The Sex of Contraception: Tracing the gendered origins of contraceptive responsibility

• In Event: 4463 - Framing Reproductive Decision-making

Abstract

Reproductive-age women are disproportionately responsible for preventing pregnancy relative to men within their heterosexual relationships. While research has begun to illuminate the ways in which contraceptive responsibility is gendered, we know less sociologically about how and why this is the case. In other words, to more fully understand the social processes that result in women’s obligation to prevent pregnancy, we must more fully explore men’s and women’s contraceptive experiences over the life course. We ask, what experiences may have cumulatively shaped and ultimately gendered contraceptive responsibility? Through in-depth interviews with 86 racially and socioeconomically diverse women of reproductive age and 17 of their male partners, we find two key processes influence the gendering of contraceptive responsibility—how men and women become sexualized beings and the effects of this socialization on contraceptive education. Notably, while men and women share similar socializing agents, typically their adult caregivers, the messages they receive vary by gender, often demonstrating that contraceptive use is imbued with social meanings around sex, sexuality, and what it means to be masculine or feminine. Additionally, men and women identify similar sources of knowledge, typically peers, teachers, and health care providers. Yet, the substance and sheer quantity of this information in combination with messages received early in childhood about sexuality reinforce a gender-based division of contraceptive labor. Exposing this social process through which contraception becomes gendered demonstrates that contraceptive use, too, is a social process—one rooted in the cumulative effects of gender socialization and subsequent knowledge-building over the life course.

Authors

• Jamie Manzer, University of Delaware

• Ann V. Bell, University of Delaware