Movie night and male contraceptives

by Not Sure

Oct 05, 2025

This week’s Alan Watt Redux is from October 9, 2016 entitled “Real News is Sparse, Usual Threatening Kind, Sign Every Agreement or Be Left Behind - Part 3”, and I chose it because of an idea I had on Wednesday, October 1 when I gave myself ‘movie night’.

My idea was to use part of this 2016 talk where Alan Watt read an article about contraception and combine it with an excerpt from another talk where he discussed the technique of the left/right paradigm. But also on Wednesday, October 1, Pope Leo XIV blessed a block of ice, and I decided to leave Alan’s Oct. 9, 2016 talk intact, focused as it was on the climate change con. Better to turn ‘movie night’ into a Not Sure piece.

I’ve been trying to reclaim a more human approach to life and spend less time at my desk. This project is still in the beta testing phase, but I’ve made some progress. Starting this past Wednesday, I’m giving myself one day off a week. This won’t be a chore day, a cleaning day, an errand day, or any other kind of day that involves doing anything productive. On Wednesday, I did find myself back at my desk (resentfully) for about forty-five minutes, doing something I thought was absolutely necessary, and I weeded a flower bed, but not too vigorously. Progress, not perfection, I’ve heard.

Alan Watt was very good about breaking and braking for the unnecessary. It was rejuvenating and it allowed his mind to rest from the specific kind of research and thinking he did much of the time. Sometimes, he would go on music ‘benders’ and listen to hours of the same band or performer. Other times, he’d request light reading, which was me reading to him. Preferred books were the Sherlock Holmes short stories and anything by Philip K. Dick. But mostly, Alan liked ‘movie night’. He didn’t mind watching a movie for the second or third time if he thought it was good.

It is a fact that I rarely sat through a movie with Alan start to finish. I think I would like to have done so, but maybe he wanted a cup of tea, or a batch of chips (that’s French fries) or the stove needed another stick of wood. Still and overall, it was relaxing for me too, and I’ve reflected lately that I seldom take these breaks on my own. My new resolution is that I will make time for this kind of thing.

So on Wednesday, I began to make good on that resolution. I turned on the television and went to YouTube and scoured through comedies. The newer ones seemed silly and base, and I finally settled on something I’d never seen before from 1980. Hopscotch, starring Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty, Sam Waterston, and Herbert Lom was described as a comedy spy film.

I got about halfway through it and my mind wandered to trivial questions about the actors. It wasn’t a boring movie, but it wasn’t riveting. When did Walter Matthau die? 2000, age 80, heart failure.

Was Sam Waterston alive? Did he ever win an Emmy or Screen Actors Guild award for Law and Order? He was nominated often enough. He’s still alive and will be 85 next month. Three Emmy noms for Law and Order, no wins. Eleven Screen Actors Guild noms for the same, one win. Waterston is a board member of Oceana (preserving and restoring the world’s oceans) and he received the Goodermote Humanitarian Award from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2012 for his longtime support of refugees around the world.

In 2019, along with Jane Fonda, he was arrested in Washington D.C. for protesting the Trump administration’s policies regarding climate change.

As Alan Watt said, we’re given stars, we follow stars. Angelina Jolie and George Clooney are members of the Council on Foreign Relations, and some public relations firm regularly dreams up appropriate things for them to say about burning social issues.

Ned Beatty seems to have spent more time marrying, fathering children, divorcing, and remarrying than getting involved in causes and activism. In 1988 however, he did support the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson.

Glenda Jackson (no relation to Jesse) was an English actress who received much acclaim and many awards. Born in 1936, she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made her theatre debut in 1966. In 1992, she quit acting and ran for Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labour Party. Thus began her distinguished career in politics which she continued until 2015, when she returned to acting and she continued to take roles until her death in 2023.

I continued down the list of all the actors in Hopscotch, even the minor players with small scenes. I might not be good at movie night, but I excel at trivial pursuit.

I finally arrived at Mike Gwilym, a Welsh actor whose scene in Hopscotch lasted only two or three minutes. Born in 1949, Gwilym’s parents ran a chain of women’s clothing stores in Wales. His maternal grandfather was the Belgian oil industrialist Edmond Jules Dupont. Where was Gwilym now? He retired from the stage in 1990 and moved to the south of Spain (Andalusia) where his parents had a summer home. There he met his life and business partner who was a fine arts specialist and they embarked together on a career in fine arts, design, and property development.

Their design and property website contained a blog section which housed a variety of blogs about summer in the south of Spain, winter in the south of Spain, dinner parties, musings on family and friends, and these were written by Gwilym’s partner, E. M. Coutinho.

What else could I find about E.M. Coutinho? According to Wikipedia, E.M. was Elsimar Metzker Coutinho, a Brazilian scientist, professor, gynecologist, and television personality of Luso-Austrian descent who was born in 1930 and passed away in 2020. That couldn’t be Gwilym’s partner because his E.M. Coutinho is still actively blogging. I continued scrolling through his blog site.

He wrote a piece entitled “Wishing You Much Doris Day in 2025”. I like Doris Day. Beautiful voice. I know. Doris got Hollywooded, but have a listen to her doing “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, written in 1930, first recorded by Ozzie Nelson and his Orchestra, and receiving renewed popularity when Cass Elliott of The Mamas & the Papas covered it in 1968. But here’s Doris. Perfection.

Doris Day - Dream A Little Dream of Me

But I didn’t read what E.M. Coutinho had to say about Doris Day because right next to that piece was this:

Of Gestrinone & Other Hormones — from endometriosis to puberty blockers

Clearly this was quite different than anything else E.M. Coutinho wrote about, and so I read it. He wrote about the 1967 Spanish version of Life magazine, whose two main features were Saturn V and his grandfather. It’s attached here for you to read in its entirety, but I’ll give you a few key points from this article, and about E.M. Coutinho the grandfather in general. E.M. Coutinho descended from money, land, political, artistic and pharmacological connections. An interesting factoid is that Coutinho is from the Late Latin cautum, from the past participle of cavere ‘to make safe.’

E.M. Coutinho

Early in his career, Coutinho was invited to be a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in the area of reproductive endocrinology. Following on the work of Csapo and Corner who were the discoverers of progesterone, he began studying steroids with progestagenic effects. He then returned to Brazil to run a maternity clinic at the Federal University of Bahia which under his leadership became the Human Reproduction Research Center of the World Health Organization in Latin America.

Coutinho’s work with progestogenic substances led to the first injectable contraceptive, Ciclofem. Thrust into the limelight as one of the world’s leading experts in endocrinology and family planning, Coutinho was sent to China to investigate a problem. In the 1970’s, researchers at the University of Peking discovered that men working at cotton plantations were becoming infertile. Coutinho helped the Chinese figure out that the sterilizing agent was gossypol, a phenol derived from the cotton plant. Quite obviously, the Chinese then began experimenting with gossypol to create a male oral contraceptive.

Gossypol

The grandfather’s namesake went on to write about the work his grandfather did using hormones like Depo-Provera to treat children with early or delayed puberty. Grandfather Coutinho was responsible for the discovery of treatments for infertility caused by endometriosis.

E.M. Coutinho the younger defended the use of hormones for a variety of problems and weighed in on the ‘fear mongering’ and ‘moral panic’ of medicalizing children. His main point is that people should step away from various forms of moral panic and make informed decisions.

An aside here, and in keeping with the articles that Alan Watt read in this episode about euthanasia, and his mention of that famous quote from The First Global Revolution: Is man the enemy who needs to be downsized and castigated for his role in climate change? Are there too many of us, and that’s why contraceptives, whether oral, injectable, or remote controllable, are constantly being studied and marketed? Or, does science just want to help? Make it possible for infertile women to bear children?

We now take an intermission. Get up and make some popcorn, or something healthier.

In this talk, Alan Watt was explaining how relentless this agenda is, our children are indoctrinated with their generation’s key points. They’ll cry when the polar bear is shown adrift, alone on his tiny chunk of iceberg. No matter the truth, the agenda must go on.

An article that Alan read in this talk:

The Future of Birth Control: Remote Control Fertility

Many years ago, Alan received a letter from a transgender woman named Sage, who wrote that they had recently discovered Alan’s talks and wished they had found them much earlier. Sage regretted the transition but was now married to a woman and they had children. To step away from the responsibilities of the life they had made seemed cruel and selfish.

As always, time was in short supply and that letter went unanswered for about three months, but a thoughtful reply was eventually sent. It always saddens me to remember that some weeks later that letter was returned, as Sage had moved and there was no forwarding address information.

Alan Watt also heard from parents, grandparents, and other relatives of young people who underwent hormone therapy to change secondary sex characteristics, and sometimes also had surgery. The tone of these communications varied from horror, to sadness, to love, compassion, acceptance, and a blend of these.

Not long ago, I was speaking with someone whose granddaughter is now living as a man and taking hormones. He was accepting, or at least resigned and said, ‘We know the agenda. Is this surprising? These people are casualties.’

Critical theory arose from the Frankfurt School in the 1920s: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse were heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud. It’s outside the scope of this piece to examine critical theory, so I will give an outrageous summary. It analyzes and seeks to change and even overturn aspects of society. It challenges pure objectivity and rationality and favors lived experience and ideology over objective truth.

Perhaps if I was a student at university today, I might be asked to write a paper on New Keynesian economics from the perspective of a transabled Inuit, or to argue in favor of Third Wave feminism from the point of view of a cisgender undocumented immigrant from Latin America.

Academia has been filled with these types of ‘novel’ approaches for many decades now. Just read Foundations: Their Power and Influence by Rene A. Wormser from 1956. It did not surprise me then to continue looking through the blog site of E.M. Coutinho the younger, as he wove his politics and sexuality throughout his posts. What was interesting was to get a gauge of a large cross-section of the world who do not think as I do. It was on the thread of one of his commenters that I discovered this song parody from a New Zealand woman with a large following who started her channel during Covid-19 to ‘keep people smiling through the uncertainty’. She started by reworking “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music, in celebration of the ‘upside’ of lockdown, like not having to shave your legs, and letting dirty dishes pile up in the sink.

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Less cheerful was a commenter whose German handle means ‘delight in other people’s suffering’. After one of Coutinho’s posts, he supplied the stuff of conservative grannies’ nightmares when he said that right-wing haters deserved to be hunted and, well, dealt with.

The weaponization of the left/paradigm that we see in so many countries now is not a recent development. It was designed years ago by academics, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and behaviorists, and pushed through into policy. Again, see Foundations: Their Power and Influence.

We’re way past political fixes, and not just because that would be too little too late, but because the politicians who ushered these changes in slowly, Fabian style, in your country and in mine, are just the middlemen. Trying to legislate is a bit like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.