ABSTRACT
Although family planning methods are expressly designed for use during sex, we know stunningly little about how contraceptive use affects sexual experiences and processes. As individuals, we tend to think of sex’s potential for pleasure, for forming relationships and for building individual identities. However, as Kirsten Moore and Judith Helzner have argued, professional roles as family planning researchers and practitioners may demand that we instead tend to focus on the ‘risk’ and ‘threat’ of unwanted pregnancy, disease or sexual violence (Moore and Helzner 1996). Rather than presenting sex as a potentially enjoyable, affirming or generative experience, family planning discourse portrays sex at best as the sanitised ‘exposure to the risk of conception’1 or, at worst, the cause of unfortunate outcomes such as violence, STIs or unintended pregnancy (Dixon-Mueller 1993b). This tendency to de-emphasise sexual pleasure, desire and enjoyment is especially strong when it comes to women, toward whom family planning efforts are disproportionately directed. In this chapter, I will further illustrate the sexually sanitised framework used within contemporary family planning research and programming, providing examples and suggesting some of the limitations and double standards of this framework. I also overview some of the well-intentioned causes of this ‘pleasure deficit’ (Higgins and Hirsch 2007). Perhaps surprisingly, roots reach back to the early feminist birth control movement and extend through far more recent international women’s rights advocacy. In concluding, I suggest some possible reframings of sexuality within the field, drawing on some encouraging new research to light our way.
