2 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S 10 S exualities art of a “true college experience,” many students say, involves going to parties, getting drunk, meeting someone new, and having sex. 1 As one student describes it: “There’s this system that’s like, you’re gonna get drunk, randomly meet randoms, and just, like, whatever happens.”2 This is hookup culture, a new norm on college campuses in which casual sexual contact in the absence of romantic intentions is held up by many as an ideal. Over 90 percent of college students in America say their campus is characterized by a hookup culture. 3 Most students are excited by the opportunity to experiment with their sexuality, and three-quarters of students will hook up at least once before graduation.4 But many students also feel a great deal of pressure to participate. Kimbra, one of our students, was one of them. Tall and outspoken, with chin-length dark hair, radical politics, and a bisexual identity, she seemed the child of unapologetic hippies. She expressed concern, though, that she wasn’t sexual enough. “Maybe I actually am a prude,” she worried: I’m so embarrassed by that, and so I want to distance myself from it. I “know” that I should want to have sex all the time, and should take advantage of it when I get the chance. . . . [ P]ressure to be sexual was and has been so constant for so long. . . . I feel as if by not voluntarily taking part in it, I am weird, abnormal, and a prude.5 4 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S Kimbra was articulating a sentiment that is widespread among college students. Hookup culture often feels like more than just an opportunity to engage in routine casual sexual encounters; it can feel like an imperative. As another student put it: “People ask, ‘You’re at college and you’re not having sex? What’s wrong with you?’ ” This imperative is part of wider changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors. Instead of reflecting a sudden transformation of human nature, this increasing sexual permissiveness is a result of changes in the cultural and institutional context for sexuality. In order to understand the way we feel and the choices we make, we need to look beyond the individual. Accordingly, the answer to the following question is no: Gendered ideas, interactions, and institutions may affect almost every part of my life, but some things are personal and my sexuality is mine and mine alone, isn’t it? Let us make the case. We’ve already encountered the sexual regimes of the Puritans, the romantic Victorians, the revelers of the 1920s, and the experimental teenagers of the 1950s. In all cases, sexual attitudes and behaviors were strongly influenced by the societies in which these individuals lived. The same is true now. To understand how, we’ll learn about the rebels of the sexual revolution, take a closer look at sexuality today, and end somewhere that might be familiar: hookup culture. T H E S E X UA L R E V OL U T I ON After World War II ended in 1945, people made babies. Lots of ’em. Birth rates increased in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and most European countries. In the United States, they rose from just over two children per woman during the Great Depression to a high of nearly four.6 These kids, the “baby boomers,” grew up during the 1950s and ’60s, changing the demographics of the country. Between 1960 and 1970 the number of eighteen- to twentyfour-year-olds increased by over 50 percent.7 The Vietnam War began in 1955 and massively expanded in scope in the mid1960s. It would last twenty years, during which time an active resistance would emerge. Anti-Vietnam activists would ally with the civil rights movement. Violent attacks by American government authorities—both on the Vietnamese during the war and on American anti-war and civil rights protesters— stirred a more general resistance to authority. Some boomers, now in their teens 5 THESEXUALREVOLUTION F I G U R E 1 0 .1 | FERTILITY RATE IN THE UNITED STATES,* 1920–2012 150 50 0 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 *!A nnual num ber of births per 1,0 0 0 wom en of childbearing age. Source: Livingston, Gretchen and D’Vera Cohn. “Chart of the Week: Big drop in birth rate may be leveling off .” Pew R esearch Center (20 13). and twenties, rejected their parents’ eager embrace of conformity, willingness to turn a blind eye to injustices, and sexual conservatism.8 Youth often push boundaries set by adults and by 1970 there were more young people than ever. Many things changed. This generation—with members now in their sixties—brought us the civil rights, women’s, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. It also brought us the sexual revolution. One aim of the sexual revolution was to liberate female sexuality, but what does a liberated sexuality look like? Reflecting the androcentrism of the time, women’s sexuality was framed as “suppressed” and men’s as “normal.”9 The very definition of sexual liberation, in other words, came to be modeled on a masculine version of sexuality that involved fewer restrictions on sexual behavior. Sexual attitudes and behaviors became more permissive as a result, especially for women.10 Women were “ both excited by and resentful of this new world,” wrote historian Angus McLaren.11 Many wanted to say yes to sex, but doing so presented its own set of problems. Comparing notes, women discovered that their sexual encounters with men typically conformed to men’s desires. Women were unhappy with men’s 2012 6 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S lack of interest in women’s sexual pleasure and the ongoing risk of sexual violence.12 McLaren concludes, “They wanted to say yes to sex and no to sexism.” 13 But that was easier said than done. T he killing of four students at Kent S tate University by the Ohio National Guard in 1970 spurred mobilization against the V ietnam War and a call for less violent policing. T he youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which promoted peace and challenged repressive authority, also helped prompt the sexual revolution. Just Say Yes? It’s tempting to pat ourselves on the back and conclude that the sexual revolution vanquished both sexual repression and the gendered double standard. However, today’s context for sexual expression is not devoid of rules; rather, it involves a new set of expectations that bring both opportunities and imperatives. Consider the question regarding whether and when to lose your virginity. The majority of Americans think that waiting until marriage to lose your virginity is a romantic but silly idea. In fact, nearly two-thirds of young adult men and women say that it’s simply not realistic to wait until marriage to have sex and only about 5 percent of Americans are now virgins on their (first) wedding night.14 This sentiment means that most people who want to have premarital sex don’t feel a crushing amount of pressure to preserve their virginity, but it puts new pressure on many people to “lose it.” In fact, today many men and plenty of women think that being a virgin, after a certain age, is embarrassing.15 One student who sought to lose her virginity the summer before college explained: “The thing I feared the most about going off to college? Being a virgin. . . . I thought S OFS Y C O N T E M P O R A R Y R U L EE X U A L I T 7 that only nerds, religious nuts, and momma’s boys were untouched when they started college.” She’s not alone. While previous generations protected their virginity, many people today go to great lengths to get rid of it, even if they’re not sure they want to. 17 About a third of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds say that they feel pressure to have sex, and half of women and a third of men report they weren’t sure they wanted to lose their virginity when they did. 18 Likewise, in a society that conflates virginity loss with penile-vaginal intercourse, some gay men and lesbians will have heterosexual sex because it seems like the only way to lose their virginity. Put simply, the historical pressure to say no to sex has been replaced by a pressure to say yes. This creates anxiety and sometimes very negative experiences for people who don’t want to have sex or participate in certain sexual activities. It can also contribute to depression and selfdoubt among people who are, for whatever reason, unsuccessful in finding sexual partners. Meanwhile, gender rules and gendered hierarchies still shape how people experience their sexuality. 16 CONTEMPORARY RULES OF SEXUALITY We’ve introduced the idea of doing gender; we also “do” sexuality. We learn the rules for whom we should be attracted to, what is attractive, how to be sexual, and what we should and shouldn’t do with one another. Though we resist these rules as well as obey them, the result is that our sexual activities are far from spontaneous or natural. Instead, much of our behavior is carefully orchestrated, creating patterns in our sexual interactions. In the next three sections, we discuss the erotic marketplace, the gendered division of the sexual dynamic, and the sexual script. The Erotic Marketplace The term market is typically used to describe the abstract space in which goods and services are attributed economic value. Borrowing that idea, the phrase erotic marketplace refers to the ways in which people are organized and ordered according to their perceived sexual desirability. Some people have more erotic “capital” than others. This isn’t about purely personal taste or human nature. It’s part of a cultural value system that attributes more worth to some bodies than others. 8 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S In this section we draw on data from over 7 million active users of the popular dating website OkCupid. Three-quarters of single people have used online dating sites.19 It is the primary way in which people seeking same-sex relationships meet one another, and heterosexual couples are as likely to meet on the Internet as they are to meet through friends or at a bar.20 Lots of people are using these sites, and analysis of their profiles and communications tells some interesting stories about gender, its intersection with race, and the “hot or not” game. gender and the erotic marketplace Attractiveness is an important commodity in the erotic marketplace. OkCupid data shows that men are significantly more likely to message S carlett J ohansson, like other darlings of H ollywood, has been women who are judged to be of given titles attesting to her erotic capital, like “S exiest Woman A above-average attractiveness live” (Esquire), “Babe of the Year” (GQ), and “S exiest C elebrity” (Playboy). compared with women who are of average and less-than-average 21 attractiveness. Much more likely. Two-thirds of men’s messages go to women who are in the top third of attractiveness, such that a very attractive woman gets five times as many messages as the average woman and twenty-eight times as many as the least attractive. Figure 10.2 shows that women tend to message more attractive men as well, suggesting that attractiveness matters to them, too, but not nearly as much as it does to men. The most attractive men receive ten times the average number of messages, but the most attractive women receive twenty-five times the average number. This asymmetric emphasis on women’s appearance suggests that, at least in the abstract, women’s value in the erotic marketplace is less tied than men’s to who they are and what they do, and more tied to how they look. Men’s desirability is C O N T E M P O R A R Y R U L EE X U A L I T9 less centrally dependent on his appearance, such that he can make up for mediocre looks by being funny, smart, or rich. Women can’t so easily do this. Why? In the erotic marketplace there is a ceiling placed on women’s level of success. With the noted exception of attractiveness, most of the variables at play in F I G U R E 1 0 . 2 | NUMBER OF MESSAGES RECEIVED VS. RECIPIENT’S 2 5 2 0 messag1 e 5 1 0 5 ATTRACTIVENESS 0 10 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S 3 0 least attractive (0) medium (2.5) most attractive (5) Source: Christian Rudder, “Your Looks and Your Inbox,” OkT rends, November 17, 2009, http://blog.okcupid.com /index.php/your-looks-andonline-dating/. the erotic marketplace—income, level of education, occupational prestige, age, height, weight, strength—fall into a pattern. Gendered matching rules suggest that men should be more than women. Cultural norms dictate that the man be taller, stronger, bigger, older, more educated, and have a higher-status job that brings in more income. It doesn’t have to be a Cinderella story; that is, we don’t expect him to necessarily be a lot more (most princes don’t marry maids), but we’ve learned to feel comfortable with a gentle asymmetry. As a result, it makes sense to us that women would seek out men who are just a little bit more than them on each variable and, likewise, that men would feel most comfortable with women who are just a little bit less. The OkCupid data on age puts this in stark relief. Age is an imperfect measure of both attractiveness and accomplishment. We tend to conflate aging with ugliness, so we should predict that women’s value in the erotic marketplace would be harmed with age. This should be true for men as well, but we can imagine that it might be offset by other things we value in men. In fact, heterosexual male OkCupid users report that they will consider dating women who are significantly younger, but only a bit older.22 More, as a man ages, his lower bracket goes lower relative to his own age. The average thirty-year-old man, for instance, says he’s interested in dating a woman as old as thirty-five and as young as twenty-two. A man at forty will date a woman as old as forty- five but as young as twenty-seven. This is what men say, anyway. In reality, men’s messaging habits are even more skewed toward younger women.23 In practice, men mostly seek contact with the youngest women in their reported preferred age brackets and women who fall below their lower bracket. Their willingness to date “down” suggests that they prefer or will accept a mate whose career is “behind” their own. The average woman, conversely, prefers to date a man who is her age or older. The average thirty-year-old woman is interested in men up to seven years older and as much as three years younger. As women get older, they will accept about five years on either side. In actual messaging, they tend to focus on men their own age. CONTEMPORARYRULESOFSEXUALITY Gender inequality is at work in the erotic marketplace, then, placing a high value on men’s accomplishments and women’s appearance. For men, being bigger, stronger, and older, having advanced degrees and enjoying a high-prestige, well-paid occupation is always an advantage. For women, all these things carry both advantages and disadvantages. Gains may help her catch a highly valued man, but she might reasonably worry that too many gains could knock her out of the competition altogether. Meanwhile, her ability to attract men may decrease as she ages, while the men in her same age cohort become relatively more attractive. His achievements count more toward his attractiveness than hers do, and her fading looks harm her more than his. Importantly, relationships that evolve off-line involve more complicated chemistry than the abstract ranking of OkCupid profiles, but these relationships still reflect the gentle asymmetry driven by gender inequality more so than they would in the absence of gendered matching rules. And even people who reject these rules are culturally competent enough to know when they’re in violation of social norms. If they’re not, the gender policing of relationships will likely tip them off sooner or later. race in the erotic marketplace Race plays a role in the erotic marketplace, too. For black men, racial stereotypes are a double-edged sword. By virtue of being stereotyped as hypermasculine, black men are seen as especially sexy, sexual, and sexually skilled compared to white men. Though they may be sought out as sexual partners because of these stereotypes, the idea that they are too masculine—and, therefore, too sexual—may make them seem like frightening or inappropriate partners. For Asian men, stereotypes based on race are more straightforwardly negative. Asian men are seen by some as unmasculine and, therefore, sexually deficient. Research shows that even Asian women may think so.24 We see these patterns in the OkCupid data. In terms of compatibility, as measured by a mathematical algorithm, all races match with all other races rather equally. 25 But all races aren’t equally valued in the online erotic marketplace. Table 10.1 lists the percent of the time that a man will receive a reply after he sends a message to either a woman seeking men or a man seeking men. In a society that centers and elevates whiteness, we would expect that white men would have an advantage, and they do. In fact, white men are more likely than men of any other race to get a response from women. Among men seeking men, white men get the second-highest amount of replies after Middle Eastern men. In both cases, Native American men follow close behind white men in popularity. Conversely, black men are among the least likely to get a response from women and the least likely to get a response from men. Asians, too, are among the groups that get the least frequent responses. In another study of online dating behavior, college-educated white women were actually more likely to respond to a white man without a college degree than an Asian man with one.26 Racism—both the kind that fetishizes and the kind that denigrates—also affects the desirability of women. Asian women, by virtue of being seen as extra-feminine, are seen by some as more sexually malleable than white women, which may make them appealing 11 12 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S to men who are looking for subservient women. One white American man who prefers Asian women explained: “I’m kind of a soft guy. I really find American women overly aggressive.”27 Table 10.2 shows that women typically seen as “Asian” (those who identify as Asian but also those who identify as Pacific Islander, East Indian, and Middle Eastern) do very well in the erotic market. These are the four groups TA B L E 1 0 .1 | PERCENT CHANCE THAT A MAN IN EACH RACIAL GROUP WILL RECEIVE A RESPONSE FROM AN INQUIRY Racial Group Men Messaging Women Men Messaging Men White 29% 45% Native American 28% 44% Middle Eastern 26% 48% Pacific Islander 25% 38% H ispanic 23% 42% Asian 22% 38% Black 22% 35% East Indian 21% 38% Average 28% 43% Source: Christian Rudder, “How Your Race Aff ects the Messages You Get,” OkT rends, October 5, 2009, http://blog.okcupid .com/index.php/your-race-aff ects-whether-people-write-you-back/. TA B L E 1 0 . 2 | PERCENT CHANCE THAT A WOMAN IN EACH RACIAL GROUP WILL RECEIVE A RESPONSE FROM AN INQUIRY Racial Group Women Messaging Men Women Messaging Women Middle Eastern 50% 52% Pacific Islander 46% 49% Asian 44% 53% H ispanic 43% 50% East Indian 43% 63% White 42% 51% Native American 42% 49% Black 34% 47% Average 42% 51% Source: Christian Rudder, “How Your Race Aff ects the Messages You Get” and “Same-Sex Data for Race vs. Reply Rates,” OkTrends (blog). CONTEMPORARYRULESOFSEXUALITY most likely to receive a response from women messaging men, and three of the top four from women messaging women. In contrast, as in Table 10.1, black women are among the least likely to receive a response. Black women face a situation similar to that of Asian men. Racial stereotypes that masculinize African Americans relative to whites undermine a black woman’s value in the erotic marketplace. When a black woman messages another woman, the response rate is four percentage points below the average; when she messages a man, it falls nine points below average. Black women—whether they are college educated or not—are least likely to be contacted or receive a response.28 While our individual preferences seem very personal, this data reveals that our aggregated preferences conform to social hierarchies.29 Actual dating and marriage patterns reflect what we see online.30 Whites are more likely to marry Latinos, Native Americans, or Asians than they are to marry blacks. White men are more likely to marry Asian women than black women, and white women are more likely to marry black men than Asian men.31 Reflecting colorism, lighter- skinned racial minorities are more likely to intermarry with whites than darker- skinned minorities. Evidence further suggests that people are more comfortable experimenting with interracial relationships than they are committing to them.32 When white teenagers date white peers, they introduce them to their parents 71 percent of the time, but their nonwhite girlfriends or boyfriends get to meet the parents only 57 percent of the time. Black teenagers are also reluctant to introduce their boyfriends or girlfriends if they’re in an interracial relationship, though the difference in likelihood of introduction is smaller. In any case, the rate of interracial dating tends to decrease as levels of commitment increase. People are more likely to date someone of a different race than they are to live with them and they’re even less likely to interracially marry. Gender and race hierarchies, then, clearly shape our ideas about who is an appropriate sexual and romantic partner. Social forces also affect how we think about our sexualities. The Sexy and the Sexual Paris Hilton once said: “My boyfriends always tell me I’m not sexual. Sexy but not sexual.”33 The difference is significant. To be sexy is to be an object of desire for others; to be sexual is have the capacity to experience sexual desire.34 Most of us want to both feel desire and be desired but, in practice, the lessons we learn about sexuality tend to divide and subdivide these phenomena by gender. 13 14 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S We get many of these lessons from the draw our attention to men’s subjectivity, media. The sex education Americans their internal thoughts and feelings. This is encounter in schools largely focuses on an acknowledgment that they are sexual, reproduction and, outside of giving which is good, but it is also a prescription. instructions to abstain or protect Media images do more than allow men themselves from infections and pregnancy, sexual subjectivities; they are assigned a parents rarely talk to their children about very specific version of male 35 sex. The media fills this void. Television heterosexuality. In this way, men undergo programs, movies, advertising, and other a process of sexual media content, however, aren’t very good R eal women and girls are seen through lenses formed by omnipresent sexually explicit images of women’s bodies teachers. Overwhelmingly, these media presented as desirable objects for the gaze of the presumptively heterosexual male consumer. assume a heterosexual male gaze, meaning that the content is designed to appeal to a hypothetical heterosexual man.36 Plotlines and visuals intended to incite male sexual desire function to subjectification: They are told what their internal thoughts and feelings should be. Advertisements, for example, consistently portray a particular kind of woman as sexually desirable, repetitively implying that she is the proper object of men’s sexual attraction. Men internalize this prescription to greater or lesser degrees, and no man is completely passive in the face of his subjectification. All of us, though, learn what this subjectivity looks like and all of us, regardless of our gender identification, have to contend with the cultural expectation that this version of male heterosexuality re presents what men are really like. For women, media made with the male gaze in mind means being exposed to constant scrutiny of female bodies. Sexual objectification is the reduction of a person to his or her sex appeal. To be clear, it’s not the same thing as finding someone’s body desirable; it’s the absence of subjectivity, the total irrelevance of the internal life of the person portrayed. Both men and women are objectified in popular culture, but men are CONTEMPORARYRULESOFSEXUALITY objectified much less often than women.37 As a result, many of us internalize the idea that a woman’s value is heavily dependent on her attractiveness, whereas a man’s value is somewhat less so.38 This is the same phenomenon we see reflected in the OkCupid data. Many women self-objectify, internalizing the idea that their physical attractiveness determines their worth. During sex, habitual body monitoring may translate into a process called spectating, watching one’s sexual performance from the outside.39 A woman might try to stay in sexual positions she thinks are flattering, arrange her body and limbs to make herself look thinner or curvier, try to keep her face looking pretty, and ensure she doesn’t make any embarrassing noises. She may even avoid orgasm because climaxing means losing control of these things. As a result of spectating, some women have “out-of-body sexual experiences” in which they don’t focus much on how sex feels. And, sure enough, research has shown that the more a woman worries about how she looks, the less likely she’ll experience sexual desire, pleasure, and orgasm.40 While heterosexual men are less likely to be sexually objectified, gay men can be positioned as either the objectifier or the objectified and, in fact, they report higher levels of self-objectification than heterosexual men.41 A gay man interviewed about his experiences complained that sex often left him feeling “used” by men: You get tired of being used. . . . [I] was just nothing but this little receptacle. . . . It wasn’t reciprocal. . . . I need to feel like some attention is to me and I’m not just this machine. . . . It makes me one dimensional. It just makes me an object.42 The discomfort of being sexually objectified may help explain why so many heterosexual men are uncomfortable in gay male spaces. Used to being the “predator,” suddenly they are the “prey.” Many women and gay men, in contrast, have grown accustomed to this feeling, even if they don’t enjoy it. The Scripting of Sexuality Sociologists use the term sexual script to describe the rules that guide sexual interaction. 43 We know there’s a script because, instead of randomly or experimentally progressing with a sexual encounter, most people do the same things in more or less the same order. It goes something like this: kissing (closed mouth), then close body contact, kissing (open mouth), then groping (first the butt, then the breasts). Once this all has occurred, the couple gets horizontal. Then there’s more kissing and groping, including the touching of genitals through clothes. C lothes start coming off; first her shirt, then his, then her pants, then his, then her bra and underwear, finally his. It’s a toss-up if it’s a same-sex couple. Sexual activities are also tightly ordered. If it’s a heterosexual couple, there’s touching of naked genitals, oral sex on him, then penile-vaginal intercourse. Oral sex on the woman is a wild card these days, but it usually doesn’t precede oral sex on the man. The scripts of same-sex couples aren’t as straightforwardly gendered, but they still have a somewhat rigid ascending order of intimacy. The sexual script is strongly institutionalized, especially when two people are first becoming sexual together. The rule that french kissing comes before fondling, for instance, isn’t just a guideline; someone who moves straight to second base could be charged with 15 16 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S sexual battery, a legal term for unwanted but nonviolent sexual touching. Even the body parts people are allowed to find sexy is carefully scripted. The guy who prefers feet, for instance, may be seen as a pervert. We police one another around these sexual rules, requiring that others behave sexually in culturally competent and intelligible ways. This script creates predictability and helps ease social interaction—“Did she kiss me back? Aha, now I have clearance to try for second base”—but it is also gendered. Both difference and inequality become a part of our sexual scripts, with implications for interpersonal interactions. In the remainder of this section, we discuss how gendered social scripts contribute to high rates of sexual assault and an orgasm gap between men and women. sexual assault Written into the sexual script for heterosexual sex is the idea that men are supposed to initiate sexual activity and women are supposed to decide whether the couple should go forward with each “move.” This is called the push-and-resist dynamic, a situation in which it is normal for men to press sexual activity consistently in the direction of increasing intimacy (whether he wants to or not) and for women to stop or slow down the accelerating intimacy when he’s going “too far” (whether she wants to or not). The push-and-resist dynamic may encourage and even require men to press women for sexual intimacy, and this is often uncomfortable or annoying, but it doesn’t account for why one in six women will survive an attempted or completed sexual assault. 44 The majority of men, no matter how strongly they embrace their role as the initiator, will never commit a violent or coercive sexual crime. The push-and-resist dynamic doesn’t make all men semi-rapists. Instead, it gives cover to the small proportion of men who are responsible for the vast majority of sexual assaults. Research suggests that most assaults are committed by a small percentage of men. In one study, 6 percent of college men admitted to behavior that fit the description of rape or attempted rape.45 Two-thirds of those men (4 percent of all men) were serial rapists, having committed an average of six rapes each. A study of navy enlistees found that a higher percentage admitted to rape or attempted rape (13 percent), but similarly found that about two-thirds of those men were serial offenders.46 These men are sexual predators. They plan their assaults, carefully choose their victims, use alcohol as a rape drug, and employ force when necessary. They are the minority, but in cultural context, they blend in. This cultural context is what scholars call rape culture, an environment that justifies, naturalizes, and even glorifies sexual pressure, coercion, and violence. The idea that men are naturally sexually aggressive is part of rape culture, as are jokes that trivialize sexual assault, advertisements that glamorize scenes of sexual force, sex scenes in which women say no and then change their minds, and the persistent belief that sexual crimes are falsely reported more often than other crimes (they’re not). Rape culture gives rapists plausible excuses for their actions and can also make it difficult for people who are targeted to understand that they can fight back. Indeed, rape culture makes us forget that men’s bodies are at least as vulnerable as women’s. 47 Maneuvers that take little strength—a thumb to the eye socket, a punch to the throat, an CONTEMPORARYRULESOFSEXUALITY elbow to the nose, a quick kick to the knee cap, or a twist of the testicles—can often bring an attempted assault to an end. In fact, research has shown that hollering, fighting back, or fleeing reduces the likelihood of a completed rape by 81 percent, without increasing the severity of injuries sustained by victims.48 Women rarely outrun men in the movies, but they often can in real life. When men or women are assaulted—whether they successfully fight off their perpetrator or not—rape culture can make it difficult for them to recognize that what happened to them is a crime. Or, alternatively, it can make victims concerned that they won’t be believed. This is understandable, as campaigns aimed at reducing rates of sexual assault frequently perpetuate rape culture, blaming victims for the actions of repeat sexual offenders. Anti-sexual assault campaigns on college campuses, for example, tend to focus extensively on what women can do to reduce their risk of sexual assault. This approach reinforces the idea that women could stop sexual assault if they just made different choices. This is an odd way to think about crime. When we think of sexual assault as a matter of female risk taking, the perpetrator disappears from the equation. 17 18 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S T his British police campaign that intends to reduce the incidence of rape does so by putting the onus of preventative action on the woman, as do campaigns on many U.S . college campuses. CONTEMPORARYRULESOFSEXUALITY People get robbed because there are robbers and get scammed because there are scammers, the logic goes, but women somehow “get themselves raped” by making the wrong choices. In reality, the only thing that causes rape is a perpetrator’s decision to rape. In the absence of rapists, that is, none of women’s choices results in sexual assault. Also partly because of rape culture, the laws and prosecutions aimed at reducing sexual assault and penalizing perpetrators are, at best, weakly enforced. Rape myths frequently underlie the decisions and judgments of police officers, lawyers, judges, jurors, and the victims themselves. Partly for these reasons, it is estimated that only 10 percent of rapes are reported to law enforcement and 37 percent of these will proceed to prosecution.49 Only 3.4 percent of rapes ultimately end in conviction. the orgasm gap A large survey from the late ’80s and early ’90s found that 75 percent of men reported regularly having orgasms with their partners compared with 29 percent of women.50 This is called the orgasm gap, a phenomenon in which heterosexual women report fewer orgasms than heterosexual men. The gap isn’t a simple consequence of different anatomy or physiology. That is, despite what you may have heard, women are not somehow bad at having orgasms. When women are alone they reach orgasm between 80 and 96 percent of the time.51 Women in same-sex relationships report having two to three times as many orgasms as women in heterosexual ones.52 In pre-colonial Polynesia, women were expected to have about three times as many orgasms as men, and they did.53 The orgasm gap isn’t natural; it’s a social artifact related to the gendered sexual script. First, the script itself leads couples to penile-vaginal intercourse, an activity that regularly results in men’s orgasm but not women’s. Only 20 to 30 percent of women routinely have orgasms through intercourse alone.54 Second, the gendered sexy/sexual binary justifies a focus on the male orgasm, since it’s his desire that supposedly drives and is sated by sexual activity. This lets men off the hook for female orgasms, but it also discourages women from pursuing their own. Likewise, because the script puts women in the position of responding to sexual activity but not initiating it, women might not tell their partners how to give them orgasms.55 Just as we “do” gender, we “do” gendered sexualities. Our sexual script places men and women at odds, with men expected to push for sex and women expected to hold out for love. This dynamic makes manipulative and even coercive behavior seem normal, creating fertile ground for sexual violence. It also contributes to the orgasm gap between men and women. Expectations regarding women’s attractiveness focus women’s attention on their bodies, provoking anxiety and distracting them from the pleasure involved with sexual activity. Men, conversely, are prescribed a narrow heterosexuality and policed 19 20 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S if they step outside its boundaries. For men especially, the imperative to be sexually active makes it difficult and disconcerting to opt out of sex altogether, at least without a good account to explain why. We see all of these dynamics, and more, on many college campuses today. HOOKUP CULTURE Joel “couldn’t even begin to list” all the ways the media had prepared him for a “sexually overloaded college scene.” This student had grown up in a small town just outside of Death Valley, California. He’d attended small schools all his life; there were sixty students total in his high school. These were intimate environments that made puberty extraordinarily awkward. “Everyone knew everything about everyone else,” he explained, so sexual experimentation was rare and, when indulged, secretive. College promised to be a whole new world. That summer he anticipated the “imminent freedom that college presented.” In his first week, he kissed four girls. Things were off to a great start. Joel quickly discovered, however, that reality didn’t exactly match the fantasy. “I soon realized,” he wrote midyear, “that there was little resemblance to the college life that I saw on TV and in movies.” After just one month of college, hookups had “lost their appeal.” During the second semester of his freshman year, he didn’t have any sexual contact with anyone at all. “I now know that the images in the media are only sloppily upheld by a handful of students,” he wrote, “and for the most part are not an accurate indicator of actual college lifestyle.” Joel isn’t wrong. Casual sex is not as common on college campuses as the media would lead us to believe. The average number of hookups for a graduating senior is seven.56 This might seem low but, in fact, most students overestimate the frequency with which their peers hook up, as well as how “far” they go and the degree to which they enjoy it.57 A quarter of students won’t hook up at all; 20 percent of students will still be virgins when they graduate. Only about 20 percent of students hook up more than ten times in four years and only half of those do so with pure enthusiasm.58 Most students are ambivalent. The majority (70 percent of women and 73 percent of men) say they’d prefer to be in a relationship. Joel is one of them. If most people don’t really like hookup culture, why does it dominate college campuses? Why Hookup Culture? Why Now? Since there have been colleges, there have been hookups, but hookup culture is new. The difference is crucial: It’s the difference between a campus on which HOOKUPCULTURE C ollege students collectively enact hookup culture, organizing and populating parties with the express purpose of facilitating casual sexual contact. some people have casual sex and a campus on which casual sex is the most visible and widely embraced approach to sexuality. A number of institutional forces have ushered in hookup culture. When women began attending universities in the 1920s, administrators considered themselves substitute parents. They set policies designed to minimize or eliminate sexual activity, especially that of women. Today, with the exception of sexual-assault programs, sexual-health information, and free condoms, most colleges do very little to direct the sexual activities (or non-activities) of their students.59 The students themselves, then, shape the cultural norms for sexual behavior on their campuses. To them, casual sex makes some sense. Many are busy preparing for careers and are in no hurry to “settle down.” Students, especially those from wealthy backgrounds, speak about college as a place for personal growth, not interpersonal bonding. One student explained: I’ve always looked at college as the only time in your life when you should be a hundred percent selfish. . . . I have the rest of my life to devote to a husband or kids or my job. . . . But right now, it’s my time.60 Relationships can be time consuming and emotionally draining. Hooking up can be a good way for young people to gain some sexual experience and blow off steam 21 22 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S while they ride out an extended adolescence: a significant period of time during which young people (who are no longer kids) prepare for a future (when they’ll finally be “real” adults).61 As you might suspect, though, not all students are equally invested in hookup culture. Who L ikes Hookup Culture? Hookup culture is disproportionately endorsed and enacted by the students with the most power to shape campus sexual culture: those who are white, wealthy, heterosexual, conventionally attractive, able-bodied, and socially adept. Sexual-minority students, for example, are less likely to hook up than heterosexual students.62 This is partly because parties and dances are not always gay-friendly. Many college students draw sharp boundaries around heterosexual activities. Girl-on-girl kissing for male attention, for example, is premised on the idea that both the women are heterosexual. While some women who are questioning their sexual orientation might use this as an opportunity to explore what it feels like to kiss another woman, others who participate in this activity report that they do it only if they’re confident that the woman they are kissing is not a lesbian.63 Accordingly, these women are invested in carving out heterosexualonly spaces and, in one study, reported more homophobic attitudes than women who don’t kiss other women at parties.64 For students of color, embracing hookup culture can bring individual rewards, but these students also risk affirming harmful beliefs about their racial group. Many black people feel the need to perform a politics of respectability, a form of resistance to negative racial stereotypes that involves being “good” and following conservative norms of appearance and behavior.65 The erotic marketplace plays a role here, too, racializing desirability and, therefore, rates of hooking up. Data show that black women and Latinas, as well as Asian men and women, are less likely to hook up than their counterparts.66 Research also suggests that class-privileged students hook up more often than other students.67 Working-class women in college may be more focused on getting through school. One woman, reflecting on all the partying, observed: Some of these girls don’t even go to class. It’s like they just live here. They stay up until 4 in the morning. [ I want to ask,] “Do you guys go to class? Like what’s your deal? . . . You’re paying a lot of money for this. . . . If you want to be here, then why aren’t you trying harder?”68 HOOKUPCULTURE Students from families with tight budgets are also likely to have a job outside of school and may live at home to save money. These students have less time to spend partying and less opportunity to do so. Sharing a small house with one’s parents— which is often a car or bus ride from the party—isn’t conducive to ca sual sex or heavy drinking.69 For Shawn, an Asian student, it was just logistically difficult: It’s easier to party if you live somewhere on campus than off campus. If you’re commuting, you may be able to do it every once in a while and crash and find a place to sleep, but if your parents are expecting you home, it’s hard because you can’t drink and drive.70 Students who live at home, especially young women, are subject to surveillance from parents who may have rules against drinking, drug use, sexual activity, and staying out late. Lydia, for example, a Latina student, imagined that dorm life was more autonomous: “They don’t have parents worrying about when they get home or calling them. . . . They do as they please.” The students with the greatest opportunity and interest in hookups are also the students with the most power to shape social life on college campuses. As a result, it can feel like “everyone is doing it,” even if a significant proportion of the students dislike hookup culture or are excluded from it. In this way, hookup culture is a microcosm of our society. It reflects the same power dynamics we see outside of colleges. Danger on Campus Like the women of the 1970s, women in college want to say “yes to sex and no to sexism.”71 And it’s still easier said than done. Gender inequality shapes both the pain and pleasure that hookup culture can bring. Sexual manipulation and coercion are normal parts of college life. Women who attend college face a significantly higher risk of sexual assault than women who don’t (one in four female college students experience a completed or attempted assault, compared with one in six women overall) and women who actively participate in hookup culture are more likely to be assaulted than women who opt out.72 Rape culture makes it difficult for campus activists fighting sexual violence to secure resources from administrators and ensure that colleges have proper reporting, fair policies, and proper management of cases. Its narratives also make the coercive behaviors that rapists engage in—plying women with alcohol or pulling them into secluded parts of a party—look “normal.” And rape culture continues to obscure the most common source of sexual assault. Ninety percent of college victims know their attackers, but students still worry more about being raped by 23 24 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S strangers.73 Students asked to identify places on their campus map “where the danger of sexual assault is especially high” are more likely to point T hese protestors are challenging the negative assumptions about women’s sexuality in the word slut and arguing that a woman’s appearance is never a justification for sexual assault. to the woodsy paths and poorly lit parking lots than the fraternity houses and dorms where assault is far more likely. It’s difficult to change what’s happening on campuses because they are shaped, in great part, by the wider social changes we’ve seen over the last 250 years and the more immediate institutional features of college life itself. But students can and do make a difference. Sexual culture is powerfully influenced by which students happen to be present and outspoken. Bystander intervention programs, for example—ones that educate students about sexual assault and teach them how to spot likely incidents and safely intervene—are effective in reducing rates of sexual violence.74 Unlike programs that emphasize what women can do to reduce the likelihood of rape, these empower the entire college commu nity. The success of these programs is proof that students can make colleges more inclusive, safer spaces for personal growth. HOOKUPCULTURE Pleasure on Campus While both men and women often discover that they dislike or are ambivalent about hooking up, women’s dissatisfaction is felt more acutely. The uneven distribution of pleasure—the orgasm gap between male and female college students—contributes to this dissatisfaction. In hookups, women have about half as many orgasms as men.75 Many men appear to differentiate between hookups and girlfriends. One male college student insisted in an interview that he always cared about “her” orgasm. However, when asked if he meant “the general her or the specific,” he replied, “Girlfriend her. In a hookup her, I don’t give a shit.”76 Some other men take a similar approach: If it’s just a random hookup, I don’t think [her orgasm] matters as much to the guy. . . . But if you’re with somebody for more than just that one night . . . I know I feel personally responsible. I think it’s essential that she has an orgasm during sexual activity.77 Some men don’t prioritize women’s orgasm in hookups but, to be fair, women often don’t prioritize their own pleasure either: “I will do everything in my power to, like whoever I’m with, to get [him] off,” said one college student.78 When women are worried about giving their male partners orgasms, it can distract them from their own pleasure: “My sexuality was filled with anxiety and my need to please the guy instead of worrying about my own pleasure,” said one student.”79 In contrast, women in relationships with men have 80 percent as many orgasms as their partners. Relationships in college typically begin with a series of hookups and it appears that a couple’s attentiveness to the woman’s orgasm escalates along with their interest in each other.80 Women have orgasms in 11 percent of first hookups, 16 percent of second or third hookups, and 34 percent of hookups after that.81 Figure 10.4 shows just how widely a woman’s chance of orgasm varies when considering the nature of the relationship and the activities the couple engages in. When partners incorporate a wide range of activities, especially oral sex and women’s self-stimulation, the orgasm gap begins to shrink. The far right bar represents the chance of an orgasm alongside inclusion of intercourse, oral sex on her, and self-stimulation in the context of a relationship. When couples participate in all three activities, his chance of orgasm is 96 percent and hers is 92. Looking at the data this way, college students are doing better than previous generations. Recall that the national survey found that 75 percent of men were regularly having orgasms, compared with only 29 percent of women. 82 These percentages were mostly from relationships. College women in relationships 25 26 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S appear to be experiencing more orgasms than their mothers and grandmothers. Orgasm, however, is still gendered. Both men and women tend to believe that men are more entitled to orgasms, and women are still being divided into those women who men care about (girlfriends) and ones they don’t (hookup partners). F I G U R E 1 0 . 4 | PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN HAVING AN ORGASM IN FOUR SEXUAL CONTEXTS, BY OCCURRENCE OF SELECTED SEXUAL BEHAVIORS Percent or More S exual C ontexts Note: Oral sex refers to receiv ing oral sex . S ource: E . A . A rm strong, P. E ngland, and A . C. K . Fogarty, “Orgasm in college hook-ups and relationships,” in Families as T hey Really Are, ed. Barbara R ism an (New York: W. W. Norton, 20 0 9 ). Revisiting the Question Gendered ideas, interactions, and institutions may affect almost every part of my life, but some things are personal and my sexuality is mine and mine alone, isn’t it? The sexual revolution changed the cultural context for sexuality, but it didn’t usher in an era of liberation. Instead, there are new rules for sexuality. This means new opportunities to have sexual experiences but, because sexual liberation is modeled on a stereotypically masculine approach to sexuality, there is also a new imperative to say yes to sex. HOOKUPCULTURE Whether we gleefully embrace these new opportunities or struggle with the imperatives, our experiences are strongly colored by gender and other culturally meaningful social categories. Our race, gender, and other traits intersect with our sexuality, organizing us in an erotic marketplace that we don’t control and can’t easily escape. In this erotic marketplace, women’s value is more closely tied to their appearance than men’s, and certain racial groups are seen as more or less sexual and sexually desirable. Even our experiences of sexuality are gendered; the pushand-pull dynamic of the sexual script not only contributes to the orgasm gap, it normalizes manipulative and coercive behavior. That said, individuals are not helpless. There is a great deal that people can do to change the ways in which gender shapes sexuality. As individuals, they can resist gender rules that enforce conventional sexual roles and, together, people can change the norms that govern sexual interactions as well as the institutions that structure them. Next . . . Hookup culture may make relationships seem passé, but most college graduates will eventually settle down. Nearly two-thirds will be married (and some divorced) by their thirtieth birthday.83 These marriages have more potential to be true partnerships than any in history. For the first time in thousands of years, marriage law prescribes to men and women the same rights and responsibilities. One source of oppression for women appears to be crumbling. And yet, despite changes aimed at giving women equal footing, women have become increasingly unhappy with their marriages over the last thirty years. The data show that women today experience significantly less wedded bliss than men.84 In fact, despite the cultural messages that insist that women crave marriage and children more than men do, research shows us that the happiest women are single and childless. This prompts us to ask: If marriage is better for women than ever, why do married women report lower levels of happiness than married men and single women? An answer awaits. FORFURTHERREADING Armstrong, Elizabeth, Laura Hamilton, and Beth Sweeney. “Sexual Assault on Campus: A Multilevel, Integrative Approach to Party Rape.” Social Problems, 53 (2006): 483–99. Eck, Beth. “Men are Much Harder: Gendered Viewing of Nude Images.” Gender & Society 17, no. 5 (2003): 691–710. Hennen, Peter. “Bear Bodies, Bear Masculinity: Recuperation, Resistance, or Retreat?” Gender & Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 25–43. 27 28 Chapter 10! S E X U A L I T I E S Pascoe, C. J. “Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance.” In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 3rd ed., edited by Rose Weitz, 318–28. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Sanchez, Diana, Jennifer Crocker, and Karlee Boike. “Doing Gender in the Bedroom: Investing in Gender Norms and the Sexual Experience.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 10 (2005): 1445–55. Nagel, Joane. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 30 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S 11 Families hanks to hundreds of years of legal reform and social change, individuals have substantially more freedom to arrange their relationships as they wish. This is what feminists have been fighting for and what many women want. Still, women have a more troubled relationship to marriage than men.2 Men are more likely to believe in the idea of a “soul mate”; women are more skeptical. Women are also less eager than men to marry. Once married, wives are less happy than husbands. More than a third of men (38 percent), but less than a quarter of women (22 percent), think that happiness comes more easily to married people than singles. Women are also more likely than men to file for divorce. This is, in part, because they’re significantly less likely than men to think that a child needs both a mother and a father; 42 percent of women think that being raised by a single parent does no harm compared with 29 percent of men. After divorce, women are happier than they were when married; for men, the opposite is true. Accordingly, divorced women are more likely than divorced men to say they’d prefer never to remarry. This has prompted us to ask: If marriage is better for women than ever, why do married women report lower levels of happiness than married men and single women? The reasons have to do with how people arrange their family lives. In this chapter, we will explore the gendered nature of housework and child care in pop culture and conversation, then look at the surprising contrast between what people say they want and how they actually divide up paid and unpaid work in practice. Moving past the averages, we’ll review the wide variety of family arrangements, with an emphasis on how gender intersects with other features of families. In the end, we’ll talk about how families produce and reproduce patterns of inequality, both gendered and otherwise. GENDERED HOUSEWORK A N D PA R E NT ING Today only about 12 percent of American households consist of a husband who financially supports a wife and children.3 The majority of moms (80 percent, including 65 percent of moms with preschoolers) are in the workforce.4 Accordingly, breadwinner/housewife marriages are outnumbered by both single- parent families and two-parent families in which both partners are engaged in paid work. These families face a specific challenge: finding time to do the child care, cleaning, feeding, and errand-running that housewives do for breadwinner husbands. For single parents and families with two working parents, that work is a second shift, work that greets us when we come home from work. 5 After hours in the workplace, working parents without a stay-at-home spouse often face many more hours before they can fall into bed: Groceries must be bought, dinner must be cooked, messes must be cleaned up, chores must be supervised, cars must be gassed up, homework must be reviewed, budgets must be balanced, and kids must be bathed and put to bed. Working two jobs—one paid at work and one unpaid at home—can be exhausting. In fact, as a result of their “double day,” over half of married fathers and three-quarters of both married and single mothers say that they have too little time for themselves; a third of dads and over 40 percent of married and single moms say that they’re always rushed.6 These trends are true in most North American and Western European countries, but they are especially extreme in the United States among the middle and upper classes.7 The second shift, you might suspect, isn’t a gender-neutral problem. Child care and housework still carry the gendered meanings they did when breadwinner/housewife families were considered ideal.8 In the remainder of this section, we’ll review the social construction of child care and housework and look at the actual and the ideal division of labor in families today. 32 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S GENDEREDHOUSEWORKAN D P A R E N T N G Child Care and Housework in Pop Culture There’s a sneaky linguistic switcheroo that reveals that mothers are considered the primary parent and fathers the secondary one. While the male version of a term usually comes before the female—for example, “men and women,” “his and hers,” and “boys and girls”—writing about parenting usually uses the phrase “mom and dad.” We receive daily messages—linguistic and otherwise—that affirm the idea that women are, or should be, the main person in charge of the second shift. Advertisements for home décor, cleaning supplies, and food for families almost exclusively feature or target female consumers. Even when parenting guides, magazines, and newspaper articles don’t make an explicit claim that mothers should be the primary parents, most assume they are.9 They may address the reader as “you” but frequently reveal that they are imagining a female reader. “You’ve undoubtedly been smooching your baby and saying things like ‘Give mommy a kiss!’ ” reads one parenting magazine.10 Parenting websites sometimes feature a “Dad Zone,” revealing that the rest of the website is really for T he assumption that child care is primarily for mothers shows up in advertisements for a variety of products. I T he A BC comedy Baby Daddy, about a twentysomething who suddenly becomes a father after a one-night stand, uses the stereotype of fathers as incompetent caretakers to comedic eff ect. moms.11 The online retailer Amazon has an “Amazon Mom” site but no corresponding “Amazon Dad.”12 When books, magazines, and websites about parenting do address fathers, they often aim to convince men that “babies can be fun” or that being an active parent is important. Mothers don’t receive these messages on the assumption that they’re already wholly invested in parenting. To make parenting seem fun and easy for dads, marketers offer them shortcuts. Whereas commercials and advertisements for elaborate or healthy meal options typically feature moms, advertisements that feature dads are often for fast food, microwaveable meals, or pizza delivery. If dads are not portrayed as reluctant parents, they’re often portrayed as incompetent ones. Fathers alone with their children are often played to comic effect: He’ll burn the toast, dress his daughter in summer clothes on a winter day, or mix darks with lights and turn the family’s clothes pink in the washer. 13 Exasperated women are often shown swooping in and relieving men of household duties on the understanding that it would be easier for them to just do it themselves. Sitcoms, TV commercials, parenting advice books, and other pop cultural content represent women as the primary caretakers of the house and children and dads as backups. Real people seem to agree. 33 34 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S GENDEREDHOUSEWORKANDPARENT NG Housework and Child Care as Feminized Labor “It’s whatever,” said Rick when asked about how he and his male roommates keep the house clean. “It doesn’t really matter. I mean, it’s not like something I consider. It’s not like I’m caring about it if it happens or not.” 14 Rick was interviewed by sociologist Kristin Natalier, who was interested in how all-male households divvied up chores.15 Many of her interviewees felt that caring too much about cleanliness was “girly.” Doing masculinity meant not caring, or at least pretending not to care, whether the house was clean. Since caring about cleanliness is feminized and our society is androcentric, Natalier’s interviewees avoided doing household tasks if they could. Jeremy explained what he did if there weren’t any clean dishes: “We go ‘nah’ and leave it. We just get noodles up the road.”16 When these men did do housework, they had to come up with an account: some motivation other than a desire for cleanliness. They would put off doing laundry until there was absolutely nothing left to wear. Likewise, they wouldn’t do dishes unless there were no clean ones left and they couldn’t afford to eat out. Then they would only wash the dishes they needed, no more. Manliness, of course, is a social construction. So, while some men were quite comfortable with this system, it frustrated other men who preferred cleanliness. If they said nothing, they ended up either living with the mess or doing the majority of the housework themselves. If they complained, they faced gender policing from their housemates. “I’m not his wife,” grumbled one roommate, but a plea for a more equitable division of labor was unlikely to be recognized as legitimate. Natalier’s study of all-male households of roommates reveals that housework is gendered. Studies of gay fathers suggest that child care is, too. Gay dads use language associated with women to describe their desire for children and their role as a caretaker. They talk about listening to their “biological clocks,” having “maternal instincts,” and being “housewives” and “soccer moms.”17 An excerpt from a conversation between Nico and Drew, a couple with twin toddlers, shows just how much the “mother as true nurturer” idea pervades their thinking about parenting:18 Nico: Since I don’t work as often, I am more of the mom role. I am home more with them. I’m the one who takes them to the park during the week and I usually feed them and . . . Drew: Wait, I am just as much a mommy as you! Just because my job is more lucrative does not automatically make me the dad, and besides, we both feed them dinner, read to them, get them to bed and I always do the dishes so that you can relax. I Nico and Drew both used language that indicated that parenting was a woman’s activity. This reflects a gendered understanding of household chores but, interestingly, both were competing over who got to be “mommy.” Domestic work is gendered in ways that exclude or marginalize men, then, but is this how people really want it? And is this how labor is typically divided up? Ideal and Actual Divisions of Labor Sociologist Kathleen Gerson asked eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds how they would ideally divide homemaking and breadwinning.19 Only a minority of young people said that they wanted to do so by gender. The majority—about 80 per cent of women and 70 percent of men across all races, classes, and family backgrounds— said that they wanted a relationship with “flexible gender boundaries” in which both partners do their fair share of breadwinning, housekeeping, and child-rearing.20 In other words, they preferred sharing (doing more or less symmetrical amounts of paid and unpaid work) over specialization (splitting unpaid and paid work so that each partner does more of one than the other). Reflecting these ideas, family life today is more balanced than it was in the ’50s and ’60s. Men do twice as much housework and three times as much child F I G U R E 1 1 .1 | GENDER GAP IN DIVISION OF LABOR Average number of hours per week spent on... 51 53 54 14 7 49 10 4 2.5C hild care 10 42 32 Paid work 18 37 21 8 Mothers 1965 Fathers Housework Mothers Fathers 2011 35 36 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S Source: Parker, Kim and Wendy Wang, “Modern Parenthood: Roles of Moms and Dads Converge as They Balance Work and Family,” Pew Research Center, March 14, 2013. I D E O L O G I C A L A N D I N S T I T U T I O N A L B A R R I E R S T O E Q U A L S H A R I N G 37 care as their counterparts in 1965.21 Meanwhile, women are working outside the home almost three times as many hours than they did in the ’60s and spend about half as much time on household chores. As a result, men and women spend about the same amount of time on paid and unpaid work combined: Mothers spend about fifty-three hours a week, and fathers spend about fifty-four (Figure 11.1).22 The proportion of time men and women spend in paid and unpaid work still differs, however, in gender-stereotypical ways. On average, women spend twentyone hours per week working for pay and an additional thirty-two on housework and child care. Men, in contrast, spend an average of thirty-seven hours per week in paid work and seventeen on the house and kids. To put it more simply, men do about two-thirds of the paid work and one-third of the unpaid work and women do the inverse. This data raises two questions. First, if men and women want relationships in which they share paid and unpaid work about equally, why do they specialize in practice? Second, why are women significantly less satisfied with the division of labor if men and women are working equally hard? Only 11 percent of wives say that the division of labor in their households is fair compared with 45 percent of husbands.23 In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll try to answer these questions. IDE OL OGICAL AND INS T IT UT IONA L BA R R IE R S T O E QUA L SHARING Couples overwhelmingly want to share all the kinds of work required to sustain their families but, more often than not, they don’t. This is partly for ideological reasons, but institutional forces also press couples into making decisions that reproduce asymmetry. In this section we show how couples get pushed into specialization by their spouses and their circumstances. Ideological Barriers to Reorganizing the Second Shift Both men and women face ideological pressures to specialize. Many men are still strongly attached to the breadwinner role and many women find themselves strongly drawn into parenting because they think it’s best for their child. “if somebody’s gonna be the breadwinner . . . ” Reflecting a 1950s gender ideology, some men and women are traditionalists: They ascribe to the values of the breadwinner/housewife marriage that emerged with industrialization and came to be seen as “traditional.” Traditionalists believe that 38 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S men should be responsible for earning income and women should be responsible for housework and child care. Frank, for instance, ascribes to these values: “I look at myself as pretty much of a traditionalist. It’s the way I am inside. I feel that the man should be the head of the house. He should have the final say.” 24 Carmen, Frank’s wife, agrees. She just wants to be “taken care of,” she says.25 Unlike Carmen and Frank, neo-traditionalists embrace a modified version of traditionalism: They think that a woman should be able to work if she desires, but only if it doesn’t interfere with her “real” duty to take care of her husband and children. Sam, for example, explains that he would accept a working wife, but, “[i]f she wanted to work, I would assume it’s her responsibility to drop the kids off at grandma’s house or something. She’s in charge of the kids. If she’s gonna work, fine, but you still have responsibilities.”26 These traditional and neo-traditional men and women resist reorganizing the second shift on principle; they believe that it is, in fact, a woman’s job. About one in three men and one in seven women are traditionalists or neotraditionalists. Recall, though, that sociologist Kathleen Gerson found that the majority of men and women are egalitarians, preferring relationships in which both partners do their fair share of breadwinning, housekeeping, and child- rearing. Looking at this data, Gerson wondered: What happens if people who prefer sharing discover that it isn’t possible in practice? She asked her egalitarian respondents what type of family they would like if they couldn’t sustain an equal partnership. Suddenly, the happy confluence of men and women’s opinions disappeared: 70 percent of men chose a neo-traditional arrangement as their backup, but only about 25 percent of women did the same. It turns out, if equal sharing proves too difficult, men overwhelmingly hope to convince their wives to de-prioritize their careers and focus on homemaking and raising children. Matthew exemplifies this plan: If I could have the ideal world, I’d like to have a partner who’s making as much as I am—someone who’s ambitious and likes to achieve. [But] if it can’t be equal, I would be the breadwinner and be there for helping with homework at night.27 Most men value their role as workers too much—and perhaps homemaking too little—to imagine de-prioritizing their own career. “If somebody’s gonna be the breadwinner,” Jim said, “it’s going to be me.”28 Women are much less likely to prefer neo-traditionalism as a backup plan, but they may find themselves negotiating about how to divide labor with a husband who does. Simultaneously, they may find themselves the subject of a set of ideas about parenting that powerfully shapes their thinking about their role in the family. “every minute of the day” Here is how one mother described her approach to childrearing: I D E O L O G I C A L A N D I N S T I T U T I O N A L B A R R I E R S T O E Q U A L S H A R I N G 39 For me, I feel it is vital to be there for my children every day, to consistently tend to their needs, to grow their self-esteem, and to praise them when they’re right, to guide them when they’re not, and to be a loving, caring mom every minute of the day.29 This mother believes that being a good parent means being actively engaged with her child “every minute” of “every day.” She is articulating what sociologist Sharon Hays calls the ideology of intensive motherhood, the idea that (1) mothers should be the primary caretaker of their children, (2) child-rearing should include “copious amounts of time, energy, and material resources,” and (3) giving children these things takes priority over all other interests, desires, and demands.30 At its root, intensive mothering is about putting children at the center of a woman’s life. When children are small, this means letting them decide when to eat and sleep; avoiding the use of play pens or other restraining devices in favor of close supervision; providing constant interaction and stimulation; utilizing brainstimulating toys and activities; and engaging in negotiation instead of instruction. Intensive mothering also means maximizing children’s educational achievement (volunteering at school, meeting with teachers, helping with homework); keeping a close eye on their grades (ensuring they get good marks through cajoling, threatening, or helping); and organizing educational vacations and buying learning games (trips to zoos and children’s museums, math- and science-based video games and apps). Finally, it means ensuring that children are well-rounded and have good self-esteem by enrolling them in activities for ideal physical and cultural development (piano lessons, Little League, dance classes); ferrying children to and from school as well as after-school and weekend activities; and giving them at least some of the material goods they want or need (the “right” clothes and accessories). The ideology of intensive motherhood is a dominant model of parenting in the United States but, importantly, it’s a rather unusual way of thinking about parenting in historical and cross-cultural contexts. Individual mothers are the primary caretakers in only 20 percent of cultures and, in most of these, children are given considerably more freedom and independence than we tend to think is wise today.31 Indeed, according to historian Peter Stearns, for most of American history children were seen as “sturdy innocents who would grow up well unless corrupted by adult example and who were capable of considerable self-correction.”32 In other words, so long as they didn’t encounter a person who set out to harm them deliberately, children could be expected to look after themselves, learn about life, and become well-adjusted adults. 40 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S A ttachment parenting, or intensive motherhood, involves keeping one’s child close at all times—perhaps even while checking e-mail. In the 1800s, some experts even argued that excessive nurture was harmful. Women were given strict warnings not to over-love. “[M]other love is a dangerous instrument,” cautioned John Watson, who wrote one of the best-selling child advice books of all time. According to Watson, a mother’s love was: An instrument which may inflict a never-healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness. As for affection, Watson advised: “[K]iss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.” But only, he said, “[i]f you must.” Parents were advised against hugging, kissing, and letting a child sit in their lap. Responding to the Watsons of the time, wealthy white Victorian wives embarked on a deliberate and self-interested effort to preserve their social standing in the face of the changes brought by their industrializing society. Pressing back against the devaluation of their separated sphere, and adjusting to men’s disengagement from the home, these women claimed that mothering was an essential, delicate, and time-consuming enterprise. The more they could convince others of the importance of intensive mothering, the more esteem they could I D E O L O G I C A L A N D I N S T I T U T I O N A L B A R R I E R S T O E Q U A L S H A R I N G 41 preserve alongside the androcentric reorganization of the economy.33 This was the birth of intensive mothering. J ust like then, today the ideology is more common among upper- and uppermiddle-class mothers than others, but the ideas of privileged groups tend to dominate cultural conversations. Today mommy bloggers, parenting experts, child psychologists, and advice-book authors tend to advocate for intensive parenting. Women are often held uniquely responsible for providing their child with experiences and support. In response to these demands, women often worry that the time they spend in paid work detracts from their role as a parent.34 Men do not feel the same about their role as a father. In this sense, mothers face a double bind that men do not. On the one hand, their paid employment may be necessary for paying the bills, or buying the house in a good school district, or saving for college tuition. On the other hand, their unpaid investments in intensive mothering are deemed crucial in giving their child “an edge” over the neighbor’s kid. In an increasingly precarious economy, families often believe that careful cultivation of a child’s skills and talents is essential to ensuring that their children enjoy the same class position as their parents. This escalating competition for maternal time has been called the “rug rat race”: Fear of falling behind drives parents to do as much as they can and no amount is ever deemed too much. If they have the resources, many mothers will choose to disinvest in their careers, at least in the short term. Institutional forces often conspire with these inclinations. Institutional Pressures toward Neo- traditionalism to share or specialize? Both work and family are “greedy institutions,” ones that take up an incredible amount of time and energy. High expectations for workers (which we’ll talk about more in the next chapter) intersect with high expectations for parenting, making it difficult or impossible for people to be successful at work, feel good about how much time they spend at home, and attend to their personal well-being. Often couples come to the conclusion that one or both of them needs to spend less time at work and more time at home. Doing this in a gender-balanced way means both spouses need to retreat into lower-paying, less demanding occupations or, alternatively, work part-time. Most families can’t afford to have two incomes compromised by low wages or limited hours; they may, though, be able to afford one compromised income. This might push a family to specialize. Features of the economy, then, make it difficult for both parents to pull back at work and spend more time at home. Even if a family could theoretically afford two compromised incomes, marriage and employment law can make this situation challenging in practice. Of the families that have health insurance, most access it through a parent’s employer, but this benefit typically only accrues to employees who work a forty-hour workweek. 42 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S Families either need at least one adult with a full-time job or they need to pay for health insurance themselves, which can be prohibitively expensive.35 (Of course, individuals who live in countries with nationalized health care don’t face this problem, and the Affordable Care Act may change the situation in the United States.) Time is another resource that strains families. The placement of homes, child care centers, workplaces, and doctors’ offices in different parts of town is an institutional barrier to sharing paid and unpaid work. Long commutes add to the work day, making it even more difficult for income earners to participate in home life. Commutes aren’t inevitable but a consequence of zoning laws that separate residential and commercial districts. If we zoned differently, it might be easier for families to share at home. Among high-income earners, the tax code further rewards breadwinner/ housewife families over those that share these duties; the income of a couple in which one earns $140,000 a year and the other earns nothing is taxed at a lower rate than that of a couple in which both partners earn $70,000. 36 This is a tax incentive for the couple to specialize. These are just a few examples of how institutional policies push families to divide paid and unpaid work in uneven ways. Studies have shown that these forces impact same-sex as well as heterosexual couples. Three-quarters of gay and lesbian couples with two working parents specialize.37 Institutional pressures are part of why we might see such divisions of labor in gay and lesbian households, where sex isn’t a factor. gendered decisions about specialization These institutional pressures to specialize might explain asymmetry in divisions of labor, but they don’t explain why women typically take on the heavier domestic roles. The answer has partly to do with ideologies, but institutional forces play a role here as well. Most couples, for example, consider their finances when deciding who should focus on work and who should focus on the house and kids. Often the smartest thing to do is rely on the career of the partner who has a higher salary and greater opportunity for advancement.38 Since men typically earn more money than women, heterosexual couples may choose to prioritize the man’s career for purely economic reasons. When a child arrives, it may make sense, above and beyond any biological or ideological reasons, for the mother to take time off from work. Many moms relish this opportunity and many dads are jealous. Still, there is a price to pay: Each month that a woman stays out of the workforce is a month in which her partner is building a career. By the time she’s ready to work full-time again, he’s “ahead” of her. He may have gotten a promotion or a raise; in any case, his F I G U R E 1 1 . 2 | AVERAGE NUMBER OF PAID WORK HOURS PER WEEK, BY NUMBER OF CHILDREN I D E O L O G I C A L A N D I N S T I T U T I O N A L B A R R I E R S T O E Q U A L S H A R I N G 43 men Source: Pew Research Center, “On Pay Gap, Millennial Women Near Parity—For Now,” Dec. 11, 2013, pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millenial-women-near-parity-for-now/ greater experience now makes him more employable. Now it makes even more economic sense for the couple to prioritize his career instead of hers. Instead of deciding to let her take a turn—so that she can prioritize work for a while and he can enjoy the pleasures of family life—she may get a part-time job or switch to a less demanding occupation. This may be the best option for the pair, but it also strengthens his advantage over her in the workplace and motivates continued specialization. The more they specialize, the more economic sense it will make to continue doing so. Gender dynamics outside the family also explain why gender asymmetry in the division of labor isn’t static but increases as relationships get more serious. At the beginning of relationships, men and women tend to use their time in similar ways. The differences grow larger as relationships become more serious: from boyfriend/girlfriend to a couple that lives together, from cohabitation to marriage, and from married to married with kids.39 New mothers tend to cut back on their work hours, while new fathers tend to ramp up at work instead of down. 40 As you can see in Figure 11.2, additional children exacerbate this trend. As a result of their longer work days, men often do less housework.41 In response, wives often work even less, citing their husbands’ hours and the new housework demands as a reason why.42 In sum, institutional forces that make sharing difficult resonate with ideological commitments: men’s inclination toward neo-traditional families and women’s acceptance of the ideology of intensive motherhood. In the face of these pressures, families make choices and sacrifices. Some manage to carve out sharing relationships, others do not, and still other couples break apart. 44 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S DIVISIONS OF L A BOR IN FA MIL IE S So far we’ve discussed how ideological and institutional forces press families to make gendered choices that align with a neo-traditional ideology. Still, families are diverse. In this section, we review seven ways of arranging family life: two solutions involving specialization, two sharing solutions, two types of self- reliant parenting, and the choice of childlessness. Neo-traditionalist Divisions of "Labor As the averages reveal, the most common type of family is one in which each spouse specializes. Some of these families resemble the idealized 1950s breadwinner/housewife model, others are a modified version. We’ll start with the latter. the supermom and the neo-traditional dad When faced with neo-traditionalist men who resist sharing housework and child care, the desire to do right by their children, and a need or wish to work, many employed mothers work full time and still take on the lion’s share of the second shift. Juggling work, the logistics of day care, and the needs of a spouse and children can be difficult. Deb, a factory worker, explains how she arranges child care for her two children so that both she and her husband, Mario, can work full time: When I work the 7 A.M. to 3 P.M. shift we start the day about a quarter to five. I can’t bring the children to the sitter until 6:30 A.M., but I have to punch in at the plant by 6:45, so I race. On weekdays, I have two sitters because Melody, our main babysitter, can’t take all three kids. On the weekends, I take them to my mom, to Mario’s cousin, or to my mother-in-law. Usually, I bring one child to each house, because when Gina and Hunter are together, they’re monsters. When Mario and I both work the same hours, the kids get to spend the night at their grandparents’ for the whole week. 43 Supermoms may not be neo-traditionalists themselves but, because they are working full-time jobs, they will struggle to manage the second shift. In fact, the average mom spends fifty-three hours a week on paid and unpaid work combined, but this includes housewives with zero time spent on paid work. Excluding them, the average employed mother spends seventy-one hours a week on paid and unpaid work.44 They have half the leisure time of men and spend ten more hours per week multitasking.45 As a result, partners married to neo-traditionalists often wear themselves out trying to bring home a paycheck and do the majority of DIVISIONSOFLABORINFAMILIES 45 the second shift. Without enough hours in the day to play all their roles, moms can feel like they’re falling short in every part of life: as a mother, as a spouse, and as an employee. “[I felt like] I was doing everything wrong,” admitted one mother.46 Their husbands may be happy to help if they’re asked: “She’ll always give [the baby] a bath, or if she can’t, she’ll tell me to do it because I won’t do it unless she tells me, but if she asks me to do it I’ll do it,” says one dad.47 But even neo-traditionalist men who are good “helpers” typically don’t take responsibility for child care and housework. This is why when dads do housework and child care, it is often described as “stepping in,” giving mommy a “break,” “babysitting,” “pitching in,” and “help ing out.”48 This can create ugly interpersonal dynamics. Their partners, who have to ask for help, often feel like “nags.” Anyone who works full-time and takes responsibility for domestic work may find themselves acting and feeling similarly. Consider Don, who had this to say about his same-sex partner, Gill, who resists equal participation in housework: I have to prod him; “bitch at him” is what he would say. I have found it difficult to figure out ways to bring up the condition of the house without creating too much of a fight. I sort of have learned that there are certain times to bring it up. I especially try to avoid bringing things T he 2011 film I Don’t Know How She Does It, starring S arah Jessica Parker, relies on and affi rms the stereotype of the supermom who does everything. up when he just gets home from work. I find he is more willing to help, or at least to hear it, later at night. Of course, he doesn’t see any of this—it’s annoying—nor does he recognize what an effort it is to get him to help.49 When partnered with a neo-traditional person, being a househusband can feel just as disempowering as being a housewife. Likewise, women can take on the masculine role in a neo-traditionalist household. Ruth, in a relationship with Cindy for nearly a decade, comments: 46 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S I have learned how to read Cindy for moods and I know when I can get her to do stuff and when I can’t. It’s sort of a subtle negotiation. I don’t know if she realizes that I am scanning the moments waiting to ask her to clean out the fireplace or hose out the garage, but that’s what I do. I sort of get in tune with the rhythm of her life now and it seems to work.50 In neo-traditional households the domestic partner does more of the work involved in the second shift as well as more of the cognitive work of family life (planning and delegating chores), even though he or she is also often working full-time. This can cause resentment to build up on both sides. the modern breadwinner/housewife Most supermom/neo- traditionalist families are solidly in the middle class: wealthy enough to be economically secure but not secure enough to live on one salary. In contrast, women at both high and low income levels may find themselves pushed out of the workforce entirely. Highly paid men who make the elusive “family wage” can afford for one parent to stay home.51 Among the wealthiest 5 percent of families, 42 percent include a stay-athome parent. Interestingly, we also see a disproportionate number of breadwinner/housewife ar rangements at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.52 Over half of families with incomes in the bottom 20 percent of households have a person who stays home full-time.53 It might be tempting to think that low-income breadwinner/housewife families struggle financially because they’ve chosen to sacrifice a paycheck in order to avoid putting their child in day care, but that’s not usually the case. In low-income households, wives overwhelmingly stay home because day care costs more money than they are able to earn at the low-wage jobs to which they have access. In most states the average cost of child care exceeds tuition at a public college. In the state where child care is cheapest, Mississippi, day care for an infant absorbs a third of the income of a full-time worker earning minimum wage; in Massachusetts, where it’s the most expensive, it exceeds the entire income of that same worker by over $2,000 a month.54 Accordingly, some low-income families leave one person at home because it actually saves them money. It also pushes them into specialization. The modern breadwinner/housewife arrangement may seem ideal compared with the overworked supermom and nagged husband. At least one person can dedicate themselves full-time to the second shift. Studies show, however, that stayat-home mothers are decidedly less happy than moms who work, even if they really wanted to be a stay-at-home wife.55 Partly for this reason, these marriages end in divorce more often than any other kind.56 DIVISIONSOFLABORINFAMILIES 47 Sharing Solutions If breadwinner/housewife marriages are the most likely to end in divorce, ones in which there is sharing are the least likely. In fact, all things being equal, spouses and cohabitators with fair divisions of labor have sex more fre quently, are less likely to go to relationship counseling, divorce less, and are more happily married. 57 Sociologists generally consider duties shared if the division of labor is between 50/50 and 60/40. There are two ways to build a sharing relationship: outsourcing and turning inwards. outsourcers While highly educated men with high-paying careers may be in the best position to support a housewife, they are also among the most likely to marry a woman who has a similar level of education and ambition. Their wives may choose to stay home, but they may also decide to keep a strong focus on work. Most of these families will need to hire a substantial amount of help to allow both parents to remain on accelerated career tracks. This is domestic outsourcing, paying nonfamily members to do family-related tasks. To a certain extent, outsourcing is now the rule for families. Most children are placed in some form of day care. Higher-income families can even hire live-in nannies who are present and available nearly twenty-four hours a day. We also see the outsourcing of meals (eating in restaurants, getting take-out, ordering delivery, or buying prepared meals from the grocery store), work around the house (hiring housekeepers, gardeners, a “handyman” to fix things, a neighbor kid to shovel the sidewalk after it snows), chores and errands (accountants, tailors, dry cleaners, dog groomers, drivers, or mechanics), and direct child care and instruction (babysitters, of course, but also tutors, swimming instructors, and camp counselors). Depending on their resources, families can buy a great deal of help from nonfamily members, enabling them to balance the competing demands on their time. Elena, a vice president of public relations, gives us a hint as to how many familyrelated tasks some in-home day-care workers handle: We have a nanny who comes in. . . . She’s actually great at cleaning and she’s really good at, well, she’s not really good at doing the laundry, but she does my laundry, and so that’s just great in itself. . . . I mean it’s not like paying her to do that because she’s paid to do something else [child care], but she is awesome, and she takes our library books back and she takes our movies back and she’ll go to the cleaners. Yeah, she’s the best! And she’ll go to the grocery store for me.58 Nannies and other forms of outsourcing are one way that class-privileged couples can build and maintain relationships where they do similar amounts of child care and housework. This is a form of sharing, but it has an ugly under belly. As one New York Times editorialist asked: “Are we achieving more egalitarian marriages [for the middle and upper classes] at the cost of a more egalitarian society?59 We answer 48 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S this question later in the chapter. First, we’ll discuss another approach to equal sharing. turning away from work together While domestic outsourcing allows both parents to be career-oriented, some couples choose to point their energies in the opposite direction. Sometimes both members of a couple decide to de-emphasize work and focus on raising a child.60 One such couple was able to arrange it so that both could work part-time—the husband was an editor and the wife an accountant—and someone could always be home during the day. Another couple both quit highpaying jobs and became teachers when they had their first child. Dual-nurturer couples are often relatively affluent but non-materialistic. They make economic sacrifices when they disinvest at work but are able to do so because of financial advantage. That is, only people who make high salaries can afford to work part-time. Sharing relationships are happier and more stable than relationships with specialization, but some are stronger than others. Dual-nurturer couples consisting of a woman who does 60 percent of the domestic work and a man who does 60 percent of the breadwinning are the most stable.61 Half-and-half arrangements are less stable and gender-swapped relationships—in which the man does 60 percent of the homemaking and the woman does 60 percent of the breadwinning—are less stable still. This suggests that we’re more comfortable with almost sharing than we are with sharing, and that when the script gets flipped it can strain relationships. Self-Reliance as a Solution While people tend to have strong feelings about sharing versus specializing, some won’t have the opportunity to negotiate a division of household labor with another person. By choice or circumstance, they simply won’t end up with someone. Others will find that their negotiations go sour and they divorce. divorced parents Conflict over household responsibilities is among the top reasons why between a third and half of all marriages will end in divorce.62 As we’ve already established, both men and women overwhelmingly want egalitarian relationships, but men turn neo-traditional when asked about their backup plan. Unfortunately, as illustrated in Figure 11.3, men’s typical fallback position clashes spectacularly with what most women want. Faced with a husband who wants them to be a housewife or work part-time, almost three-quarters of women would rather divorce and raise their kids alone. Danisha, for example, took her mother’s advice to heart: She taught me your marriage is not who you are. It’s one thing to want to live with your husband and all that good stuff, but don’t get to the point where you can’t do things on your own. Because a lot of women, friends of hers, regret that life has passed them by and they’re stuck.63 DIVISIONSOFLABORINFAMILIES 49 F I G U R E 1 1 . 3 | MEN AND WOMEN'S FALLBACK PLANS Source: Kathleen Gerson, The Unfinished Revolution: Coming of Age in a New Era of Gender, Work and Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 129 Patricia’s mother’s life also offered her a cautionary tale: My mother’s such a leftover from the fifties and did everything for my father. I’m not planning to fall into that trap. I’m really not willing to take that from any guy at all.64 Some women, like Monique, learn to fear a breadwinner/housewife model the hard way: I was dependent on my kids’ father, and I never want to be dependent on a man ever again. . . . I have the kids now, and I want the job, the career. When I have all that, I can add a man if he’s a good guy, and if he’s not, let him go.65 Young women’s desire for independence contrasts sharply with the neotraditionalist fallback positions of the majority of men. A recent study resonates 50 Chapter 11! F A M I L I E S with Gerson’s results: 66 percent of women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four say that “being successful in a high-paying career” is “very important” or, even, “one of the most important things” in their lives.66 Women also strongly value parenting: Over half (59 percent) report that “being a good parent” is a top priority.67 A much smaller percentage (37 percent) say the same about marriage. These are some pretty stunning findings. What appears to be a happy convergence between men’s and women’s ideals—both are egalitarians—can turn into an intractable situation. When their ideals bump up against an institutional context that makes sharing difficult, many couples feel betrayed and resentful. Some of these couples will divorce. And, when couples separate, custody is granted to the mother the majority of the time: 83 percent of single, divorced custodial parents are mothers and almost half of all mothers will spend at least some time as a single parent.68 How happy are divorced parents? It depends. As we know, while divorced men are less happy, on average, than their married counterparts, divorced women are happier. The second shift helps explain why. Women without husbands spend fewer hours on household chores because some husbands create more housework than they provide. So divorce may offer women the opportunity to live a more enjoyable life that conforms to their own ideologies. In contrast, men lose the domestic support of women that they enjoyed during marriage, the same support that pressed many women to leave in the first place. going it alone Another route to self-reliance is to begin that way. Sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas spent five years getting to know 162 racially diverse low-income single mothers in Philadelphia.69 Many of them had children while they were young and unmarried, something that many Americans believe to be selfdefeating. Why...
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