and this is something that would directly imperil that. I also think there is just a lot of pushback against the newness of the notion that contraception should be a shared risk.

For people who think that box was checked long ago by products being made available for women, this seems like an unnecessary additional risk for huge swaths of men to be taking on.

Rosin: Got it. Right. Now, among the scientists, do you get the sense that the future they see is a possible replacement for the pill in lots of quarters? Because I can imagine a situation where: A couple sits down, they’re looking at a male contraception that has virtually no side effects. Most female contraceptives have some side effects—some very significant side effects. And they would choose the male contraceptive.

Wu: Yeah, it’s a great question. And opinions about this are a little divided. I think a lot of researchers are curious to see what is going to happen. I can see on an individual-to-individual basis how, for a lot of couples where the woman has really struggled with the side effects of birth control, or not wanting to go through somewhat invasive procedures to have longer-acting methods placed.

There are many good reasons to not be excited about women’s contraception right now. There may be a scenario in which male birth control replaces female birth control within those couples. But I also have heard from a lot of people that they don’t expect overall-population or community-wide enthusiasm for female contraception to really diminish all that much.

There are going to be a lot of couples who want to team up and use multiple methods at once. You know, why not? That will that much more decrease the chances of pregnancy.

It’s almost like using both an IUD and a condom, but splitting that even more equitably between men and women at this point.

And then I think this is a slightly more cynical reason, but there are going to be plenty of women who don’t trust their male partners to fully take on the responsibility, even if that does become pharmaceutically an option.

Is the male partner in the scenario going to apply that cream regularly enough?

Rosin: Right. Like, it definitely opens up the question of shared responsibility. It doesn’t necessarily explode it, so that we’re all of a sudden living in a different world. But I do feel like it inches closer. And I am thinking about what changes in society if we start to think of preventing the birth of the child as also the responsibility of a man. We kind of vaguely do now—like a condom, very vaguely. But when a man has many, many options, it becomes harder to duck, you know?

Wu: Right.

Rosin: It shifts the burden of vigilance.

Wu: I would hope so. I’m sure there will still be a lot of lingering sentiment that women’s contraception should be the biggest safety net here, because unfortunately some men will continue to see this as a still very low-stakes endeavor for themselves. But we’ll see. I think another thing that I am excited about that could shift things culturally, and just make all of this feel easier for women in a kind of indirect way, is maybe this could inspire female contraception to be less riddled with side effects, to be more convenient, you know, to take some inspiration from the male side of things.

Why can’t we revamp female contraception at the same time?

Not just by saying, “Hey, there are more options for your partner to take,” but “There are also better options for you to take, too.”

Rosin: So, just to end here: An equitable world for you, given where you know the science is going and what’s possible, what would it look like?

Wu: Well, it would certainly go beyond contraception. Probably.

Rosin: We can go there if you want. I was mostly thinking about like, let’s limit it to the pharmacy aisle. Like, if we’re talking about contraception, and I’m going to a doctor or walking down the aisle, what is equitable?

Wu: I mean, I think there are a lot of ways to imagine how that future would be different. Certainly pharmacy shelves would look different. But also would we have, you know, a revolution in medicine? Would we train a huge contingent of doctors to be a larger counterpart to what we currently see as the realm of OBGYNs?

And, you know, would those conversations start to happen with men? Would we, like, regularly check in with men about their sperm counts, their fertility, how they’re participating in their partner’s health? That sort of thing.

And I would certainly hope that there would be expanded thinking about how to access these options. Like, how are we going to think about who is able to access them, how insurance is going to cover them? You know, what is going to require a prescription versus what can just be grabbed off the counter.

If there’s going to be a huge disparity in the methods that are available, can we at least think about, like, making several options freely accessible to men and several options being freely accessible to women, so that it’s not creating or reinforcing the sort of gender disparity that we’ve been talking about?

There are just so many things. And like, gosh, even how sex ed is taught in schools. That could really start to change young people’s minds about gender and sexual freedom and just the culture around all of this, from really early.

Rosin: Oh, wow. Okay. I hadn’t thought of this. You’re blowing my mind now. So basically what you’re talking about is all of the complications and variations and the whole idiom we’re used to around women’s health. That same equivalent starts to develop for men—not just male contraception, but at every step.

Like they’re taught in schools. Not just “wear a condom” but that it’s their responsibility to take contraceptions, and how contraceptions affect them. They talk to the doctors about what the contraception will do to them. You know, they talk to their partners, and on and on. And that’s where you get a sense of equal investment, price paid and joy, in the whole process of family planning.

Wu: Totally. And I think what’s fascinating about this is: You can even think about the tale of these interventions being different for men and women. Women go through menopause. Men don’t. You know, there’s a universe in which men and women, young men and women, maybe start to think about contraception, use contraception around the same time. But maybe because men might end up using it for several more decades than women in this utopian future that we’re imagining, you know, maybe that actually helps push things, again, in the direction of, “Yeah, this is actually something that should really be a normal, natural, sustained part of how we envision male health, and what it means to be a man alive for multiple decades in this world.”

Rosin: Wow. Yes. Okay. My thinking on this has been so limited, and you’ve just thoroughly expanded it. So thank you so much for that.

Wu: Happy to help.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudine Ebeid, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.