“I Just Wasn’t Thinking”: Strategic Ambiguity and Women’s Accounts of Unprotected Sex

ABSTRACT

Heterosexual university students continue to endorse sexual scripts that preference men’s desire and sustain gendered power imbalances in sexual relationships and encounters, leading women to risk pregnancy by engaging in unprotected sex. Because young women also endorse norms encouraging them to protect themselves and their partners from unintended pregnancy, women are caught in a bind between two often competing norms. We conducted semi-structured individual interviews with university women (n = 45) to examine how they navigate these competing norms. We found that women explained risky contraceptive decisions by saying they “just weren’t thinking,” thus employing strategic ambiguity, or vague language used to maintain social status, to navigate between competing norms. Our findings suggest that women were actually thinking about risks and making calculated decisions in the moment which often privileged men, putting themselves at risk and sometimes causing distress. To save face, women presented the idea that they “just weren’t thinking” in different ways that conformed to traditional notions of romance and sexuality: being in the moment, love and trust for their partner, and deferring to the perceived or actual wishes of men. We conclude that there is a need to promote and achieve affirmative sexuality which includes women feeling empowered to express their own sexual needs – whether that be consent or refusal, contraception, pleasure, or all of these.

Acknowledgments

These data were collected as part of the first author’s PhD dissertation research. We thank Drs. Stefanie Mollborn, Jane Menken, Sanyu Mojola, and Paula Fomby for their input on this project, and Dr Stefanie Mollborn and Dr Cristen Dalessandro for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. I also thank Cherie V. James whose love, guidance, and unfailing devotion to women’s rights led me to this line of work. Finally, I thank the many women who shared details of their most intimate experiences. Without them, this work would not have been possible.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Accounts Theory was developed to explain how people who engage in behavior inconsistent with social norms explain or make sense of their behavior. Scott and Lyman (1968) argued that when people are confronted with violating social norms, they offer “excuses” or “justifications” to rationalize their behavior so that it aligns with social expectations. We argue that during interviews women used strategic ambiguity by offering the claim “I just wasn’t thinking” to “excuse” that they had engaged in condomless sex because they perceived such behavior to be socially deviant given that they ascribed to the self-development imperative.