How We Ask about Gender and Sexuality Matters More Than You Think

Cross-posted at Social (In)Queery

When nationally representative surveys first started appearing that addressed issues of gender and sexual identities and practices, most people had the same question.  It was some derivation of, “How many gay/lesbian/bisexual/trans*/etc. people are there?”  And, from a sociological perspective, it’s a question often associated with a fundamental misunderstanding of how complicated a question like that actually is.

In 1994, Edward Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert Michael and Stuart Michaels published an incredible book on one of the first nationally representative surveys of the American population concerning issues of sexuality, sexual behavior, and sexual orientation–The Social Organization of Sexuality.  In their chapter, “Homosexuality,” they begin a brief section of the book on the “dimensions of sexuality” that encompasses some of my favorite findings out of the study.  In it, they write,

To quantify or count something requires unambiguous definition of the phenomenon in question.  And we lack this in speaking of homosexuality.  When people ask how many gays there are, they assume that everyone knows exactly what is meant. (here: 290)

Measuring the size of the LGBT population is difficult for more than a few reasons.  I spend a week on the considerations of measuring sexuality in my Sociology of Sexualities course.  During that week, we deal primarily with discussing the size of the LGBT population in the U.S., how this is measured, and both how and why measurements are likely skewed.  Ritch Savin-Williams has a wonderful short analysis of how challenging it is to estimate the size of the LGB population (here) and Gary Gates’ estimates of the LGBT population are some of the most widely accepted.

Are Class Differences in Parenting Style Disappearing?*

By: Tristan Bridges and Tara Tober

–Reposted at Huffington Post—

An interest in ensuring communities have access to safe areas for children to play has produced a wild array of solutions. One of the solutions in our community is the development of what urban planners call “pocket parks.” These are small, repurposed lots in communities—torn down and built back up again as playgrounds, picnic areas, and small patches of grass on which children might play and families might congregate. Pocket parks increase property values surrounding them and provide more access to public space to spend leisure time. They have the added bonus of offering some infrastructure that might promote community.

When we first moved to Brockport, New York, some of the first friends we met were other parents we navigated on pocket park playgrounds near our home. Our children were around the same age as theirs, we were similarly neurotic about what they were up to on the playground, we seemed to have similar feelings about what other parents ought to be doing with their kids. We didn’t discuss this openly. We didn’t have to. All this is to say that when we met other parents at the park and decided to try to befriend some of those we met, we shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that we shared more in common with them than parenting philosophies. We shared similar upbringings, class backgrounds, levels of education. We even had similar kinds of jobs, politics, aspirations, and hobbies.

Annette Lareau’s ethnography of class reproduction—Unequal Childhoods—tells the story of how U.S. parents from different class backgrounds “parent” in different ways. And it’s not the “better” or “worse” story that gets played out in popular culture. All of the parents Lareau studied want to help their kids find happiness and thrive. They just don’t go about fulfilling these goals in exactly the same ways. Middle-class family life had a qualitatively different flavor for working-class and poor family life. Lareau refers to the parenting that middle-class parents in her study practiced as “concerted cultivation.” As the name suggests, Lareau found that middle-class parents were primarily concerned with cultivating their children’s various talents, helping them find and voice their own opinions, reasoning with them, and were consistently preoccupied with their children’s development. These families were constantly on the go; the children were enrolled in a fantastic array of activities and the families were extremely busy.

By contrast, working-class and poor families had incredibly different daily rhythms associated with their families. Lareau refers to the parenting practiced by working-class and poor families as “the accomplishment of natural growth.” It wasn’t that these families did not set boundaries for their children; they cared deeply about their children, set limits on their activities, and more. But, within these limits, Lareau found that working-class and poor parents provided a lot of room for their children to spontaneously grow. They didn’t have the same schedule of organized activities; their kids played outside a lot with other children (often, though not always, outside the watchful gaze of their parents); and the parents were much more likely to use clear directives when communicating with their children than to reason with their kids in the ways Lareau observed middle-class parents doing.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both styles. Concerted cultivation promotes a sense of entitlement that allows middle-class children to learn to navigate institutions seamlessly (as they simply interact with so many from a young age). But they also learn that they can bend the rules in most institutions, make special requests, and more. The accomplishment of natural growth, by contrast, might afford children greater independence and may be more likely to produce authentic friendship and community. In network terms, you might imagine the accomplishment of natural growth as producing small, but incredibly dense networks—the kinds of networks that might help you get a babysitter last minute, let you borrow a car, or watch your children while you shop for groceries. Concerted cultivation, on the other hand, seems more likely to foster more extensive networks, stretching far beyond your neighborhood and the community physically surrounding your home—but, we’d also imagine, given the hectic schedules, these networks are likely to be less dense and ties between friends and families more weak. This might make it harder to find a sitter, but these networks might be ideally situated to help get your child into the college they want and, later on, these networks have been shown to help people find jobs. So, Lareau’s study illustrates one small, but incredibly important way that class reproduction takes place.

But, here’s the rub: we don’t think middle-class families are satisfied yet. The Atlantic recently published a new article on parenting by Hanna Rosin—“Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone!” Rosin joins a chorus of popular critics, psychologists, and more about the dangers of “over-parenting.” Apparently, parents today are overly worried about their children’s safety, attempting to anticipate and protect children from risks around every imaginable corner. These worries have shifted the landscape of contemporary childhood in a diversity of ways. With Lareau’s study in mind, it’s probably important to say that when Rosin is talking about “parents,” she’s not talking about all parents—just those who practice concerted cultivation.

Rosin writes about a playground’ish area in North Wales that is just shy of an acre of land. Referred to as “The Land,” it’s a bit different from what you might be thinking when you hear “playground.” It’s filled with… well, it’s full of junk as far as we can tell. Children are running around, jumping on, throwing, breaking and playing with all manner of dangerous items. The older children at The Yard light fires in tin drums, listen to music with explicit lyrics, and more. The younger children jump on dirty old mattresses, off of piles of wooden pallets and dirty old car tires, and play in the mud. Rosin refers to the area as an “adventure playground.” There’s an elaborate system of supervision such that very few adults are there. In fact, supervisors are trained to attend to children in the area with a sort of “don’t interact unless you absolutely must” rule guiding most of their interactions with children. The adult “playworkers” in The Yard watch the children, but almost never intervene.

The whole idea behind The Yard and adventure playgrounds is that reasonable risks are an important part of childhood development. And, as you might suspect, parents practicing concerted cultivation might have a different assessment of “reasonable” than the creators of The Yard. There’s a litany of pop psychology written to middle-class parents, not-so-subtly asking them to “back off” a bit and highlighting the benefits for children’s development. Dan Kindlon’s Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children in an Indulgent Age is among the most popular. While he’s not using Lareau’s language, Kindlon and others are basically calling middle-class parents to check the “concerted-ness” of their cultivation a bit. But, based on the story, we gathered that this was an area in which middle-class children were playing. It’s not the U.S., but these are kids who are supposed to be over-scheduled, extremely busy, and “over-parented.” And adventure playgrounds exist in the U.S. as well. Here’s one in Berkeley—if you look them up online, you’ll find most are in affluent cities with liberal and educated reputations and populations. But, are these playgrounds part of some larger cultural trend wherein middle- and upper middle-class parents are turning to accomplishment of natural growth-model parenting?

We don’t think so. We suspect that what might be going on is better termed “the concerted cultivation of natural growth.” A close inspection of the pictures accompanying Rosin’s article show that the boundaries of The Yard are fences. It’s not just unstructured play these children are engaging in. That’s the sort of activity that Lareau found among working-class and poor children. Rather, we suspect that what’s going on here is something more aptly called “structured unstructured play.” Children are engaging in daring activities—the kinds that might foster independence and a sense of self-sufficiency—but this isn’t exactly the same thing. There are adult workers around who are there to make sure that children’s unstructured play follows an elaborate set of rules for unstructured play designed by a team of experts on the topic.

While Lareau discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the two parenting styles, what we’re calling “the concerted cultivation of natural growth” appears to be a style attempting to mitigate the negative side effects of middle-class parenting. For instance, Lareau found that middle-class kids’ schedules are so packed that spontaneity is less possible for them, the fights Lareau witnessed among middle-class siblings were more severe, and many of the children were more disconnected from the communities in which they lived (unless some of their various activities happened very close to home). But, this transformation (if such a transformation is actually underway) produces an interesting question—one that’s unanswered in the research as far as we know. Are the benefits of the accomplishment of natural growth possible if you attempt to achieve such a parenting style in a concerted way? Our suspicion is that the concerted cultivation of natural growth won’t work in precisely the same way as the accomplishment of natural growth. We’re also not certain just how different these practices are from concerted cultivation more generally.

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*This post is not based on research.  It’s just an idea in which we are interested.  And perhaps there’s some research on this issue of which we are unaware.

Violence and Masculinity Threat

By: Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Just under two weeks ago, in Milford, Connecticut, Chris Plaskon asked Maren Sanchez to attend prom with him at the end of the year at Jonathan Law High School.  They’d known each other since 6^th grade.  Maren said no.  Witnesses told authorities she declined and told Chris she would be attending the dance with her boyfriend (here). Chris knew Maren had a boyfriend and, likely, that she’d be attending with him. After being turned down, Chris threw his hands around Maren’s throat, pushed her down a set of stairs, and cut and stabbed her with a kitchen knife he’d brought to school that day.  It was April 25, 2014.  Maren got to school just a bit after 7:00 that day and before 8:00, she was dead.

This tragic, almost unfathomable violence reminds us of so many stories of adolescent male violence over the past couple decades. Jackson Katz discusses a seeming epidemic of violence among young, white men in his new film, Tough Guise 2.  In analyzing the tragedies of school shootings, Katz tells us that we need to think about these tragedies as contemporary forms of masculinity. When young men have their masculinity sullied, threatened or denied, they respond by reclaiming masculinity through a highly recognizable masculine practice: violence. When events like this happen, it’s easy to paint the young men who perpetuate these crimes as psychologically disturbed, as—importantly—unlike the rest of us.  But, stories like Chris Plaskon follow what has become a predictable pattern.

Sociologists investigating similar phenomena address this as a form of “social identity threat.”  The general idea is that when you threaten someone’s social identity, and they care, they respond by over-demonstrating qualities that illustrate membership in that identity.  Michael Kimmel writes about a classic example:

I have a standing bet with a friend that I can walk onto any playground in America where 6 year-old boys are happily playing and by asking one question, I can provoke a fight.  That question is simple: “Who’s a sissy around here?” (here: 131)

While you might think Kimmel’s offering easy money here, he’s making a larger point.  By asking the question, Kimmel is inviting someone’s masculinity to be threatened and assuming that this will require someone to demonstrate their masculinity in dramatic fashion.  Sociologists have a name for this phenomenon: masculinity threat. New research relying on experimental designs suggests there’s a lot more to these claims than we might have thought.

On “Boxing In”–Pictures, Children, and Identity

Photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s project on children around the world depicted with their most prized possessions was recently published. It’s an adorable set of photos of children with odd collections of items they feel define them. The photos are collected in a volume—Toy Stories: Photos of Children From Around the World and Their Favorite Things.

Initially, I was reminded of JeungMee Yoon’s “The Pink and Blue Project” (here), where she took pictures of girls surrounded by all of the pink things they owned and boys surrounded by their blue clothes, toys, and décor. Some of what struck me was the global uniformity in the objects surrounding children. It’s a powerful statement of globalization to see that children are growing up all around the world with some of the same cultural influences: from characters, to colors, to cars and weapons, and more.

But, at a larger level, I think this project reflects one way we like to think about identity: that each of us has one of them and that it is established early on and that it (or elements of “it”) stick, such that we can recognize vestiges of our childhood identities in our adult selves. Indeed, when I’m explaining Freud to students, I often start by summarizing what I take as Freud’s central insight—“Life history matters.” It matters for who we are, who we might become, and more.  But, “life history” is rarely captured in snap-shots.  We think of it this way–but out identities are projects that unfold in time.  Some things make larger marks than others, but identifying exactly what is important and why is often more difficult than we like to think.

Masculinity, Gender (Non)Conformity, and Queer Visibility

by Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe

Originally posted at Girl W/ Pen

Coco Layne got a haircut.  She shaved both sides of her head, but left the top at a length that falls roughly to the bottom of her face.  As a feminist fashion, art, and lifestyle blogger, she was quick to recognize the ways that she could subtly re-style her hair and dramatically alter her presentation of gender (here).   So, in classic feminist art blogger style, she produced an art project depicting her experience.  Coco’s project—“Warpaint”—comes on the heels of several other photographic projects dealing critically with gender: JJ Levine’s series of photographs—“Alone Time”—depicting one person posing as both a man and a woman in a single photograph (digitally altered to include both images); the media frenzy over Casey Legler, a woman who garnered attention, recognition and contracts modeling as a man; the Japanese lingerie company that recently went viral by using a man’s body to sell a push-up bra, just to name a few.

Along with these other photographic projects on gender, Warpaint is critical commentary on what gender is, where it comes from, how flexible it is, what this flexibility means, and what gender (non)conformity has to do with sexuality.  Coco’s work provides important lessons about how gender is produced just below the radar of most people most of the time.  These projects all point out the extensive work that goes into doing gender in a way that is recognizable by others. Indeed, recognition by others is key to doing gender “correctly.” It is what scholar Judith Butler calls performativity or the way in which people are compelled to engage in an identifiably gendered performance. When people fail to do this, Butler argues that they are abject, not culturally decipherable and thus subject to all sorts of social sanctions. Butler points out that the performance of gender itself produces a belief that something, someone, or some authentic, inalienable gendered self lies behind the performance.  These photographic projects lay bear the fiction that there is this sort of inevitably gendered self behind the performance of gender.  This is precisely why these projects produce such discussion and, for some, discomfort.  It makes (some of) us uncomfortable by challenging our investments in and folk theories surrounding certain ways of thinking about gender and sexuality.

Much of the commentary the Warpaint project focused on Coco’s ability to get a retail job when she displayed her body in ways depicted on the bottom row.  Indeed her experience reflects research indicates that different workplaces reward particular gender appearances and practices. Kristen Schilt’s research on transmen at work, for instance, highlights the way that performances of masculinity get translated into workplace acceptance for these men. Yet doing gender in a way that calls into question its naturalness can put people (including those who do not identify as gender queer or tans) at risk. In Jespersen v Harrah, the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals held that female employees can be required to wear makeup as a condition of employment (in a workplace where men are not required to wear it).  While recent decisions have been more favorable to trans identified employees, most states do not have employment law or school policies protecting gender non-conforming individuals.  Simply put, most states do not have laws addressing —to use Coco’s language—gender expression.

What Can Testicles tell us about Dads?

 

Cross-posted at Girl W/ Pen

So… I’m going to go ahead and say that this is the wrong question to be asking. This question proceeds from a belief that testicles CAN tell us something about dads. A new study is making the rounds in the news that addresses the relationship between testicle size and parenting behavior among men (well… 70 men… not randomly sampled…). The paper is entitled “Testicular Volume is Inversely Correlated with Nurturing-Related Brain Activity in Human Fathers” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. I can think of more than a few titles that might have been catchier (and clearly, journalists reporting on the research had a similar idea).

In fairness, I don’t have access to the complete study (though I’ve requested it). But the problem is also in how this study gains attention in the media. It’s a great example of how a correlation combined with cultural stereotypes and assumptions can run wild. When correlations combine with popular stereotypes concerning a particular topic (like, say, the relationship between testosterone and any number of socially undesirable behaviors), questions about the science sometimes get lost because it looks like something was “scientifically proven” that we already wanted to believe anyway.

So, here’s the relationship the researchers found: men with smaller testicles tested more positively for nurturance-related responses in their brains when shown pictures of their children. The study reports that men with smaller testicles had roughly three times the level of brain activity in the area of the brain associated with nurturing. These men (with smaller testicles) were also men with lower levels of testosterone—something that has previously been shown to be associated with nurturing behavior among men.*

You Are You – Bending Gender at a Children’s Camp

Slate ran a story last week about a camp for boys who prefer to bend gender.  Photographer Lindsay Morris has created a photo-documentary of the boys at camp.  She gives the camp a pseudonym (for obvious reasons).  She calls it “You Are You.”  I like avoidance of gendered pronouns in the title she selected.  The images are wonderful.  They depict an space in which playing with gender boundaries, meanings, and more is the norm, not the exception.

Children become socialized into the world we know in various ways.  And I believe that if we want the boys, girls, and more from our children’s generation to live in a world with less gender and sexual inequality, we have to not only teach them to question and push boundaries, we have to be willing to let them teach us.  Children still ask questions about things that we might have learned to accept without thinking.  And we can learn a great deal about gender and the potential for change from examining the aspects of life they might be better positioned to question than we are.

In a recent post with D’Lane Compton, I shared a story of a young girl coming up and pointing at my son in the grocery store, asking her mother a series of questions about him that ended with, “Will he always be a boy?”  The mother assured her daughter that he would, and I couldn’t help but think, “Well, with repeated acts like that over the course of his life, he’d certainly think twice before deciding otherwise.”  I didn’t share these thoughts with her or her child, but it was an experience that left a mark (on me anyway).  At You Are You, it seems as though that’s not a question considered worthy of asking or answering—at least when they’re at camp.

“Are You Man Enough to Be a Nurse?” Campaign Posters

By: Tristan Bridges and Sarah Mosseri

Cross-posted at The Fifth Floor

Beliefs about inherent differences between men and women are pervasive.  Thinking about men and women in opposition to one another is a belief system, and one in which our culture puts a great deal of stock.  Gender differences are promoted by popular culture and are subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) reproduced through our basic institutions such as the family, education, and the military. So-called “natural differences” are also called upon to justify and reinforce gendered divisions of labor by suggesting that women and men are somehow naturally suited to different kinds of work.

As with most socially constructed distinctions, the notion of “separate but equal” does not apply here.  The prototypical “feminine” work is care work (e.g., teacher, nurse, social worker, flight attendant), and professions organized around “care” account for a huge proportion of women’s paid work.  Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos (here) report that roughly one third of the 66,000,000 women in the formal labor force in the early 2000’s could be accounted for by only 10 (of the 503) occupations listed on the U.S. Census!  Not much has changed in more recent history either.

Now recognized as “occupational ghettos”, these female-dominated care professions are associated with a great deal of work, lower levels of cultural status and prestige, and often less pay as well.  As a phenomenon, occupational segregation may well account for the majority of the gender wage gap.  According to Maria Charles and David Grusky (here), occupational segregation persists less because we think of men as better and more deserving of the higher status and higher paying jobs and more because of our collective investment in the idea that men and women are simply naturally suited to different sorts of work.

Nursing is one example of this.  An area of care work, nursing is a female-dominated occupation that has suffered from the effects of gendered devaluation—an issue that has made it difficult to recruit men into the field. As Paula England argues, “Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have little incentive to take on female activities or jobs” (here).

Intending to challenge the femininity of nursing and to directly target men for recruitment into the field, the Oregon Center for Nursing (OCN) launched the “Are You Man Enough To Be A Nurse” campaign.

Never Gender a Book by its Cover

Book covers are gendered spaces.  Not only authors names (one reason I’ve always been fond of using first initials rather than first names), but the colors, designs, scripts, and more are deeply gendered symbols.  Author Maureen Johnson tweeted about getting a lot of comments from men saying that they’d love to read her books, but require a “non-girly cover” to do so.  Johnson’s book covers have some pretty characteristic “feminine” features, from the women depicted on them, to the script used for the titles, to the colors, and more (see below for a sample).

Johnson challenged her readers to craft masculine covers for books with feminine covers and feminine covers for books with masculine covers.  She called the project “Coverflip,” and it spawned quite a bit of support (check out the #coverflip hashtag for more on the story in Huffington Post here).  Johnson wrote about it in this way:

Imagine that book was written by an author of the OPPOSITE GENDER. Or a genderqueer author. Imagine all the things you think of when you think GIRL book or BOY book or GENDERLESS book (do they EXIST?). And I’m not saying that these categorizations are RIGHT—but make no mistake, they’re there… Now, as a mental exercise, imagine [the author is a different gender]. The book has the same exact topic. Does the cover look like this? (here)

The call produced a stream of submissions.  To the right and left are two of Johnson’s books flipped.

The fact is, we do judge books by their covers.  Cover art matters.  So too does the gender of the author, the author’s name, the title, and more.  Covers are one way publishers can communicate to potential readers “what kind of book” a particular book is and who the intended audience might be.  I like to imagine people coming across #coverflip and thinking, “Well I’d never read that book… Buuuuutttttt… I’d read it with that cover.”

The Geography of Love (and Hate)

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) created an image of a pink equal sign on a red background to signify support for gay marriage as the Supreme Court began meeting to consider the future of same-sex marriage in the U.S. The image was promoted by HRC in a variety of ways, and if your friend group is anything like mine, you probably saw facebook go red around the end of March in 2013. The meme took on a variety fo different forms, but the HRC image was the foundation. Martha Stewart’s iteration was my personal favorite (the red velvet cake to the right).

Facebook noticed the trend too. But can we measure support for same-sex marriage with facebook profile pictures? Not exactly. Millions of U.S. facebookers change their profile picture on any given day. Heck, I have a few friends overly fond of selfies who change their profile pictures more than once a day. But, on Tuesday, March 26^th—one day after HRC started the campaign urging people to change their profile pictures—2.7 million more Americans changed their profile pictures than normal. This is about 120% more than normal. Facebook was able to show that there was a strong correlation between this increase and the specific time that HRC started asking facebook users to change their profile pictures. They also showed that facebook profile picture updates were more likely among younger Americans (under 40 years old).

This is consistent with demographic data on shifts in American opinions about same-sex marriage and sexual equality more generally. For instance, a recent report released by the Pew Center documented that about 50% of Americans favor the legalization of same-sex marriage. But this conceals generational discrepancies in support like the fact that 70% of individuals born after 1980 favor same-sex marriage compared with less than 40% of baby boomers.