Stand by Your Manhood (11 page)

A-ha! But this isn’t just about babies, is it? It’s also about sexual irresponsibility and STDs. That’s the snag: inadvertently creating a new generation of reckless men who’d fuck without giving a fuck.

‘Actually, that’s a red herring,’ she says, authoritatively. ‘Many women on the pill have unprotected sex
because
they’re on the pill – and that hasn’t stopped it being a success. It’s a separate, ongoing issue and shouldn’t be used to derail men’s options.’

Good point. Just because the female pill controls pregnancy – and not STDs – doesn’t make it any less of a
huge success. Nor is it any less of a money-spinner. The same applies to a male pill.

‘In fact,’ Fleming says, ‘countless men call the FPA’s helpline because they frequently find unplanned pregnancies “devastating”. Our statistics show that half of all pregnancies are unplanned. We know these can be as distressing for men as they are for women, but it only strikes men at this point. And, once a woman is pregnant, they have no say on whether she keeps it or not. The only opportunity men have to exercise choice is at the contraception stage. That’s why we want to see more of them putting their reproductive needs first.’

When I ask (through gritted teeth) whether men are trustworthy enough to take a contraceptive, Fleming doesn’t mess around. ‘That’s just absurd,’ she says. ‘Men do responsible things every day.’

For the sake of credibility, I request some proof. She points me in the direction of a 2008 study by GfK National Opinion Polls, which shows that 36 per cent of men would happily take a male contraceptive if available, whilst a further 26 per cent might, providing it were safe and reversible (something which would be a medical pre-requisite anyway). Add these together and you have 62 per cent already on board.

Oxford Journals also published a 1999 study of 1,894 women at family planning clinics across Scotland, South
Africa and China. More than 90 per cent of those in Scotland and South Africa thought a male pill was a good idea, whilst Chinese women (71 per cent in Hong Kong and 87 per cent in Shanghai) were only slightly less positive. Reassuringly, only thirty-six people said they wouldn’t trust their partner at all – that’s just 2 per cent of the total.

I then approach the British Pregnancy Advisory Service – an organisation which guides women through their options around abortion. Clare Murphy, BPAS’s Director of External Affairs, says men should ignore the cynics (some might call them misandrists) who say they’d be unreliable with a pill. Especially as our only other real option – the vasectomy – is increasingly unavailable on the NHS. ‘After condoms, vasectomy is the sole protection for men,’ she says. ‘Even then, we’re seeing a decline in their popularity due to funding cut-backs, so it’s either not available or severely restricted. Additionally, men are also more conscious that relationships break down. If they do, they naturally want the option to start a second family elsewhere.’

In 2001/02, there were 37,700 UK vasectomies, compared with 15,106 in 2011/12. The figures have fallen 16 per cent from 2010 to 2011 alone. In the USA the scenario is even more depressing, with a man needing to get his wife’s permission before doctors perform a vasectomy – otherwise they refuse.

But would the NHS even bother to prescribe a male pill if it were available? Under equality legislation, they’d probably have to, says Murphy. In fact, they’d open themselves up to litigation on the basis of gender bias if they didn’t. The tricky bit, she adds, isn’t legal wrangling or the fear of high-profile discrimination cases, but finding a drug company with the courage to invest in something new.

Bayer was founded in the German town of Barmen in 1863 – a former industrial metropolis that, interestingly, was also home to Friedrich Engels, co-founder of Marxist theory. Bayer’s legend as a pharmaceutical giant was immortalised when they invented the original Aspirin in 1897. Chances are you already have some of their products in your bathroom, especially if your girlfriend takes the Dianette contraceptive.

They’re also one of the few medical companies who looked into launching a male pill, but got cold feet. When I contacted them, a spokesperson admitted they considered the prospect, but ‘discontinued the programme’. Hmmm. Was this due to concern over law suits from accidental pregnancies? Or is there simply more money to be made from keeping birth control a woman’s domain? They refused to say. Even the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, whose members supply 90 per cent of all NHS drugs, were tight-lipped.

Perhaps the stumbling block isn’t willingness, but the practical difficulty of controlling millions of sperm as opposed to one egg. Likewise, the epic task of bringing a product to market isn’t easy either. It goes a little something like this: after scientists make their initial lab discovery, bio-tech partners create a compound to prove it won’t wreak havoc on the body’s other cells. A prototype is then made for human drug testing, which is a three-stage, ten-year process conducted under strict medical supervision. Only then, if nobody dies or grows an extra limb, can it be considered for commercial use. At this point, a marketing plan must be devised to ensure the end product doesn’t flop. And even then it’s a risk.

‘It’s to do with maths,’ says Dr Allan Pacey, Chair of the British Fertility Society and Senior Lecturer in Andrology at the University of Sheffield’s Medical School. ‘Both the methods and the market are already there. Ultimately, it’s now about convincing the venture capitalists to step up, but it’s extremely expensive.’

Fortunately, Pacey thinks Professor Smith stands a good chance because his approach has a unique selling point.

‘All it will take is one of the smaller pharma companies [who are constantly looking for that competitive edge] to take the plunge,’ he says. ‘And because the latest developments centre around non-hormonal methods, it’s much more likely to happen. Think of an
independent record label launching a new act before a major buys them out.’

Weeks later, when back in London, I learn that male contraceptive research is still happening at Bayer – although on a small scale. Similarly, the World Health Organization is also continuing work in this field, as are America’s National Institute for Health. In fact, the NIH are spending huge sums of government money on the discovery of new male methods.

Buoyed by this, I approach Pfizer – the world’s largest drug-maker and producers of Viagra. I wonder if there’s mileage in pitching the male contraceptive as a sex drug, but, once again, I’m greeted with radio silence. Perhaps, surrounded by all those little blue pills, everyone’s too busy shagging to answer questions from journalists.

Undeterred, I track down Dr Peter Rost, Pfizer’s former vice-president of marketing. Since his sensational departure from the company in 2005, which saw him fired after claiming that Pharmacia, a company Pfizer bought in 2003, illegally encouraged the sale of human growth hormones, he’s reinvented himself as a bona fide media maverick. (US President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, famously wanted to nominate him for a Guts of the Year award following his public swipe at his former employers.)

So, how would he sell it? ‘It
would
be tough because
men don’t have the fear factor of getting pregnant,’ he says from his office in New Jersey. ‘That’s a very big marketing device with women. Instead, a better approach would be to imply that only the bravest men would take it. This isn’t necessarily true,’ he adds. ‘But it taps into their psychology. Ultimately, echoing the control message of the 1960s would also work because men have never really had that – yet they want it.’

Whether a pharmaceutical giant would give it to them is another story, he adds. ‘Yes, men would be very cautious about taking such a drug at first – because it’s tinkering with their virility, albeit temporarily – but not nearly as much as the companies who are too scared to supply it.’

This isn’t a lone theory. In an interview with
The Independent,
legendary Austrian-American scientist Carl Djerassi, the guy known as the father of the pill, voiced his own doubts on a male equivalent becoming a reality – because men don’t demand it. ‘This has nothing to do with science; we know exactly how to develop [the male pill], but there’s not a single pharmaceutical company who will touch it – for economic and socio-political, rather than scientific, reasons.’ he said. ‘Their focus is on diseases of a geriatric population: diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular, Alzheimer’s. Male contraception is nothing compared with an anti-obesity drug.’

Ironically, before his pill became commonplace in
1960s America, Djerassi’s first marriage ended in divorce because he got a lover pregnant – after the condom broke. This fact, the idea that it could happen to the very man who created the solution, is a telling sign. If it can happen to him, it can happen to any one of us.

Days later, I find one of Peter Rost’s books,
The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman,
in a charity shop. It’s a shocking exposé of the medicine industry. Fascinated, I find a quiet corner in my local pub and read it within hours. As I leave, I nip to the bathroom. There, I see a condom machine. Rusty, empty and defaced with graffiti, it looks pathetic. Here is man’s only real contraceptive choice – unavailable.

An old, dog-eared piece of paper with the words OUT OF ORDER! is sellotaped across it. My sentiments exactly, I think.

THE SIGN ON THE SECURITY
gate of Guy Harrison’s West Sussex farm reads: ‘Every breath you take, every step you make, I’ll be watching you – The Police: you’re on CCTV.’

Anti-establishment messages like this aren’t a typical sight in the rolling acres of Ashurst, a sleepy village in the middle-class town of Horsham – especially from the
likes of James Blunt’s brother-in-law, whom you might expect to be a model citizen having posh pop peerage in the family – but it’s a fitting nod to his cynicism for the powers that be.

Ten years ago, Guy was arrested under the Terrorism Act when he stormed the Houses of Parliament in 2004 and sensationally flour-bombed Tony Blair during Prime Minister’s Questions. Detained and charged under Section Five of the Public Order Act, he faced two decades in a maximum-security prison and a lifetime of surveillance, but he wasn’t a suicide bomber, a religious fanatic or even a Greenpeace activist. Nor was he protesting sexed-up dossiers and the Iraq War.

He was far more controversial than that: he was a father.

A self-made businessman, the 46-year-old is quite the unlikely anarchist. Born and raised in Guildford, he grew up on a farm next to the Surrey/Sussex border. He was an average student at local school St John’s, where his most rebellious act was turning up one day on his father’s tractor. He went on to become an estate agent in London, where his career took off – which is appropriate given that he famously met his wife, Emily, when James ‘sold’ his sister on eBay to whoever could get her to a funeral in Ireland amid an air traffic strike. Guy triumphed and used his private helicopter, which he’d bought ‘for fun’
from the Belgian military months earlier, to seal the deal. As you do.

Yet, as far as gestures go, this is pretty tame compared to the epic effort he made to see his first daughter, Isabella – the surprise product of a ‘toxic’ relationship which ended in 2001.

Take note, gentlemen.

‘Oh, the stupidity of being a young man,’ he jokes, deadpan.

Nine months later, Guy – less carefree man about town, more tasered single dad – graciously offered his ex and her new boyfriend £25,000 to fund a deposit on a home. They accepted, of course, but the Child Support Agency quickly ruled the generous sum was a ‘gift’ and could not be considered financial support for the baby, even
though it was accompanied by a legal contract which described it so. The upshot? Guy was swiftly relieved of an additional £400 every month for eighteen years, totalling more than £100,000.

That’s expensive sex.

Things went from bad to worse when his ex, who shall remain nameless, had two more children with her new boyfriend, which rendered Guy an immediate imperfection on their family portrait. Despite his best efforts to remain in the picture, including three court rulings that assured Sunday custody every other weekend – what a privilege! – she rewrote genetic history and dwindled his access to nothing: a christening took place without him, phone calls went unanswered and long-standing plans were suddenly scuppered at the last minute, never to be rescheduled. His money was welcome, but he wasn’t.

The last time he saw his daughter was in a grey, lifeless supervision centre in Oxford, where he was forbidden from even taking her to the bathroom. That was fourteen years ago.

Caught in a pincer movement, he quickly built a legal case with a pricey City lawyer, hoping that if he kept calm, played by the rules and threw money at the problem, British justice would surely prevail. Sadly, in the words of The Clash, he fought the law and the law won. Having spent £50,000 on thirty-eight court appearances,
his role was effectively erased by the state. His final, make-or-break battle took place on the same day two American Airlines planes crashed into New York’s Twin Towers.

‘That was my own personal 9/11,’ he says.

Unsurprisingly, having exhausted all of his options, the months that followed were dominated with suicidal depression in what Guy calls ‘a living bereavement’. When I gingerly ask him to describe his lowest point, aware that the wound is still raw, he pauses – but not to think. He already knows the answer. Rather, choked on emotion, he is trying not to break down in front of me.
‘I had a rifle in my mouth,’ he says, lowly. ‘It was a very, very dark time.’

Thankfully, in a do-or-die decision, he channelled his energy into one of the few sympathetic groups for disenfranchised dads: Fathers 4 Justice – the controversial men-in-tights organisation who scale buildings as superheroes to change sexist family law. There, he spent four years fielding calls from thousands of men who, like him, never thought it would happen to them. Yet, here they were: navigating the same soul-destroying, dead-end, bullshit process with desperate pleas for help falling on deaf ears.

‘Every six weeks there would be a suicide and we’d scrub their name off the list,’ he throws in, casually. ‘That’s how normalised the desperation was. Men were literally dying to see their own children.’

But, despite the trauma, his work became a strange form of by-proxy therapy. Fortified by it, and with nothing left to lose, he became stronger. Politically motivated. Happy to risk life and limb on stunts which demanded attention as well as answers. Which is how he found himself in Parliament, stood before our country’s (then) most powerful person, holding a condom filled – rather cheekily – with ‘self-raising’ flour. Credit where credit’s due: at least he had a sense of humour about it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

A decade on, as we take a seat in his immaculate living room – littered with pictures of his children with Emily, one-year-old Lola and Hugh, three – he vividly describes his arrest and the hours that followed at Paddington Green police station: a place typically reserved for suspected terrorists, not eager fathers. There were the good cop/bad cop cross-examinations which took place every three hours – even throughout the night, the fetid stench of the squalid cell and the gritty reality that, pretty often, justice miscarries when you’re a bloke. Even if your motivation is good.

‘I’d be rubbish in a Jack Bauer situation,’ he admits with a wry smile.

I can’t help but laugh. As he pushes a well-curated biscuit barrel under my nose and serves tea in a china cup, it’s clear that this well-spoken, charming man – a gentleman
and a gentle man, dressed in foppish chinos and a polo club T-shirt – is hardly a danger to national security. Christ, he even wrote to Downing Street and offered to pay Blair’s dry-cleaning bill following their tête-à-tête (who, in turn, replied saying he was very sympathetic to the cause, but couldn’t be seen to accept the offer in case it upset his Blair Babes – ta very much).

Despite this, five days on trial in Southwark Crown Court followed, as did five solid years of
Homeland
-style surveillance which was itself a daily white-knuckle ride. ‘Nobody saw the aftermath of the arrest once the TV cameras disappeared,’ he adds.

Hence the sign.

Even Emily, who, at a guess, is probably about as bellicose as Kate Middleton, was arrested as the milieu unfolded. A fact that’s hard to comprehend when you meet her because she’s so poised, respectful and well-mannered. But as she sits there recanting the tale – beautiful, clever, calm and WASPy – I realise that her Blunt DNA is startlingly evident. She is her famous brother liquidised, shaken up and poured into female form. Meanwhile, the real criminal, Isabella’s mother, escaped justice because of her own physical attributes: specifically, her gender. A reality which is less the exception, more the rule when it comes to family breakdown.

‘It all depends on whether fathers are listed on the birth certificate,’ says solicitor Vanessa Lloyd-Platt.

It wasn’t always this way. In the 1800s men typically got custody of their children, but not as a result of naked privilege. They were solely financially responsible for them, too. Yes, they got the children, but they also got the bill. Benefits Britain didn’t exist.

Now, 200 years on, women get the kids, but men still get the bill. Sometimes men even pay for children that aren’t theirs. The Child Support Agency have roughly 500 cases of paternity fraud per year – and they’re just the ones we know about. According to a YouGov study, 1.2 million British men doubt their parentage.

The recent case of Steven Carter is not unusual: the CSA deducted £50,000 from his accounts between 2007 and 2014 – even though a DNA test later proved the child in question wasn’t his. They acknowledged this, but the Department of Work and Pensions still won’t refund him because the ‘child’ is now twenty-two – thus an adult – so the case is closed. Then there’s Mark Webb, who raised
his ‘daughter’ for seventeen years only to discover they were no relation. When he sued his ex-wife for compensation, both county and appeal court judges denied his damages claim, brushing it off as a man’s obligation.

To this day no British woman has ever been convicted of paternity fraud.

This set-up is no accident. Since Harriet Harman and her pals entered politics, the laws which govern family life have been re-jigged to put women on top – and men on the back foot. Together, they decided families weren’t society’s natural, balanced building block, but a cunning plot to oppress mothers whilst placing men in undeserving positions of power (when, actually, men were breaking their backs in jobs they hated just to keep everything ticking over). To avenge this, they squeezed men from the home and hit them where it hurts: the heart.

Don’t believe me? The Children Act 1989 specifically declares: ‘The rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child is abolished.’

A year later, a 1990 report by the Institute for Public Policy Research called ‘The Family Way’ saw Harriet personally declare: ‘It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion.’ Meanwhile, American feminist Linda Gordon ruled: ‘The nuclear family must be destroyed … whatever its ultimate meaning.’

Even now, the Children and Families Bill doesn’t mention the word ‘father’ once. Not once.

Fast-forward to the present day and Isabella is one of four million children who are products of this. On the bright side, at least Guy’s in good company: Sir Bob Geldof was one of the first high-profile men to address the issue after losing access to his daughters Peaches, Pixie and Fifi when Paula Yates left him back in 1995. This should alarm even the most successful man, because, if raising millions to ease Ethiopian famine through Live Aid doesn’t render you decent father material, the rest of us are – to be frank – fucked.

When I met him at a party in west London some time later, he confessed that fighting the system nearly bankrupted him. ‘It was beyond expensive,’ he told me.