
Main Category: Sexual Health / STDs
Also Included In: Men's health
Article Date: 07 Apr 2011 - 16:00 PDT



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Couples are put off using the male pill as contraception because many women feel their partners would forget to take it, and some men feel it would challenge their masculinity, research says.
Dr Susan Walker told the British Sociological Association annual conference in London today that only 50 per cent of the 134 women and 54 men she surveyed said they would use the contraceptive method when it came on the market. Nineteen per cent said that they definitely would not use a male pill, while 31 per cent were unsure.
Dr Walker, Senior Lecturer in Sexual Health at Anglia Ruskin University, found that 52 per cent of the women surveyed were concerned that their partners would forget to take it.
Only 17 per cent of the men surveyed thought that men would forget to take a male pill daily, suggesting that men had greater confidence than their partners in their own ability to remember.
Dr Walker said: "Whilst the female interviewees loved and trusted their male partners some of them simply felt that men are, as a gender, more forgetful."
In in-depth interviews with some of those surveyed, one woman told her: "I think that women are better at remembering these things. Women tend to worry more about the fact that they could potentially get pregnant."
Dr Walker also found that about one in six of the men interviewed felt that taking a contraceptive pill was an activity that was culturally associated with women and which therefore might make them feel less masculine.
One man told her: "The manly image probably does lend itself to a reluctance to take something like a male oral contraceptive pill."
Dr Walker said: "I had expected men to be concerned about the biological effects of a male pill. But what I found was that the cultural association between taking the pill and femininity was also a concern. Somehow taking the pill was not seen as something which conveyed a manly image".
However many of the interviewees also thought that the male pill would be a more mature and responsible way of practising masculinity and were in favour of using it.
The male contraceptive pill is not at present on the market - it is at the trial stage, and has been successfully used with human volunteers. The World Health Organisation has stated its backing for its development.
Dr Walker carried out the survey in the East of England and interviewed in-depth 34 of the 188 surveyed. All those surveyed were using other forms of contraception at the time of the survey.
Source
British Sociological Association
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