Ithaca College

Rebecca Plante reviewed The Male Pill: a Biography of a Technology in the Making by Nelly Oudshoorn in the October 2004 edition of Gender and Society.

In the book, Oudshoorn maintains that male contraceptives are really "technologies of trust." Plante writes "Ultimately, a male pill is representative of some profound questions of gender relations generally. Can heterosexually active women share responsibility for hormonal contraception with men? Will men around the world advocate to make a male pill available? Can modern partners bear the weight of this tiny pill and its potential to expose the most fundamentally hegemonic aspects of heterogendered relations"?

Contributed by Jonathan Laskowitz