Just A Little Snip

Hi friend,

We’ve seen so many stories about how female founders have trouble securing investment, which was why when we read this Vanity Fair piece on a “sperm race” in LA hosted by a company aptly named Sperm Racing, the first thing that jumped out to us wasn’t the absurdity of the endeavor (which may or may not have been entirely fake), but the fact that its 17-year-old founder has already raised $1.5 million from a host of unnamed male investors.

One of the big donors is “not someone mainstream you would probably know” though he is “really involved in the Elon camp and stuff like that.” In the crowd were friends of Brian Johnson, the biohacking man who publicly shares his nighttime erection data. The Sperm Racing founders also signed a deal with Polymarket, so observers could bet on its races.

This where we are with masculinity in this country. As VF’s Zoë Bernard notes, “there is no finer distillation of our current masculine fixation than that increasingly elusive marker of virility, sperm itself.” But maybe, just maybe, this focus on sperm health could be harnessed for good. (We won’t get our hopes up.)

This is all a lead-up to our feature this week, which is about vasectomies in long-term hetero relationships. Many men are scared to get them! That’s below, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

I was at a cocktail party recently when, a few drinks in, someone (ok, it was me) bluntly asked the gathering of fellow moms in their late 30s and early 40s, “So… what’s everyone doing for birth control now?”

Lately, the topic seemed unavoidable. In my social media feeds, pundits were discussing the unsustainability of modern parenthood in America, and creators were lamenting the unpredictability of their perimenopausal bodies, menstrual cycles, and ovulation windows. In my group chats, a bunch of women were mostly sure they didn’t want any more kids and were categorically certain that they didn’t want to go back on the Pill. They found it unacceptable that, after all these years, they were still solely responsible for managing the physical and mental burden of family planning for their households.

“Vasectomy,” one cocktail party guest replied to my query. “Vasectomy,” echoed another. The same conversation came up in a group chat of college friends as we planned for our 20-year college reunion. One friend’s husband declared his vasectomy “the best decision he made in 2024.” Another friend’s husband had been dragging his feet on getting snipped; it took a chemical pregnancy (aka a very early miscarriage) to finally get him to make the appointment. Three years ago, one friend’s husband bid eagerly on a vasectomy at an elementary school auction. He was outbid, and their surprise third child just turned two.

For many families in this life stage, a vasectomy seems like a choice with few downsides. With a brief in-office procedure and a week or so of recovery time (plus a very specific ejaculation schedule and a moratorium on unprotected sex while all the sperm drains out of there), they get the peace of mind of a foolproof birth control method – one that doesn’t require daily medication, fussing with latex, monitoring your ovulation, or having a medical device inserted into a uterus that has withstood so much. (So much!) And the women, whose bodies have been through a lot (Decades of synthetic hormones! Invasive IUDs! Infertility procedures! Complicated pregnancies! Traumatic childbirth! Run-of-the-mill childbirth! Multiple c-sections!) get a permanent reprieve from the physical toll and mental load of family planning. 

Alex, 43, and his wife Lucy, 41, have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old, and he got a vasectomy shortly after their youngest was born. His own dad had a vasectomy, and he had no hesitations about doing it. 

“I was adamantly opposed to having more than two kids,” Alex said. “The whole world is easier for families of four. We sit in the car together. We get the right number of hamburger buns. The siblings don’t have a third wheel. And having more kids might have slowed down our careers.”

Alex, who was the one to broach the idea of a vasectomy with his wife, describes the experience as uncomfortable but not painful, though he was worried about the recovery and asked the doctor if he’d be able to hold the baby afterward. His wife reminded him that she had held and nursed the baby immediately after getting a c-section – a far more invasive surgery. 

“I feel really good about it,” Alex said. “We made the right choice.”

Some men are hesitant. Dr. Vikrant Uberoi, a urologist at a large mid-Atlantic collection of practices called Chesapeake Urology, performs about 100 vasectomies a year, and says that the vast majority of his patients tell him they are getting a vasectomy because their wife wants them to – often she is the one who made the appointment. When patients are reluctant, it’s most often because they are concerned about the pain, or that there will be a change to their sex life – that they won’t be able to ejaculate, it will hurt when they ejaculate, or their erections won’t be as strong. “None of that is the case,” Uberoi clarifies. As for the pain, he says “It's a nothing procedure. It takes 10 minutes. You can be on your phone, you feel four seconds of discomfort, and then afterwards you get to sit, you don't do chores for a little while, and you get to ice and watch TV.” Uberoi got a vasectomy in 2022.

Nick, 43, has three daughters aged 10, 4, and 7, and was put off the idea of getting a vasectomy when his wife, who wants him to get the procedure, showed him an animated video of what happens during the surgery. “I would not recommend women show their husbands that video,” he says. The idea of being awake during the procedure makes him “squeamish,” he says, and he’d be more willing to go through with it if general or twilight anesthesia were an option.

This super-simple quiz from telehealth provider Winona helps you narrow down the likeliness that you’re entering perimenopause or menopause. And then, depending on your symptoms, you can learn about treatment options.

You can learn more, and take the quiz, here. #partner

TO STREAM The family-friendly (well, it’s PG-13) Apple TV+ film Fountain of Youth feels like Indiana Jones-lite, with John Krasinski and Natalie Portman sharing top billing as siblings hunting for the fountain of youth. Meanwhile, HBO is finally releasing its Pee-Wee Herman doc, Pee-Wee As Himself.

TO GET Ahead of summer, we’re stocking up on a few tried-and-true beauty basics from Nordstrom. That includes this great-smelling, luxe deodorant (that actually works really well); the lightweight gel sunscreen we’ve been swearing by; and these excellent blush sticks for a hit of glow without too much makeup. #partner

TO LISTEN We just started listening to the first few tracks of Grace Potter’s upcoming release, Medicine, and it’s great. Apparently, the bluesy album — which was produced by T Bone Burnett — was shelved for more than a decade.

TO LEARN This episode of Switched on Pop is a must-listen for those of us whose children love radio hits. It explains a lot, including the current Benson Boone “Worship Pop” moment. And now we know the names of the artists behind the tracks we’re forced to listen to in the car.

This piece about an ayahuasca trip is such a good read. • On losing your mother to dementia. • Inside the last Lucille Roberts: “All of us hope this gym never closes.” • A lot of pretty pictures of Jon Hamm in this profile. • Nostalgia for the non-fancy, non-aesthetic family vacations of the past.

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