The Male Pill: A Biography of a Technology in the Making (review)

"Whatever happened to the male Pill?" was the first question after I spoke at the 40th Birthday Party for the [Female] Pill held in 2000 by the Department of Reproductive Medicine at UCSF. Oudshoorn set out to answer this question, and she gives us the best possible book on the development of the male Pill I can imagine at this historical moment. Amazingly, the male Pill is still pending.

Oudshoorn is a Dutch science and technology studies scholar of considerable renown, especially for work on hormones (Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones, New York: Routledge, 1994) and the consumption junction (How Users Matter, coedited with Trevor Pinch; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). She draws on both domains of expertise in her book on this surprisingly understudied topic. It is beautifully written and analytically quite sophisticated without being at all dense.

This is important recent history not only in terms of medicine, techno-science, reproduction, and feminist studies but also and fascinatingly in terms of North/South and postcolonial studies. Two of the major actors in the development of the male Pill were the governments of China and India. Both have often been portrayed by feminists and others (accurately so) as profoundly exploitative of women in terms of population control strategies. Neither has been avid regarding the reproductive rights of women. Oudshoorn gives a much more nuanced reading, but one that does not lose its feminist bite. That is, governmental support for the development of a male Pill by India and China is not feminist in its origins but concerned with population control. Ironically, those governments then ended up allied with segments of Western feminists in advocating for more male contraceptive development generally and the male Pill specifically. Odd bedfellows indeed! This alliance then had to convince multiple transgovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organizations (including the UN Family Planning Agency and the World Health Organization) as well as reproductive scientists and clinical researchers to go down this research path—more accurately, to create the path itself. In the 1950s there were only six sites on the planet where male reproduction appeared on the research agenda. Male contraceptive development was and remains an uphill battle.

Oudshoorn helps readers grasp how stunning differences—including resistances within segments of the scientific and other communities involved—are tolerated within large, multisited, social organizational efforts over time. Somehow the broader, long-term commitments to improving male contraception have greased the skids under various recalcitrant elements in ways that are still keeping this project moving. Few studies have taken up such multinational scientific research projects, although these are becoming increasingly common. Oudshoorn's work will serve as a model.

Part I describes who the advocates of male contraception were and how they have attempted to overcome resistance to a male Pill by developing an alternative research and development network (Chapter 2). Because of initial pharmaceutical industry disinterest, international public sector agencies became primary actors. They first created a worldwide laboratory to synthesize hormonal contraceptive compounds, the chosen research direction (Chapter 3). They then extended this network for research and development to create the requisite infrastructure for clinical testing (Chapter 4). In some contrast to (female) Pill history, testing of the male Pill has been exceptionally rigorous in terms of safety (Chapter 5).

Part II shifts to the cultural work involved in sponsoring, developing, and promoting male contraception. First males needed to be configured as constituents of family planning services nationally and internationally, destabilizing many assumptions about users (Chapter 6). Service delivery situations also needed to be reinvented, and a "drastic reorganization of the infrastructure of family planning clinics, including the founding of special clinics for men" (p. 18) was requisite (Chapter 7). The needs and issues involved in delivering male contraception downstream were themselves initially confronted as part of the many challenges of recruiting men into the clinical trials (Chapter 8). To boot, advocates then needed to hone...