OKAY SO. FINALLY. I HAVE PROPERLY (ish) MET THE WEIRD SPINNING WHEEL
*AND CRACKED SOME OF ITS SECRETS*
(loooong post ahead, click to unfold at your own risk)
INTRO
Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D
So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.)
Great! We'd never been there!
I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh.
I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird.
I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.
Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff.
… Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :]
… i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-°
IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.
I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.
So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG
It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.
THE WEIRD WHEEL
sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that.
BUT. no glass.
So.
What is "wrong" with this wheel?
"well it has only one pedal…"
yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.
no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.
but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!
in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken.
(the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)
so…
… what to make of all this?
especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite:
make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool.
Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it.
I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.
And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.
And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…
THE PATENT
At first I was like. Wait. What?
But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!!
All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.
So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855.
But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!
… And I found it.
I FOUND IT.
I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP)
A few notes though!
I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because
a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem
b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!
c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)
It was great.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I'll try and go read the rest of the patent to see if there are more interesting details, but it might take a while…
Si quelqu'un y arrive avant moi, n'hésitez pas à détourner ce post :3
OK this is FASCINATING. I may have just spent far too long trying to find something I saw somewhere else, and only ended up playing 'spot the SWSO on ebay' again.
It's an auto-level winder! It's amazing! Many congratulations on finding the patent. I am assuming here that 'bobinoir' translates as 'bobbin winder'?But does 'rouet bobinoir' mean 'thing that looks like a spinning wheel but it's JUST a bobbin winder', or does it mean 'spinning wheel WITH bobbin winder', because ... different things! I have never seen a 'just a bobbin winder' in person before but I have seen them on ebay (just not today, apparently), but clearly that makes basically negative sense if there really is only one non-removable bobbin. The museum's explanation of the item seems to suggest (to me with somewhat rusty French and no specific technical vocabulary in this field) that the idea is that you fill the bobbin and then empty it straight onto the skein winder? But whyyyy? Because that bobbin clearly has way less capacity than the skein winder, so if you want to be all about efficiency you surely make your rouet with a HUGE bobin, so that one bobbin fills the skein winder???
... and on the other hand if you are trying to unwind a large skein onto many tiny bobbins OH LOOK you have the ideal piece of machinery.
Here's some marketing blablabla from a modern auto-level winder, with various efficiencies emphasised by me:
Spin More Yarn in Less Time
The WooLee Winder will save you many small bits of time that can really add up. You can spin an entire bobbin full without stopping to change any hooks. In addition, winding your yarn levelly onto the bobbin means that you can fit a lot more yarn on each bobbin making bobbin changes less frequent. Also, most of the WooLee Winder bobbins are larger than the original bobbins for that wheel. This added capacity lets you put up to twice as much yarn on each bobbin. Many spinners have said that they can save as much as 1/3 of their spinning time using their WooLee Winder.
Ply Like Never Before
You’ll think of plying in a totally different light when you use your WooLee Winder. You’ll be able to ply an entire bobbin of yarn in only a few minutes and without stopping. This will allow you to ply evenly and consistently. Plying from WooLee Winder bobbins can also help to improve your plying experience since the yarn on these bobbins will unwind smoothly without any of the problems experienced with hook-wound bobbins.
So presumably it saves fibres / bits of yarn because there are allegedly less breakages with the modern technology? (So far I personally have only had plying nightmares with spindle cops collapsing, but I am sure there are going to be some others in my future).
Uh. Hi, I'm Min, you don't know me, apparently I like spinning wheels now. And I'm fascinated by the little pulley block in your last picture of the Complicated Strings, because it looks exactly like the kind of thing that gets used on a sailing ship to make a rope change direction when something's just in not quite the right place for everything to run smoothly ... but in this situation it could also be used to adjust the tension on whatever drive band it's part of.
What if I told you that “aromantic people, by and large, are not inherently incapable of feeling love” and “feeling the emotion of love is not required to be a good person” and “it’s an individual person’s choice whether to call something love or not” and “broadening the definition of love is inherently a resistance against amatonormative systems which seek to control the contexts in which love can be expressed” and “both loving differently and not loving at all are valid and vital methods of resistance against those systems” are all compatible statements that can coexist
Was trying to make a joke about TV writing to my friend the other day and had to pause and go "...does the phrase 'surf dracula' mean anything to you?"
image description: tweet by @/topherflorence, reading: back in the day if u did a tv show called surf dracula you'd see that fool surfing every week in new adventures but in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ass flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get to see him surf for 5 min in the finale /end description
eating disorders and abortions are two things that are like, spoken about in most mainstream discourse as though they are pretty rare and aberrant, but then when you’re actually friends with a lot of women you come to find out that they are extremely extremely common and kind of banal & mundane
telecom service providers in india are getting orders from government to shutdown our internet. they might also mass delete the posts and videos online. i know this is not the content you followed me for but please raise voice for the people in india if you can. if you find any posts about the brutality that the police inflicted upon protesters, people seeking legal or medical attention, people needing donation for sanitary pads, food, water, masks, etc. on twitter or instagram, please share it. it's my humble request. this is our last day. they're applying emergency alerts and new rules from tomorrow but today we are standing here in rain raising our voices and we will continue to do so.
I have a feeling this might be like "scramming" all over again and it will turn out to be Wenglish All Along, but:
Has anyone else heard of the word "bipping"? Pretty much cognate with "beefing" semantically speaking, I think, though also you could use it to mean "having a go/arguing/starting a spat".
Uses as a verb or noun:
"I told my Mam I would be out on Friday after all and she started bipping at me about my finances"
"In town there were two lads bipping outside the pub earlier."
"Me and Gareth have had our bips, but he's tidy deep down"
This is a recipe I've adapted from various soda breads to make it as easy as possible when I'm dealing with high fatigue, low spoons, and/or no appetite. It has the appeal of warm, soft fresh bread, but the oats make it a bit more substantial.
You will need:
Oven (not a microwave)
Mixing bowl
Spoon
Cup or 1/2 cup measure (or something of similar size)
Baking tray
Ingredients:
1/2 cup whole oats (not instant)
1/2 cup self-raising flour (or plain flour + 1/2 tsp baking powder)
1/2 cup whole milk
A pinch of salt
Instructions:
Literally just mix everything together in a bowl, then dump it onto a baking tray in a rough approximation of a round bread roll. Bake at 180C for 15-18 minutes. Allow to cool and eat with whatever you would normally have with fresh bread.
Notes:
It doesn't matter exactly how big your measuring cup is as long as the three main ingredients are equal, but you'll need to extend cooking time for a larger piece of bread (or divide into two).
When you've mixed your ingredients you should get something like thick porridge, NOT like dough. If you make a dough you can shape with your hands, it'll come out too dry. This stuff should be sticky and blobby, thick enough that it holds its shape on the baking tray. You should be able to spoon it out and mash it together to make a rather un-aesthetic mound.
If it's too thin, wait a couple of minutes for the oats to absorb the milk. If it's still too thin, add a bit more flour.
I like to mix in some grated cheese to make something a bit like a cheese scone. You could also lean more into sweet flavours to make a muffin-like end result (particularly if you spoon it into cases).
This does NOT keep well, it goes stale very quickly. It's a bake-and-eat thing. I don't know if it freezes.
I haven't tried making it with non-dairy milk. The milk is providing both liquid and fat so you'd want to make sure you were using something that HAS a good amount of fat.
Throwing this out there in case it's useful to someone. Please note I can't help anyone troubleshoot (see above re: high fatigue and low spoons!).
Not to be rhe ten millionth person to say “USAmerican President Donald Trump Is An Incoherent Public Speaker Whose Train Of Thought Can Be Best Described As Scat Jazz” but I just remembered that when he talks at international events it is several dozen people’s job to translate what he’s saying and what he intends to say to world leaders in real time
If anyone reading this isn’t fluent enough in English to understand the sentences that man says, please know that he has essentially mixed a number of adjectives and topics together in a hat and is pulling them out at random like a horrible children’s game
Like that waxy jaundiced bitch will straight up be like “J'étais sur internet l'autre jour – internet, la plus grande invention américaine. Et la Chine a “internet aussi. Pas un bon internet, pas comme le mien, j'ai un internet formidable. Les gens me disent : « Donald, ton internet est génial ! » On adore l'internet de Donald. Mais la Chine… Chine, Chine, Chine… Vous savez qu'ils mangent des oiseaux ? C'est terrible. J'adore les oiseaux. La Chine mange des oiseaux. Pas comme nous. Pas comme mes oiseaux. Mais vous savez, c'est comme ça, et c'est terrible. Mais voilà ce que je vais faire : je vais sauver les oiseaux. Je vais sauver internet et sauver les oiseaux. Tous ces magnifiques oiseaux. Pour l'Amérique. Et la Chine va nous détester pour ça. Ils vont nous détester parce qu'on est les meilleurs sur oiseaux”. And people will lose their minds
International translators have had this problem for A While - if they *don't* clean up what he says to sound coherent, they look like they're doing a bad job.
Explore Trump translation challenges, tips for interpreters, and 2025 strategies for accurate political translation and Trumpslation success
There was a scandal in Poland because one translator decided to translate him accurately, tone, vocabulary level and word salad tangents and all. Polish conservatives who don't speak English and previously only heard smoothed out translations that sounded coherent and used big words were up in arms about how the translator was "inserting her political agenda", "mocking him", "exaggerating", "purposefully trying to make him look bad" and "incredibly unprofessional". I listened to the translation in question. It was literally just accurate.
5. Sensitive and Controversial Language
Trump’s speeches occasionally contain misogynistic, sexist, or inflammatory language. Japanese interpreter Tsuruta, for example, faced challenges when translating sexualized remarks, ultimately opting for standard terminology to maintain professionalism. Similarly, Chinese translator Kumiko Torikai found certain lewd expressions ethically challenging, ultimately leading to her retirement. Navigating these situations requires skillful balancing of accuracy, professionalism, and cultural sensitivity, ensuring that the translation is appropriate without distorting the original intent.
I don't know why the authors of PoliLingua act as if Trump's verbal misogyny and racism wasn't very much part of his "original intent".
it only now dawns on me that millions of people on this planet think Trump is way smarter than he is because translators have neglected to relate his violent speech accurately out of misunderstood politeness. Make the ape sound like a ape
We had a mini-scandal in the German translation/interpretation community last year about exactly this – the interpreter for the inauguration got sick of Trump's incoherence and made a remark into his mic that was not intended to be heard (here's my post on it).
Honestly, it's not even just as translation problem. Many Americans believe that American television networks/stations are biased against him for airing fully unedited segments of his remarks.
A friend of mine, in order to convince her this was not the case, finally forced his mom to sit down and actually listen to an uncut tape of him speaking. His dementia is so bad that even many Americans assume he's just being mocked when they actually hear him speak.
I don’t know which 20 year old with grade 1 anterolisthesis on here needs to hear this… but do not get a spinal fusion for a grade 1 slipped disc. please stop and reconsider.
put off getting a spinal fusion surgery until you’ve exhausted literally every other treatment you can try
the long-term complication rate of spinal fusions is through the roof
they will not warn you that you will probably need more spine surgery within 10 years. multiple revisions are on the table in your lifetime. it’s not the fast fix orthopedic surgeons sell it as. I can guarantee you won’t be pain-free either.
it’s largely irreversible. many people regret their fusions. hardware fails. I can’t even sue the manufacturer of either types of my hardware despite them failing because the statute of limitations has passed. many surgeons won’t work on my case either.
I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting
People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.
For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.
And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.
These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.
So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results
Also, please do not listen to how people talk about cover letters on this site. Cover letters are important, and in many industries you can be damn sure they'll be read. And no, they're not 'fanfic about working in your office', or just re-stating the resume contents in a fancier guise. If you treat them like that, then of course they're not doing much for you. That makes you sound like a syncophantic windbag, and it's not doing anything else to help.
I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.
The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.
This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.
And the other mistake? Everyone writes cover letters that are too long. One page is fine. Two is the absolute maximum, and that's if you have a lot of specific things to say. It's a waste of your time and theirs to pad it out with fluff. Of my two most recent successful cover letters (i.e. jobs for which I was interviewed) one was 390 words and the other was 550. That's the length of this post. How long did it take me to write this post? About 15 minutes to write, 5 to proof and edit. That's how long you should be spending on a cover letter, maximum.
it might be time to talk about it: someone has been cyberstalking me for months now, and I don't know what to do.
they post about me every day, multiple times a day, speculating about my income, my family, my medical transition, my disability, and so on. extremely transphobic things have been said. extremely ableist things have been said. I have blocked them, but this has not stopped them from screenshotting everything I post. and when I don't say anything new and interesting, they scroll through my blog history until they can find something worth mocking. it makes feel genuinely unsafe to have this level of obsessive attention on me.
even still, I would love to ignore this person! that's largely what I've been doing. but every now and then, one of their HUNDREDS of posts about me finds traction, and then I have to deal with large numbers of people who spam my posts, fill my inbox, and make very real threats.
and recently, the concentration has been on taking away my ability to make an income. which, not to play the 'disabled' card, but I am not a wealthy or powerful person. I am on immunosuppressants, there are times when I'm housebound or bed bound, and I am very much struggling to scrape by. you are not punching up.
I just don't know what to do. this isn't "healthy criticism". I am open to criticism. I want to have conversations, and look into my blindspots, and make changes about how I write and present myself. even if you can't see me doing it publicly, that IS what I am doing.
that is not the goal of this campaign, though. I genuinely think the goal is bully me into suicide, and hey, it's kinda working!
but yeah, just opening this up to everyone because staying silent hasn't helped me, and I don't know what will.
Free service with ads: Well, if I'm not paying for it they have to foot the bill somehow.
Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.
Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.
"We used to be a paid service without ads, but now we're putting ads in it! If you want the ad-free version you have to pay more for preeeeemium": Fuck you fuck you fuck you
I saw today's lj_2008 post announcing the return of Basic accounts with great interest, because the large print giveth and the small print t
Yesterday, we discussed part one of <a href="http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/234496.html">Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising
Friday we did part one of <a href="http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/234496.html">Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed
this essay series is old enough to register to vote in the United States, and its author is the same Denise of Dreamwidth who keeps writing new explanations of why KOSA-type regulation of the data thieves will fuck over anybody on the internet who wants to refrain from collecting personal information—for reasons including but not limited to how hackers can't steal and governments can't subpoena data that didn't get collected to begin with—because every time Netchoice sues another government over another KOSA-type law, it is a slightly different law that needs a slightly different explanation of why it is unenforceable for several different pragmatic reasons in addition to being unconstitutional in several different ways
Dreamwidth is still ad-free and venture-capital-free and refusing to do business in jurisdictions that would require it to collect more personal data than it collects now, and therefore Dreamwidth is proof that internet business models do not need and should not have any of ads, venture capital, and data theft; this has been true long enough that my own Dreamwidth account is almost old enough to vote
the thing that keeps other people in the industry boggling at Dreamwidth, in a lot of the same ways and for a lot of the same reasons that people in the industry boggle at AO3, is that the income stream is all users of the service, because the service itself (and the Dreamwidth features that are available to all users but have higher limits for paid users) is valuable enough to enough people that part of what paid users are paying for is specifically to keep the service itself free for everyone else
I think people should be able to exist in public without worrying about being recorded and posted online, even if they're being "weird", and I also think that if you see someone recording you without your consent then you should be able to legally spray paint their camera lens.
There are many reasons that research into male birth control has been slow. Some of this has to do with the complications around testing: Any medical device or procedure that potentially involves pregnancy comes with increased ethical considerations, but it’s especially complicated when the person using the method isn’t the patient who could end up pregnant if it doesn’t work, so the risk-benefit is a less clear. The risks for taking contraception as a woman—like blood clots and mood swings—are greatly outweighed by the risk of getting pregnant, Nickels says. “Pregnancy is more of a health risk [than those potential side effects] so therefore it is ethical to administer contraceptives to women because we mitigate the health risk of pregnancy,” he explains. “Men don’t get pregnant. There is no health risk for men in pregnancy.” Sure, you could argue that the man is mitigating the health risk for their partner, but that’s not something we currently have a regulatory framework for.
"The DIY Male Birth Control Taking Over Reddit", Kara McGrath, June 23, 2026.
interesting article in Playboy, of all places, on a collection of practices called thermal male contraception that involves elevating the temperature of the testes to lower viable sperm count.
posting this paragraph in particular because it wasn't something I'd thought about before; I've seen a lot of posts and stuff over the years arguing that research on long acting reversible contraception for men is stalled because research participants (and presumably eventual consumers) will not tolerate the range of side effects considered acceptable for female contraception methods, but it hadn't occurred to me that there are ethical regulatory hurdles here too.
