It's really frustrating how often this gets framed as sexist, when it's a totally different problem. I get why people would equate them but they are very different biological processes. Producing a baby is a complicated process, and there's a lot of steps that we can intervene in to prevent it. Producing a million sperm is, maybe surprisingly, less complicated and it's harder to target a specific thing and produce easily reversible results.
Men have had vasectomy on the table for a long time now. It's just more serious than most forms of female birth control, in terms of implementation and recovery, still not foolproof, and not as easy to reverse.
Even more frustrating is that sexism definitely does exist and play a role. It's just more about the human parts of the process, like dealing with medical staff, dealing with insurance, dealing with local, state, and now federal governments that want to bar access to women. Looking at the pill side is misplacing the anger.
Here's why I still think of it as a win: It's not just the contest between two people, or their ideas, or their backgrounds. What you really have to look at is the contest between the propaganda and the budgets. The simple fact is that a lot of voters aren't that involved, they vote based on word of mouth or advertising, not by looking into the backgrounds of those they're voting for.
Cuomo outspent Mamdani 4 to 1. Billionaires and politicians went all out to attack Mamdani. Many painted apocalyptic pictures. If you look at those more distant contests, where someone won by a wider margin, I would bet that the advertising and endorsements weren't so lopsided either.
This isn't a win for Democrats or Mamdani, this is a win for word of mouth campaigning. This is a win for people being so sick of what's on offer that many ignored the dire warnings of billionaires and politicians. That's some good news I can get behind.