ارتباط جنسیتی در میان جوانان در مکزیک: پیامدها برای مداخلات بهداشت جنسی

Effective communication between partners is crucial for good sexual health, but is often difficult to achieve. This qualitative study shows how gendered communication can act as an important barrier to successful dialogue between men and women. Both content and manner of speaking are often gendered: not only can topics of conversation be socially defined as more or less appropriate for a speaker according to his or her sex, but men and women can also differ systematically in terms of the phrases and words they use. This may lead to a lack of the common forms of expression that are needed for effective communication. The study examines communication about sexuality among young men and women in low-income areas of Mexico City. The relationship between gender stereotypes of sexual behaviour and the gendered nature of communication strategies is explored. The negative consequences of gendered communication for effective dialogue between men and women are illustrated. Interventions that can enhance communication between men and women would be expected to have a positive impact on sexual health. This paper argues that research and interventions intended to improve sexual health may instead inadvertently reinforce communication barriers not only by failing to address the social pressures that exacerbate gendered communication, but also more insidiously, by using language that actively contributes to these pressures. An example of an intervention that avoids this problem is the Mexican programme “Gente Joven” (“Young People”).

The importance of effective communication within sexual dyads (i.e. between partners) is often cited as key to good sexual health (e.g. Drennan, 1998; AIDSCAP, 1996). In practice, such communication is often difficult to achieve. A major potential barrier to dialogue between men and women is that communication is gendered: there are socially determined differences in the ways that men communicate compared with women. The designers of interventions to improve sexual health need to understand and tackle barriers to communication. The extent to which a programme can encourage mixed-sex communication can be considered to contribute to the “process of laying the foundations for the social skills necessary to ensure safer sex in the future” (Wight & Abraham, 2000, p. 31). An intervention that fosters communication styles that are not specifically “masculine” or “feminine”, but that are more neutral may be able to increase couple communication1. By contrast, research or interventions that reiterate gender stereotypes, deliberately or otherwise, may inadvertently reinforce these barriers. In this paper, I will first outline the processes through which communication can affect sexual health, and set out the ways in which communication can be considered to be gendered. Using qualitative data, I will then consider the specific example of young people in Mexico City to explore the nature of their communication: the extent to which it is gendered, and the relationship between communication strategies and gender stereotypes of sexual behaviour. The ways in which gendered communication can impede effective dialogue between the sexes is illustrated. Finally, I will argue that existing communication difficulties could actually be exacerbated by the very interventions that aim to improve sexual health.