Aug 18

Aug 18 Episode 521: Krystale Littlejohn

Kelly chats with Krystale Littlejohn, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, about her upcoming book, Just Get on the Pill: The Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics.

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"Are You Listening" from Elephant Shaped Trees by IMUNURI.
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Lyrics written by Stephanie Leary.
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Episode Transcript

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This transcript is AI-produced and may contain errors. If you need a cleaned-up version, please email twobroadstalkingpolitics@gmail.com.

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Kelly Therese Pollock 0:00

On today's episode of Two Broads Talking Politics, I'm joined by Krystle Littlejohn, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, and author of the forthcoming book, Just Get on the Pill, the Uneven Burden of Reproductive Politics.

Hi, I'm Kelly. This is two broads talking politics. And I am on today with Dr. Krystale Littlejohn, who is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. And we're going to be talking about her books. So first, hello, Krystale. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Yes, thank you for joining me. So you have this new book coming out, called just get on the pill, the uneven burden of reproductive politics. And so I wanted to start just, if you could tell me a little bit about how you got interested in this topic, what inspired you to do this kind of research. And then we can dive a little bit more into sort of what exactly the research is, and what it says to me.

Krystale Littlejohn 1:19

So this all started from the way back in college, when I noticed my peers just talking about their experiences trying to prevent pregnancy using different birth control methods. And then when I went to graduate school to study sociology, I've just decided to dig around a bit and realize that the literature didn't talk much at all about people's experiences with dissatisfaction. And that is what I heard nothing. But people talk about when I was in college, and I decided, you know, I want to just dig some more into this and see what's going on, see what's happening, and tried to give voice to people's experiences. And that led to this project that over the course of many years analyzing all of these interviews, eventually culminated in the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock 2:04

Yeah, so then let's talk some about what type of research this is. So I think, you know, people who aren't deeply involved in academics might not really know what sociologists do. And of course, there's different kinds of research done in sociology. So could you talk us through a little bit the the methodology for the kind of research you're doing? You know, and sort of what what that means?

Krystale Littlejohn 2:25

Absolutely, I would say that social scientists are the sleuths of the social world, right. So what we do is, we're trained to think like detectives to see patterns and to try and make sense of them. Or we try and we find problems, and we go ahead and try and fix those problems. In my case, I noticed a glaring issue in birth control, women and people can get pregnant, felt frustrated, by trying to prevent pregnancy without enough support from their partners. And socially, we just don't take their frustration seriously. And so what I wanted to do was then go ahead and start a project where I could really try to explore that further. And so the hallmark of social science research is being systematic. We used we call it we collected over 100 interviews for this project. And whether you're using survey methodology experiments or interviews, the goal is to make sure you design the study ahead of time, but you have enough data, you ask the right kinds of questions, so that you can get people to open up about their experiences, and really make sure that you can get into as many different aspects of those experiences as you can. And so for just get on the pill, I was part of a research team that interviewed just over 100 women in the San Francisco Bay Area, we posted fliers to recruit women. And then we held interviews that lasted about one to three hours where we talked, we talked to them about their sexual history. So we asked about each partner they had experienced sexual intercourse with, we talked about their experiences with birth control, side effects, dissatisfaction, and then any pregnancies that that they had. And once we had all of those data, all of those interviews done, I then dove in and analyze the interviews there were more than 3500 pages of data. So it took took me years to get that data. But although it was a lot of work, the women stories are remarkable. And it just was so clear that their their stories needed to be told in a book.

Kelly Therese Pollock 4:18

And you did some controlling, right to make sure that you had sort of a range of different demographic demographics represented. Can you talk a little bit about what what that looked like?

Krystale Littlejohn 4:28

Exactly. So as we were doing the research, we wanted to make sure that we had women who had experienced pregnancies as well as those who had an experienced pregnancies. The goal of the larger study was to be able to understand people's experiences using birth control, and especially getting a clearer sense of what happens when they want to prevent pregnancy. But they're, they're not using birth control to do so. And so we have women in the study who represent a range of different racial backgrounds is your question. Again, so we have a quarter of the sample that was black women, white women, Latin x women, some Native American women as well as Asian women. So it's a, it's a, as I mentioned, a very diverse sample, we have people who are from higher income backgrounds and lower income backgrounds. We sampled on community college campuses, and for your university campuses, or say we recruited from community college campuses and for your university campuses. And so the data represent a really wide swath of young women, the women in the study were between the ages of 20 and 29. So a wide swath of women who had different experiences with being pregnant or not be or never experiencing pregnancy, as well as a range of experiences with their partners.

Kelly Therese Pollock 5:51

And did you have hypotheses going into this? Or were there things that really surprised you? Sort of, as you were, as you and the team, were talking to these women?

Krystale Littlejohn 6:02

Yeah. So for me, I was really interested in women's experiences with side effects. So my earlier research started by looking at dissatisfaction. And seeing that even though that we're not talking about dissatisfaction as a society, it's actually really important in people's lives. And so I initially started out in my research, using surveys, but the surveys couldn't tell us what's going on with people, right? What is they say that they're solving because of dissatisfaction with side effects? But what does that look like? What are their experiences? How are they making sense of them? We didn't have very much information on that at all. And so for me going into this project, I was really interested in trying to understand what's happening for women. What is generating this, this dissatisfaction with their methods? What do they do when they start to feel dissatisfied? Or they believe they're having side effects? How do they make sense of that? And what do they do moving forward. And so that was, that was my interest going into the data, I didn't know much about what it was going to turn out to look like. And that's one of the most fascinating and fun things for me as a social scientist is that sometimes you think you're going into a project, you think you know, what's going to happen. And it turns out completely differently. Sometimes you have your hunters confirmed. For me, this was a topic that was unexplored. And so I imagined that dissatisfaction was going to be important. I just didn't know exactly what that was going to look like. And I will add here that the one thing that was really fun for me was that I didn't actually anticipate that there was going to be so much discussion of women feeling like they had to carry the burden of preventing pregnancy, largely by themselves. And so what ended up becoming the focus of my book wasn't even what I imagined that I would be writing about going into it. And so it was really fun as I started to peel back the layers to see that this was going to be a book that was important for telling these women's stories, even as I hadn't necessarily anticipated that that was going to be the case going into the project.

Kelly Therese Pollock 8:04

Did you find as you were talking to women, you know, you said these conversations are 1-3 hours? Was there hesitation? Of course, these are people who volunteer for this. But you know, was there hesitation in talking about a subject that they maybe aren't very used to talking to strangers about? You know, what, what does that sort of actually look like when you're in the room having those discussions,

Krystale Littlejohn 8:26

I found that women overwhelmingly wanted to talk about their experiences, we didn't get in, when the interview started, we were talking to them about their goals for the future, we talk to them about their experiences with their daily lives. So we didn't go right into talking about their experiences with their, you know, their sexual experiences with their partners. But once we started getting into it, they were actually quite enthusiastic about just sharing their experiences. And I think this stems from a broader challenge that we have in our psyche for many people, where not many people can just have somebody listen to them for one hour to three hours and just talk to them about their lives and ask them about what's going on for them, and just really listen to their experiences. And I think that was really powerful for women in the study, and many, many of them actually ended up saying at the end of the interview, how much they appreciated just having an opportunity to share their experiences with somebody else to have somebody listen to share experiences that they may not may have never shared with anybody else before, but felt real. It felt like a really cathartic experience to be able to share about their sexual histories and sexual experiences with an interviewer who was an A person, right at the end of the day were people who were talking to other people and listening to other people and trying to understand their lived experiences.

Kelly Therese Pollock 9:48

Yeah, so you alluded to this already. And of course, the subtitle of the book alludes to this to have the uneven burden. But talk me through what the findings of your research were and what what that actually But you actually found as you were talking to these women?

Krystale Littlejohn 10:02

Absolutely. I found that our society applies intense social pressure to use birth control only on people who can get pregnant and not on their partners. So rather than telling couples that, that both people can and should use birth control to prevent pregnancy, our society pushes women largely to do it by themselves using birth control methods that are designed for their bodies. And so just get on the pill tells the story of how women learn to accept that responsibility. One woman, for example, started using the pill after her mom found a condom wrapper and realize that her she was having sexual intercourse. And so as I was kind of having this conversation with this woman, I thought, This is awesome. You know, she's having sex, she's using condoms to protect herself from pregnancy and STI is, but what her mom saw was that her daughter wasn't on the pill. And so she told her that they were putting her on birth control, she made the appointment for her daughter, she sat in the appointment with her daughter, she, as this woman is recounting the story, she literally tells me that her mom says to the doctor, this is what's happening, she needs to be on birth control. This is what I think that she should do to prevent pregnancy, right. And so she was absolutely channeled into using prescription birth control. In her case, that pill, even though she had been using condoms with her partner, and so what ends up happening is she stopped using condoms, right, she gets on the pill, she stops using columns with her boyfriend. And they go on to just rely on her using prescription birth control. And I found this over and over and over in the UK, right that woman after woman told story after story of how they came to be the person responsible for preventing pregnancy. And it wasn't just parents, it was providers who help them understand that it's their job to prevent pregnancy and channel them toward doing so with the pill or with the shot or the IUD, whatever their method was, it was friends, it was partners, right partners played a huge role in this as well. And so the book is really about how women learn that it's their social job to prevent pregnancy, and the negative consequences that can result from that even though we take it for granted, and assume that it works, right? We have these effective methods, people are using them, the pill is liberatory, we assume that it works. But we are missing this really dark underside. That is people are being pressured to use birth control methods. And it's not always about their reproductive freedom. And it doesn't always feel liberating for them when they are taking the primary responsibility for preventing pregnancy.

Kelly Therese Pollock 12:43

Yeah, and you find a little bit then of a difference racially, to in exactly how this plays out. And what this means. Can you talk a little bit about what that was?

Krystale Littlejohn 12:55

Yeah, so one of the biggest things in the book is that black women were also channeled into using prescription birth control methods are encouraged to use prescription birth control methods, but they were much less likely to just go ahead and start using those methods, then were women of other races. And so even though all women and all people who can get pregnant face social pressure to try and prevent pregnancy, using methods like the pill that are designed for their bodies, I found that black women were less likely to just kind of go with that flow and say, okay, it's their job to use the pill to prevent pregnancy. Instead, they expected their partners to keep using condoms, even if they did go on the pill. Or they just told their partners No, right, they're not just going to get on the pill or the shot, their partners had to keep using condoms throughout their relationship. And this was, in large part they expressed just the feeling that it was unfair to expect that women should be responsible for preventing pregnancy all by themselves. But they also talked about the importance of making sure they prevented STI s right and really protecting themselves from STI is using condoms. So they saw condoms as their method to not just the method that was meant for their partners. And that was something that that definitely differed by race.

Kelly Therese Pollock 14:12

Yeah. And I was interested in the the framing you just started to get at that a little bit. But the the framing of sort of condom as a male method of birth control and prescription as a female method of birth control. I can you talk about that framing and sort of why why you're looking at it in that direction. And how that maybe start starts to get us toward thinking in some other way about, about birth control and birth control options.

Krystale Littlejohn 14:38

Absolutely. I love all of the questions that you're asking. This is this this question, in particular, was such an exciting surprise for me when I started doing this work. And so what I found is that women very much understood external condoms as you're as you're mentioning male condoms, right? They understood that as something that was meant to be for the man And when we look at our society, you know, we could Google it right now, if you google male conduct, you're there. So many results come up. And the idea is that we teach people that external condoms belong to men, even in the way that we label them. We have the metal condom, and we have the female condom. And this very much socializes people to believe that there are particular methods made for particular bodies. And in this case, the belief is that male condoms are for men, and prescription birth control methods are for women and or the female condom is for women. But obviously, the female condom has people use the female condom, much less often they use the quote unquote, male condom. And so what this looked like in practice was that women believe that their partner should be responsible for providing condoms, when condoms would be used. And it was their job to make sure that they were on prescription birth control. And we could imagine that that is a fine arrangement, as long as everybody kind of does their part. But of course, in practice, that's that would it look like right? In practice, you had women that were pressured into using prescription birth control or felt like it was their job to use prescription birth control? And I want to be clear, right, it's not that everybody feels like using prescription birth control was coercive, right? It's not that everybody felt that way. But it's that they were socialized to believe that it was their job to vent pregnancy using those methods. And that often contributed to them not thinking that it was a big deal that their partners weren't using condoms to help them contribute to the partnership, making sure that a pregnancy didn't happen, if that's what they were interested in. And so women just came to accept that they should use prescription birth control methods like the pill, and they really abdicated responsibility for providing condoms for buying condoms for using condoms, to their partners. And they saw that as something that their partner should have to take care of. And they're the in the data there were in the interviews, we saw what that looks like. And I talked about this and just get on the pill, where because of that expectation, partners didn't always bring condoms, obviously. And when they did it, it oftentimes led to people not using anything, they might just use withdrawal, or they might not use any form of birth control. In one in multiple cases, actually, there could be a condom provided. But if the partner said he didn't know how to use it, there were a number of cases where the woman didn't know how to use it either. And so they ended up not using anything, even though a condom was available, just because of this lack of knowledge. And so channeling people into these different methods, see, can seem natural in our society. But to me, it's very much like just like, we've moved away from understanding that things like clothing, right, like pants, you know, at one point we imagined were for men, right? And we've moved away from that and said, No, that's absurd, we should think about it that way. And that's very much how I think about prescription birth control and the quote unquote, male condom, right, we need to move away from this kind of gendered language that teaches people that really important tools for pregnancy and disease prevention only belong to one person or one partner and not the other.

Kelly Therese Pollock 18:08

And it's a striking use started your research thinking about dissatisfaction. And men certainly are very vocal about their dissatisfaction with condoms. And that comes up in the interviews, as you're talking to women about what their partners are saying that any woman who's been on prescription birth control of any kind can certainly tell you that there are side effects, and maybe they're not always terrible, but but they're certainly side effects they exist. So that seems like another sort of gendered it like it was acceptable for the man to say, Well, I'm dissatisfied. And the side effects of this mean that I won't do this, but that it wasn't okay for women to express the same. Is that sort of what you were finding in your research?

Krystale Littlejohn 18:52

Yes, that's, that's spot on. Right? There's this idea that as you as you're just saying, in society, in our society, there's focal, right, there's focal acknowledgment about the fact that men don't like condoms, or some men don't like condoms, but there is the silence about the fact that many women and people who can get pregnant don't like prescription birth control, some people choose not to use it, but lots of them continue to use it, right. They don't necessarily like it, but they they continue to use it. And there is intense social pressure for them to do so. Right. When people talk about not like, you know, take the pill everyday, for example, you're much less likely to find people that say that's and that's understandable, you know, maybe you just aren't going to use it right? Instead, we have methods set an alarm every day, make sure you do this, right. We we find ways to get them to use it to find it more acceptable. When women who had speaking of side effects one woman who had nausea on the pill, talked about how she would just take it every night so that she could sleep through any of the the side effects that she was having to it right and so There's absolutely this de emphasis on women's dissatisfaction with prescription birth control. And this expectation that if they don't like it there, they just have to put up with it. Or they can bounce around and try different methods until they find a method that works for them. Many of the women talked about trying three, four or five methods right in, or going back and forth between methods until they found something that worked. And so you see that when men mentioned, they don't like condoms, there can be this pressure on women to then use birth control, or this suggestion, in fact that if men don't like condoms, it's okay, because their partner can just use prescription birth control. But we don't bet we don't usually see that assumption that or that expectation, when it comes to women not liking prescription birth control. Instead, the recommendation is that they just keep trying or that they find a method that is right for them, with the belief being that they will eventually find one that they can tolerate, even if it's not one that they can, quote, unquote, like. And so there was definitely that gender difference in how we validate people's experiences with dissatisfaction for sure.

Kelly Therese Pollock 21:11

So what are some of the recommendations, then, you know, how do we move beyond this sort of gendered on unfair burden between the genders, you know, and move to a space where there is a more it's about it's a burden at all right, but there's an equal sort of taking responsibility for this.

Krystale Littlejohn 21:33

It absolutely has to start with sex education, in our families, in our schools in our communities. The biggest thing is that we have to make sure we're encouraging partners to share responsibility for preventing pregnancy and really working to interrupt this idea that it should solely be on the woman's plate to make sure that she's taking care of preventing pregnancy for the couple. It requires that all people learn about all methods of birth control, right, in order to have people use the methods, if that's what they choose to do, right, in order to have them use methods that work for them. And to be able to try methods, right, we have to make sure that they know about all methods of birth control that are out there, instead of assuming that one method is right for one group of people and one method is right for the other. And it especially requires that we teach people what contraceptive coercion looks like. So in just get on the pill, women often didn't recognize that their partners pressuring them not to use condoms is actually a form of coercion, that's coercion. And they didn't, they didn't necessarily understand that. And so I think the partners weren't always trying to be coercive. I think they just imagine that if there if the woman was using prescription birth control, they shouldn't have to use condoms, and they might try and convince them to just forego using condoms, during sex. But that stems at least in part, from how we approach sex education, in schools and in our families. And so if we want to really improve sex education, we have to shift our shift our framework toward shared responsibility, and recognize that placing pressure only on women to do all the work not only undermines their concept of freedom, but it also can risk their health and really facilitate caution.

Kelly Therese Pollock 23:20

So moms of boys should especially take notes, I say, moms, all parents, of course, but it's mostly moms who listen, so moms of boys, you know, I think about this, as a mom of boys, you know, I how do I make sure that I'm raising feminist boys? How do I make sure that they are learning about taking equal responsibility for all sorts of things? So this is certainly in an opportunity for those sorts of conversations.

Krystale Littlejohn 23:50

Absolutely. And I also think a big opportunity is in for mom's trying to raise feminist daughters, it's also to see condom use and be buying condoms, and using condoms as something that's also about feminism and also about making sure that people feel empowered over their bodies. So I'm right there with you about trying to think about what this means for raising feminist children. For sure.

Kelly Therese Pollock 24:15

Speaking of feminism, I noticed that you talk in the book about I think, what you call the black feminist viewpoints. And you talk to about sort of your own personal experiences and knowing, you know, sort of what what background you're bringing to your own research. Could you talk just a little bit about that and what that looks like in research?

Krystale Littlejohn 24:34

Absolutely. The biggest thing is making sure that we value everybody's experience in the research process. And so coming into the research, rather than thinking about this from a strictly public health approach that might be thinking about whether or not people are using contraception and it's important for preventing pregnancy and preventing STI I really tried to understand if they're not using birth control what's going on for them? That makes birth control use not that makes it where birth control use is not the ideal circumstance or the ideal situation for them. And that really required decentering are the the knowledge emphasis, right? So rather than just thinking about what the research says, I have to say, what are these women telling us about their experiences? And what can we as researchers learn from them, instead of assuming that we have the answers instead of assuming that we are the origin of knowledge, and we're just kind of taking their experiences to make to help other people understand it, it's saying they are teaching me about their experience, and their generosity and sharing their knowledge about their experiences and their embodied you what we call embodied expertise, right, like what it means to live in their bodies and be in their bodies and navigate the world in their bodies. That expertise is actually really important for us as researchers. So a kind of black feminist way of knowing means that we say, hey, are participants of all backgrounds of all classes of all different social groupings, they have something to teach us as researchers, we just have to make sure that we're listening. And that's really the the lens that I applied in this research that helped me come to the conclusions that we talked about, with black women being less likely to just get on the pill, as the name of the book says, right, they were less likely to just get on the pill, which meant that they were more likely not to use any form of birth control in that they could end up not using any form of birth control whatsoever. But I show that that's about understanding their experience and seeing how they tried to resist those social pressures that would coerce them into using a particular form of birth control. And it wasn't because of what some people think about folks just not using birth control, if they're not thinking about it, right, we have all of these kinds of myths about what's going on for people using a black feminist framework. Help me see this is what's actually happening with their experiences. And we can learn a lot if we just listen. Yeah.

Kelly Therese Pollock 27:15

Oh, I love that. So how can people get a copy of this book?

Krystale Littlejohn 27:19

Absolutely. It's it's going on so you can preorder the book now from the major retail retailers go to justgetonthepill.com and there you can go ahead and find the link there to do so.

Kelly Therese Pollock 27:33

Excellent. Well, Krystale, thank you so much for speaking with me. This was a really great read. I enjoyed it. I love social sciences anyway, but and I'm so glad that you were happy to talk about not just your research, but why you made the types of choices and research that you did I find that really compelling. So thank you.

Krystale Littlejohn 27:53

Thanks so much for having me. It was so much fun.

Sonya 27:56

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