Same-Sex Couples May Have More Egalitarian Relationships
http://www.wbur.org/npr/373835114/same-sex-couples-may-have-more-egalitarian-relationships
National Public Radio (NPR) December 29, 2014
LGBTQ Partnering & Families
“Can I watch?” Sometimes women kissing women isn’t about you
Expert Contact: Paula England, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, New York University
pengland@nyu.edu
Release Contact: Virginia Rutter, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, Framingham State University
206 375 4139; vrutter@gmail.com
Is there more going on in the hookup scene than meets (men’s) eyes? The college hookup scene is typically understood as a male-dominated environment-where men are mainly in charge of sexual initiation, parties are often centered around fraternity houses, treating women as sex objects is common, and women engage in sexual displays, including kissing each other, in order to arouse male interest.
Yet, in the forthcoming April 2014 issue of Gender & Society, a team of researchers observes that for some women the super-straight environment of college hookups is also a setting “to explore and to later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities.” Turns out public kissing and threesomes play an important role – and that not all of that sex play is about performing for men’s pleasure.
In a recent survey of college students about hooking up,
- 40 percent of women who called themselves lesbians had had oral sex or intercourse with men;
- Two percent of women who identify as straight report having had oral sex with a woman;
- Compared to straight women, more women who indicated they were not sure about their sexual identities had same-sex sexual experience: 15 percent have given and 18 percent have received oral sex from a woman.
A novel study on same-sex hooking up. The Gender & Society study, “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” took a novel approach to investigating bisexuality and sexual fluidity. Researchers Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor (University of California-Santa Barbara), Shiri Regev-Messalem (Bar Ilan University, Israel), Alison Fogarty (Stanford University), and Paula England (New York University) used the Online College and Social Life Survey (OCSLS) of over 24,000 college students from 21 four-year colleges and universities that was designed to study how college students approach hooking up, dating, and relationships. To this large data set, the researchers added 55 in-depth interviews with women students at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara who had had some romantic or sexual experience with other women, to learn more about same-sex activity occurring in hook-up settings that are mainly understood to be heterosexual.
Study co-author Paula England-who developed the OCSLS study-explained, “‘Hooking up’ was defined in our survey as ‘whatever definition of a hookup you and your friends use,’ but we know from talking to students that what they usually mean by a hookup is some sexual activity-ranging from kissing to intercourse-outside of a committed relationship.”
Hooking up, women with women, and a puzzle. The investigators reported that of the 14,128 women surveyed in the OCSLS, 94 percent identify as heterosexual. Though identifying as “straight,” these women’s behavior did not always line up with that-instead, women had more sexual fluidity.
Because of this sexual fluidity that the women surveyed ended up revealing, the investigators conducted in-depth interviews. In particular, the interviews focused on women who identified as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or some other non-heterosexual identity in order to learn more about how encounters in the hookup scene played a role in developing their current sexual identities. They learned that, since women making out with other women and threesomes between two women and a man are acceptable as a turn-on for men, this allowed women to expand and explore their sexual identities.
As study coauthor Verta Taylor points out, “Some students are embracing fluid identities and calling themselves ‘queer,’ ‘pansexual,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘bi-curious’ or simply refusing any kind of label. The old label bisexual no longer fits because even that term implies that there are only two options: lesbian/gay or straight.”
Women kissing women. In tune with the Katy Perry song, “I Kissed a Girl”, the interviews revealed that for some women, public kissing-typically seen as for the enjoyment of men onlookers-is a key opportunity for exploring same-sex attractions.
Often alcohol played a role in women’s opportunities to explore same-sex attraction, just as it plays a significant role in hooking up in general. While some women who make out with other women in public had a previous same-sex attraction, others told interviewers about experimenting when they had had no previous sexual attraction to women. In sum, the authors note that “Kissing can result from or lead to emotional connections with women. It doesn’t always-but sometimes it leads to more exploration.” The interviews confirmed that public same-sex kissing in the hook up scene is one pathway into same-sex desire and behavior.
Threesomes. About 20 percent of women interviewed for this study reported participating in threesomes. “Threesomes allow same-sex pleasure without the stigma of non-heterosexual identity,” the authors explained. In some cases, women said that threesomes were a way to reduce their anxiety about approaching women on their own. One woman noted, “It’s not clear how you would initiate a relationship with a woman…I’m really inexperienced chasing women, rather more experienced at chasing men.” In other cases, women explained that threesomes were instigated by male partners, but that it led to women following up-solo-with the other woman in the encounter. The authors explain, “Although threesomes may begin with men’s desires, they introduce women to new sexual pleasures or allow them to act on same-sex or bisexual desires.”
What’s it mean? Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at University of Massachusetts, notes that the study is a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on sexuality. “Rupp and colleagues’ article shows us that women’s sexual fluidity can be expressed in a variety of environments, and that the ‘hook-up’ culture does not simply support heterosexuality and male dominance. It is important to recognize the way women consider and act upon their desires, rather than assuming that they cannot escape meeting dominant ideals regarding heterosexuality.”
Coauthor and historian Leila Rupp explains that this may not be so new: She points to intimate sexual relationships between co-wives in polygynous households in China and the Middle East, romantic friends in heterosexual marriages in the Euro-American world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “girlfriends” in avant-garde cultural environments such as Greenwich Village and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. “Bisexual behavior between women has flourished in a variety of societies where women’s same-sex desires and sexual behavior did not pose a threat to the gender order,” explains Rupp. Whether in these historical settings or in the setting of collegiate hook-up culture, women’s same-sex sexuality can flourish in tight conjunction with heterosexuality. What is new in the 21st century setting, however, are the ways in which women can go on to have the opportunity to affirm new identities.
About the Study
Rupp, Leila, Verta Taylor, Shiri Regev-Messalem, Alison Fogarty, and Paula England. 2014. “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” forthcoming in April Gender & Society.
About the Study Authors
Leila Rupp, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, can be reached at lrupp@femst.ucsb.edu.
Verta Taylor, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, can be reached at vtaylor@soc.ucsb.edu.
Alison Fogarty, Stanford University, can be reached at afogarty@stanford.edu.
Paula England, Professor of Sociology, New York University, can be reached at pengland@nyu.edu.
About Gender and Society
Gender & Society is a peer-reviewed journal, focused on the study of gender. It is the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, and was founded in 1987 as an outlet for feminist social science. Currently, it is a top-ranked journal in both sociology and women’s studies. Gender & Society, a journal of Sage Publications, publishes less than 10 percent of all papers submitted to it. For additional commentary, you can also read the Gender & Society blog and follow the journal on twitter: @Gend_Soc.
For more information, contact Gender & Society editor Joya Misra, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts. Misra is also affiliated with Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Labor Studies. Her research and teaching focus primarily on inequality. She can be reached at misra@soc.umass.edu.
Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), currently headquartered at the University of Kansas, works to improve women’s lives through advancing and supporting feminist sociological research, activism and scholars. Founded in 1969, SWS is a nonprofit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members in the United States and overseas. For more information, contact Dr. Joey Sprague, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas and SWS Executive Officer, at jsprague@ku.edu.
About CCF
The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions. For more information on CCF researchers, contact Stephanie Coontz, Co-Chair and Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com.
Children in families with same-sex parents
CCF’s Dawn Braithwaite was on KFOR’s Lincoln Live radio show discussing children in families with same-sex parents. Listen to the interview on their website (after clicking, scroll down and select “Children in Gay Families”).
Lesbian Mystiques
By Judith A. Howard
Professor of Sociology
University of Washington
jhoward@uw.edu
Betty Friedan highlighted the many ways that cultural images and expectations of gender in the 1950s and 60s held women back. The expectations derived most obviously from patriarchy, which Friedan recognized, but also from white supremacy, capitalism, and heterosexism, which she did not. In Friedan’s time the feminine mystique certainly constrained women’s senses of themselves and their possibilities, but at least it recognized women as a group. The “lesbian mystique,” by contrast, denied lesbians even existed. The concept was literally inconceivable. In the 19th century, Queen Victoria is rumored to have flatly proclaimed: “Women don’t do that.”
Of course there were lesbian subcultures and activism throughout the ages, even during the heyday of the feminine mystique. A group of us living in Madison WI at the time, not exactly Friedan’s suburban middle America, organized what we rather inflatedly called a national conference of the National Lesbian Feminist Organization. And there were the womyn’s music festivals, at least one of which continues to this day.
But through most of the 20th century, to the extent that lesbians were recognized at all, they were viewed as masculine, butch, man-hating (ironically) dykes. Femmes were not regarded as similarly lesbian, since they looked like “normal women.” Lesbians were also assumed to be working class – out of the middle class mainstream.
These assumptions were held not only by the larger culture, but also by heterosexual feminists, who were worried that recognition of lesbians would endanger the feminist movement. Friedan herself is infamous for coining the phrase, the “lavender menace” in the late 1960s, when the National Organization of Women excluded lesbians.
Perhaps in reaction to this invisibility and intolerance, lesbians in the 1970s held images and self-definitions that were also limited in some ways. There was an essentialism about 1970s lesbians, evident in an assumption that lesbian behavior predicted a lifetime of lesbian preference and identity. Other even more profoundly unrecognized identities, especially trans identities, were conflated within lesbianism, complicating the presumed “essences” all the more.
These essentialisms have changed markedly in the 21st century. A recentNew York Times essay by Michael Schulman, “Generation LGBTQIA” (January 9, 2013), makes clear that today we recognize a far broader and more fluid dimension of sexual possibilities. One’s sexual partners are not assumed to always fit one gender profile: they change, they play. Whether or not this fluidity will grow into more stable patterns as these women (and men) age is an open question.
More generally, there has been an astonishingly rapid transformation in public opinion about gay men and lesbians in recent years. In November, for the first time, three U.S. states approved same-sex marriage by popular vote. Meanwhile, Minnesota defeated the same kind of anti same-sex marriage measure that had passed everywhere it was introduced in the previous 15 years. We can now marry in a number of states, including my own. We can give birth to children; we can adopt children. We can serve openly as Presidents and Provosts of major institutions of higher education. We can serve openly in the military.
I do not mean to suggest that discrimination against lesbians is a thing of the past. Still, the degree of prejudice and ignorance has been dramatically reduced (in the U.S., certainly not in all global regions), through exactly the kind of consciousness-raising and collective action that Friedan helped pioneer for the women’s movement as a whole.
Feminine Mystique Symposium: Feminism and Families Today
On the 50th Anniversary of The Feminine Mystique, Council on Contemporary Families Scholars identify what’s changed—and what hasn’t.
Table of Contents
Keynote: Four myths about Betty Friedan and feminism
By Stephanie Coontz
The Youth and Beauty Mystique: Its Costs for Women and Men
By Paula England
Sexual Mystiques: Do we still like it old school?
By Virginia Rutter
The Unfeminine Mystique: Stereotypes about African-American Women
By Shirley Hill
Lesbian Mystiques
By Judith A. Howard
Latinas’ Mystique
By Lorena Garcia
The Rise of the Motherhood Mystique
By Cameron Macdonald
About CCF
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. Our members include demographers, economists, family therapists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists, as well as other family social scientists and practitioners.
Founded in 1996 and now based in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, the Council’s mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met. To fulfill that mission, the Council holds annual conferences, open to the public, and issues periodic briefing papers and fact sheets.
It’s Not Just City Folk: Gays and Lesbians Experience Striking Gains in Acceptance in All Regions and Subgroups of America
At a time of dramatic change in attitudes towards gays and lesbians in America, a new study released this month in Gender & Society highlights the diversity of gay and lesbian experiences in America. “Midwest or Lesbian? Gender, Rurality, and Sexuality,” by University of Nebraska sociologist Emily Kazyak, puts the lives of rural gays and lesbians under the microscope. Almost 10 percent of gays and more than 15 percent of lesbians in the United States live in rural areas. While 25 percent of same-sex couples are raising children, same-sex couples in rural areas are even more likely than their urban counterparts to have children.
As University of Massachusetts sociologist Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society, puts it, “the rapidity of changes in attitudes toward gays and lesbians has been stunning. Kazyak’s article helps bring into focus how greater acceptance of gays and lesbians is not simply a phenomenon of big cities – but reflects changes and opportunities in rural communities as well.”
How much change? Researchers at Sociologists for Women in Society and the Council on Contemporary Families recently surveyed how much and how rapidly gays and lesbians have been integrated into mainstream life. Consider these changes in the past year alone:
- In November, for the first time, three U.S. states approved same-sex marriage by popular vote. Just three years ago, Maine voters defeated same-sex marriage by a margin of 53 to 47 percent. This year they reversed themselves, approving it by 53 to 47 percent. Maine joins a growing list of rural states including Iowa and Vermont that recognize same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, Minnesota defeated the same kind of anti same-sex marriage measure that had passed everywhere it was introduced in the previous 15 years.
- While California defeated same-sex marriage in 2008, a February 29, 2012, Field poll shows that if the measure were submitted again, it would win. Today a record 59 percent of registered voters in California approve same-sex marriage.
- In numerous public opinion surveys, including one from November 2012, the past decade’s rise in approval for same-sex marriage in all regions of the country is evident: even the Midwest and the South, where gay and lesbian rights are less popular, have seen a 14 percent increase in approval for same-sex marriage.
- In 2009 Hispanics opposed same-sex marriage by a large margin. In 2012 exit polls, 59 percent of Hispanics supported it. In just the four months between July and October 2012, the number of African Americans opposing same-sex marriage fell from 51 percent to just 39 percent.
- White evangelical Christians are seeing a dramatic generational shift, with 40 percent of those under 30 supporting same-sex marriage, compared to only 18 percent of those over 30.
- And on December 6, a new poll by USA Today found that almost three-quarters of Americans 18 to 29 years old now support same-sex marriage, while more than a third of Americans say their views about same-sex marriage have changed significantly over the last several years, with approval rising in every age group.
Are these changes significant for gays and lesbians living in rural areas? Dr. Kazyak’s Gender & Society study, published by Sage Publications, offers answers, based on her examination of the experiences of gays and lesbians who live in rural areas (with populations as small as 2500 people). The University of Nebraska-based researcher focused on rural areas in the Midwest. She finds that rural gays and lesbians enjoy more acceptance than stereotypes about rural life would suggest. In fact, Dr. Kazyak reports that lesbians in rural areas can pick and choose from a wider range of gender behaviors than their urban counterparts. Largely because of the tradition of shared labor in farm families, behaviors and activities that would be considered unfeminine or “butch” among urban women are more widespread and meet greater approval in rural areas.
Dr. Kazyak describes how rural lesbians reported the gender flexibility available to them. One lesbian described the kind of upbringing that is common in rural areas: “I helped my dad a lot on the farm, raising…livestock…I really enjoyed driving the farm machinery! It just empowered me, driving a tractor or truck.” Another woman stated, “Tomboyishness was somewhat more acceptable than it might be somewhere else.” A third pointed out that “farm girls might dress up for the prom, but they also could slaughter a hog.” This flexibility allows lesbians who are drawn to masculine activities or who dress in masculine ways to find more acceptance than they might in an urban or suburban setting.
On the other hand, Dr. Kazyak discovered that gay men felt required to appear more macho than their urban counterparts. One man she interviewed commented on how few rural gay men display the mannerisms that are sometimes associated with gay life in metropolitan areas. He noted how surprised he initially was by “getting flirted with what I thought were straight men….[T]hey weren’t straight men, they were gay men, but they looked very straight, they acted very masculine…. It was, like, this wasn’t what I thought of as a gay man. So being in this town really changed how I thought of myself and the gay community.” Both rural gays and lesbians thought their lives and identities were much different than their urban counterparts.
Dr. Kazyak noted, “My research on rural gays and lesbians shows us that the lives, behaviors, and self-presentations of gays and lesbians are more varied and complex than portrayed on TV, even in shows such as ‘Modern Family,’ where one of the gay characters grew up on a farm. The rural Midwest is not a place we typically associate with gay and lesbian life, but my research shows us how gays and lesbians are increasingly out and accepted in small towns across the country.”
Dr. Kazyak adds, “Times have changed for gays and lesbians throughout the United States; but there are still many challenges, from the fact that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation remains legal at the federal level and in many states, to the alarmingly high rate of homelessness among gay and lesbian youth.”
Article: Kazyak, Emily. 2012. “Midwest or Lesbian? Gender, Rurality, and Sexuality.” Gender & Society 26 (6): 825-848.
Author Contact
Emily Kazyak is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research addresses the variations in identities and family relationships of sexual minorities across cultural and legal contexts. In one of her current projects, she examines legal decision making in LGBTQ families and how the lack of legal protection these families often face impacts their well-being. She can be reached at ekazyak2@unl.edu or 402-937-9057.
[divider style=”shadow”]About Gender & Society
Gender & Society is a peer-reviewed journal, focused on the study of gender. It is the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, and was founded in 1987 as an outlet for feminist social science. Currently, it is a top-ranked journal in both sociology and women’s studies. Gender & Society, a journal of Sage Publications, publishes less than 10 percent of all papers submitted to it. For more information, contact Gender & Society editor Joya Misra, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts. Misra is also affiliated with Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Labor Studies. Her research and teaching focus primarily on inequality. She can be reached at misra@soc.umass.edu.
About SWS
Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), currently headquartered at Southern Connecticut State University, works to improve women’s lives through advancing and supporting feminist sociological research, activism and scholars. Founded in 1969, SWS is a nonprofit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members in the United States and overseas. For more information, contact Dr. Shirley Jackson, Professor of Sociology at Southern Connecticut State University and SWS Executive Officer, at swseo@socwomen.org.
About CCF
The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of family researchers, mental health and social practitioners, and clinicians, dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families. For more information on CCF researchers, contact Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com.
