Actually I do know who needs to hear it - people like this: https://twitter.com/kazweida/status/1521312672465051649
I know it's not the most important thing right now, but since the Roe v Wade news there have been a bunch of tweets encouraging men to get vasectomies, and/or trying to analogize between female birth control methods and vasectomies, that include some assertion to the effect of "you can just get it reversed later when you're ready for kids".
This is not true. Yes, the vasectomy reversal procedure exists but its success rate is not very good (70% at best), and the likelihood of restoring fertility only goes down as more time passes since the initial vasectomy. This is why urologists advise their patients to consider a vasectomy to be a permanent procedure.
I won't say much more about it, other than it would be nice if more forms of male birth control (e.g. Vasalgel) entered the market soon.
One ball is for pee, the other is for plastics. Cum is made by mixing the two.
in 100 years aliens will find footage of Kardashians and assume that they were the first wave of mutations as a result of microplastics in the balls
That's how you concentrate the microplastic. Otherwise you're just wasting it every time you cum.
One of the worst things my mother ever did was beg my father to reverse his vasectomy because God was telling her to procreate more, they got three more kids they didn't want and couldn't support and then got divorced.
I'm not an antinatalist, but it's okay to not have swimmers.
I am unironically anti-natalist. Like, I wouldn't try to talk anyone out of it, and I like kids and all, but given the state and trajectory of the world it just seems cruel to make new people who are going to live their entire life watching the world die.
My biggest gripe with antinatalism is its Euro framing. Yes, world is burning. Adding more people may seem to be questionable. But who in the world has reproduction above replacement level? Are the black and brown poors of the world really being evil in their daring bid to... do something that is completely natural and necessary for the continued existence for humans? By and large, it's a very small part of the picture no matter the philosophizing that may accompany it. Antinatalism can also fall into blatant misanthropy at points, which is a slippery step away from a nihilistic disdain for all life.
My take is that Anti-Natalism fundamentally misunderstands the point of reproduction/having kids. Like, it's not supposed to be a weird utilitarianist calculus to figure out whether or not the kid you'd end up having is gonna end up experiencing more Utils of pleasure (or whatever the fuck we're gonna use as a calculation). It's about the continuation of the species, and of human social bonds.
Yeah for me it's a purely individualistic thing. I couldn't look someone in the eye knowing that I was fully responsible for all the suffering inflicted on them and feel good about myself. My life has sucked, I don't believe that "But there are good parts of life, too!" line at all.
If I'm being honest, I find the "but there are good parts of life, too" argument convincing because I don't have depression.
See it's easy for people who spend some or all of their life mostly functional to be like "Yeah the good days outweigh the bad days". But like, I have bipolar disorder. My bad days are horrifying. Absolutely nightmarish in ways that I really can't explain because there's no real language for talking about what happens when your brain's normal cognitive processes break down. I would never, ever, place someone in a situation where they might have to go through what I've gone through. The only reason I stick around is that my standard of living makes the days when I'm functional tolerable, and because my family would be really upset if I killed myself. But in a vacuum? If I could just press an off switch and not have to suffer like this? No question. And that's from a position where all my immediate needs for food and housing are met, I honestly don't know how anyone survives what I've got when they don't have a stable social safety net that can care for them. Well, I mean, I do know, because how people survive is mostly that they don't. The suicide rate for people with serious treatment resistant bipolar is very high.
Like i don't resent my parents or anything, but I think it does speak to the vast gulf of experience between able bodied/minded people and people who have serious disabilities, just how casually and thoughtlessly people have kids. Like from a purely economic standpoint; Disability is incredibly expensive in America, and social support is dogshit when it exists at all. I know people whose kids will need total economic support for their entire lives, and at some point the parents will be too old to care for them, and then what? What happens to someone who is like 65, unable to work, unable to care for themselves? I know there are some programs for adults but, like, this is america; The truth is most people in that circumstance die ugly, either on the streets or in prison.
Like, this isn't something I ever talk about with people IRL, because what's the point? People are going to have kids, or they won't. But I think it's a subject that's very, very seriously, and people treat it very, very lightly.
The kicker is that most parents aren't even nice to kids who end up having mental problems. The people who are supposed to be most sympathetic and supportive to you instead treat you like you're at fault and deserve to be punished. It's an enormous injustice and a total abdication of responsibility. If you create a person whose life is constant suffering, the least you could do is be nice to them and do what you can to help.
I don't want to make a claim of universality. I don't want to claim that there's an achievable balance that's for everyone. I am aware that there are experiences worse than death that millions of people regularly live through.
It feels wrong going into this as a person with no major traumas and no depression. It may be frustrating to see me, someone with the privilege of being a contented person, going on to say "happiness isn't everything." But the promise of happiness is itself a lie in many regards, from the "pursuit of happiness" to the pseudoscience of "positive" psychology.
I don't want to judge you or invalidate your suffering. You seem to be having a tough time with things. I do want to contend that, outside of either of our experiences, there is a drive towards furthering life that nonetheless survives despite its abysmal failures. Some lives are destroyed in the mix, some mice meet owls, some people are born with debilitating conditions. No single part of this natural order is redemptive, just, or resilient. But the whole mass of life tends to stick around, one generation at a time. To me, antinatalism concerns itself with the obvious failures of life, but offers no real alternative to it other than letting everything die out within a generation. It avoids or disgraces many of the other things that are tied to the experience of living, and often appears to be little more than a philosophical dead end that appeals to those who find themselves at dead ends.
I've got another take on this and like most of the shit I post, it has to do with fish. Gambusia, probably the most invasive species of freshwater fish in the world, are prolific breeders. They're livebearers like guppies, so they give birth to free-swimming fry. Throw a dozen in your pond and you will have literally hundreds by the end of the year. You will never run out of gambusia if you have a stable population in a pond.
But the thing is, these fish are actually somewhat difficult to spawn in a tank. The females have the fairly unique ability to delay giving birth - sometimes for months - until there are no predators nearby, including the male parent. I've only had one give birth in my tank and the fry got eaten immediately. The gambusia simply aren't going to waste the resources that go into childbirth if it's unlikely that the next generation will reach sexual maturity.
I think anti-natalism as a movement is silly, but I understand why people hold to it as a personal philosophy. We want to give our young the best chance of survival, and when that's no longer an option, rejecting the idea of raising children altogether is a perfectly reasonable response. Look at the states where birthrates have been hit the hardest - these are some of the worst places to live in the US. The movement is problematic because of the underlying premise that population control is the answer, but simply refusing to have kids until things change and even politicizing this decision is perfectly acceptable. There ought to be a competing narrative - maybe a voluntary "birth strike" of some sort, we can we workshop it - so that left-leaning adults don't fall into an ideology with proto-fascist trappings.
What I was taught (from a university-level human sexuality course) is that the success rate of reversal goes down by 10 percent per year.
Now, if that does fail, there is good news and bad news. The good news, is that the organs that produce sperm are still there and should still function just fine! The bad news is that you will NOT like the procedure for getting it out.
Oh no, they don't do anything like that. They just have to
CW: pain
extract sperm with a needle. In your balls.
Now, perhaps I am the wrong person to make this judgement since as a gay man I have zero need for a vasectomy, but that seems quite a bit worse than the vasectomy. So that's why you should get some sperm frozen BEFORE getting snipped!
A vasectomy involves using heat to seal the sperm carrying tube shut, it's also not the most pleasant thing I believe.
Getting a vasectomy was one of the best choices I've ever made.
Did it hurt? I have the children I want and I'm thinking of getting one.
It wasn't comfortable but a day watching TV with a bag of ice on my nuts and I was walking ok the next day.
Can confirm. Feels more like tugging. Played god of war with peas on my nuts for a couple days after.
Not worrying is :stalin-approval:
I feel like I took a softball to the crotch for about five days. Still worth it
Same comrade. It helps my partner is very empathetic that she doesn't want kids, so I was confident doing it.
does it cause any change in your erections, orgasms or sex drive at all?
It's been a while so I can't remember immediately after but if it did have any effects they certainly weren't long lasting.
TMI but you asked
I think it may have effected my orgasms but not actually in a negative way, is not just one sudden explosion anymore there's a ton of aftershocks for like a minute later, it's honestly kinda awesome.
oh that's cool. I'll probably get one some day, but I'm worried about it effecting my sex drive/abilities or something -- or more importantly, the vasectomy reversing itself naturally and then I end up impregnating someone when I think it's impossible
You're supposed to go back and get a sperm count like a year later to make sure everything worked. If you're good then you should be good for life.
That pesky 2% is largely due to user error, so make sure you're applying your condoms correctly! Use a little lube on the inside, pinch the tip, all that jazz.
you mean that pesky 18%.
https://www.acog.org/womens-health/infographics/effectiveness-of-birth-control-methods
According to people I've known who've had one and had it reversed, there's also a fucking ton of pain that compounds with each operation for them.
So beware. Condom and pull out. Not one or the other, both. That's the alternative.
Speaking of Vasalgel, I've heard that one reason that there are so few penis/testicles-focused contraceptives is that pregnancy isn't considered a health threat to testicle-havers but is to uterus-havers. In other words, things like The Pill, which can have serious side-effects, can get researched and prescribed more easily because the alternative is a health risk (pregnancy), and things like Vasalgel have to go through much more extensive testing and show very little risk since the vast vast majority of testes-havers don't have a pregnancy risk.
Any takes on this? I learned this years and years ago and now it's fuzzy
I just linked the wiki on it. Apparently the Indian researchers were getting the most pushback from the WHO and NIH.
I've heard there's a pill entering human trials soon which would be nice if the side effects aren't insane like existing hormonal options. On the other hand, the vasectomy procedure was easier than getting my wisdom teeth taken out or a sleeve tattoo. An uncomfortable lidocaine injection and a tugging sensation, but I carried on a normal conversation with the urologist and walked out of the clinic right after the procedure. Three days of using a CBD vape and I was pain-free. Becoming fertile again or going the IVF route would be expensive when I know I can provide an ideal environment for a kid, but even more expensive would be accidentally having a kid for at least a decade. Any risk of that is unacceptable and I didn't like the ethical disconnect of my partners having to go on more invasive options because I'm also like a Zapatista but against condoms.
When I have talked about getting a vasectomy people always try to pitch the idea to me that "If you do invitro later its expensive". You don't have kids to fucking save money, and the idea that you shouldn't because you are protecting yourself from a single big bill is silly to me.
To me it is the ultimate family planning. People can't afford to just fuck carelessly like boomers and wind up with a kid, it makes more sense than anything.
There are also lots of children that deserve to be adopted, even if reversing the surgery doesn't produce fertility again.
Getting it done definitely made adoption more attractive to me if I eventually want kids. Especially since one of my big reasons for not wanting them is that there is no future for children, it'd at least be taking one of the already-damned and giving them a shot.
I’ve heard there’s a pill entering human trials soon which would be nice if the side effects aren’t insane like existing hormonal options.
It's been "just around the corner" for decades. Would be nice to see it actually come out though.
Thanks for pointing this out. I really hope we get some reproductive education, maybe some reproductive right soon women too but we'll see.
Do people really think a vasectomy is reliably reversible? Are Americans that gefoked in the head? It involves cauterizing the vas deferens, that is sealing the tube carrying semen from your testicles using heat. Anyone that thinks that is easily reversible needs to get some actual sex ed and biology education. Like sure sometimes you can reverse it, but there's been a permanent change involving the flesh inside there, it's not like an on or off switch.
I will invent a small valve that attaches onto the vas deferens. I will call it the cum-spigot and become the richest man alive.
I'll reinvest my cum-spigot money into arming leftwing paramilitary groups. They will get all the training and money they need, only requirement is they go by "The Cummunists"
Get a vasectomy. Get your tubes tied. If you change your mind and want kids later on, adopt.
I'm not kidding. The world doesn't need extra children, but many already-existing children need parents.
I'm also not fucking kidding. I'm not going to do the Fascists work for them by deliberately excising myself from the genepool. That may not be a relevant concern to you, but it is to me.
I'm with you. We don't need an official line on everything on this site. Some of us are free to disagree with nebulous reasons why things are "bad" whole cloth.
on the other hand, we will need a large pool of young people to serve in the American Red Army and to work on massive environmental reconstruction projects. could probably get most of these people through immigration/climate refugees but I don't think anti-natalism is necessary. There's not too many people, the west just uses too many fucking resources per person.
Bad look, if people want kids they have a right to have kids. If socialists respect human needs and wants that includes the basic need and want to have children. Should adoption be made easier and encouraged? 100% yes, but people shouldn't be shamed for wanting to have bio kids either.
I'm more worried about whether they reverse by itself without me knowing.
If men in power were actually motivated to help people we'd already have a functioning RISUG formula.
