The new male contraceptive gel is one you apply to your shoulders daily, the way you would a moisturiser, and it suppresses sperm production without surgery, without insertion, without a device placed inside your body, and without the kind of hormonal disruption that has defined female contraception for over sixty years.
The researchers who developed it described male contraception as an “unmet need.” That phrase, clinical and neutral as it sounds, describes what women have been experiencing for decades.
When the NES/T gel, developed by the NIH and the Population Council, completed its global Phase 2b trial involving 462 couples, it reported a 98% effectiveness rate, comparable to that of female hormonal methods. The side effects were minimal. Mild skin irritation and slight weight fluctuations. Researchers were careful to formulate it in a way that maintained healthy testosterone levels, specifically to avoid the kind of side effect profile that female contraception has had since its beginning. Convenience and tolerability were not afterthoughts in the design of this gel. They were the point. And that is exactly what needs to be examined.
Female Contraception Was Built on Women’s Pain. The Male Contraceptive Gel Was Not.
The first oral contraceptive, Enovid, was approved in 1960. During its original trials, the lead female doctor noted that approximately 17% of participants reported serious side effects and flagged that the dosage was likely too high to be widely acceptable. The male researchers running the study dismissed her concerns as insignificant.
Three deaths occurred during the trial. No investigation was conducted to determine whether the pill was a contributing factor. This was the foundation on which female contraception was built. Women’s pain was dismissed and set aside in the interest of getting the product to market.
For decades after, women reported depression, loss of libido, and a range of hormonal disruptions to their doctors and were told, consistently, that these experiences were in their heads. It took sustained research and feminist pressure to confirm what women had been saying all along.
The Dalkon Shield IUD, introduced in the 1970s, caused infections, infertility, and in some cases death before it was pulled from the market. Hormonal methods that followed came with documented risks of blood clots, mood disorders, and bone density loss with long-term use. The position of medicine was not that these side effects were unacceptable. The position was that they were manageable, that the benefit outweighed the cost, that women should weigh their options and proceed.
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The 2016 Trial That Exposed the Hypocrisy
In 2016 a male contraceptive injection trial was halted early after men reported mood swings, depression, and other side effects. Women responded with fury because those were the same side effects women had been reporting for years and being dismissed over. What made the comparison more cutting was the data. When researchers examined the numbers, women had actually discontinued female contraceptive trials at higher rates than men discontinued the injection trial. By the evidence, men’s side effects were comparatively less severe.
What This Looks Like for the Nigerian Woman
A woman navigating contraception in Nigeria is doing so inside a healthcare system where her concerns are not always taken seriously, inside a culture where contraception is understood as her problem to solve, and inside a social context where her access to that solution is frequently controlled by others.
Unmarried women are routinely denied contraceptives at clinics and married women are asked to produce their husband’s permission before a doctor will proceed. A woman’s decision about her own body is treated as a matter requiring external authorisation, and the exhaustion of that reality compounds every physical side effect she is already managing alone.
The attitude is not limited to institutions only. A woman who has chosen to remain anonymous said she once raised the question of male contraceptive responsibility in conversation with a man she was seeing. He responded that women were overcomplicating things, that contraceptives already existed for women, so why should men concern themselves? He added that he would never consider a vasectomy, even a reversible one, because something might go wrong.
The irony of that reasoning was not lost on her and it is not lost on most women. Men have long been comfortable with the arrangement precisely because the cost of it is entirely on someone else.
This comfort is reflected in the numbers. Hormonal methods remain the most commonly used contraceptives among Nigerian women, yet overall modern contraceptive use sits at just 12.3%. This figure is shaped by access barriers and by a cultural framework that has never seriously asked men to participate.
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The Gel Is Good News but It Is Also a Mirror.
The gel, when it eventually reaches wider use, is genuinely good news. It removes the oldest excuse men have had for not participating in contraception. It means that for the first time, there will be a meaningful, non-invasive option available to men, and the question of who carries the physical burden of family planning becomes one that couples will actually have to answer together.
But it also shows the gap between how medicine has treated women’s reproductive health and how it has approached men’s. The gap has been reflected repeatedly across decades, embedded in research priorities, clinical trials, and the casual dismissal of women who complained about side effects.
Women have always deserved the same standard of care that was applied to this gel from the very beginning. The fact that it took this long, and that it took building something for men to demonstrate what is possible, is the main issue.
The most useful thing a woman can do with this information is refuse to be incurious about what goes into her body. Ask the questions. Push back on dismissals. Understand that the history of female contraception is one in which her comfort was consistently treated as negotiable.
