This post by Deepali Gaur Singh tells a bizarre story of an attempt by the administration in the bandit-riddled Shivpuri district of India’s Madhya Pradesh state to limit population growth. The district, heavily over-populated where the average number of children per family is five, is offering men who get a vasectomy a fast-track application for a gun permit.

“This is a state with a high number of dacoits [bandits], where people like to keep rifles,” Manish Shrivastav, the administrative chief of Shivpuri and originator of the lateral thinking behind the plan, said.

“It also has a low level of vasectomies because of a perceived notion of manliness. I decided to match that with a bigger symbol of manliness — a gun licence. It has been a success.”

That remains to be seen. The problem is that this whole approach does nothing to enlighten males at all. It simply trades off one issue and may well create a larger one. Women in this particular culture, as Singh describes it, bear a heavy burden for infertility, even if it is the man who is infertile.

In a traditional culture with a rigid division of duties where men earn and women nurture, female infertility is seen as a curse that women have to endure. With infertility for women comes ostracism and a life of loneliness, even as male infertility strangely finds its victims in women as well. Often women have had to carry the burden of their spouses’ inability to help conceive and so complex are the images of manhood, virility and fertility that it manifests itself in a complete denial of a man’s inability to be fertile. Concepts of manliness are so acutely woven in to the male psyche from a very early age that while men carry the pressures of that imagery women bear the consequences of it.

The situation does nothing to change the root problems and will probably cause other more serious problems to expand. It looks like a cultural mess which is likely to get messier, and likely more dangerous for women.

Part of the problem is convincing the men of the district that vasectomies will do nothing to change their sexual performance. Many think it will leave them sexually weaker.

That myth isn’t just restricted to the cultures of South Asia. I’ve heard it from men in any group where the discussion of vasectomies arises. In North America.

A vasectomy is perhaps the simplest and easiest way to achieve virtually fool-proof birth control. That should be enough for any responsible male in a committed couples relationship, but there is another undeniable fringe benefit.

Freedom!

No more worries about her pill dispenser, a breaking or leaky condom, a faulty IUD or messy spermicidal jelly. (It ain’t lube.)

Far from weakening a man’s sexual function, my own experience is that it improved it – because the inhibition of generating a bunch of swimming little creatures intent on getting their teeth into something egg-shaped completely vanishes. Semen production is the same, erections are the same and the sex is now definitely for sport.

There are no discussions about birth-control here. It’s done, it’s permanent and it makes sex so much more fun.