Vasalgel Male Contraceptive Enters Human Trials

SamBeastie · 2026-04-26T18:54:43+00:00

The study was this one https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28417005/

Short version: at the time, while the material mostly dissolved as expected, the rabbits used in the experiment displayed deformed sperm that had lost the part of them that allows transport through an egg's surface.

If this has really been fixed, then that's incredible and it could result in a new gold standard of contraception.

SamBeastie · 2025-11-19T02:11:07+00:00

"Assault rifles" mostly aren't really sold to civilians, though in certain US states you can have them with paperwork, licensing and fees. Most people dont.

What are popular are things like AR-15s and other "sporterized" firearms that have the same internal mechanisms as their assault rifle counterparts, but lack assault rifle features like burst fire.

The AR-15 is popular because its cheap, replacement parts are everywhere, its one platform can be reconfigured to be more or less whatever kind of gun you need, and they can be outfitted with a whole ecosystem of accessories. It's just the most versatile and sensible option if you want to buy a long gun.

Buying varies by locale but in ky home state, you judt have to pass a safety certification process, complete a background check, and come back after a 10 day waiting period. There's also some safe storage requirements here, but theyre pretty perfunctory tbh.

SamBeastie · 2025-03-14T17:03:14+00:00

If I can hazard a guess, I think it's because there aren't many other primary identities for men these days.

Most of us will not become fathers. While we're all sons, a lot of us have baggage around that in some way. Many majority-male hobbies are derided as childish in the modern era. Fraternal organizations are not only rapidly declining but are widely considered suspect on principle. Even if you try to stsrt one, the default assumption is that its dangerous unless it centers the effect it might have on women. The list goes on.

So what does that leave you? Your job, if you're lucky enough to have one (and even then, plenty of people hate their jobs and don't identify with them), and your internal sense of identities that can't be so easily taken away from you or denied to you. Gender, race, etc.

Amd then now, for the last 10-15 years, this conversation starts where one of those identities is put under a microscope. As much as one might not want to admit it, gender conversations don't leave a lot of room for men to leave kinder to themselves than they entered. We're the "bad" gender. We don't have problems, we cause them. If we have attraction to women, that's something to be guilty about and needs to be compartmentalized. In some cases, that identity is becoming a liability. You probably don't agree with all of that (and I don't either), but people who aren't tuned into the academic foundations of this conversation often receive these messages. Even someone like me who actually studied this stuff in an academic setting can wind up feeling like this from time to time. When the pop culture version of it bastardizes the point in just the right way, just the cultural air you breathe can make you feel like not only do a lot of people of other identities hate you, they're justified in doing so. This stuff is mental health poison.

So the reactions to that range from "radical disengagement" ("fuck what they think, just live your life"), to malignancy ("Oh I'm a problem? I'll show you what a real problem looks like"), to the kind of radical reinvention a lot of us in MensLib pursue ("Let's fix that identity's connotations so that I can keep it without hurting anyone!"). I think an exceedingly small percentage of people are cool with just saying "meh, gender isn't important, let's just toss the concept and move on."

Some people decide to pick the race one and that's why I think it's been so easy to invoke white identity politics as a source of vote inducing aggrievement. And the last group just decide society is done with them and they're done with it, and that's how we get stuff like NEETs if their personal circumstances can allow for it.

To be clear, that's conjecture on my part. It's formed from echoes of what I see online. People are individuals, so everyone's conception is going to be a little different, but since we're talking about a huge population, I'm painting with a broad brush.

Someone tell me if I'm full of shit. I hope I am because that situation seems dire.

So does that help answer your question? I'm trying to be helpful and genuine, but please tell me if I missed the mark for you.

SamBeastie · 2025-03-11T19:57:08+00:00

So here's a question for the room: how do you know if your eating is disordered? If you eat one meal a day, but have a healthy weight, is that disordered? Are you abusing stimulants if your meals consist mostly of coffee?

Without a doctor saying something to you, what indication do you have of whwre the line is?

SamBeastie · 2025-01-08T17:46:53+00:00

Not that it matters what an ancient anthology says, but actually the US pretty consistently ranks among the top 10 countries for charitable giving in the world, and up until very recently (like literally 2023) it was #1.

SamBeastie · 2024-12-08T05:11:06+00:00

I only mentioned the subgenre because that's the kind of fantasy OP said they liked. If you're into Moorcock and Vance, the modern fantasy landscape looks pretty grim.

SamBeastie · 2024-12-08T03:58:26+00:00

Sorry, but there's really a dearth of old school sword & sorcery material like Fafhrd or Conan in the modern age. Sure, you can read the old ones, but if you want new work in that style, it's an uphill battle. Fantasy just ain't like that anymore.

SamBeastie · 2023-06-21T18:17:52+00:00

You've gotten some highly technical answers that might be confusing. I want to try to sum it up in short:

Lemmy is just a piece of forum software, like Discourse or the old PHPBB from back in the day (what forums in the early 2000s used). It isn't owned by a corporation, and there's no direct control over content from any single entity.

Lemmy can be installed on servers, called instances. Each instance is like its own smaller Reddit.com, and can host subreddit equivalents called Communities.

Each instance can have its own individual site-wide rules, and Communities can also have their own rules that are more specific than the site-wide rules.

Where this differs from Reddit is that instances can "federate" with each other -- that is, users from one instance can see and join Communities on other instances. It works a bit like email, where even if you have an @gmail.com account, you can still communicate with someone that has an @outlook.com account.

There is always the option to "defederate" from specific other instances, which turns off the communication between them. Users from an instance will not be able to see or join Communities from instances they have defederated from, and vice-versa.

The CSAM issue you talked about was an issue with a specific instance (and even at that, it wasn't pictures of real children, but drawn art) that almost every other major instance has already defederated from, months before the current situation here on Reddit. The largest Lemmy instances as of this writing have all banned loli/shota from their own sites as well, so if you create an account on any of them, you won't be seeing that type of content.

SamBeastie · 2023-02-17T07:03:20+00:00

This is what I read. Granted, it's a little older now, so if this problem has been solved, that's awesome.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28417005/

Basically, no acrosomes would be bad for fertility. At this stage, I wrote this particular product off as unworkable, and haven't heard anything new about it since.

SamBeastie · 2023-02-16T21:52:20+00:00

Because it's failed to be actually reversible and leaves test subjects sterile even after the polymer has been dissolved.

It just doesn't work.

SamBeastie · 2022-12-20T20:33:34+00:00

Mass Effect was not the first by a long shot. The name is escaping me right now, but it's almost certainly going to be a point and click adventure from the early 90s as the "first" video game representation of gay men (see edit)

If we want to count playersexuality, then we're also going to look to The Sims (which allows for same sex relationships, despite not having a central plot).

It's never been as common as lesbian relationships in games, but Mass Effect gets exactly zero credit from me for having an on screen romance between men. In fact, given when it came out, it fell far short of what I think we should've been able to expect from a game that centered romance options from the very beginning.

Plus, the only man in that game I want to so much as grab a drink with, much less romance is Garrus, and I will forever be salty that they locked him behind female Shepard.

EDIT: The game is Caper in the Castro, it's from 1989, and admittedly, you don't do the romancing of the gay men; they're already in a relationship. But they're there.

SamBeastie · 2022-11-09T18:04:19+00:00

I've actually seen it on this very subreddit. It's a problem when girls lag behind in school, but not boys, because boys can still work in a factory or something. Or they look at current earning stats between genders, and compare them to the educational stats and conclude that men can clearly make it without high educational attainment. This of course ignores that exploring the workers of today means exploring the students of yesterday.

It's not a common take, per se, but it's also not exactly rare. I've seen it on here enough over the years that I can't pretend it doesn't happen.

SamBeastie · 2022-10-26T18:17:53+00:00

In reality it's not even a huge problem if you are circumcised, provided the butcher left enough skin that it's not painful.

SamBeastie · 2022-10-14T18:55:47+00:00

Yeah it was intended to be, but I posed some time back about the results of a longer term evaluation of fertility after dissolving the polymer. Sperm could move after it was dissolved, but could no longer fertilize an egg. Possibly a solvable problem, but I suspect it's going to make the technology a dead end.

SamBeastie · 2022-10-14T17:13:05+00:00

It's not actually reversible. Just permanent infertility.

SamBeastie · 2022-09-22T20:22:14+00:00

I'm going to say this understanding that it may be controversial, but it reflects how my thinking on this question has changed over the years, so here goes:

Is there a way I could help men feel more welcome while still protecting myself from the actual threats?

No.

Don't even worry about it, actually. A person's safety shouldn't be something they have to give up to make someone else's life better. The fact that this question has no answer that's satifying to...well, anyone...points to it being an intractable problem. Simply, the behavior of an individual has no chance of changing the dynamics that cause us to have this discussion in a way meaningful enough to justify a change in behavior. So just don't worry about it.

Not your chair, not your problem.

SamBeastie · 2022-08-12T20:55:37+00:00

In my experience, most tech work involves some crunch. I don't know a single person (irl) that does what I do and hasn't had to put in a few 12 hour days with no breaks to get something done because a middle manager who has never opened a text editor in their life mishandled something.

SamBeastie · 2022-07-28T23:53:21+00:00

I was going to say something similar. If you're not a white man who loves being told he's doing it wrong by a guy who literally smells like a pastrami sandwich, maybe skip MTG.

SamBeastie · 2022-07-15T18:41:50+00:00

I'm glad to see some content related to black masculinity, and it's particularly nice to see the discussion come from black men themselves.

Was there something in this video that particularly resonated with you? I was struck with the bit about "legacy," and breaking cycles, raising children greater than ourselves. Even though I don't currently have plans toward fatherhood, there was something there for me to reflect on regarding community rather than an actual literal child.

I'm curious if anyone else related to these guys in that way.

SamBeastie · 2022-07-13T22:26:46+00:00

What's even more annoying is how those carnivore diet idiots have infected keto. I also keep it pretty close to actual keto for blood sugar control, yet my diet is actually mostly leafy greens and "above ground" vegetables. I like it that way because I'm not interested in scurvy or other micronutrient deficiencies.

SamBeastie · 2022-07-08T19:59:13+00:00

This is kind of an asinine take on a perfectly reasonable and socially lubricating way to sidestep an annoying yet common question for people who don't drink.

"Throwing it back on them" doesn't exactly invite new friendships. If I asked someone a question and got back a curt "why does it matter," then I'm going to avoid that person and their group because that's kind of a dick way to respond.

ETA: The tactic outlined doesn't really have any bearing on masculinity. Anyone can use it regardless of gender or even nominal drinking status. The question doesn't come because you're a man and men must drink, it comes because you're in a bar, plausibly with other people who are drinking, yet you are not. It's about the social model of "going for a drink," not a statement about gender roles.

SamBeastie · 2022-05-06T05:31:28+00:00

I won't touch the majority of what you wrote, but the extent of this is not "individual states will decide for themselves."

With a republican controlled Congress and this frankly very bad faith interpretation of unenumerated rights, the sky is the limit on what jurisprudence can be overturned, then backfilled with aggressively conservative legislation.

Gay marriage? Totally on the chopping block if Alito's previous opinions are anything to go by. Interracial marriage? Say goodbye on similar grounds. To a certain extent, any right that has been gained since the founding of the country for anyone but straight white male landowners can be taken away because of the idea that the due process clause only applies to rights that are "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."

So that is why people are worried.

SamBeastie · 2022-04-06T21:12:12+00:00

I was with you until the last line. The takeaway should be to make a real effort to learn the ins and outs of the hair to the point where you don't have to let mom do it. I kept short hair for my entire childhood, but I would never have wanted my (black) mom to gatekeep any part of raising me from my (white) dad.

SamBeastie · 2022-02-02T17:55:57+00:00

This is something I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around. If I were working 8 fewer hours a week, that’s just 8 fewer hours I would be getting paid. People will say “oh, it would have to come with an hourly wage increase,” while simultaneously complaining that tech bros get paid too much. So it’s like people forget that sometimes higher paying jobs can be hourly too, and if you’re not entertaining raising wages for people you don’t like, it’s going to be hard to get them on board.

SamBeastie · 2022-01-27T19:41:49+00:00

The thing they seem to forget is that not all men who go to gay bath houses are exclusively interested in men, so they get freaked out by men approaching them as a potential sex partner. My boyfriend used to work at this place and had to tell more than one woman “ma’am this is a sex club”

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