It has happened to every guy. Your words tangle amid the bra and Levis lying next to the bed. The air in the room is becoming heavier. Over the soft rumple of sheets and the sloppy sounds of kissing there’s just the gentle rise and fall of her breath. Everything is perfect.

Then you remember—you’re out of condoms. The dance comes to a grinding halt, and you roll over and look at the ceiling, waiting as the sexual energy dissipates like heat off a big block Chevy. Someday soon, this reliance on condoms may seem like a bad dream. One of the most popular prescription drugs in history, Pfizer’s Viagra, is already available for the other thing that happens to every guy. And right now, research facilities at the University of Washington and Dutch pharmaceutical giant Organon are perfecting a drug that’ll allow guys to roll back over and say, “Don’t worry babe, I’m on the pill.”

In the age of AIDS, it seems almost quaint to consider a new form of oral contraception. In those fortunate high schools not taking the “just say no” approach to sexual matriculation—sounds dirty doesn’t it?—condom use is literally drilled into student’s heads. It seems to be everywhere, from pop culture to billboards, reinforcing that safe sex is the only sex one should have.

For the most part, “no glove no love” is the right message. Oral contraception is simply not for everybody. While the pill works well for many women, its potential side effects range from relatively mild (water retention, headaches and mood swings) to potentially devastating (blood clots, pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks and strokes). Having been in several committed, monogamous relationships over the years, I’ve had serious conversations about the pill more than once. While I’d certainly welcome—with open arms—the opportunity to have sex without a condom, I could never ask a partner to take the pill.

For different reasons, none of the wonderful girls with whom I’ve discussed birth control ever got on it. One smoked a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day, and since puffing and pill popping is about as safe as drinking and driving, I told her I couldn’t support it. Another one of my girlfriends had taken it before, only to find it turned her into a complete psychopath, while another just didn’t like the idea of tinkering with her body chemistry. The risks associated with the female pill can definitely discourage its use.

Of course, the pill also doesn’t protect against disease. AIDS aside, nasty poxes like chlamydia, genital warts and herpes—once referred to by sex columnist Dan Savage as the “worst thing that could ever happen to you, pre-AIDS”—may not carry a death sentence, but these viruses carry lifetime consequences, not the least of which is the uncomfortable prospect of informing every potential sex partner about your “situation.” But even if the Center for Disease Control suddenly revealed that chocolate malts cure HIV, chlamydia vanished upon eating banana Runts and Clearasil permanently banished genital warts and herpes, male birth control would still have a formidable problem.

That problem, of course, is the trust factor.

Late Night with Conan O’Brien parodied NBC’s insipid “The More You Know” clips with a bit that perfectly sums up the trust factor regarding male birth control. The spot simply states: “No one ever said having kids was easy. But it can be—just have sex and leave town.”

The point is, if a woman purrs into a man’s ear and says “I’m on the pill,” even if there’s no way to physically tell, she has a vested interest in telling the truth. If she’s lying, or forgot to take a dose, she’s the one stuck holding the bag, or rather, the baby. Unscrupulous men, however, could very well lie and then do as Late Night suggests, because while contemplating an abortion can be a painful and difficult choice, for someone slimy enough to actually lie about taking birth control, filling the tank and hitting the road is about as easy as things get.

It’s clear male oral contraception could never really replace condoms for casual sexual encounters. But what about men in committed relationships? And what about men who want to put an extra barrier between themselves and fatherhood? That’s when the male pill starts to make sense.

Today’s man has woefully limited birth-control options. For the risk-averse, there’s always the vasectomy, but even though the procedure is done under local anesthesia and is supposedly painless, its very permanence makes it unattractive. There’s also the uncomfortable fact that the same doctors who say it’s painless also prescribe ice on your crotch for up to 24 hours post-operation. For the foolhardy, there’s the “pull out” method, but that’s more like an enjoyable round of Russian roulette than a method of reliable birth control.

Given that scientists are testing safe, effective male oral contraception—along with brain-twisting concepts like nanotechnology and robotic interplanetary explorers—it’s funny to contemplate that our primary form of protection is still the humble condom. The prophylactic has been in use, with varying degrees of success, for thousands of years. Planned Parenthood’s official condom history says ancient Egyptians and Romans both used condoms and that the “oldest condoms were found in the foundations of Dudley Castle near Birmingham, England. They were made of fish and animal intestine and dated back to 1640.” Over the years, condoms were made out of virtually everything: linen, lambskin, animal guts, the muscle of conquered foes, leather, and even—ouch—tortoise-shell, before rubber was settled on in the 1930s. As crazy as it sounds, linen condoms allegedly prevented the contraction of syphilis.

Of course, condoms have improved a great deal since 1640. Today there’s even a female condom, but it looks like an anorexic jellyfish and has all the sex appeal of a lug nut. The hard facts are that while condoms are cheap and effective, they add everything to sexual intercourse that dog shit does to a Prada loafer.

Fortunately, for those who’d like to see the condom go the way of the dodo, there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Studies even suggest that a natural form of oral contraception is already widely available for men. Unfortunately, it’s illegal. Clinical trials by the State University of New York found that smoking marijuana offsets the rhythm of irie men’s sperm, making fertilizing an egg extremely difficult. Simple coincidence or Darwin in action? Only Jah knows.

On the white-market side, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that researchers at the University of Washington have been testing pills and injections—similar to Norplant for women—for the last several years and have found them to be up to 97 percent effective. Like the female pill, the new technologies are hormone-based. The male pill works by delivering a cocktail of progestin—also a main ingredient in the female pill—and testosterone. This combination, when taken daily, will stop sperm production and prevent pregnancy. As the University of Washington’s John Amory explains: “The testicle makes two things—testosterone and sperm. The pill uses external testosterone to shut down the brain’s signals to the testicle, which stops making sperm and internal testosterone,” and leaves men with “a healthy amount of testosterone.” While testosterone is doing most of the work, the progestin also blocks sperm production—just as it blocks egg production in females—and provides another level of protection.

While the long-term affects of the male pill aren’t yet known—it simply hasn’t existed long enough—none of the subjects in Seattle reported any pronounced repercussions from taking it other than slight weight gain. And worldwide clinical trials support the studies at UW. Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles, along with their colleagues in Beijing and the United Kingdom, have also developed reliable, reversible male oral contraception and found none of the heart or blood problems associated with the female pill. Organon, the Dutch pharmaceutical company, even claims its pill to be 100 percent effective—a significant improvement over condoms and the traditional pill, which can fail anywhere from 1 to 14 percent of the time. Because of the FDA’s long approval process, however, it will be several years before American men will be able to choose oral contraception. But the check is clearly in the mail.

With a male pill on the way, the question becomes, why did it take so long? Women have had an oral contraceptive for over 40 years, and while it was surely liberating for women to suddenly have such control over their reproductive rights, the very idea of the pill is misogynistic. Think about it: While nurse Margaret Sanger and International Harvester heiress Katherine McCormick are the true mothers of the pill (see Leigh Simpson’s piece in R6: The Revolution Issue), it was scientist Gregory Pincus—thanks to McCormick’s millions—who developed the chemistry of contraception. And he certainly wasn’t the only man trying. So the people who designed the pill were men—you can almost picture them, wearing clunky black glasses and white lab coats and chain smoking as they toiled—but instead of asking what they could take to prevent pregnancy, they decided to pass the buck.

With regard to birth control, my fundamental problem is that by consenting to scrap condoms, I’m asking my partner—whom I presumably love—to do something I can’t do myself. And that isn’t fair. Male oral contraception is important because it levels the playing field and gives me the ability to say, “Fine, if you want to smoke, then I’ll take the pill.” It’s about time I had that option.