“I’m asexual bisexual,” Scott, 37, told me in 2018 as we sat in the Southern California sun.
That summer I was collecting interviews for a project on gay, bisexual, and queer men’s relationships with masculinity. Frankly, Scott’s description of his sexuality baffled me. How could someone be both asexual and bisexual?
It wasn’t until years later when my research focus turned fully toward asexuality that I began to understand: Scott, like many other people under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on a concept of sexuality often unacknowledged outside of asexual circles. Scott later clarified that his sexual attraction was asexually oriented while his romantic attraction was bisexually oriented. In this explanation, Scott, like many others under the asexuality umbrella, was drawing on the idea of split attraction.
Although this idea is common in asexual spaces, there is (to my knowledge) no research specifically on the split attraction model… until now.
As an asexuality studies scholar, I cannot avoid encountering the idea of split attraction. Although hardly explored in academic literature, the concept of split attraction is prevalent in asexual communities.
Split attraction models frame various types of attractions/orientations (e.g., sexual, romantic, platonic, sensual, and esthetic)as operating separately from one another. They might “match” (i.e., someone might be romantically and sexually attracted/oriented exclusively to women) or they might not (i.e., someone might be romantically attracted/oriented to women but sexually attracted/oriented to men).
This conception of split orientation stands in contrast to prevailing understandings of orientation. As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick explains, “the common sense of our time presents [sexual identity] as a unitary category” in which one’s sexual and emotional feelings, behaviors, and affiliations should all align. Under this normative framework, which operates both in the heteronormative and queer worlds, knowing someone’s sexual identity also leads us to assume with whom they prefer to fall in love, cohabit, procreate, and form cultural and political communities.
Although social scientists have largely embraced the idea that sexuality is multifaceted—composed of behavior, desire, and identity—far less attention has been paid to how desire and identity can themselves be broken into differentiated parts.
In my research, I draw on interviews with 77 individuals who identify under the asexuality umbrella to define and describe frameworks of split attraction/orientation. I also put my findings and the scholarly literature related to this topic into conversation with community theorizing on split attraction. I argue that this conceptual framework reveals that, broadly in U.S. culture, sexual identity is typically treated as a “unitary category” in which “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are used interchangeably and romance and sexuality are assumed to necessarily be intertwined and aligned.
The concept of split attraction helps reveal and deconstruct sexuality as a unitary category. The concept challenges three core ideas to the model of unitary sexual categories: (1) that “sexual orientation” and “orientation” are interchangeable, (2) that romance and sexuality must necessarily be intertwined and aligned, and (3) that people’s attraction/orientation can and should be described in a single word (straight, gay, asexual, bisexual, etc.).
As a result, I consider split attraction as a helpful framework not only for scholars of asexuality but also for the study of sexuality more broadly.
Is split attraction specific to asexuality?
I suspect that split attraction is prevalent among asexual individuals not because asexual individuals are necessarily more likely to experience split attraction, but rather because prevailing unitary category models of sexuality pose unique challenges for asexual individuals.
When asexual individuals experience an absence of sexual attraction but a presence of romantic attraction, it is difficult to resolve within a unitary sexual category framework. This is particularly true given the lack of knowledge about and invalidation of asexual identities as well as the presumption that all humans experience sexual attraction.
Conversely, when a non-asexual person experiences a “mismatch” between their romantic and sexual feelings, these feelings may be more easily resolved through labels like pansexual and bisexual—or even through concepts like sexual fluidity. Thus, even though the concept of split attraction could be applied to both asexual and non-asexual experiences, the need for the concept of split attraction may simply be more pressing for asexual individuals than for non-asexual individuals.
In other words, as we introduce the idea of split attraction to people outside of asexual communities, I strongly suspect we will find that it’s useful for many non-asexual people too. Splitting attraction opens up new frontiers in the study of sexuality, intimacy, romance, family, and beyond. Let’s embrace it.
Canton Winer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University and a leading scholar of asexuality. You can keep up with his research on Substack or find him on Bluesky at @cantonwiner.bsky.social.
Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where she studies religion, politics, and money and directs the Meanings of Democracy Lab. She is the the host of the new documentary podcast When The Wolves Came: Evangelicals Resisting Extremism, and the author of My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America, which delves into how paying taxes became a moral battleground in public life. Dr. Braunstein’s award-winning research has appeared in top scholarly journals and been featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine. She also writes op-eds for publications including The Guardian, Religion News Service and The Conversation. Here I ask about My Tax Dollars: The Morality of Taxpaying in America. You can find Ruth on Bluesky @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social and at https://www.ruthbraunstein.com.
Cover of My Tax Dollars
AMW: Much of the public debate around taxes focuses on policy (rates, deductions, fairness). But My Tax Dollars shifts the focus to culture and meaning-making. What do you think we miss, politically or socially, when we overlook the emotional and moral dimensions of taxation?
RB: In doing research for this book, I spent a lot of time reading about the history of the antitax movement in the United States. This is a movement that has grown in size and intensity over the past century. And yet, over that same time period, the highest marginal tax rate has *declined*—from a peak of more than 90% to around 37% today. So if we think this movement is just about tax rates (and other technical nuts and bolts of tax policy), we are missing something more fundamental about what drives their concerns.
When I went looking for those deeper answers, I heard a lot about the form that the income tax exchange takes. Essentially, the idea that most individuals are required to chip in a portion of what they earn each year; that the more they earn, the more they owe (which is the basis of a progressive tax system); that all of these “tax dollars” go into a big pot controlled by the federal government; and that this pot of money is then used to fund the myriad programs and services that Congress includes in the federal budget each year.
This approach to taxation raises a number of concerns among antitax groups. Some people don’t like the idea that individuals would not have complete control over the “fruits of their labor.” Some would be comfortable donating the same portion of their money to a church or charitable organization, but not to the government. Some focus on the progressive nature of the federal income tax, which they view as unfairly punishing hardworking people while rewarding those who choose not to work.
When we take these arguments seriously, we see that it hardly matters how much one’s tax bill is at the end of the year. What matters is that the current tax system embeds Americans in political relationships (with their government and with their fellow citizens) that are inconsistent with some people’s understanding of how those relationships should be structured.
So a central theme that runs through the book is that we need to be attuned to how different tax arrangements imply different kinds of political relationships; how our perceptions of these relationships actually vary significantly and are contested; and how different groups respond when taxation presents them with a “relational mismatch.” My hope is that by being attuned to these questions, we can have more constructive public conversations about what we hope to achieve together as a society, and about the tradeoffs of varied fiscal strategies for achieving those ends.
AMW: You write about the sacred and profane meanings people attach to how their tax dollars are used. How do those meanings play out when it comes to funding programs for families, like public education, childcare, or parental leave?
RB: So as I mentioned, many Americans are focused on the form that taxation takes. But many are also focused on the uses of their tax dollars. In large part, this is because Americans across the political spectrum tend to think of public revenues not as something we share collectively, but as aggregations of their personal tax dollars.
This means that at the very least, they want to feel like they getting good value for their money, much as they would when they make an investment or a consumer purchase. In addition, many Americans also assess whether the ways their tax dollars are being spent aligns with their values. This assessment often involves fixating on a few specific uses of tax dollars that are perceived as morally concerning, or even as profane threats to one’s vision of what is sacred.
So what does this mean for the many funding programs that would benefit American families, like public education, childcare, or paid parental leave. We know that large shares of Americans either currently do or would benefit personally from these programs. Put differently, the programs offer high value for one’s money, especially as the costs of raising families increases. In this light, it seems perplexing that these programs would be controversial. Especially in a moment when the Trump administration is publicly lamenting low birthrates and supporting the “pronatalist” cause, it seems counterintuitive to also be defunding public education and dismantling programs that help people build families.
The approach I propose offers an answer to this puzzle. It directs us to consider how these policies, which provide empirically good value to many Americans, are also viewed by some Americans (and the elites and movements that speak for them) as undermining their values. Public education, which religious conservatives often refer to disparagingly as “government schools,” are viewed by many on the Right as promoters of secular values and knowledge that challenge white Christian privilege in society. Publicly funded or subsidized childcare gets the same bad rap. And, along with policies like parental leave, it is viewed by some on the Right as encouraging women to abandon of their “proper” role in society, which is to be mothers and caretakers of children.
When conservatives argue these programs are simply too expensive, that is not the whole (or perhaps even the real) story. If we accept such arguments on their face, we will never have a real conversation about what we value as a society, and what we don’t; what kinds of families we want to support, and under what conditions. People are entitled to different opinions on these big questions—but our leaders also have a responsibility to speak clearly about them so citizens can make informed decisions about who will represent their best interests.
AMW: You write about very different groups—antiwar activists, tax defiers, antiabortion protesters—who all claim moral authority over “my tax dollars.” How do these competing claims shape the legitimacy of government and civic belonging in today’s polarized political climate?
RB: One of the background themes of the book is that the United States is a country marked by profound diversity, deep political polarization, and also an individualistic streak. Given all of this, it is an actual marvel that we manage to have a functioning tax system and to pass a federal budget every year. Like truly, we should recognize this as a profound accomplishment of our pluralistic democracy.
Even more astonishing is that Americans have famously high “tax morale,” which translates into extremely high levels of voluntary compliance with the tax system. This reflects a widespread understanding that part of the deal of living in a country like this is that, as individuals, we are never going to agree with every single thing that our tax dollars are spent on. As long as the process is viewed as legitimate, and is responsive to citizens’ input through mechanisms like elections and advocacy and, yes, even antitax protest, most Americans are willing to accept their responsibilities as taxpayers.
But we are living in a precarious moment, and the delicate balance we have managed to strike on this issue could easily be knocked off-kilter. The activist groups I write about in this book all shape our public debates about taxation. But they do not all represent the same degree of threat to the viability of this system.
Antiwar activists, for example, employ one of the most radical tactics I write about in the book: they publicly refuse to pay the taxes that they owe. But, they do this as a form of civil disobedience intended to display their moral opposition to war, not because they believe the tax system is illegitimate. In this sense, their tactics are radical, but their position toward the tax system is not and does not represent a major threat to its legitimacy.
On the other hand, the current presidential administration and many elected members of Congress may appear to be promoting the relatively mainstream goal of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government by cutting wasteful spending. But in reality, they are implementing a far-right antigovernment playbook that was developed over the past century by activists operating at the radical fringes of American politics.
Within only the first few months of this administration, they have dealt blow after blow to the legitimacy of the tax system: they have promoted conspiracy theories about the IRS that paint the underfunded agency as an armed and dangerous shadow army of the deep state. Ironically, it is the administration itself that has recently breached the privacy of taxpayers’ data and is using that data to surveil and punish those they view as enemies. Meanwhile, they have made cuts to the IRS that will decimate its capacity to collect unpaid taxes, especially from the super rich. This naturally undermines ordinary people’s sense that everyone is paying their fair share, a key condition on which people are willing to pay their own share.
Each of these alone would raise concerns about the ongoing legitimacy of the tax system; together, they could be catastrophic. Whether or not one likes to pay taxes or has different spending priorities, the implications of these attacks should be chilling. Without a functioning tax system, we would lack sufficient revenues to fund even the most basic functions of government, including the military. We would not be able to pay our debt, or raise more funds. Even if we had a well-designed tariff system that could generate some revenue (which we do not), relying exclusively on this as the president has proposed would make us wholly financially dependent on foreign countries.
We have reached this moment, in part, because Americans have settled for an impoverished conversation about taxation, one that reduces all tax questions to tax rates, and paints one party as wanting to lower them and the other as wanting to raise them. This conversation has convinced large swaths of Americans that these attacks on the tax system are being done in their best interest, or at least in the interest of lower taxes. But at what cost? We need a conversation that involves a much fuller accounting of what is at stake.
LGBQ+ youth raised in conservative Christian spaces often struggle to develop a positive understanding of their sexuality. Home, church, school, and other community institutions can ideologically align in ways that teach them to hate, fear, and suppress, rather than embrace and explore, their emerging sexual desires. Counternarratives can be hard to come by.
As a result, and despite scholarly critique, there is a persistent narrative that in order to thrive, LGBQ+ people must leave these spaces and find more supportive communities. For those with the resources to do so, a four-year college away from home is one pathway out. LGBQ+ students are almost five times as likely as heterosexual students to select a college away from home in an effort to find a more welcoming space.
These students have high hopes for college, but does college live up to their expectations?
We interviewed 26 LGBQ+ college students in order to understand how their transition to college affected their emerging sexual identities and sense of self. In particular, we focused on how this process is impacted by opportunities for and barriers to sexual and romantic relationships. As we found in our recent article in Social Currents, while community support was important to positive identity-development, so, too was the ability to enact their sexual desires through sexual and romantic relationships.
Most students quickly built supportive communities that gave them new ways of understanding themselves. Sydney, a pansexual cis woman, said, “Everyone is just incredibly accepting, and their beliefs correlate with mine. I feel like it’s the family I wanted growing up… It’s exciting to meet somebody who also feels the same as you do in that regard. Growing up as a member of the LGBTQ community, it was hard to enjoy normal things because you felt so different all the time.”
This created a newfound freedom for students to be open about who they were to those around them. Tyler, a gay cis man said, “I used to be really conscious about [being gay]. But now I don’t even think about that. I mean I think people can tell that I’m gay. I don’t try to conceal it here anymore and I never faced any sort of retaliation or anything.”
New communities replaced their old ones. Almost all of the students we interviewed had distanced themselves from the Christian churches of their youth and instead involved themselves in spaces such as the LGBT Center or other LGBTQ+ organizations on campus. As Riley, a queer transmasculine person, said, “When I was younger, I very strongly believed in God. But it made me feel really shitty because of my sexuality and gender identity. I just couldn’t connect to [Christianity] once I realized it conflicted and I wasn’t going to be in line with it.” Instead, they joined a social justice advocacy organization for trans people on campus, explaining, “[It helped] me get resources initially and it made me feel like part of the community. Which I hadn’t had before because I didn’t know that many trans people.” Many now had social networks mainly comprised of LGBQ+ people.
But these communities did more than just make people feel good about identifying at LGBQ+; they also helped students broaden their understanding of their sexuality, which many found deeply affirming. Specifically, opportunities to explore their sexuality through sexual and romantic relationships mattered a great deal.
Just being able to act on their sexual desires validated their sense of self. As Benjamin, a gay cis man, explained, “After experimenting throughout college a little bit, I became more comfortable with myself.” Nicole, a queer cis woman, had hooked up with ten people since arriving at college, but only once with a woman, which she ranked that as her most enjoyable hookup, saying, “I think it’d be the one with the girl, just because it was the first time [having sex with a woman], and it really validated me. It validated my sexuality – like confirmed how I was feeling.”
Students also had the opportunity to experiment with BDSM, threesomes, and polyamory, which they found revelatory as each new opportunity taught them something about themselves and their desires.
But despite these positive experiences, LGBQ+ students still faced challenges finding sexual and romantic opportunities. And because these opportunities were so valuable for feelings of inclusion and positive identity development, students who struggled to find partners felt like they were missing out.
Given the contrast with their communities of origin, the LGBQ+ scene felt big when students first arrived on campus. But they quickly realized how small it was. Not only was it hard to find partners who hadn’t hooked up with a friend, a potential source of drama, it was also difficult to find LGBQ+ social spaces. Most of the parties and bars on campus were dominated by heterosexual students.
LGBQ+ students were left with organizations and spaces that felt better suited for advocacy and community building than for finding sexual and romantic partners. And through this, it became clear that LGBQ+ students had different ideas about what these spaces should be doing.
Hailey, a lesbian cis woman, said, “I feel like the LGBTQ Center should have some kind of resource. Whether it be a speed dating situation or a potluck, just creating the space. Cause the space isn’t working.” Owen, a gay cis man, avoided the LGBT Center because he felt it was more about activism than a space to meet other LGBQ+ people, explaining, “It doesn’t really appeal to me much. I feel like it’s more political than I’d like to be involved with. The main reason I would want to go to that is to meet other LGBT people, not necessarily to get involved with more political aspects.”
But other students felt that LGBTQ organizations should be more focused on social justice issues, calling out people like Owen as the privileged face of the community. For example, like Owen, Nashe, a queer genderqueer person, avoided the LGBT Center, but with a different critique, saying, “The spaces definitely feel uncomfortable to me…. It’s uncomfortable being the only Black queer person in a space.” In both instances, the spaces weren’t working in ways that facilitated desired connections and the resultant tensions spilled over into the hookup scene. Students felt like they missed out on opportunities for sexual and romantic relationships as a result.
This matters, because as our research makes clear, sexual and romantic exploration is critical to positive identity development in emerging adulthood. These experiences affirmed LGBQ+ students’ desires and allowed them to reconceptualize what they wanted from sex and relationships. Thus, any barriers to exploration are not minor for LGBQ+ students. Colleges must take the lead in creating spaces that attend to the diverse social needs of LGBQ+ students. This includes attention to sexual and romantic inclusion, which is vital to developing positive self-concepts, sense of self, and a feeling of belonging on campus.
Ellen Lamont is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Appalachian State University. She can be reached at lamontec@appstate.edu. You can follow her on X @EllenCLamont.
Teresa Roach is specialized teaching faculty and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at Florida State University. She can be reached at tar09c@fsu.edu.
Sociologists have long examined how states shape families. In the recent case of Syrian refugees resettled in Canada, state policy did more than shape. It dismantled and redefined the family, imposing a narrow structure that ignored the realities of refugee kinship systems.
Our seven-year ethnographic study followed 52 Syrian households resettled under Canada’s Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative. Most arrived with their extended kin networks intact. Instead, they came as reduced units: parents with young children, and rarely anyone else. Grandparents, adult children, siblings, and in-laws—core members of the family in their countries of origin—were systematically excluded.
In a new article published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, part of a special issue on “Refugee Resettlement as an Institution,” my co-author Laila Omar and I argue that this exclusion was not incidental. It was built into policy. Canada’s immigration law narrowly defines “family” for reunification purposes, and the United Nations’ guidelines for refugee referrals reinforce this restriction. The dominant assumption behind these definitions is that the nuclear family is universal. In reality, this model clashes with the kinship norms of many refugee communities.
The result was not just separation, but a fundamental restructuring of family life. One mother, Rima, explained, “We are used to being a family, not alone.” Her teenage daughter often cries after video calls with her aunt, who helped raise her and remains abroad. For this family, and many others, the physical distance from kin reshaped the emotional and developmental experiences of daily life.
Before displacement, caregiving was shared. In Syria, grandmothers bathed babies, aunts helped with homework, and uncles offered both discipline and emotional support. Families relied on dense kin networks that extended well beyond the nuclear unit. In Canada, those supports vanished. Mothers were left to manage everything alone, in unfamiliar systems and in a new language. Several were unable to attend English classes or pursue job training, not because of a lack of motivation, but because no one was there to help with the children. Integration was expected, but the social infrastructure that made it possible had been cut away.
The most common experience across our study was what we call unresolved protracted separation. Of the 52 families, over 40 remained separated from key family members throughout the research. These separations were not due to neglect or lack of effort. Instead, families encountered impenetrable bureaucratic barriers and financial hurdles.
Zeinab, a widow resettled in Canada through BVOR, a public-private partnership, described the process as unfair and corrupt. She had tried repeatedly to bring her sister to Canada. “I told them last time, ‘Bring my sister here. Just for my children. I can’t go back to Syria. They want to murder me and my children’,” she explained. But the UN rejected her sister’s application. Zeinab was devastated. “Even in Amman, the UN is all about money and bribes. Those who need help die, and those who lie come here.” Though she remained committed to working within the system, even imagining herself appealing directly to the Prime Minister, her experience reflects the exhaustion and helplessness many families voiced. Reunification was not simply delayed. It was denied.
A smaller number of families achieved what we term negotiated reunification. These households succeeded in bringing over extended kin through private sponsorship, often by taking on enormous financial burdens. Noor, a mother of eight, borrowed $40,000 to sponsor one adult son and his family from Jordan. She said her mental health improved dramatically once he arrived, but the family remained in debt. She had no hope of affording sponsorship for her other children. In Noor’s words, “There is no way other than through the UN.” For families like hers, reunification required both money and access to private networks. These resources are unevenly distributed.
A third group pursued what we call next-generation reunification. As their children reached adulthood, some parents arranged marriages with extended relatives abroad. These were not simply traditional matches. They were intentional strategies to reestablish broken kinship ties. Yasmin, for example, planned for her 23-year-old son to marry a cousin living in Turkey. She hoped the marriage would eventually allow the bride to immigrate and rebuild a family structure that had been lost in migration. Others did the same. These marriages became one of the few available paths for restoring the extended family, especially as families gained permanent residency or citizenship and greater mobility.
Across all three outcomes—protracted separation, negotiated reunification, and next-generation strategies—the underlying issue remains the same. The state forced refugee families to conform to a model that does not match their reality. Families that arrived with broader definitions of kinship were pressured to shrink. Those that resisted or tried to adapt did so under immense strain.
For family sociologists, this case offers a sharp illustration of how the state defines and regulates family life. In the context of refugee resettlement, that regulation is not abstract. It is felt in daily routines, missed celebrations, caregiving gaps, and long-term developmental impacts on children. The nuclear family is not simply encouraged. It is enforced.
Despite these constraints, families continue to assert their own understandings of what family means. They do so through sponsorship efforts, strategic marriages, and daily calls to loved ones still abroad. These acts are not just emotional. They are political. They reflect a refusal to accept the family model imposed by resettlement systems.
When policy continues to ignore the lived reality of family among displaced people, separation and loss will remain defining features of refugee life. But even in the face of exclusion, families continue to reimagine and rebuild. Their efforts deserve not only recognition, but support.
Neda Maghbouleh is the Canada Research Chair in Race, Ethnicity, Migration, and Identity and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her work increasingly engages family, following the lead of study participants whose lives revealed these connections. Follow her on Bluesky/Twitter @nedasoc or reach her at neda.maghbouleh@ubc.ca.
Most of us have heard that body weight can influence health, but far less attention has been paid to the ways it can influence romantic partnership. In our new article in Social Forces, we followed more than two thousand older adults over five years to see whether body size relates to having a partner and partnered sexual activities.
The study relies on the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a nationally representative survey that includes anthropometric measures of weight and height while also recording the interviewers’ rating of each respondent’s body shape on a five‑point scale from very thin to obese. Those two indicators overlap only modestly, meaning we may pull apart two routes by which body size can matter: the functional component of mobility and comfort captured by Body Mass Index (BMI) and the component of social evaluation captured by the interviewers’ rating.
When we looked five years down the road, body size clearly shaped people’s chances of having a partner, but it did so in different ways for men and women. Women who were described by interviewers as carrying more weight were less likely than women described as slimmer to be married, cohabiting, or in a steady dating relationship. The same pattern appeared—though a little more modestly—for BMI independent of the visual rating. Men, in contrast, showed no significant drop in the probabilities of having a partner as body size increased. These patterns held after we adjusted for age, education, and race, suggesting that the impressions tied to body size play a role independent of social background.
Among those partnered, the patterns of body size remain for partnered sex. Women at the upper end of the BMI range reported fewer occasions of vaginal intercourse in the past year, fewer experiences of genital touching and oral sex, and were more likely to say there had been several months when sex simply was not pleasurable. Men’s reports varied little across the body size spectrum and occasionally ticked upward. Solitary sexual activities told another story. How often people thought about sex and how often they masturbated showed no link to either BMI or the visual rating for men or women. When no partner’s eyes are involved, the influence of body size seems to fade.
At least two possible mechanisms could explain how size leads to these outcomes, and we tested each of them in the research just published in this paper. The first mechanism concerns attractiveness. Because the same interviewers who rated body shape also gave each respondent an overall attractiveness score, we could see whether attractiveness associated with different body shape mediate its association with partnership or sexual activity. Our results show that the negative associations of rated body shape with having a partner and engaging in partnered sex were mostly explained by the differences in the attractiveness scores. This mechanism mattered a lot for women and their access to intimate sexual activity. For men, attractiveness explained their patterns between body shape and finding sex not pleasurable and engaging in any sexual activity.
The second mechanism concerns comfort and mobility. The survey asked whether respondents had trouble walking one block, walking across a room, dressing, bathing, eating, such as cutting up food, getting in or out of bed, and using the toilet. Higher BMI predicted a higher count of such limitations for men and women alike. These limitations partially explained connection between high BMI and both men and women’s reports that sex had not been pleasurable. They did not explain the lower odds of having a partner or smaller number of sexual encounters, which points back to the importance of social impressions.
These evidence of social patterning matter for everyday life because partnership shapes so many other outcomes: household income, caregiving arrangements, emotional support, and shared decision‑making. When the chances of partnership and satisfying sex shift with body size, other parts of family life shift as well. Health guidelines and research often present BMI as a personal health indicator. The patterns we see remind us that body size also carries social meaning, and that meaning can open or close doors.
Body size is far more than a health statistic. It is part of a social script that guides who meets, who matches, and how intimacy unfolds, and that script reads differently for men and for women. Recognizing both the perception side and the functional side of body shape can help individuals, clinicians, educators, and media creators open more pathways to lasting partnerships and satisfying intimate sexual activities for people of every shape.
Yiang Li is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also a predoctoral trainee in the NIA T32 Program in the Demography and Economics of Aging at the Center on Healthy Aging Behaviors and Longitudinal Investigations and a student affiliate at the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago. His research focuses broadly on social demography, health, family, neighborhood, and aging. You can follow Yiang Li on bluesky @yiangli.bsky.social and learn more about him on his website.
Linda J. Waite is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and Senior Fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include social demography, aging, the family, health, sexuality, and social well-being. She is the Principal Investigator of the NIA-funded National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project. Waite is the recipient of a MERIT Award from the NIA and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
What does it mean for survivors of the Shoah and their children to be “at home” with the Holocaust? Of course, this question does not suggest that survivor-families lived comfortably with or found a sense of refuge in the memories, stories, or traumas from the Holocaust post-1945. For survivors and their children, those known as the second generation, this was most certainly not the case; these two groups, affected both directly and indirectly, were not uncommonly traumatized by the murderous events that took place during Hitler’s reign between 1933 and 1945. This question of being “at home” with the Holocaust instead refers to how the memories, stories, and traumas from the Shoah took up residence, abided with, and haunted survivors and their children alike in their homes for years to come. For both groups, their domestic lives were in significant ways shaped by the Holocaust; it came home with them, so to speak, darkly coloring how they interacted with and inhabited their domiciles. Being at home with the Holocaust thus denotes a state of domestic existence that was (and is) imbued with the enduring legacy of the Nazi regime.
My new book, At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second-generation (and, to a lesser extent, third-generation) Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid, Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, my research reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.
At Home with the Holocaust’s examination of the literature and oral histories of children of survivors gives voice to a number of interrelated themes and phenomena, including how members of the second generation’s relationships to their homes reveal their relationships to themselves, their parents, and the Holocaust; how their homes and material belongings contained therein spatialize, temporalize, express, and shape their inherited traumas; how survivor-family homes paradigmatically shape subsequent domestic spaces (along with space and place in general); how the home, often in complex ways, stands for the self in second-generation Holocaust literature and oral history; and how notions of home(lands) are complicated for descendants of survivors. An exploration of survivor-family homes as represented and narrated by members of the second generation moreover sheds light on how the affective impact of survivors’ memories—as expressed in their verbal and nonverbal communication—manifest, invade, and permeate their and their children’s domestic lives. It is these emotional intensities that radiate from survivors and are perceived by their children as both parties navigate time and space in their family homes. Second-generation authors and narrators give expression to this affective transmission, particularly in and through their narratives about their homes.
But although survivor-family homes are markers of haunted pasts, they are also markers of separation from those pasts—those which symbolize a severing of continuity. They stand for new starts, New-World beginnings, ruptures from the Old World, and archival containers of that which occurred after the catastrophic years of 1933–1945. Holding within them both traumatic pasts and the severing of those pasts, survivor-family homes represent the second-generation paradox: They are not only intimately connected to and gripped by the past, but they are also emphatically distant from the Shoah. This proximity and distance—this simultaneous connection and disconnection from the Holocaust—defines many second-generation lived experiences, certainly within the home but also, no doubt, without.
Throughout the literary representations of survivor-family homes and homelands analyzed in At Home with the Holocaust, along with selected oral-history discussions of domestic space, it becomes clear how space speaks. As survivors’ traumas and experiences of the Holocaust were imbued in their homes, such traumas and experiences were expressed in and by the emotional space of the second generation’s childhood and adulthood homes. Surrounded by their parents’ Holocaust pasts that found emotional, material, and spatial expression in their domestic milieus, children of survivors became aware of and subject to their inherited traumas of the Holocaust. Survivor-family homes were and are integral actants that emotionally speak to the second generation about their parents’ Holocaust experiences. This specific sort of speaking—this type of emotional, material, and spatial communication—typified and, in many cases, continues to typify many survivor-family homes, wherein the second generation have found themselves, in complicated and complex ways, at home with the Holocaust.
Lucas F. W. Wilson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga and was formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (JKP Books, 20205), and he is the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the co-editor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington Books, 2023). His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues. He is currently working on an edited collection about queer experiences at Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. You can follow him on Twitter (@wilson_fw), Instagram and Threads (@lukeslamdunkwilson), and Bluesky (@lukeslamdunkwilson.bsky.social).
Untitled by NickyPe licensed by Pixaby. Older couple embracing
On International Women’s Day, as we celebrate the achievements and contributions of women worldwide, it’s also a time to reflect on the silent, unpaid work many women do every day—relational management. This involves managing not just their own emotions but also anticipating, soothing, and supporting their partners’ emotional needs. It’s a burden too often seen as “natural,” but it’s time to acknowledge it and work toward balancing the load.
If you’ve ever had to remind your partner to call his mom, notice his bad mood before he does, or listen to him unload about his day while silently setting your own emotions aside, congratulations, you’re familiar with relational management. It’s a job you probably didn’t apply for but inherited thanks to social norms, gender expectations, and a culture that grooms women to take on the emotional heavy lifting in relationships.
What is relational management? I coined the term to describe the work women do in heterosexual relationships to help their partners manage their emotional lives. It involves actions like checking in on his feelings, soothing his bad days, and providing the praise and validation he craves. While men often see this as a natural part of relationships, women often feel the weight of constantly being responsible for their partner’s emotional needs.
The Burden of Relational Management
Let’s be clear: relational management isn’t about managing your own emotions. It’s about taking responsibility for someone else’s emotional well-being. It’s about noticing when they need support, even if they don’t ask for it, and they often don’t. Women have been socialized to intuit what their partners need emotionally and deliver it seamlessly, whether it’s offering a pep talk after a bad day or absorbing their partner’s frustration so he can decompress. Over time, this constant vigilance can become exhausting.
Why do women end up doing this work? Because society positions them as emotional caretakers from a young age. Little girls are praised for being nurturing and empathetic, while boys are told to toughen up and suppress their emotions. As a result of that socialization and insistence that men not express their emotions, by adulthood, many men lack the tools to process their feelings independently, and women are left to fill the gap. It’s no wonder relational management becomes an unspoken requirement in many marriages.
One man in my study described his primary partner as “self-absorbed” because she no longer asked about his bad days. But here’s the catch: he never told her he needed that support. Instead, he expected her to notice on her own, a common expectation rooted in traditional gender roles. Women are supposed to just know when something is wrong, right? Wrong. This expectation burdens women with the responsibility of being mind-readers, an impossible task that leads to resentment and burnout.
The Cost of Gendered Expectations
This isn’t just a personal issue. It’s rooted in systemic gender norms that dictate who should take on emotional caretaking. U.S. cultural norms have long positioned women as emotional caregivers, whether within families or romantic relationships. The result is an imbalance where women carry the weight of ensuring their partner’s emotional stability while men often take this labor for granted. Over time, this creates cycles of frustration for both partners.
For women, constantly performing relational management can lead to burnout and a sense of being undervalued. For men, the expectation that their emotional needs will be met without communication stunts their emotional growth and places their self-worth in the hands of someone else. Both outcomes can damage relationships.
How to Share the Load
Acknowledge the Work: Talk openly about the emotional tasks each partner is doing. Many men don’t realize how much relational management their partner handles until it’s pointed out. Men typically don’t recognize relational management as work. They simply see it as something a woman does when she cares about you.
Share the Responsibility: Both partners should be encouraged to take turns checking in on each other’s emotional well-being and creating a system where emotional care is not one-sided. This could include setting aside regular time to connect or alternating who initiates conversations about feelings.
Address the Stigma Around Mental Health Help: Encourage open discussions about mental health without shame. Men often avoid seeking help because of societal stigma, but therapy, support groups, and emotional resources should be normalized as part of maintaining well-being, just like physical health.
Encourage Emotional Growth: Men need space to develop their own emotional coping mechanisms. Encourage them to seek support outside the relationship, whether through friends, family, or therapy.
Socialize Boys and Young Men Differently: We need to start teaching boys from a young age that emotions are not a weakness and that it’s normal and healthy to express and manage them. By providing boys with tools like emotional literacy, conflict resolution, and self-awareness, we give them a foundation for healthier relationships in adulthood.
Why This Matters
Relational management isn’t just a quirk of modern relationships. It’s a reflection of deeply ingrained gender norms. As long as we continue to socialize boys to suppress their emotions and girls to nurture everyone else’s, this imbalance will persist. But change is possible. By challenging these traditional roles and fostering emotional equality, couples can create partnerships that thrive on mutual support, not one-sided labor.
Relational management reflects a larger societal issue. One that leaves women drained and men without essential emotional tools. We must empower both men and women to recognize and value relational management as a shared responsibility. By doing so, we create healthier relationships where neither partner feels overwhelmed or neglected.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended American lives in many ways. Schools and offices closed; childcare centers shut down; many workers suddenly found themselves working at home while others had to decrease their hours or lost their jobs entirely; and many families were unable to leave their homes for months, producing isolation from friends and other relatives. While devastating in many ways, this unprecedented situation also provided an opportunity for heterosexual couples to examine their household dynamics and rearrange their daily patterns.
Gender continued to provide an organizing framework for how most couples divided domestic labor. Women continued to, on average, do more domestic work—including cooking, cleaning, mental labor, and childcare related tasks—than their male partners. Despite this general trend, our study made it possible to examine what factors prompted some couples to divide household labor more equitably and what prevented other couples from doing so.
Pandemic Workplace Changes & the Division of Domestic Labor
Changes in workplace policies during the pandemic mattered because they allowed couples who desired more egalitarian partnerships to create them. Our study found that major shifts in the organization of work and caregiving institutions—such as the rise of remote work and the move of schooling and caregiving into the home–did not by themselves reduce inequality in domestic labor for most parents. While most of our participants were concerned that the closure of both day care centers and schools increased the burden of caregiving, only those who reported that both members of the couple held egalitarian aspirations responded to these constraints by creating more egalitarian relationships.
Among the small number—just 10 percent in our study—who were able to enact a preference for more equal sharing, changes such as shifting to working at home or a different work schedule, combined with preexisting feminist beliefs, prompted a more equitable division of labor. Since their prior workplace arrangements and schedules had prevented them previously from achieving more equitable partnership, this shift in the organization of work allowed them to enact a set of practices that more closely resembled their preferences. Had the pandemic not allowed a convergence between their desires and the organization of their jobs, a move toward more egalitarian practices would likely not have occurred.
The Persistence of Unequal Burdens
The persistence of beliefs that women should take primary responsibility for caregiving and housework prevented most families from taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by working more flexibly from home. When a relationship relied on a traditional view about the proper allocation of domestic labor, parents were unlikely to report a reallocation in their work or caregiving demands. Indeed, even when mothers espoused an egalitarian view, a partner’s reluctance prevented a move toward equality. Such women noted that their partners lacked the “initiative” to take on additional tasks and expressed frustration that the work of organizing caregiving and domestic work remained invisible even when their partners were increased their time at home. Despite pandemic-related shifts that moved both work and caregiving in the home, these parents were unable to veer away from arrangements that had taken root long before the pandemic began.
Our analysis of the pandemic experience suggests that reducing gender inequality within families depends not only on transforming the organization of work and caregiving—specifically creating greater workplace flexibility for all parents—but also on supporting norms that stress the importance of equal sharing in relationships.
Policy Recommendations
Now that most families depend on the earnings of breadwinning women, achieving fairer and most satisfying work and family arrangements depends on melding supportive institutional practices with ideological commitments that together reinforce egalitarian principles.
To achieve this end, we suggest four policy interventions:
Legislation that guarantees the right to flexible work arrangements would promote organizational changes that permit couples to adopt more egalitarian practices
Expanding childcare support would enable parents to better balance work and caregiving responsibilities
Comprehensive family leave policies for all parents, including fathers, would strengthen norms that stress the importance of equal parental involvement
Continued promotion of the need for women’s rights contributes to organizational and normative changes that increase the possibilities for gender egalitarian partnerships
Golda Kaplan is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at New York University. Follow them on Twitter @golda_kap
Michelle Cera is a PhD Candidate in Sociology, New York University. Follow them on Twitter @michellejcera
Barbara J. Risman is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Follow them on Twitter @bjrisman
Kathleen Gerson is a Collegiate Professor of Sociology at New York University. Follow them on Twitter @KathleenGerson
When young Americans leave home to build their own lives, many are also leaving behind their family’s religious traditions—but not necessarily their spirituality. Our decade-long study reveals that as young adults establish independent identities, many break free from religious institutions while crafting more personalized spiritual lives that better align with their evolving values about family, relationships, and individual expression.
Religious Change in Early Adulthood
The religious landscape is dramatically shifting. The proportion of religious “nones” has grown from just one in twenty to more than one in four Americans in just a few decades. But beneath these numbers lies a deeper story: as young people transition into adulthood and separate from their families of origin, they often reconsider inherited religious practices and especially institutions.
This transformation happens during a crucial developmental period. Whether they attend college or enter the workforce, many young adults experience a similar religious trajectory as they establish independent identities. They’re not simply drifting from faith—they’re actively choosing spiritual paths that feel authentic to their emerging adult selves.
When Family Religious Socialization Backfires
Interestingly, those raised in the most religious households often show the steepest declines in institutional involvement. The very intensity of religious upbringing can sometimes plant the seeds of later disaffiliation.
Chris, who grew up in a devout Catholic family in rural Pennsylvania, attended church weekly throughout childhood. By his twenties, he had distanced himself from the institution while maintaining personal faith. “I was tired of going to church and hearing about politics,” he explained. “For a church that says they’re accepting, we pride ourselves on being holier than thou.”
Despite leaving the institutional church, Chris maintained a belief in something more, showing how religious disaffiliation doesn’t necessarily mean secular materialism. This pattern of rejecting institutions while preserving at least some elements of personal spirituality appeared repeatedly in our interviews.
The stories of the young people we followed illustrate how rigid religious socialization can sometimes produce the opposite effect parents intend. Young adults often seek spiritual paths that honor both their upbringing and their evolving identities—even when that means leaving behind family religious traditions.
Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Transformation
The cohort we followed from adolescence into adulthood from 2003 to 2013 came of age during a period of rapid change in attitudes toward LGBTQ+ rights, culminating in the 2015 legalization of same-sex marriage. This shift profoundly influenced how many young people viewed religious institutions.
Our data shows that supporters of same-sex marriage disaffiliated from religious institutions much faster those who opposed it. For many, the perceived conflict between institutional religion and their deeply-held values about inclusion and equality became simply untenable.
Daniela’s experience exemplifies this tension. When she joined her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, she encountered confusion from her religious peers: “When someone found out I was in the GSA, they were like, ‘But you go to church,'” she recalled. “And I’m like, ‘I’m a Christian who thinks it’s okay [to be gay]… I don’t see a contradiction.'” Despite her initial attempts to reconcile these perspectives, Daniela eventually left organized religion altogether, like many others who supported same-sex marriage.
Similarly, Claude, a Methodist from South Carolina, struggled with his church’s stance on sexuality. After losing a close friend to an anti-gay hate crime, his religious participation declined significantly. “The Bible says being gay is wrong, but I don’t personally believe that,” he reflected. “You’re born how you are.” For Claude and many others, religious institutions’ positions on sexuality directly contradicted their lived experiences and deepest values.
Reimagining Family Values
The term “family values” has often been associated with traditional religious perspectives on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. But young Americans are redefining family values to emphasize authenticity, inclusivity, and personal fulfillment over institutional rules.
This shift mirrors broader changes in the family as an institution. Just as Americans increasingly form families outside traditional pathways, they’re crafting spiritual lives outside traditional religious institutions. The same values driving both transformations: authenticity, self-determination, and inclusivity. Similar to how young people are reimagining family as an institution especially as it relates to patriarchy and heteronormativity, they are doing the same thing with religion.
Even during this reimagining they’re seeking to keep, and amplify, love as a core element in both family and in religion. As one participant put it: “I still really believe in the core beliefs, in God… living in a way that pleases God is important. And that to me is—beyond just following rules—is a way to show that you love God. But also by sharing love, and being a servant to people around you.”
Supporting Authentic Faith and Family Development
For parents hoping to pass down religious traditions, these findings suggest considering not just what beliefs they transmit, but how they do so. Religious socialization that leaves room for questioning and personal interpretation may foster more lasting connections to faith than rigid approaches demanding unquestioning acceptance.
Faith communities seeking to reach younger generations might consider creating spaces that honor both tradition and individual authenticity, the golden rule and its implementation—which, for emerging generations, includes considering issues like LGBTQ+ inclusion and women’s equality.
This DIY approach to spirituality reflects broader shifts in how Americans approach all institutions, from marriage to work to education. The challenge—and opportunity—is creating new forms of family and community that support individual flourishing while still providing the belonging and connection that humans fundamentally need.
Landon Schnabel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University, where they study religion, gender, sexuality, and social change. Their forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is titled Is Faith Feminine: What Americans Really Think About Gender and Religion. Follow them on Bluesky or Twitter @LandonSchnabel.
Brigid Schulte works at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change to ensure that all people have the opportunity to life a rich, full and wholehearted life. She’s an award-winning journalist, think tank program director, keynote speaker and author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life andthe New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, gender and modern life, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One has the Time. She was an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine and was part of the team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. She serves as the director of the Better Life Lab at New America, using the power of story to reimagine better work, family, gender, and care. She hosts the Better Life Lab podcast on Slate. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Time, Slate, U.S. News & World Report, New York Magazine, Fast Company, CNN, and many others. She is a frequent television, radio and podcast guest and has been quoted in numerous media outlets. You can find out more about her on website.
Haley Swenson is a research fellow for the Better Life Lab. Swenson was the deputy director of the Better Life Lab from 2020 to 2022. Swenson directed major research projects for the Lab, and led the team’s editorial and impact strategy. Swenson has also directed multiple reporting grants and story series, editing and writing pieces that have landed in the Washington Post, Harvard Business Review, and at Slate. She is an expert on the relationship between gender inequality at work and gender inequality at home, as well as their intersections with racial and economic injustice. With Brigid Schulte, she helped create and manage BLLx, a distillation of research-based experiments on better sharing the work of family and home life. Swenson earned an MA and a PhD in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies from The Ohio State University. Her dissertation was titled Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age. Swenson came to New America in 2017 as an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow and edited the Better Life Lab at Slate. She and her family live in Salt Lake City. You can find out more about her on her website. Here, I ask them about their new study, A Glimpse of Stability: The Impact of Pandemic Aid on Families in Poverty.
AMW: In your recent study, A Glimpse of Stability, how did the pandemic-era government relief packages, such as rental assistance and expanded Child Tax Credits, directly impact family financial stability during the pandemic?
Brigid: When you think back to 2020 and the early days of the pandemic, with a deadly novel virus spreading quickly and leaving people sick or dead in its wake, it was a terrible time for families. Child cares and schools shut down. Businesses closed or went out of business. At one point, 20 million people were unemployed. And no one knew when it would end. Economists were predicting a “financial apocalypse” that would send millions of families spiraling into poverty and hardship. Instead, Congress and the first Trump administration and later the Biden administration responded with a robust set of public policies and investments — the largest outside of wartime — that really worked to make people’s lives better. Economists found that families’ financial well-being actually improved, even in such a turbulent and unstable time.
In our work, spending more than two years intensively listening to families living in poverty or on low wages across the country, what became clear is that a handful of these policies made a real difference.
Mortgage forbearance, rental assistance and eviction moratoriums kept families in their homes rather than out on the streets, which is critical for stability, especially for healthy child development.
Giving families cash without all the usual punitive rules restrictions (you can’t buy diapers with food and nutrition benefits, for instance) made an enormous difference. The expanded Child Tax Credit, for instance, brought the U.S. child poverty rate down to its lowest recorded level. That and stimulus payments empowered families to make their own choices about what they needed. Research shows families spent most of the cash on food, housing, basic necessities and paying off debt.
Expanding access to food and health care was a life saver for many families.
Expanding unemployment also made a huge difference keeping families afloat as they sought work.
What we found lacking, however, was real investment in child care. Families across the socio-economic spectrum really struggled to work and pay bills without stable child care. And though Congress did infuse some funding to keep the child care system afloat, it wasn’t enough. The system was underfunded and dysfunctional to start with. One single parent, a nurse, wasn’t able to work and care for her four children at the same time, and wound up being evicted several times, despite the moratorium, and spiraled into poverty.
Haley: I just want to add one thing here. The pandemic was a catastrophe for many families. One case study I wrote was of Chantel Valdez’s family in Blanding, Utah. She and her two children lost their main support network, two elders, Grandma Mary and Uncle George, who loved them and cared for them. They both passed away from COVID in 2020. There were some pandemic losses that can never be undone and never be made up for. But at least while they grieved and recovered over the next year, Chantel continued to receive income because she qualified for unemployment after the schools she worked for closed. They had good, wholesome food, because of SNAP. They had safe and stable housing, because of emergency rental assistance. They were able to access mental health services because they had access to Medicaid for the first time.
Think about any family going through the worst things that have ever happened to them, harder experiences than they could ever imagine, all at once. For a brief moment during the pandemic, our society and both political parties decided families shouldn’t have to cope with all that on their own. It was a real moment of crisis for so many families. I can’t help but think about how many other crises families encounter every day, and because it’s no longer considered a public health crisis, they are, effectively, on their own.
AMW: In your experience, how did the narratives surrounding poverty shift during the pandemic, and what role did government assistance play in changing those narratives?
Brigid: It’s so interesting how the narrative of “deservingness” shifted during the pandemic. You heard from conservative lawmakers that they’d support family-supportive policies and investments because people were out of work “through no fault of their own.” The implication is that, outside the pandemic, if people live in poverty it must be their own fault?
I think, like how the Great Depression began to shift mindsets about the powerful role public policy and investments can make in making all people’s lives better, we began to see some shifting. That policymakers can choose to invest tax dollars to create an economy that works for all people and where all families can thrive.
But, as the new Trump administration and GOP-led Congress seeks to decimate the civil service and slash family-supportive policies, you see those hardened “deservingness” narratives arise again. On X, the social media platform Elon Musk owns, the billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE leader, called people who rely on public aid “parasites.” Other GOP leaders want to put work requirements for anyone receiving public support.
All of that ignores reality: One in three Americans rely on at least one of 10 public support programs. Unlike the false and racist stereotype of “welfare queens,” more than 40 percent of those who receive public benefits, by far the majority, are White. And one Government Accountability study found that the majority of those who receive food or health care public assistance, are already working full-time. Those that aren’t working are children, the elderly or those with disabilities.
So the real story is not that people in poverty aren’t working hard enough. The real story is that business and political leaders have allowed an economy that creates jobs that don’t pay enough to support people’s lives.
We also produced some creative multimedia products designed to dispel these persistent yet false narratives and help people better understand the complexity of living a life in poverty, and all the barriers that can get in the way of just trying to get to the end of the day:
Aphoto story, Why Cash Matters, chronicles a day in the life of the Johnson family. Like 52 million households, about 41 percent of all households, the Johnson’s make too much to qualify for public support, but not enough to live on. We show how an ongoing $500 a month Guaranteed Basic Income pilot, started with federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, and continued by the city of Alexandria, Virginia, has been a lifeline for them.
We also created a choice-basedinteractive experience or game, “something else came up.” Readers/players are confronted with the same set of choices that one of our case study participants, Kiarica Schields, faced one morning trying to get her son off to child care in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. The goal was to give people more insight into her experiences, and explore the widespread impacts of poverty and systemic barriers to family well-being. As we explain in an accompanying blogpost,Why did a think tank make a text-based game, “while the choices appear abundant, your environment and material circumstances create seemingly infinite barriers. Navigating around these barriers is time-consuming and reduces access to opportunities to build a better life.”[1]
AMW: What lessons do you think policymakers can take away from this moment, particularly regarding how support programs could be structured to help families in the long term, beyond the pandemic?
Brigid: The real lesson here goes to the heart of what has been a widening ideological and political gap over the past several decades: the role of government. Conservatives argue that the federal government should be small, businesses unregulated, and that markets should be allowed to run free. But what the pandemic experience showed is that the federal government can and must play an enormously important role in using tax dollars wisely, making investments, setting policies and reasonable regulatory guardrails to ensure the health, wellbeing and quality of life of all people, families, communities and the economy.
Haley: If you look back to 2020 and the policies that followed the start of the pandemic, they showed us unequivocally that government and public funding can make people’s lives better. The stories research participants so generously shared with us show that to be true, but those policies were time-capped and did not last long enough for some families. We need robust policies serving whole families with long-term funding, that don’t set arbitrary limits on support or require them to jump through bureaucratic hoops. I think the key to achieving that is to start by believing these families matter and that they deserve our collective support.
Alicia M. Walker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Missouri State University and the author of two previous books on infidelity, and a forthcoming book, Bound by BDSM: What Practitioners can teach Everyone about Building a Happier Life (Bloomsbury Fall 2025) coauthored with Arielle Kuperberg. She is the current Editor in Chief of the Council of Contemporary Families blog, serves as Senior Fellow with CCF, and serves as Co-Chair of CCF alongside Arielle Kuperberg. Learn more about her on her website. Follow her on Twitter or Bluesky at @AliciaMWalker1, Facebook, and Instagram @aliciamwalkerphd
About Council on Contemporary Families
The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. CCF seeks to enhance the national understanding of how and why families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.
