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  1. Depends on how the product was presented, really. Also, considering how panicked some men today still seem to get at the very concept of male birth control, I don’t think most men in our culture are ready for that level of responsibility and self-determination. ;-)

  2. Also reflecting back on the idea you had above, re: men visibly on birth control… if the world is anything like this, I believe that the opposite would happen: That there would be a concerted effort to ostrasize and demean any man who had voluntarily ’emasculated’ themselves and was no longer ‘virile.’ You would see scientifically-ignorant pundits and politicians saying that MBC would turn men gay, and the more ‘religioulous’ ones try to weave in the meme that such men were no longer actually men. And it still wouldn’t be a sign of a ‘safe’ man; furthering on the scientifically illiterate (and not even well-meaning) pundits, they might start to say that men on MBC won’t leave any DNA or some malarky like that. WIthout going too much more depressing than this, I think that there would be a resounding backlash against it. Hmm… I may have to try writing this somewhere….

  3. Precisely. Personally, I’m often somewhat startled at how few people seem aware on a day to day basis of kyriarchy… and then I remember how unpleasantly shocked I was — and how angrily I denied it — when I first discovered that privilege in myself. It took me a long time to move internally past the hasty attempts to assign blame — though it was never my fault, of course! — and into what I believe is a more productive stance of exploring how we may work together to help eradicate, or at least lessen the negative effects, of kyriarchy.

  4. Oppression does not exist in a cultural vacuum, after all – it is never so neat and tidy as to declare only the aged, or the disabled, or red-haired women, or albinos, or whatever, as socially anathema.

    And this goes back to the idea of ‘kyriarchy.’ Too many people think ‘oppression!’ and immediately go to a model of social strata which is basically laid on the foundation of ‘the oppressed’ as if they were all some mash of a nondifferentiated medium. It’s never that simple; there are hierarchies set up within ‘the oppressed.’ Sometimes these are inadvertantly applied, either from within (so that some people can feel better about themselves) or from without (as a purposeful or incidental method of control.) And sometimes it’s done deliberately, if not fully consciously.

    This is villains’ territory — not Evil Roy Gato treating women like property, but Evil Roy Gato getting the hero’s culture to think it’s all right to treat women like property, even as he makes the hero bend knee to his ‘betters.’

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