Sex, Men, and Babies

Stories of Awareness and Responsibility

William Marsiglio, Sally Hutchinson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814761229
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi di genere

Over the past 15 years much pioneering work has been done on the social demography of young men's sexual activities, contraceptive use, and fertility experiences. But how do men develop and manage their identities in these areas?

In Sex, Men, and Babies, William Marsiglio and Sally Hutchinson provide a compelling and insightful portrait of young men who are capable of anticipating, creating, and fathering human life. Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 70 single men aged 16-30, this is the most comprehensive, qualitative study of its kind. Through intimate stories and self-reflections, these men talk about sex, romance, relationships, birth control, pregnancies, miscarriages, abortions, visions of fathering, and other issues related to men's self-awareness, and the many ways they construct, explain, and change their identities as potential fathers. The interviews also provide valuable insights about how young men experience responsiblities associated with sex and the full range of procreative events.

Accessibly written for a wide audience and raising a host of issues relevant to debates about unplanned pregnancy, childbearing among teens and young adults, and women's and children's well-being, Sex, Men, and Babies is the fullest account available today on how young men conceptualize themselves as procreative beings. Lessons from this study can inform interventions designed to encourage young men to be more aware of their abilities and responsiblities in making babies.

1
Setting the Stage

Making babies is serious business. At its core, it is a biological process, but a process also steeped in diverse, complex, and controversial psychological, social, cultural, and legal issues. The issues intimately involve both women and men because, as the saying goes, “It takes two to tango.” Despite the reality that women and men must both play their respective roles in making babies, men’s thoughts and feelings about sex, pregnancy, abortion, babies, and fatherhood have often been ignored or overshadowed by women’s voices. One useful response to this disparity is to study the inner worlds of single teenage and young adult men as they come face-to-face with sexual and procreative experiences.

With few exceptions, young men are at least vaguely aware of their potential to create human life. Many actually realize the potential during their teen and young adult years by being involved first with a conception and pregnancy, and then either an abortion, miscarriage, or the birth of a child. In fact, these types of experiences are fairly common. Recent national data show that about 14 percent of men aged 15-19 made a partner pregnant, and about 6 percent of sexually experienced males in the cohort have become biological fathers.¹ Because some teenage females never tell their partners about their pregnancies, these figures are lower-bound estimates. During the 1992 to 1994 period, 21 percent of men had become a father before turning 25, and 50 percent before 30.² The men who have children in their teens or twenties are more likely to be high school dropouts, have low or moderate incomes, and be African American or Hispanic. Men in their twenties, fathers or not, are probably more likely, though, to be aware of their ability to procreate than their teenage counterparts. They have more extensive experience with sexual relationships and exposure to friends and siblings who have become fathers.

For some men, experiencing an event or situation involving their potential to procreate represents a turning point in the way they perceive themselves. The joy, pride, disappointment, or fear they associate with creating human life offers them a unique mirror for self-reflection. This inward turn sometimes produces a personal transformation marked by a new perspective on self, sexual partners, children, and perhaps other aspects of life. Those who embrace the news of a pregnancy, even if it is unplanned, may intensify their feelings for their partner and cultivate an idealized image of being a loving, involved father.

Others, living vicariously through a friend’s or family member’s reproductive experience, can also develop a keener sense of what they might expect under similar circumstances. Procreative novices, those with no prior knowledge of impregnating a sex partner, may at times dwell on their unrealized potential. They may allow it to shape their current identities as well as those they project for themselves. A pregnancy scare, for example, may prompt the inexperienced to ponder the risks of becoming a father before they are ready. As they do, they may entertain a heightened awareness of their identity as fertile men. This identity may come alive in banter with male friends, during a sweaty-palm excursion to a local drugstore to purchase condoms, while having an awkward talk with a parent, or when sharing an intimate moment with a romantic partner. Likewise, some young men’s ideas about what it will take to become a “good” father may lead them to grasp the nature of their youthful status more clearly. They may quickly discover that they are not yet ready to be family men; they are, instead, single young men in search of sex uncluttered by paternity, and often unencumbered by a relationship commitment.

And then there are men who remain largely oblivious to their procreative powers. Their indifference is reflected in their thoughts and feelings as well as their practical involvements with girlfriends, “fuck buddies,” and one-night stands. Such indifference can be a trademark of men irrespective of their fertility history. It may be of little consequence for some whether they have impregnated a partner or fathered a child. Not only do these experiences fall short of bringing about a significant shift in men’s self-perception, they have little bearing on how they feel, think, and act.

Researchers have done well to profile the social demography of men’s sexual activities, contraceptive behaviors, and fertility patterns,³ but much less is known about the social psychology of men’s experiences in these areas. Scholars have failed to ask how the presumed or realized ability to impregnate, procreate, and become social fathers affects the way young single men construct and experience their sense of self. How do they become aware of their potential to procreate? How do they subsequently weave that knowledge into the way they construct and present a self, particularly when relating to their romantic partners? Alternatively, how does ignoring this knowledge affect men’s sense of self? Little is known also about the complex ways that men’s seemingly separate experiences in the procreative realm, often with different partners, affect their lives. How do these different experiences reinforce or negate one another over the course of men’s sexual and procreative careers?

Still other compelling questions demand attention as well. How do the everyday contingencies of young men’s lives, including those related to their romantic involvements, affect their attitudes, beliefs, and feelings about the critical issues that delimit the procreative realm? Why are some men decidedly more aware of themselves as persons capable of impregnating sex partners? How do men’s perceptions of themselves as men and their views on gender relations influence their procreative identity? When and how do young men experience a turning point that transforms their perspective on self and procreative issues? And, for those interested in social policy and programmatic issues, a key question is, How do young men view “responsibility” and orient themselves toward their sexual roles as well as their potential procreative, paternal, and coparental roles?

The search for answers to these and related questions must begin with the social psychological processes implicated when men become aware of their fecundity (ability to procreate) and then negotiate the terrain of sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and fatherhood. Such an approach treats men as evolving procreative beings. As men reflect on the knowledge and experience they acquire over the years, they are able to remake themselves. They can incorporate new insights about matters such as relationships, use of condoms, their fecundity, and the prospects of fatherhood into their inner worlds. As they mature, they can modify their existing beliefs and sentiments to varying degrees. Over time, some men are likely to experience dramatic shifts in how they view their procreative abilities; other men may change very little. But all men are likely to experience some type of change if enough time passes.

Research and Social Policy Context

Research that focuses on the issues just mentioned is timely for two main reasons. First, it is critical to the study of unintended pregnancy as well as childbearing among young persons who may be ill-prepared to face the demands of full-time parenting. Although rates of adolescent pregnancy and abortion have declined in recent years, they remain high relative to rates in other Western countries.⁴ Young men, too, are still responsible for large numbers of unintended pregnancies.⁵ The vast majority of the 466,000 annual cases where women become pregnant to teenage men involve unintended pregnancies with unmarried men. Among men 25-29 whose partners gave birth in either 1988 or 1994, the pattern is less troublesome but still cause for concern. Fourteen percent said they did not want to have a child and an additional 33 percent indicated the child was born prior to when they had intended to become a father. When unintended pregnancies are brought to term, especially those occurring to teenagers, they are typically associated with poor economic and health outcomes for the women and children. This is a significant pattern even though scholars continue to debate the relationship between poverty status and early childbearing. The key question in this regard: Does poverty status lead to early childbearing or does early childbearing promote poverty?⁶

Second, our research focus is timely because most men spend a great deal of time expressing themselves in their gendered and often meaningful roles as romantic partners and fathers. Hence, to study the social psychology of men’s sexual and procreative experiences makes good sense. In short, exploring the dynamic ways men experience themselves as persons capable of creating human life provides a crucial lens for interpreting an important aspect of men’s lives as men.

Public and scholarly interest in these issues has grown tremendously since the late 1980s.⁷ One indicator is that federal and state policymakers, as well as private foundations, have provided extensive funding for a wide range of research and program initiatives that target young men. The initiatives have dealt primarily with issues associated with sexual activity, contraceptive behavior, paternity establishment, and father involvement. Several of the early programs were the National Urban League’s Adolescent Male Responsibility Program introduced in 1986, the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing (1987), and the Children’s Defense Fund report, What about the Boys? (1988). Each of these initiatives helped to focus the public’s and researchers’ attention on male roles in unplanned pregnancy and childbearing.

The early initiatives provided the impetus for an array of local, state, and national research, social policy, and programmatic efforts to promote a better understanding of men’s lives in terms of sex, pregnancy prevention, and fatherhood. In many cases, the intent has been to change men’s attitudes and behavior. Stakeholders most interested in promoting responsible fatherhood have begun to emphasize that men’s roles as fathers begin long before their children are born, or even conceived for that matter. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, for example, has stressed the need to reach out to teenage and young adult men before they impregnate, or before they impregnate again.⁸ By encouraging these men to recognize more fully the potential consequences and responsibilities associated with fathering children, the organization is attempting to ensure that those who do become fathers are prepared to care for their children.

Similarly, the Fatherhood Initiative in the mid-1990s directed by the Domestic Policy Council and former vice president Al Gore’s National Performance Review emphasized the importance of understanding men’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations prior to their becoming fathers. The Fatherhood Data Team that spearheaded the initiative was comprised of more than a hundred scholars, policy analysts, and public officials. It coordinated a series of national multidisciplinary meetings in response to former president Clinton’s 1995 executive order directing federal agencies to support fathers’ positive involvement in their families and to ensure that federally funded research on children and families incorporates fathers. The national meetings culminated in 1998 with the publication of Nurturing Fatherhood: Improving Data and Research on Male Fertility, Family Formation, and Fatherhood, which reviewed and analyzed the state of theory, research, and data collection on a range of issues related to fatherhood.

Nurturing Fatherhood’s recommendations to broaden definitions of father involvement and responsibility were particularly relevant to our study. In the 1980s, father involvement with minor children had been categorized into three basic types: “engagement” (one-on-one interaction); “accessibility” (being physically present to attend to children’s needs if necessary); and “responsibility” (active planning of children’s lives).⁹ Nurturing Fatherhood underscored the more recent theorists’ proposal to refine and in some ways to reach beyond these forms of involvement by accounting more fully for fathers’ cognitive expressions (e.g., prayer) and contributions to children’s social capital. This latter notion refers to fathers’ contributions to family-based (e.g., sharing parenting styles with a coparent) and community-based (e.g., interactions with children’s teachers, coaches, neighbors) relations that typically benefit children’s cognitive and emotional development.¹⁰ In addition, Nurturing Fatherhood highlighted how recent conceptualizations of father involvement and responsibility are more likely to include men’s activities prior to birth and conception. The Fatherhood Initiative has provided an intellectual foundation and incentive for launching a new wave of research on fatherhood while sensitizing policymakers and funding agencies to its relevance.

Overall, the 1990s witnessed a surge in the number of edited journals and books devoted to fatherhood topics.¹¹ A number of organizations emerged across the country to promote research, social policy analyses, community programs, or the dissemination of information and value-based messages about fatherhood.¹² The directors of major national surveys also have recently responded to the surge of interest in fatherhood by adding questions about fathering to recent and forthcoming waves of data collection.¹³ The latest example of this trend is the Male Survey for the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which historically has interviewed only women. Research efforts such as these are novel and significant because they ask fathers themselves about their family roles.

These noteworthy activities have occurred against a backdrop of changes in family life, gender relations, men’s declining wages, increases in both women’s participation in the paid labor force and men’s involvement as primary care providers, and cultural images of fathering.¹⁴ At the same time, heated public debates have emerged over numerous issues relevant to fatherhood. These include divorce and single parenthood, “deadbeat” dads and “involved” fathers, welfare reform, teenage pregnancy and non-marital childbearing, fathers’ rights and responsibilities, the definition of “family,” and fathers’ potentially unique contributions to child development. The debates often refer to serious social problems assumed to arise from the diverse conditions of “fatherlessness” and “father absence.¹⁵ Despite scholarly disagreement over the meaning of these concepts and the extent and consequences of the latter, the debates influence how the public, policymakers, and the research community frame various questions concerning fathers and families.¹⁶

Fears about the growing numbers of fathers disconnected from their children have inspired stakeholders to develop organized responses to particular features of fatherhood. Male-only social movements and events such as the Promise Keepers, the Million Man March on Washington, the mythopoetic movement, and fathers’ rights groups have each wrestled with fathers’ voluntary or involuntary lack of involvement with their children.¹⁷ In the process, they have served to heighten public awareness about the meaning and relevance of fathers in children’s lives.

Our Study

Our efforts to understand teenage and young adult men’s lives as sexual and procreative beings is consistent with the larger research agenda on fatherhood and the expanded definitions of father involvement and responsible fatherhood. Unlike most previous research dealing with young men’s sexual and procreative experiences, our study, based on in-depth interviews, explores men’s subjective experiences. With an eye toward the past, present, and future, men in our study share in detail their thoughts and feelings about a range of topics relevant to their sexual and procreative identities. Their candid responses and revealing stories provide the foundation for this book.

Throughout, we have been mindful of how men’s experiences are socially constructed and constrained by their reproductive physiology. Accordingly, we discuss how the social psychological processes affecting men’s procreative experiences are shaped by the larger social landscape. A view of this landscape reveals that gender assumes a prominent role in organizing how men experience their lives in this domain. More specifically, we spotlight how men’s interactions with partners, friends, and family members often enable them to coconstruct their experiences within the procreative realm. In addition, we show how men’s relational experiences that involve matters such as their fecundity perceptions, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, and childbirth are affected by their direct physical detachment from all but the coital aspect of the reproductive process. Any meaningful attempt to capture men’s lived experiences in this area must take into account the interpersonal aspects of their lives as well as the gendered realities of their reproductive physiology.

Another key feature of our project is to consider men’s individual life experiences while taking into account the larger socially constructed landscape of sex and procreation. The larger setting has been influenced by the recent policy and programmatic initiatives mentioned earlier that focus on young men and sexuality, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting issues. As noted previously, scholars, policymakers, and social service providers have begun to define responsible fatherhood more broadly to include males’ conscientious involvement in sexual and contraceptive decision making to prevent unplanned pregnancies.¹⁸ These and other developments have situated males more squarely in the mix of important policy debates about sex, pregnancy, abortion, paternity, and social fatherhood.

The time is right, then, to listen to young men’s in-depth stories about the intimate details of their sex lives, relationships, contraception, abortion, and the visions they have of their future children and roles as fathers. Attending to young men’s voices should provide professionals in the field with new ideas about how they can get young men to talk about their personal involvement with procreative issues. Ideally, this research will inform ongoing and future interventions designed to encourage larger numbers of young men to develop a keener sense of their procreative abilities and responsibilities as partners and fathers. Given its theoretical focus, our research should also produce valuable insights for stakeholders interested in promoting men’s sexual and reproductive health in other countries.¹⁹

Theorizing Men’s Experiences

Men’s ability to become biological fathers ultimately rests on their ability to produce viable sperm and, in most cases, to have sexual intercourse. Although “true” fecundity status is determined with the aid of a laboratory test, men’s (and others’) perception of thei...