Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Pill: Sexual Liberation?

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

At least 160 million people worldwide take some form of the contraceptive pill. So where did it come from? Who invented it and why? And how has it changed the world?Kate is joined by Donna Drucker, author of 'Contraception: A Concise History' and historian from Columbia University. Together they discuss whether the contraceptive pill has been a force for liberation.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Petwitzers Sheets. This is a spicy podcast. This is a saucy podcast. This is the kind of podcast

that might make your granny clutch her pearls. Well, not my granny and probably not your granny to you. But you know what I mean. So in order to protect everybody, I do have to let you know. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adultery way, covering a range of adults,

subjects and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning because fair dues, we did warn you so now you can't get upset with us. Right on with the show. In 1975, country music superstar Loretta Lynn dropped one of her most successful, not to mention her most controversial songs. It was titled The Pill and it told the story of a young woman who's decided to go and have herself some fun because she has got a reliable contraceptive now, the pill. She says she's sick of having baby after baby after baby while her husband goes out at night chasing other women. But oh, how the tables have turned. We would play you some of that song right now, but frankly, we couldn't afford the licensing fee, but trust me, it is a belter

of a tune. And there is no doubt that the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1960 changed everything. And Loretta Lynn was a woman who knew about it. And Loretta Lynn was a woman who knew about it. She had six children, four before the age of 20. Yikes. The pill promised liberation for women, but at what price? How much do we really know about its dark and troubling history? Who was it tested on, for example, and what were the early side effects like? Heads up, it's pretty gruesome. So let's break out the synthetic hormones and find out more. What do you look for any man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. When the pill was first introduced, it was rightly heralded as a game changer, an emancipatory tool that allows. women to control their reproductive systems for the first time.

But this was a very hard-won battle, and it's one that's still being fought all around the world to this very day. So what part did the pill play in the social emancipation of women, and what can we learn from its complex history? Today I am joined by Donna Drucker, author of Controception A Concise History, who is a historian at Columbia University. We are going to dive into the early history of the pill, how it was tested, who it was tested on, and just how mad some of the early versions of this were.

Are you ready to do this? I'm ready to do it. Let's crack on. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Donna Drucker. How are you doing? Oh, I'm doing very well. How are you? I'm so excited to talk to you about this. I'm surprised we haven't had this as a subject before now, but I'm thrilled we've saved it. just for you. You are the author of Contraception, a concise history, and we're here to talk about the pill. But before we get to the pill, can I ask you, what was the origin story of that book? Do you remember when you had the moment of like, I must write about this? Yes, I did my PhD

dissertation on Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Reports. That'll do it. And in studying them, I realized that he hardly ever talked about the role of contraception in a sexual behavior. He doesn't. And being so deep in his kind of thinking and world, I didn't really pay that absence all that much attention at first. But then I thought, wait a minute, of course contraception will play a very significant role in people's decision to have sex or not. And so I thought, well, I want to understand. the history of contraception better so I can understand its role in the history of sexuality. And that's the origin of the book.

I never really clocked that before. I've read Kinsey a number of times. And no, he doesn't mention contraception in that very much at all. I'm trying to think, does he say anything about it at all? Not really. I think he omits it or puts it to the side because contraception was really kind of one of the only ways that scientists could talk about sexual behavior. And my thinking is that he thought it was kind of a well-studied topic and he wanted to turn the conversation about sexual behavior to actual sex and not focusing on how to prevent pregnancy. But it's just speculation. Well, good call. For anybody who's listening, who isn't aware of who Kinsie is and what he did, could you give us a very quick overview?

Sure. Alfred Kinsey was an American scientist. He was originally an entomologist. He studied a species of insect called the Gull Wasp. And in the late 1930s, he became interested in human sexual behavior, in part because he was writing textbooks on science education and realized that they really said nothing about human sexual behavior. And also, because, because, students were starting to come to him to ask other questions about biology. And he thought, I should start a marriage course. And so in 1938, he begins a marriage course for students who are engaged or in the early years of marriage. It takes off like gangbusters. And then he realizes, time to leave the gall wasps behind. You know, he starts interviewing people up in Chicago and Indianapolis.

the marriage course gets left behind and it kind of is more sort of snowballs into the two large volumes, one called sexual behavior in the human male, one called sexual behavior in the human female. They come out in 1948 and 1953 and they're these enormous compendiums of human sexual activity that still have resonance in sexology today. And it was a proper earthquake moment. I mean, ever since then, there's been a lot of sense. scientists going back to it going, excuse me, Kinsey, just a second there. I think we might have some issues with bits and pieces of this. But what it did is it normalized a lot of taboo sexual

behaviors, said things like masturbation is pretty much a universal experience, sexual dysfunction, lesbianism, gay, all of these kind of sexual things. It basically said that it's not a moral issue. This is normal human behavior. Absolutely. Absolutely. He, he documents an incredibly wide range of behavior, thought, desire, experience, and listeners may know him from the zero to six scale, or what's called the Kinsey scale, which is something you can take a quiz about online, but really you just need to look at it, which just places people on a scale from zero to six in terms of how heterosexual they are

to how homosexual their feelings, desires, behaviors are. I love that. And this came out, as you said, in the 40s and 50s. And recently I've been doing some research around the history of sex ed. And it's really interesting that, because when you were saying there that he started his course on married life, what you notice is that wherever any brave soul attempts to do this to give people the education they need, often around contraception as well, is there's an absolute mad scramble for it. People are desperate for this information.

And then the authorities get involved and it all gets shut down. And it's like, right, you can't do that. There was a pamphlet that was printed in London. It came from an American one. It was like fruits of the something or other. At one point, they were printing like over a thousand a day, just trying to get this information out there. And then it all got shut down.

People must have been absolutely starved for this kind of information about sex. Absolutely. I mean, he was teaching an Indiana university, which was, to some extent, still is in rural southern Indiana. And, you know, you couldn't read any book. books about it. If you were to stand an average student, you might have seen like some kind of skin magazine, but it would be very hard to find films, non-existent. Television wasn't popular yet. So there really wasn't any source of information besides maybe your friends giving you poor

information, maybe a doctor telling you to abstain and kind of your own, your own experience. The levels of sexual ignorance, they must, especially around, contraception? And what kind of contraception was even available in the 1940s and 50s? 40s and 50s. I'll say men for anyone with male anatomy would be condoms. Yep. Although they would also not be all that easy to find if you didn't have a lot of courage to ask the pharmacist. A wink, wink, nudge, something for the weekend, sir. Yeah. Women, only married women, in most cases, could find a cervical cap or a diaphragm from a physician.

But again, they weren't very, very popular. You would have had to make a good case for it. They weren't all that easy to insert or remove. So there was a hunger and a need for some other kind of contraception that would be easier to use, be more discreet, less messy. That wasn't as kind of dependent on the moment. nicely put as other methods were. Can you paint a bit of a picture about why reliable contraception was so important? Because it goes

beyond just like protecting about STDs, which is also incredibly important. But why at this time, women in particular, was contraception so badly needed? It's a time when, at least in the US, women had the right to vote, but that's the right to vote, they still didn't have a lot of other rights. So it was very hard to prosecute for sexual assault or rape. On a broader scale, women couldn't get loans, bank loans or credit cards. And so they're more restricted financially. They have less access to higher education. So if they are pregnant, they're very much tied to a particular man. If they can get married or they can get married or They want to get married.

But if they don't want to get married, they don't care for the man or he doesn't care for her. There is an incredible stigma against unwed mothers. I think, of course, it's not just the case in the U.S. It's a case a lot of countries. And so if there's a way to prevent pregnancy for encounters that are pleasurable or not, then that can save a lot of grief, sorrow, despair, financial ruin. It goes, really does, contraception really does go to the heart of women's liberation in so many different ways. The ability to control how many pregnancies you have, because we're existing in a system where women are financially dependent upon men, especially if they get pregnant. You have to get married. He's going to support you. But having all of those babies, I don't know, like, what's the largest family number you've ever seen in your research. I've seen some, like, shocking ones.

Maybe around 20. I think it's like, I mean, but. Ow. Ow! The physical demand of that of birthing 20, carrying and birthing 20 babies. I can't imagine. Unbelievable, right? And of course, that then has a huge knock on effect, doesn't it?

Like, you can't go and get a job or have much of a social life or any of the other stuff if you've got 20 babies. No. Or even one baby, really. If you want to, especially at the time, you know, of course, household chores took a lot more time than they do. Now, they're love less conveniences. And so if you had more pregnancies, you know, you were also doing all the, taking care of more children with all these other household chores. And your husband wasn't going to help. It wasn't his job. So your chance to develop yourself in other ways were very, very limited. So you can see there is this huge need for some kind of reliable contraception. I am going to have to tell people now that this history is not quite the,

yay, well done, guys, that you might have been hoping. No. But tell me a little bit about the contraceptive pill and where that came from. The contraceptive pill comes out of scientific research on hormones and also on steroids. So once scientists found out the different kinds of hormones in the body and what had a rough understanding of what those hormones could do, of course, they realized, well, hormones are required for pregnancy. And then the next step in the logic chain is what hormones can be then stopped to prevent pregnancy. And there's really kind of two pharmaceutical companies in the 40s that start investing in this research. I will focus on the U.S. companies.

There are some other European companies as well. And they're called Syntex and Searle. Their names aren't all that important. But two scientists discover this connection with a progesterone. And so Gregory Pinkis is a Harvard scientist who ends up getting denied tenure. and he establishes his own research foundation, and he's doing research on preventing pregnancy in rabbits, but he doesn't have any money.

So the dream team of four that come together in the U.S. are Pinkus himself, Margaret Sanger, who's a longtime birth control advocate since the 1910s. She's promoting the diaphragm cervical cap, but she doesn't have the money, but she has the motivation and the will. Catherine McCormick is the heiress to the International Harvester Company. Oh, Kaching, hello.

Yeah, so, and her husband passes away. He was mentally ill for a very long time. He passes away in 1947, and she has a lot of money. And she also is the first woman to have a degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So she has the interest and the money. the last person involved is a obstetrician gynecologist called John Rock. And he's in Massachusetts and he's very Catholic. He's very religious.

But he is also seeing the wear and tear on women who can't control pregnancies. And so he is teaching women the rhythm method or what we would know later is the rhythm method. What is the rhythm method, Donna? And please don't do this at home. Yeah, it's something. So this is a sort of a bit of a side trip, but I guess in addition to mechanical methods like the condom in the diaphragm, one scientist in Japan and one in Germany discovered the time of ovulation. It was possible sort of to time heterosexual sex so that you would reduce the risk of having sex when the woman was ovulating. The Roman Catholic Church loves this method because there's no interference in the act of sex, but it's a way, sort of, again, this is all sort of, it's a way to somewhat control the chance of a pregnancy.

So Rock is a firm believer. He tries to teach this method. It can sort of work if you're like very, very rigid about it. But you end up denying your desire because when women are ovulating, that's when they want to have sex because their bodies are like, hello. here we are, already to go. But he realizes this isn't practical working. And so he's the one who has access to patients who might be able to test the pill on women. So the four of them together, their different strengths are able to produce a trial pill. And it is tested. I mean, here comes the part where kind of like scientific motivation comes into,

to contrast with how we think about contraception now, which is these folks were mostly more interested in population control than they were in women's autonomy. And so they have call operators who test the pill on some of Rock's patients with consent, but also involuntarily on women in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. And also, in Puerto Rico. Why did they go to Puerto Rico? Puerto Rico, because its relationship with the U.S. mainland was changing. There were a lot of wonders about whether Puerto Rico would become the next state. And also it had a burgeoning population and basically no access to any kind of birth control. Pink has had some connections to hospitals and physicians in Puerto Rico. And so an

version of the pill was tested there. At the time, there's not like the apparatus that we think of today with any kind of medical trial, like control groups and, you know, consent forms and oversight, federal oversight and things like that. Who were they testing it on? I mean, Puerto Rico women, but like what was the demographic of women they were trialing? It was mostly women, Puerto Rican women who had probably at least one child to show that they were fertile themselves and they didn't have, they didn't have any fertility problems that would kind of confound the results. So they found like nurses and hospitals. They went into poor neighborhoods to ask women to give this a try. And a number of women did go through the trial. And They find that the pill works, but it also comes with tremendous side effects. Because the hormone levels were really high, weren't they? Yes.

What are we talking about here? What kind of things are being reported? So in terms of side effects, there's the same side effects we see today, and we'll get to that. But they're more extreme. So nausea, weight gain, bloating. migraines, more seriously, blood clots and strokes. Oh, wow. Yeah.

So Pinkus and his collaborator in Puerto Rico, it's a woman physician named Idris Rice Ray. And they recognize the side effects, but they're not all that concerned about them. They think the pill is so good, it's so effective, it will do wonders for, you know, population control and these women are just complaining. So they knew about these side effects. They'd seen them. Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely. And they went stuff and nonsense. You're just making a big fuss about nothing. Yeah, yeah. Women are making a fuss. Like the benefits outweigh the costs from our perspective. And so the pill is eventually approved in the US for regulation of menstruation in

1957 and then it is approved for contraceptive purposes in 1960 and then the story changes quite a bit I'll be back with Donna

after this short break birth control advocates you know cozen up to eugenicists aside which is always horribly disappointing whenever you study this history because you're rooting for people

so hard you're like Margaret's saying and and Mary Stokes, my God, I want you to be a hero, but why are you doing the awful thing? Stop it. But anyway, that's just what happened. But it was controversial the birth control movement. It was people got into a real twist about it. So when these guys came back from Puerto Rico and went, we've got the pill. How was that received? It was seen as a major social shift because it could change interpersonal relationships. So a woman could now take a pill and control her fertility without telling her husband or her male partner.

And lots of nation states were like, hello, okay, we can use this to control our populations. We can keep people we don't want to be having children from having more children, and we can take it away from people we do want to have children. So it becomes part of a global interest in population control, either to forward the number of children for certain people or to limit the number of children, other people have, of course, very much tied up in racism. Yeah. And it's all sounding depressingly familiar even today, isn't it, with the pro-natalist movement. So in the early days then, was it a case that you could just go down to your local pharmacist and say, hello? I'm a woman who'd like to have sex, please. I like the pill.

No. Surprise. It was at first very hard to obtain, especially if you were not married. Gotta be married, number one. Yes. The rights of unmarried people to have contraception or to have access to it wasn't permitted until 1973. And so for a good, oh, 13 years after the pills approved, you could get it in that period, but it wasn't federally allowed. Even married people officially couldn't get it until they were, until 1965.

And so it spreads like wildfire across countries. It's not that hard to formulate. So lots of different companies start to make it, get the. patent. And they were all side effect free them presumably because those women in Puerto Rico were just making a big old fuss about nothing, right? Yeah, you know,

the dosage was very high in terms of what we have now. The figures that I have are that the original dose of NOVID was 9.85 milligrams of progestin and 150

micrograms of estrogen. And then by 2012, the average dose was 0.1 to 3 milligrams of progestin and 20 to 50 micrograms of estrogen. Jesus. What was happening to these women then? The reporting of side effects finally reaches a critical point about eight or nine years after the pill is introduced in the US. There were deaths. Oh, yes.

This isn't just headaches and sore boobs going. No, no. The blood clots and the strokes were very real, very serious, and quite deadly. There was a journalist named Barbara Seaman who ended up writing a book about this called The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, which came out in 1969, and it precipitated, you know, federal hearings about the side effects and the deadly side effects of the pill. And so over time, the pill effects are diminished due to the lower, lower dosage. But as anyone who's taken the pill knows, you know, different formulations can still generate these same kinds of side effects. Can you either confirm or dispel a myth for me? The reason why, and if you're not on the contraceptive pill, this is a little life lesson for you, The contraceptive pill, you take it all month long, apart from seven days where you either take a placebo or you just stop taking it and you're supposed to have a period, a bleed in that break.

Can you tell us why they factored that into the design of the pill? Yes, so it would mimic your standard menstrual cycle. So it's more of a psychological component of pill taking that you suppress your hormones for, you know, 20, 21, 22, 23 days. And then you have like a normal, and I'm using air quotes here, a normal menstrual period in those days. Was that supposed to placate a lot of the naysayers about this, sort of like the Catholic Church and religious figures that you could have a break so it was more natural? It's more for women's psychology. So if you were, if you were used to having a menstrual period. If you didn't have one at all, it would sort of be very strange and kind of unsettling.

And so this is kind of an imaginary period of sorts to kind of match your, what would it be a so-called normal monthly cycle. But we don't actually need to be doing that. Nope. That's just so shitter. All of those periods and we just didn't need to be having this. It's ridiculous. So many tampons. So many tampons were not needed. Right. So what was interesting, I thought when I was reading into the history of the pill, I can understand why the church might be going, no, I very much think not. I can understand why moralists might be freaking out.

But I was quite surprised to find there was some resistance from within the early feminist movement itself. I thought that was really interesting. The argument being that it actually being on the pill means that some women might feel pressured into having sex with a man whereas before they could have said no. I was quite surprised to read that. Yeah, I think that's a fairly uncommon argument. Yeah. Yeah.

That in a way, the pill is sort of for men so that they can have sex whenever they want without any consequences. So it's kind of a, like, it's still kind of moral framework that any time you have sex, you should be prepared to have the consequences up. of it. Yeah, I'm not a fan of that argument either. We're going to have to talk about,

it's already been quite dark already, but one of the strangest things about this history is that on one hand, in one direction, you've got women fighting for all women to have access to the pill, not just married women, not just women that can pay for it, blah, blah, blah, blah. But going along parallel lines are the fact that the American government and maybe other governments are using the pill on poor people to stop people. them having children and you start to have, I guess it's not the pill, but enforced sterilizations start to happen as well. And it's really strange that you've got some women saying, we want this, and then other communities going, stop doing this all at the same time. Yes, this kind of,

especially comes into play when different means of taking anti-pregnancy hormones come into play. So it's a little harder to regulate or to watch over. over people taking the pill if you have to take it every day. But once it's available, at least in some countries, in a shot, I'm thinking especially at the Depot-Pervera shot, like once it's possible to give people a monthly shot or a shot every three months or so, it's much easier to regulate. And so the most prominent historical example of this is in South Africa where, you know, an apartheid government wanted to reduce the number of black Africans who were becoming pregnant. And so they would have these vans, like health care vans that would go to rural areas and do some kind of perfunctory, you know, medical care.

But these vans would also be stocked with Adipa Pereira. And people would get these shots. They were told it, you know, it was good for them and so on. but of course it was really to control black African populations. I suppose that's the most obvious and extreme example, but there are examples all over the place of local governments and local authorities deciding that they're not going to risk these poor young women becoming pregnant and injecting them with this, what was it called, the monthly injection pre- Depot Pereira.

Thank you. That's the one. And it's when I was first reading about this history, it genuinely shocking because it's within living memory. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So that's happening awful. When does the pill become mainstream, I suppose? When does it become accessible to everyone and less of a health risk? Really when I would say probably by the late 1980s, early 1990s, it takes time to kind of tinker with the formulations. Some of them are to see what different levels.

of hormones kind of work for different kinds of people. And then once the patent expires, then the pill can be manufactured by any company, which has pharmaceutical capacity. And I don't even know how many pills, different combinations of pills there are on the market, you know, 40 or 50 at least. And also at the same time that, you know, pill formulations were being experimented with was also in addition to Deepa Rivera, you could also get birth control from the NUVA ring. So it was the ring that you inserted in your vagina for three weeks at a time and then took it out to have your kind of so-called normal flow. You could also much later have a hormonal IUD. So there used to be, of course, the copper IUD, which still does exist, but also those kind of two technologies kind of

come together in the form of a hormonal iUD, which can last like five to eight years depending on which one you buy. So the pill isn't kind of just the pill. It's really like this whole world of hormonal management of pregnancy or non-pregnancy. It's interesting that you said it probably wasn't until the late 80s or 90s that it was genuinely available for everybody.

And hopefully governments had stopped using it to make and people infertile without their consent. But I've often heard it linked said that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was linked to the pill, that suddenly the pill arrived and everybody threw off their knickers and started dancing around in wild, reckless abandonment. And I just wonder, as someone that studied this history, is that oversimplistic? What do you think? In a way, it just kind of sounds right.

Like, here comes the pill and then you're right. Everyone, you know, there's, it becomes like a plot point in movies, like prudence in the pill. Yeah. And it's kind of made fun of. It enters popular culture. And so it just seems like, right, but in reality, it's much harder to, to trace. There's so much else happening in the 1960s that would kind of potentially contribute to, and have feelings of sexual free. And again, we're thinking sexual freedom for for who and under what condition at what age, what social class and so on.

And so kind of that idea of connecting the pill and the sexual revolution kind of loops back around to that argument you brought up a few moments ago about was the pill really for women. and in a way you could see the pill as something that's great for heterosexual men and whether they don't have to worry about getting women pregnant anymore. So it's great for them. But the women can enjoy sex too, of course, but they're still the ones whose bodies are experiencing, you know, all the potential changes and side effects of the pill. So it's not quite as freeing for them.

I'll be back with Donna after the day. short break. I think it was Time magazine who listed the pill as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century because once you can't move past the dark and the nasty history of it but the impact of this of this drug was undoubtedly colossal on women and on women's freedom. What was the long term result of being able to reliably control your fertility? It's really extraordinary in a lot of ways because it's also a different way of thinking about medicine because it's a preventative, but it's also taken by people who are healthy. And it also could be taken for someone's entire fertile life, you know, 40 years or so. So it really changes how

people think about medicine and what medicine can and cannot do for your body. And again, it does change for women who are taking it voluntarily, of course, it changes their own heterosexual relationships. And so they have more control over deciding when to be pregnant, when not to be, although it can also be a point of coercion if someone, if a partner, you know, takes your pills away or doesn't allow you to refill your prescription or things like that. And it changes kind of states' relationship to its population because the states now recognize, well, you know, we can use this to control who gives birth, but also like in the Eastern Europe from the 60s, you know, through about 1991, the pill was hardly available at all. And that was important.

part because countries like Romania were also outlawed abortion because Romanian government wanted to promote burts. And the pill was seen as sort of like this decadent Western invention. So it's unevenly accepted and spread throughout the world. But it also, you know, changes women's relationships with their bodies, with medicine, with men between them and the state. It upends all kinds of relationships. I read one article about the history of the pill and it made a point that I hadn't even considered before, said that being able to control when you have a baby meant that women could become more established at work and more established in their careers. I'd even thought of that. And it made the point that it was pretty, like, why would a woman go to university in like the

1940s? Because she was inevitably going to have to get married and have a baby and then whatever career she'd had, she's going to have to give it up because you can't do that. with a baby. And it made the point that being able to control that means that women can get pregnant later in life so they're more established in their work. They can have a career. I thought that was fascinating. Do you think that's true? Yes, because I don't know about other countries, but I know in the US, it was until the 70s, it was perfectly legal to fire someone if they got pregnant. Yes. Yes. And so if women could take the pill, then they can avoid being fired. I mean, there's, you kind of think about the sexual revolution argument, like, oh, it's a way to

let people have more pleasure and can encourage like enjoyment, you know, without the fear of pregnancy, but it's also, in a way, the pill's a very practical tool for managing your employment status and your finances before laws protected you against being fired. So as a final question then, we should probably talk about the future of the pill, specifically. Will men ever get a problem? pill all of their very own. Well, it's people have tried. What's the issue?

It has side effects. That's side effects. I know. So there was a international study done between 2008 and 2012, which was an injectable contraceptive vaccine that included regular doses of both a long acting. progestogen and a long-acting androgen, you know, which kind of suppresses sperm production. It was tested on men who were in a long-term monogamous partnership for at least one year, and after the test was over, men's sperm count would return. Turn to normal. It had an effectiveness

rate of 92.5%. Okay. That sounds good, but isn't the pill at like 99? Something like that. But a independent data safety and monitoring committee established by the WHO terminated the study early due to men's complaints. And their complaints were all the same ones that women had been putting forward since the 1950s. You know, headaches, dizziness, weight gain, loss of libido, all that kind of thing. And of course, when the study was terminated, there was lots of conversation like, oh, poor men couldn't. I think I remember this now. You know, handle what women handle all the time. But the fact of the matter is, the study was terminated based on their complaints.

And so there are other kinds of like anti-sperm like gels, particular, that are being tested for men now. But there still has not been a major advancement in the technology of contraception for, you know, decades. Do you think there ever will be? And also, I just, as somebody, like, I would be the one that gets pregnant, I just can't ever envision a situation where I would be in flagrante with a gentleman, and he would say, don't worry, I'm on the pill. And I would think, well, that's all right, then, sunshine. It's not an easily solvable problem, is it?

Because some women would just love to give all the responsibility to a partner and just enjoy their lives, enjoy their experiences. But it can be very hard to give that level of trust over to, you know, especially if you're not in a long-term monogamous relationship. If you don't take the pill, I'm getting pregnant. Right. So I think a male hormonal contraceptive could work. It likely will in some time in the next maybe a decade or so. But it would only be in very particular kinds of relationships. It wouldn't be for everyone. Donna, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? I am on Blue Sky or X at Hist of Sex. And you can find my books on Alfred Kinsey, on contraception, on infertility technology, and on machines use and sex research at an e-book store.

also at audio and e-book versions. So feel free to find my writing wherever you find your books. Thank you so much for dropping by. You've been marvelous. Oh, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Donna for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. Coming up, we are going to find out about the murderous affairs of King James I and 6th,

and delve into the truth about the minor tour. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.