sexuality

In a recent editorial in the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Ethnic Studies, uses the recent coverage of  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s child from an affair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a woman in NYC as an opportunity to examine often ignored elements of heterosexual privilege.

As Ferber reminds us, this is not the first time men in positions of power have been accused of sexual activity not befitting a married (or unmarried) man.

Another news cycle focused on powerful men’s inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior…Before Arnold, it was Tiger Woods, and John Edwards, and ______ (fill in the blank with one of the many other names that might pop into your mind at this point).
We have heard it all before. The flurry of newspaper and tabloid articles rehash the same old issues.

However, one accusation that is absent in the glut of sensationalist coverage, is that these men are destroying marriage itself. Instead, Ferber explains, we reserve that accusation for gay and lesbian couples seeking the right to marry.

The actions of individual heterosexual men are never used against all heterosexuals. One of the central benefits of being part of a privileged social identity group is that your own behavior is never taken as representing that of your entire group. No matter how many stories we hear about heterosexual men committing adultery and destroying their marriages, why is it that we continue to hear that it is LGBT people that are the greatest threat to the institution of marriage?

The privilege extends beyond the marital walls to negative stereotypes about deviant sexual desires and lack of self-control.

And what about the stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous, or as pedophiles? Here heterosexual men have gay men beat as well, and there is no dearth of public examples…And yet again it is gay men that our society stereotypes as pedophiles.

Ferber’s brief, but powerful, op-ed shows the importance of not only looking at what is said, but also what is not said. Sometimes it is the questions not asked, and generalizations not made, that reveal the benefits of positions of power.

That is what heterosexual privilege does, it allows individual heterosexual men to behave badly without anyone assuming it says something about all heterosexuals. And the point is not to assume that it does, but to ask why so many are willing to quickly make these assumptions about those who do not share the benefits of heterosexual privilege.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, sociologist Jaye Cee Whitehead shared her thoughts on economic arguments for gay marriage.

In a letter to the New York State Legislature last month, top business executives endorsed same-sex marriage on the ground that “attracting talent is key to our state’s economic future.” The signers — among them the banker Lloyd C. Blankfein, the financier Ronald O. Perelman, the real estate developer Jerry I. Speyer and the publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman — declared that legalizing gay unions would “help maintain our competitive advantage in attracting the best and brightest people the world has to offer.”

This letter is one of many examples of promoting marriage equality as good for business.

States and cities are, as the New York executives pointed out, competing to attract talent in a globally competitive labor market. The wedding industry benefits, of course, when more couples are allowed to marry. And marriage equality is associated with revenue gains from sales taxes and license fees. Backers of gay marriage speak openly of the gains from “marriage tourism” in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.

So why shouldn’t gays and lesbians have equality and bolster the economy at the same time?  In Whitehead’s eyes,

. . . supporting marriage on economic grounds dehumanizes same-sex couples by conflating civil rights with economic perks. Americans should be offended when the value of gays and lesbians is reduced to their buying power as consumers or their human and creative capital as workers. . .Worse yet, this narrative neglects the most economically vulnerable gay and lesbian couples and plays into the inaccurate stereotype of same-sex couples (particularly male couples) as being mostly well-educated and affluent.

Indeed, many proponents of same-sex marriage often point out that legalizing same-sex marriage may reduce spending on welfare programs.  But, Whitehead explains why these and other economic arguments are problematic.

Supporters of same-sex marriage ought to acknowledge that marriage is not just a natural expression of human intimacy or a declaration of personal commitment; it is a form of governance. The vast expansion of the government over the past century has embedded marriage into all areas where the state and the individual intersect, from tax obligations to disability benefits to health care decisions to family law. As with any other structure of governance in a democratic society, we ought to think about its participants as citizens rather than consumers.

So if you support same-sex marriage, do so not because it brings in tax revenue and tourism dollars and prevents people from becoming a burden on the state, but because you value gay men and lesbians as citizens who deserve equal access to the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

In February’s issue of Wired (now available online), Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh helps us understand the life of a prostitute in New York City and how the trade has been transformed by advances in technology.

While Venkatesh’s initial goal was to examine how the gentrification of Times Square and other areas of New York City would impact the sex trade, he quickly found himself documenting the rise of a new type of sex worker.

The economies of big cities have been reshaped by a demand for high-end entertainment, cuisine, and “wellness” goods. In the process, “dating,” “massage,” “escort,” and “dancing” have replaced hustling and streetwalking. A luxury brand has been born.

The shift has resulted in an increase in both the price of, and level of respect for, prostitutes. Technology has played a large part in this as it allows clients to find companionship without resorting to driving the streets.

The Internet and the rise of mobile phones have enabled some sex workers to professionalize their trade. Today they can control their image, set their prices, and sidestep some of the pimps, madams, and other intermediaries who once took a share of the revenue.

Most exciting about this short piece was the amount of information conveyed in about ½ a page of writing through the use of a wide array of supplemental graphics. A map is used to show the movement of sex workers to trendier, more upscale districts in Manhattan. And a compilation of images, statistics, and well-chosen quotes demonstrate the divide between types of sex work, as well as the infusion of technology into the escort services. For instance, Facebook is quickly becoming a medium for advertising adult-services and a BlackBerry phone has come to symbolize a professional (and disease-free) status.

Telegraph UK recently reported on the growth of a nontraditional relationship form in Britain: the LAT (living-apart-together) relationship.

Gillian Sheffer and Daniel Fisher have been in a relationship for three years. They are fully committed to one another – and are extremely happy to be together – but they have absolutely no desire to live together. Instead, they choose to reside in separate homes.

“Living apart offers the best bits of marriage without the boring parts,” says Gillian, a 49 year-old self-employed osteopath who lives in Golder’s Green, north London. Daniel, a 52-year-old teacher, lives at his own home in nearby Bounds Green. Both have children from previous relationships sharing their homes.

How common are LAT relationships?

According to a report in last month’s issue of the Sociological Review, an estimated one in 10 adults are now in committed, non-cohabiting relationships.

What do these relationships look like and who tends to be a LAT-er?

“LATs can have both an intimate couples relationship and retain their own autonomy,” says Simon Duncan, professor of social policy at the University of Bradford, who co-authored the Sociological Review paper with Miranda Phillips, research director at the National Centre for Social Research. “There isn’t an average LAT, though they tend to be better educated than the majority and somewhat more liberal. Different interpretations in the past have suggested they are either radicals or, alternatively, uncommitted, cautious people. The answer, in my view, is probably both.”

LATs can be young or old and, according to Duncan and Phillips, fall into three main categories. One group don’t see themselves as couples in the long-term sense; the second are in commuter marriages, separated by work; the third group, whose members tend to be older, choose this type of relationship because it suits their emotional and practical needs. “Often this group will have other commitments, like children or elderly parents, and value their own space, or have a cherished home they don’t want to leave,” Duncan explains.

And to quench your thirst for additional sociological commentary: 

Sasha Roseneil, professor of sociology and social theory at Birkbeck University, believes that with rates of marriage at an all-time low, more of us are exploring non-traditional ways of being together.

“They desire an autonomous life,” she says. “People in LAT relationships may wish to invest more in friendships and feel that their sexual relationship is not the most important relationship in their life.”

Avoiding the entrapment of domestic drudgery is another reason for not wanting to share a roof. “Many women have said to me that the only way they could be together with their partner is if they didn’t have to deal with his mess,” she says.

Business Week reports:

Same-sex couples are as good at raising well-adjusted, healthy children as heterosexual couples are, a review of 20 years of social science research finds.

“There’s a deeply held and widespread view out there that children need both a mother and a father to do well,” said study author Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology and of social and cultural analysis at New York University in New York City. “And it seems to be a bipartisan conviction — with a lot of public policy based on that premise — since literally both President Bush and President Obama have said exactly that.”

“But the point is that this orthodoxy is supposedly supported not just by a belief, but by actual research,” Stacey noted. “Yet we found that, in fact, there is no research that shows that children need both a mother and a father. And we looked everywhere.”

Stacey and study co-author Timothy J. Biblarz, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Southern California, published their findings in the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The review examined studies looking at a range of child outcomes and found that parenting quality trumps the gender of the parents.

In terms of parental skills, the reviewed studies typically measured familial dynamics such as parental consistency, nurturance, communication, structure, scheduling, stability, conflict and abuse. In terms of child well-being, the studies assessed psychosocial development measurements such as self-esteem, school achievement, peer relations, mental health status and depression, social problems and substance abuse.

The authors concluded that men and women of the same social class and educational background are more similar in the way they parent than women are with other women or men with all other men; that the offspring of lesbian and heterosexual parents are actually more alike than they are different; and that to date there is no research to suggest that parental gender has any significant impact on the well-being of a child.

“The bottom line is that it is the quality of parenting, not the gender of the parents, that matters for child outcomes,” said Stacey.

The New York Times reports on “soul-searching” in Turkey after the murder of a gay man last year:

For Ahmet Yildiz, a stocky and affable 26-year-old, the choice to live openly as a gay man proved deadly. Prosecutors say his own father hunted him down, traveling more than 600 miles from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.

Mr. Yildiz was killed 16 months ago, the victim of what sociologists say is the first gay honor killing in Turkey to surface publicly. He was shot five times as he left his apartment to buy ice cream. A witness said dozens of neighbors watched the killing from their windows, but refused to come forward. His body remained unclaimed by his family, a grievous fate under Muslim custom.

A sociologist comments on this “honor killing”:

Until recently, so-called honor killings have been largely confined to women, who face being killed by male relatives for perceived grievances ranging from consensual sex outside of marriage to stealing a glance at a boy. A recent government survey estimated that one person dies every week in Istanbul as a result of honor killings, while the United Nations estimates the practice globally claims as many as 5,000 lives a year. In Turkey, relatives convicted in such killings are subject to life sentences.

A sociologist who studies honor killings, Mazhar Bagli, at Dicle University in Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, noted that tribal Kurdish families that kill daughters perceived to have dishonored them publicize the murders to help cleanse their shame.

But he said gay honor killings remained underground because a homosexual not only brought shame to his family, but also tainted the concept of male identity upon which the community’s social structure depended.

“Until now, gay honor killings have been invisible because homosexuality is taboo,” he said.

Gay rights groups argue that there is an increasingly open homophobia in Turkey.

Read more.

A recent New York Times article reported on some of the data that is known about gay and lesbian parenthood and how children of same-sex parents turn out. 

The Williams Institute at UCLA finds that approximately 115,772 American same-sex couples have children.  

Summarizing the state of the field:

Until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.

Concerning child outcomes:

“These children do just fine,” says Abbie E. Goldberg, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Clark University, who concedes there are some who will continue to believe that gay parents are a danger to their children, in spite of a growing web of psychological and sociological evidence to the contrary.

In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.

Gender plays a key role in the differences that are known between children of heterosexual and sexual minority parents:

More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families.

There are data that show, for instance, that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to aspire to professions that are traditionally considered male, like doctors or lawyers — 52 percent in one study said that was their goal, compared with 21 percent of daughters of heterosexual mothers, who are still more likely to say they want to be nurses or teachers when they grow up. (The same study found that 95 percent of boys from both types of families choose the more masculine jobs.) Girls raised by lesbians are also more likely to engage in “roughhousing” and to play with “male-gendered-type toys” than girls raised by straight mothers. And adult children of gay parents appear more likely than the average adult to work in the fields of social justice and to have more gay friends in their social mix.

Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children, says M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage.” Studies of lesbian parents have found that they “are more feminist parents,” she says, “more open to girls playing with trucks and boys playing with dolls,” with fewer worries about conforming to perceived norms.

They are also, by definition, less likely to impose gender-based expectations on themselves. “Same-sex parents tend to be more equal in parenting,” Goldberg says, while noting that no generalization can apply to all parents of any sexual orientation. On the whole, though, lesbian mothers (there’s little data here on gay dads) tend not to divide chores and responsibilities according to gender-based roles, Goldberg says, “because you have taken gender out the equation. There’s much more fluidity than in many heterosexual relationships.”

In a recent article discussing the arrest of a local official in a prostitution sting, The San Gabriel Valley Tribune called upon sociologists to explain why men visit prostitutes:

Some men are excited by the illicit risky behavior of prostitution; others like the consumer-oriented and simple transaction of meeting sexual needs through purchase; others say they have difficulties getting involved in traditional relationships; and still others are looking for a different kind of sex than they can normally find, according to a study conducted by sociologist Martin Monto for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Janet Lever, a sociologist at California State-LA, weighed in an alternative opinion:

“It’s not about the sex act. It’s really about creating variety. They usually do the same acts as they do with their wife or partner. Secondarily it’s about getting more sex,” Lever said.  Two-thirds of men wish they were getting more sex with their partner, while one-third of women do, Lever said. And prostitution provides an outlet for more sex that many men perceive as safer and less complicated than having an affair.

Commenting on high profile busts such as those of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Lever added:

“It certainly seems like these guys show a great deal of arrogance… and they have a lot more at stake than the average joe schmoe, which shows they are either delusional that they won’t get caught or they are truly driven for this act.   Joe schmoe does it too, and he may be sacrificing his marriage, but not his career.”

The author adds some demographics to the story:  The 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey (led by sociologists Edward Laumann and John Gagnon) found that 16 % of men report ever visiting a prostitute, with .6 % of men visiting a prostitute each year.

Over the weekend the New York Times reported on the recent vote by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (or ELCA), the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S. to “allow gay men and lesbians in committed relationships to serve as members of the clergy.”

The vote made the denomination the latest mainline Protestant church to permit such ordinations, contributing to a halting sense of momentum on the issue within liberal Protestantism.

By a vote of 559 to 451, delegates to the denomination’s national assembly in Minneapolis approved a resolution declaring that the church would find a way for people in “publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous same-gender relationships” to serve as official ministers. (The church already allows celibate gay men and lesbians to become members of the clergy.)

The Times called in a sociologist for some additional commentary…

Wendy Cadge, a sociology professor at Brandeis University who has studied Evangelical Lutheran churches grappling with the issue, said, “It does show, to the extent that any mainline denominations are moving, I think they’re moving slowly toward a more progressive direction.”

Describing the context of Friday’s vote, several religion experts likened it to the court decision last year in Iowa legalizing same-sex marriage.

And…

“In the same sense that the Iowa court decision might have opened people’s eyes, causing them to say, ‘Iowa? What? Where?’” said Laura Olson, a professor of political science at Clemson University who has studied mainline Protestantism. “The E.L.C.A. isn’t necessarily quite as surprising in the religious sense, but the message it’s sending is, yes, not only are more Americans from a religious perspective getting behind gay rights, but these folks are not just quote unquote coastal liberals.”

The denomination has struggled with the issue almost since its founding in the late 1980s with the merger of three other Lutheran denominations.

Read more from the New York Times.

Several media outlets including The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail have picked up on new sociological research indicating that “women who hold supervisory positions are more likely to be sexually harassed at work, according to the first-ever, large-scale longitudinal study to examine workplace power, gender and sexual harassment.”

The original press release notes…

The study, [presented] at the 104th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reveals that nearly fifty percent of women supervisors, but only one-third of women who do not supervise others, reported sexual harassment in the workplace. In more conservative models with stringent statistical controls, women supervisors were 137 percent more likely to be sexually harassed than women who did not hold managerial roles. While supervisory status increased the likelihood of harassment among women, it did not significantly impact the likelihood for men.

“This study provides the strongest evidence to date supporting the theory that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination,” said Heather McLaughlin, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota and the study’s primary investigator. “Male co-workers, clients and supervisors seem to be using harassment as an equalizer against women in power.”

The Economic Times and the Globe & Mail ran the release throughout the week. The Globe & Mail conducted a more detailed interview with McLaughlin…

The harassers “aren’t trying to get into relationships [with their bosses], but they’re just trying to exert control over other employees,” said Heather McLaughlin, a University of Minnesota sociologist and the study’s lead author.

The study involved data from the Youth Development Study, which began in 1988 with a sample of 1,010 ninth graders in the St. Paul, Minn., public school district and has continued ever since. More than 500 women responded to the sexual harassment surveys, which were conducted in 2003 and 2004, when the respondents were about 30 years old.

One woman, named Holly, who was the first woman manager at her company, recalled her subordinates joking, “If we had somebody with balls in this position we’d be getting things done.”

Another woman, Marie, who worked as the only female project manager for a contracting company in construction, noted the day an older male subcontractor said to her, “This isn’t the job for a woman.”

After she helped him with some paperwork, Marie said, “I think he just thought I was being a nag and that I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“By objectifying women, it strips them of any power or prestige that they hold in the workplace,” Ms. McLaughlin said.

The article continues…

“It’s the notion that women aren’t welcome, women are less competent, women are not to be trusted with authority, and so on.”

Given that some of the study respondents were responsible for pay raises and advancement opportunities, the findings are somewhat surprising, Ms. McLaughlin said. “It’s kind of counter-intuitive,” she said of the harassment.

So what did guys get out of it?

Ms. McLaughlin said that mostly, men harassed their bosses in order to impress other men at work. She cited a 2002 analysis of “girl watching” by Montana State University professor Beth Quinn.

“She argued that it wasn’t really the women that were the intended audience, but rather other men.”

Ms. McLaughlin said that in the workplace cases, “it’s not that they’re trying to get the women fired or get her to quit her job; it’s about proving your manhood and masculinity to other men.”

Read more.

[Read coverage of the study in the Atlanta Journal Constitution]

[Read additional coverage from UMN News]