It’s Different for Girls: Billie JD Porter’s Cinematic Dissection of Contraceptive Power and Cultural Memory

In It’s Different for Girls, Billie JD Porter turns her lens toward an unglamorous but urgent question: why, in the twenty-first century, does the burden of contraception still rest almost entirely on women’s bodies? At just under forty minutes, the film operates less as a conventional exposé than as a cultural artefact, an essay in moving images, excavating the entanglement of science, gender politics, and pharmaceutical inertia.

Porter, known for her journalistic acuity in music, politics, and youth culture, approaches her subject as both investigator and witness. Her own history of nearly two decades negotiating the physical and psychological side effects of hormonal birth control—becomes the film’s subtextual heartbeat. This is not a detached treatise; it is an intervention. The film’s urgency is sharpened by its temporal context: post-Roe America, where reproductive agency is being legislated backwards, and where innovations in male contraception are both tantalizingly close and perpetually deferred.

At the screening guests were treated to a raw conversation with the films activists Dr Brian T Nguyen along with Ulyssa and Logan Revolvo, who were trail subjects and featured in the film. Writer, presenter and producer Karley Sciortino joined in the conversation moderated by Molly Lambert the journalist behind HeidiWorld and Night Call podcast.

The documentary’s visual languageresist the glossy, fast-cut language of advocacy media. Instead, the camera lingers: on the slow application of NES-T gel by a male trial participant; on the clinical quiet of research labs; on scientists whose work is at once groundbreaking and imperiled by institutional indifference. These moments are not mere illustration—they form a subtle choreography of care, patience, and stalled momentum.

Produced in association with Park Pictures, It’s Different for Girls inherits the production house’s pedigree for socially precise storytelling. Yet Porter’s authorship remains unmistakable: she situates male contraception not as a niche medical curiosity but as a prism through which to examine structural misogyny. Big Pharma’s reluctance is presented not as an economic inevitability but as a choice, one aligned with a long historical lineage of neglecting female health for the sake of male comfort.

Ultimately, It’s Different for Girls is less about “awareness” than about re-alignment. It demands the audience reconsider the cartography of reproductive responsibility: who draws its borders, who patrols them, and who is left to inhabit the most perilous terrain. In doing so, Porter not only documents a stalled medical frontier but inscribes a political demand—one as intimate as it is universal.