ABSTRACT

Heterosexual university students continue to endorse sexual scripts that preference men’s desire and sustain gendered power imbalances in sexual relationships and encounters, leading women to risk pregnancy by engaging in unprotected sex. Because young women also endorse norms encouraging them to protect themselves and their partners from unintended pregnancy, women are caught in a bind between two often competing norms. We conducted semi-structured individual interviews with university women (n = 45) to examine how they navigate these competing norms. We found that women explained risky contraceptive decisions by saying they “just weren’t thinking,” thus employing strategic ambiguity, or vague language used to maintain social status, to navigate between competing norms. Our findings suggest that women were actually thinking about risks and making calculated decisions in the moment which often privileged men, putting themselves at risk and sometimes causing distress. To save face, women presented the idea that they “just weren’t thinking” in different ways that conformed to traditional notions of romance and sexuality: being in the moment, love and trust for their partner, and deferring to the perceived or actual wishes of men. We conclude that there is a need to promote and achieve affirmative sexuality which includes women feeling empowered to express their own sexual needs – whether that be consent or refusal, contraception, pleasure, or all of these.

摘要

异性恋大学生继续认可偏爱男性欲望的性脚本，并在性关系和遭遇中维持性别权力失衡，导致女性因从事无保护性行为而冒着怀孕的风险。由于年轻女性也认同鼓励她们保护自己和伴侣免于意外怀孕的规范，因此女性陷入了两种经常相互竞争的规范之间。我们对大学女性进行了半结构式个人访谈（n = 45) 来检查他们如何驾驭这些相互竞争的规范。我们发现，女性通过说她们“只是没有思考”来解释有风险的避孕决定，从而使用战略模糊性，或用于维持社会地位的模糊语言，在相互竞争的规范之间导航。我们的研究结果表明，女性实际上是在考虑风险并做出经过深思熟虑的决定，而这通常是男性的特权，将自己置于风险之中，有时还会造成痛苦。为了挽回面子，女性以符合传统浪漫和性概念的不同方式表达了她们“只是没有思考”的想法：活在当下，爱护并信任伴侣，顺从感知到的或实际的愿望男人。