Contexts

Last year, Katha Pollitt, the longtime columnist at The Nation, received the American Sociological Association’s award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues. One of the country’s leading political commentators, Pollitt is the author of seven books, including two volumes of poetry. She is currently writing a book about the abortion conflict in the United States. Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients and the Rest of Us. She regularly blogs on reproductive politics at RHRealitycheck.org, Huffington Post, and elsewhere.

Carole Joffe: Tell us about the pathway that led you to The Nation, where you are, as the American Sociological Association (ASA) award statement put it, “a serious gadfly on the social consciousness of the public!”

Katha Pollitt: Sometimes I feel my career began in the Middle Ages. The other night I was at a book event for about 20 feminist journalists, where I was only one of two people over 40. I was the only one whose career began in paper media and basically stayed there. I started writing book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere soon after I graduated from college, and, along with my poetry publications, that led me to The Nation, where I was the literary editor in the early 1980s. I’ve stayed there ever since. Before I began my column, I was an associate editor for the front section.

The Nation is a great home for a columnist. I have a great deal of freedom to write whatever I want, to develop my own voice and style, to have fun. At The Nation we assume that readers are intelligent and knowledgeable, writers don’t have to spell everything out every time they write, as if the reader had just awoken from a coma. I have had fantastic editors who make my column better than it would otherwise be. I should always take their suggestions! The balancing of poetry and political prose is a struggle for me. Poetry tends to lose out.

CJ: Speak about your relationship to sociology and the social sciences in general. In your writings, you make periodic use of social science research that you find relevant—but at the same time, you do not hesitate to criticize academic writing you find irrelevant or inaccessible to the general reader. In particular, what is your overall assessment of academic feminism and how useful this field has been to women in the “real world”?

KP: Academic writing is often turgid and jargon-ridden. Sociology is far from the worst offender! At least sociology, like anthropology, is often about real people the author has often actually spent time with. A great ethnographic work is like a wonderful novel: what is it like to be these people and live under those conditions? How does the world look to them? What has made them what they are? What are the concrete effects of social policy? At the ASA, a man came up to me after my little talk where I had praised sociology and said, “The kind of sociology you like has very little status in the profession. These days it’s all about numbers.”

All the social sciences seem to have economics envy these days, don’t they? Feminist scholarship has revolutionized every field: history, literary studies, biography, psychology, medicine, law, biology, theology, philosophy and sociology too. Of course, not every male scholar realizes that! A lot of them trundle along as if nothing has changed.

Academic feminism has had practical effects. Think of the way Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight, to choose just one example, has shaped the discourse around body image, gender, eating disorders and obesity, or the way Dorothy Roberts’ Killing the Black Body has complicated discussions of foster care and adoption. Feminist theory—or “theory” as it is often called—seems less illuminating to me, partly because it is divorced from other disciplines and from empirical research. For example, can you really understand why we invaded Iraq by studying the masculinist metaphors used to describe it: penetration, domination, dropping bombs being like playing a video game, etc.? Domestic U.S. politics, the economics of oil, and the foreign policy objectives of the Bush Administration strike me as getting us closer to understanding what went on.

CJ: A consistent theme in your writing is the status of the feminist movement, both in the United States and elsewhere. What is your sense of contemporary feminism and its ability to address the longstanding generational and racial tensions?

KP: I actually think the feminist movement is coming back from the doldrums. Thanks to the Internet, young feminists are finding each other: there are dozens of websites, like Feministing, Feministe, and Jezebel. There’s quite a bit of activism, too, especially around sexual violence, reproductive rights, body issues and misogyny in pop culture. Today’s young feminism has an edgy, sexy, sarcastic vibe—think of Slut-walk [covered in this issue of Contexts].

That tone puts off some older women, and some younger women too, but it also draws in women who thought of feminism as dowdy and pleasure-denying. Of course the Republicans have helped a lot here. When candidates talk about legitimate rape and pregnancy from rape as part of God’s plan, when Rush Limbaugh and his ditto heads call women sluts for using birth control, that gets women’s attention.

CJ: Another major focus of your writing is abortion, and you have written (brilliantly, in my view) about the abortion rights movement, the anti-abortion movement and the predicament of abortion providers and patients alike. What have you tried to accomplish in your new book on the topic?

KP: I think the pro-choice movement has been much too defensive for too long. We talk endlessly about the hard cases—rape, incest, life and health of the mother— and it’s important to remind people about them, because anti-choicers want to ban those abortions too. At the same time, those represent maybe 10 percent of the more than 1 million abortions that take place every year. My thesis in a nutshell: we need to talk about abortion as a normal part of reproductive life, and access to it as a positive social good. It’s a good thing that women don’t drop out of school or work because a condom broke or they forgot their pill; that they plan and time their pregnancies; that they stop having kids when they’ve had as many as they feel they can raise well. It’s outrageous that women are expected to be at the mercy of a stray sperm.

Similarly, we need to complicate the way we talk about the abortion decision. Sometimes it’s difficult, sure, but a lot of the time it’s simple. Women shouldn’t be made to feel guilty if they don’t agonize over whether they should have a baby just because they happened to get pregnant.

CJ: Give us your reflections on the 2012 elections, especially with respect to the issues that most preoccupy you in your writing, such as reproductive politics, and the “war on women” more generally. Do you agree with those writers, such as Maureen Dowd, who, in response to the Democratic victories, have proclaimed that “the cultural wars are over”?

KP: Don’t you hate it that what we call “the culture wars” is actually a struggle over social justice, civil rights and civil liberties? It’s like the way news about breast cancer or domestic violence goes in the “style” section, just because it’s about women. Birth control is not some frill. It is as much health care as any other medicine or medical device—a lot more important than some of them! Abortion rights and access are totally bound up with women’s equality, including women’s economic equality, which is not a cultural issue. Gay marriage is about equality for sexual minorities, about social inclusion, and about redefining marriage away from the old patriarchal/religious model. What music to play at the gay wedding—that’s a cultural issue.

The 2012 election was a real rebuke to the Tea Party ultra-right and to the flagrant misogyny of the Republican “war on women.” But let’s not go overboard: Claire McCaskill [of Missouri] might well have lost to a more circumspect anti-choice right-winger than Todd “legitimate rape” Akin; she might even have lost had he not made that much-publicized unfortunate remark. The same was true in conservative Indiana, where a Democrat given little chance of winning took the senate seat after Republican Richard Mourdock said pregnancy from rape was part of God’s plan. For the presidential contest, the gender gap was the biggest ever. But let’s not forget Republicans still control the House and enough Senate seats to filibuster and otherwise block much legislation. Just the other day Senate Republicans, led by Rick Santorum, blocked confirmation of the UN treaty on disability rights on the non-sensical grounds that it might someday prevent home schooling.

On abortion rights, as you recently wrote, much of the action is in the states. Anti-choicers have done a very good job of making abortion hard to get in much of the South and Midwest: in five states there is only one abortion clinic. Republicans did well at the state level in 2012. They now control 24 state legislatures and 30 governorships. Where they control both, they can really go to town.

In the long run, I think liberal social policies will win. Young people are less racist, less religious, more gay-tolerant, and even, according to some polls, more pro-choice—although not as much as you would expect, given that it is mostly young women who have abortions and young men who impregnate them. The country is becoming more diverse: a party that caters to older white Christian men and their wives may do fine in Wyoming, but it’s going to be shut out of national power. Of course the Republicans know that—they are having battle royales behind the scenes as they try to figure out how they let victory slip from their grasp in 2012. They will surely try to jigger their image and modify their policies around the edges to appeal to Latinos, single women, young people and that famous 47 percent of the nation that relies on government programs to survive. Not black people though—I think they’ve given up on them. The problem is, the Republican base—rightwing evangelicals and fundamentalists, anti-choicers, extreme right-wingers, and xenophobes—may not let them move in a more centrist direction.

CJ: Finally, can you speak about the range of reactions you get from readers? As was evident from your appearances in two sessions at the ASA, you clearly have a very devoted group of followers—one might even say “groupies”—but obviously not all your mail is positive. In one of your books, you mention the amount of negative responses you got to an essay in which you explained your hesitation to fly the American flag after 9/11. What else has provoked your readers besides that essay?

KP: It’s very sad. These days I don’t get a lot of hate mail. What am I doing wrong?

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I first met Tram in 2006 in a tiny bar on Pham Ngu Lao Street in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), in a neighborhood frequented by backpackers from abroad.

Tram and other sex workers in the bar, disguised as bartenders, catered to Western budget travelers seeking brief encounters or longer relationships-for-hire. They were the bar’s key attraction, but the women received no wages from the owner; they were independent entrepreneurs in a niche of the sex trade.

Tram, 27 years old and adorned with bracelet, rings, and a diamond necklace, was a model of success and economic mobility. She lived in a brand-new luxury condo with two servants, a full-time housecleaner and a cook who prepared Western foods for her new American husband. Tram had come from a poor village, she told me, where the only jobs were in the rice fields. In Ho Chi Minh City, she worked first as a maid and then in a clothing factory. But after two years of earning no more than the equivalent of US$70 a month, Tram had saved no money, could barely cover food and rent, and saw no hope for improvement. “Life in the city is so expensive,’’ she said. She saw sex work as her best route out of poverty.

Tram met William, 70, as a client, and quickly began to develop a more intimate relationship with him, hoping that her emotional labor might lead to ongoing economic support—in a remittance relationship, or marriage. Many Western men come to Vietnam seeking wives, or they become attached to women they hired once there, sympathizing with their plight, and wanting to take them out of the sex trade and care for them. Six months after they met, William asked Tram to marry him and move to North America. They were married in 2007.

In 2009, I reconnected with Tram, along with William and their three children at an airport outside of Montreal, Canada. As we drove the three hours to their home, passing lumber farms, acres of undeveloped land, and pastures sprinkled with sheep, I commented on its beauty and tranquility. But Tram expressed no such sentiments. She had never intended to escape small town Vietnam, she said, only to end up in another small town in rural Canada. She had hoped to move to the United States, and had dreamed of living in Los Angeles or New York, “a big city, like the movies.”

Instead, she found herself isolated, in a cold climate and working long hours. Williams’ savings had dwindled, thanks to the expense of immigration, and they had arrived in North America smack in the middle of a global recession. For a year and a half, she worked nights and weekends for her brother in-law’s lumber company. She did see progress: By June of the year I came to visit, she had saved over US$20,000 and, with her sister in-law, opened a small shop selling local produce. But she was now the primary breadwinner, while William, retired but without much of his savings, stayed home with the children. “This is not what I thought my life would be like,” she lamented.

The story of Tram and William, like that of other couples in my study, suggests a reversal of the usual trajectory of marital journeys. Ethnographers Denise Brennan and Amalia Cabezas have shown that sex workers often feign love as a strategy to obtain visas to migrate abroad. In Vietnam, the opening to the West in recent decades has inspired some women, usually between the ages of 17 and 32, to seek strategic marriages with Western men through sex work. Of the 71 sex workers I interviewed, 30 got married, and of the 30 just 12 women were able to obtain visas and emigrate. While 12 may not represent a large sample, I followed them for three to six years, spending as much as a week at their homes after they landed in the United States, Australia, France and Canada. While women who traveled from Vietnam to Western countries to be with their husbands did not intend to seek out employment, two-thirds of the women in my study ended up becoming their family’s primary breadwinner—reversing typical expectations.

William, like most men in my study, had come to Vietnam deliberately seeking a wife, while others discovered these opportunities once they arrived on visits. Either way, they were eager to find women who would enter a marriage with traditional gender roles that were fast disappearing at home. Their expectations were simple; the men would provide the economic support and the women would provide care, housekeeping and emotional labor.

What happened instead was a classic case of “gender vertigo.” Sociologist Barbara Risman used this term to describe the dizzying effect on people who adopt, or find themselves having to embrace, a radical and unfamiliar social role that upends their ideas of how family structures and society work. Dating back to the 1970s at least, this vertigo hit couples engaging in egalitarian role sharing, where husband and wife occupy both roles—breadwinner and nurturer. But in recent years, especially since the Great Recession that began in 2007, this model has shifted 180 degrees. In my study, most of the women had expected to end their working days once they reached their destination. Instead, most of them quickly ended up finding jobs, looking for income to supplement their husbands’ and hoping to send some home to family in Vietnam, and 8 of the 12 women quickly became the main breadwinner, often working double shifts, with husbands working less lucrative jobs or at home doing childcare.

In Tram’s case, she was able to move beyond the daily grind to open her own business. Others struggled more—and longer.

From Sex Worker to Wife

Thy, then 28, had met her future husband, Mitchell, in 2007. “When I first met him I did not really love him,” she explains. But “life in Vietnam was hard, and I was looking for a way to get out. Even after we married I had other boyfriends because I did not think that he would get me out [of Vietnam].” But after two years of visits back and forth, and paying fees to immigration lawyers both in Vietnam and Australia, Thy was finally able to migrate.

In the mid 2000s, stung by marriage scandals, and wary of enabling sex trafficking, more visas were denied by the United States, and the emigration process became increasingly long and arduous, taking an average of two years after a couple married. Most of the men in my study depleted their savings on attorney fees, on the cost of flights back and forth, and by sending money from the United States to support wives or fiancés waiting in Vietnam. The uncertainty in turn could complicate the marriage dynamic; many women hesitate to make the commitment unless it came with some kind of assurance that they would be supported; nor did they want to drop out of the sex business if they weren’t assured support.

Thy landed in Melbourne in 2010. Using Skype, she walked me through her and Mitchell’s modest apartment, joking about how her standard of living in Australia was much lower than the one that she had in Vietnam. “The first time I went to the grocery store was a shock,” she remembered. “Eggs were $4 (Australian dollars) and a whole chicken was $15. Mitchell just kept filling the cart. The bill was $150. It was so expensive.” Soon both spouses were working just to cover the necessities.

“I feel like a machine,’’ Thy said, tears welling in her eyes. Everyday we wake up at 6:30 to make breakfast and pack lunch. He leaves, and then around 8:00, I walk to his mom’s house,” where she works as a maid for neighbors. Mitchell’s mother had introduced Thy, and spent three weeks working alongside her to instruct her on how to meet each homeowner’s personal expectations. “I work [all day] in empty houses when everyone goes to work, and when I come home, Mitchell is all I have,” said Thy. She has come to love Mitchell and to be grateful for all he sacrificed to bring her to Australia and in his work there. “Everyone in his family is very nice to me,” says Thy. “His mom buys me clothes in the winter, and she always tries to make me feel welcome. But it is very lonely.”

None of the 12 women thought of returning to sex work. Most held typical working-class jobs, although one told me in confidence that she worked in a local massage parlor that offered a number of erotic services (but not sexual intercourse). Her husband didn’t know this about the spa. She agreed to perform some of these services in order to earn more money, but she drew clear boundaries for herself around the kinds of sexual practices she would perform. What she did like about the job was that she didn’t have to struggle to speak English to colleagues or customers. “I don’t have to talk to anyone. It is mostly body language.”

For their part, many of the men in these relationships felt great anxiety and guilt that they couldn’t provide for their wives as they had promised. Most of the couples had arrived in the men’s countries in the middle of the worldwide financial crisis, and many found that they had lost their savings or retirement funds in the faltering markets. If they wanted to keep working, or to come out of retirement, they had trouble finding jobs, especially the older men.

Lawrence, in his 60s, living with his wife Nhi in Florida, told me that she “didn’t know much about life in the United States—except that I promised I would take care of her and provide her with a better life than the one she had in Vietnam. She wants so many things, and it’s hard to say no when she asks for things.” Brian, who spends idle days in Vermont, just says he’s afraid to turn on the TV to hear more news about how bad the economy is doing. His 401(k) fund is nearly gone and his $1200 a month Social Security payments are “barely enough for us to just get by.”

Younger husbands too had been through futile and humiliating job searches; 3 of the 12 were unemployed. Even for couples lucky enough to have two jobs, money was tight. Jeremie, a French man in his early 40s, had traveled to Vietnam as a tourist, and found that he and his lover, Quyen “could live it up.” Food was cheap, housing was cheap, and labor was cheap. Western men also had more opportunity; they could take up jobs as English teachers or as editors or translators for local Vietnamese companies. Back in the West, the exchange rate and status they had enjoyed in Vietnam evaporated.

But it didn’t help many of the couples to seek out other Vietnamese immigrants abroad. Some of the women found jobs in the Vietnamese ethnic enclaves, in nail salons, restaurants, or coffee shops. But when the details of their marriages were revealed, they suffered new isolation. The stigma associated with being a young Vietnamese woman married to a Western man made it difficult to establish trust or social bonds with them.

Hoai told me, “When the [Vietnamese] owners [of a nail salon] found out that I was married to an older white man, they started to trust me less with the money. They look at me like I might steal something from them because I was a bar girl in Vietnam. The female boss always watches me around her husband.”

Between Love and Money

As I heard more stories of struggle and isolation, I began to wonder—and ask—why some of the women didn’t leave their husbands, either to live on their own, in different locations or communities in their new countries, or to return to Vietnam. Most of the women in fact, believed that they could easily escape their marriages but remain in their new countries if they claimed that their husbands were abusing them; authorities would believe they were victims of human trafficking. But none wanted to do this, and none wanted to return home.

One reason was pride. Like many immigrants who boldly leave home, full of grand expectations, some of the women hid the truths of their new lives from family at home. Thanh Ha, age 26, was painfully reluctant to reveal what she was doing to earn a living in the United States. She told me at first that she had found work in a tortilla chip factory. I spent nearly four days with the family in their cramped apartment before she finally revealed what she was doing. “I work in a chip factory,’’ she said, haltingly. “But I don’t work on the line.” She hesitated. “My job is to collect garbage.”

Struck by her emotion, I tried to reassure her that this kind of job could be a stepping-stone to better things. Shaking her head, she said, “When I was in Vietnam, my first job [in a wood factory] was a step-up from my village; the bar was another step up. I was making more money. Picking up trash in America is both a step up and a step down.”

When Jeremie suggested returning to Vietnam to live, his wife Quyen was unwilling. She couldn’t imagine returning without enough money or Western luxuries to display. One of the reasons the women wanted to send money home, in fact, was to maintain the veneer of upward mobility.

But perhaps the bigger surprise in these developments is the way the women and men began to acclimate to their vertiginous situations. One pleasure for the women was how supportive their husbands were about their earning money—even when they out-earned the men. Thu was surprised by her husband Roger’s approach to the money she earned. “He never tells me how to spend it. If I was married to a Vietnamese man, it would probably be hard for him to accept. But Roger is proud; he calls me superwoman.”

“I’m lucky because Thomas lets me work,’’ says Xuan, 26, “and he never asks me how I spend the money I earn.” Xuan’s Vietnamese co-workers who are married to Vietnamese men “always have to ask their husbands if they can send money to Vietnam.’’ These immigrants may “look down on me for my past life in Vietnam, but I have more freedoms, and I live a more carefree life than they do.”

Not only were many of the men supportive, they were comforted to know that their wives would be self-sufficient without them. Stanley, a man in his late 70s, said, “She is young, and I want her to be able to take care of herself when I pass away. I had my whole life to work and build my career. She should get to do that too.” The women, meanwhile, seemed to have developed affection, even love for their husbands, and certainly a sense of loyalty, a belief that they owed their husbands a great deal. “When I married Jeremie he took care of me and paid for everything,’’ said his Quyen. “When you marry an older man you will have to pay back your debt to him and take care of him too.”

Several of the women were still optimistic about their economic prospects, and they maintained the pragmatism that had made them marry these men in the first place. Van explained to me, “We are saving money to open a small shop together. He knows English and can handle the paperwork, and I can run the shop.”

Seeking economic security and a pathway out of Vietnam, the women in my study found themselves, thousands of miles away, in marriages where they became the breadwinner. Although they wanted women whom they could support financially who would offer them emotional security, the men found themselves in non-traditional relationships they had not bargained for. This experience of transnational gender vertigo reframes our understandings of sex work, migration, and gendered relationships across transnational spaces.

These couples stayed married, for better or for worse, as the transformation of marriage, migration, and love gave rise to new and different dreams for the future. As Van said, “Do Tinh Den Bac,” a phrase that means when you have luck with love or romance, your economic luck may decline. While she and the other women I studied embarked on migration journeys believing that they were sacrificing love for economic fortune, many ended up struggling economically—and some found love along the way.

recommended resources

Brennan, Denise. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic (Duke University Press, 2004). An ethnographic exploration of how sex work- ers strategize to get married and migrate.

Cabezas, Amalia. Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Temple University Press, 2009). This book examines the emotional labors that sex workers perform in their relations with Western tourists.

Cheng, Sealing. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). This book examines Filipina migrant sex workers relations with American GI’s in South Korea.

Kempadoo, Kamala. Sexing the Caribbean: Gender, Race and Sexual Labor (Routledge, 2004). This ethnography examines the racialized and gendered relations in the Caribbean’s sex tourism industry.

Schaeffer, Felicity. Love and Empire: Cybermarriage and Citizenship across the Americas (New York University Press, 2012). This book looks at the commercialization of intimacy in marriage tourism between the United States and Latin America.

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SlutWalk marches have emerged to protest the blaming of women for their own sexual assault. Sociologists Kristen Barber and Kelsy Kretschmer consider the different ways men participate in SlutWalk, and how their participation at times both supports and undermines the feminist goals of the event.

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Recommended Resources

• Jackson Katz's TED talk on "Violence & Silence"
• Feminism as a Gendered Space, by sociologist Tristan Bridges
• Men Can Stop Rape

Boys are interesting creatures in the American public imagination.

They start off all “slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails”—cute!— but then they hit puberty and become lazy, sexual, carefree, violent, detached, and irresponsible. They become scary. We fear teenage boys, in part because they are in-between—neither children, nor adults—and they seem to be beyond our control.

We’re not only afraid of what they are now, we’re also afraid of what they will become. Boys require special attention in school, many argue, because they’re not performing as well as girls at all levels of schooling. What kind of a world will we have when these underperforming boys become underperforming men? Some, like journalist Hanna Rosin, have already passed judgment and declared “The End of Men.” She finds that women now wear the pants in the American postindustrial, knowledge-based economy. While the trend is in that direction, it is not yet actually the case, as sociologist Philip Cohen has pointed out in the Atlantic Monthly and on his blog, Family Inequality. But facts have a way of getting lost in the face of interesting-sounding arguments, even when they’re not true.

In this Viewpoints, we’ve gathered five experts who’ve spent a great deal of time interviewing and studying teenage boys’ relationships, often with surprising results that debunk conventional wisdom. Niobe Way finds that boys, counter to stereotypes, want and need close friendships, but may avoid shows of intimacy because of pressures not to be “girly” or “gay.” C.J. Pascoe notes how similar pressures lead to bullying behavior. She argues that bullying that appears homophobic is actually targeted at not-masculine-enough boys, and, interestingly, plays an important role in heterosexual boys’ friendships. In contrast to Way and Pascoe, Mark McCormack finds British boys to be emotionally healthy and engaging in deep friendship ties. He attributes these expressions of intimacy to the relatively lower rates of homophobia in Britain, as compared with the United States where similar behavior would earn boys the label of fag. Amy Schalet offers a comparative focus on the sexual and romantic socialization of boys in the United States and the Netherlands. She finds that Dutch culture supports youthful romance and sex as healthy and something to be celebrated, whereas American culture treats sex among teens as inappropriate. Lastly, Freeden Oeur looks at relationships among poor black teenage boys in an all-black high school where black adult administrators consciously cultivate a sense of manhood based on work and fatherhood.

1. Boys as Human, by Niobe Way
2. Homophobia in Boys’ Friendships, by C.J. Pascoe
3. Embracing Intimacy, by Mark McCormack
4. Love Wanting, by Amy Schalet
5. Time to Bloom, by Freeden Oeur

Boys as Human

by Niobe Way

The popular stereotype is that boys are emotionally illiterate and shallow, they don’t want intimate relationships or close friendships. In my research with boys over the past two decades, however, I have discovered that not only are these stereotypes false, they are actively hurting boys and leading them to engage in self destructive behaviors. The African American, Latino, Asian American and white teenage boys in my studies indicate that what they want and need most are close relationships — friendships, in particular — in which they can share their “deep secrets.” These friendships, they tell us, are critical for their mental health. But, according to the boys, they live in a culture that considers such intimacy “girly” and “gay” and thus they are discouraged from having the very relationships that are critical for their wellbeing.

My longitudinal studies of hundreds of boys from early to late adolescence indicate that a central dilemma for boys growing up in the United States is how to get the intimacy they want while still maintaining their manliness. Boys want to be able to freely express their emotions, including their feelings of vulnerability; they want others to be sensitive to their feelings without being teased or harassed for having such desires. They want genuine friendships in which they are free to be themselves rather than conform to rigid masculine stereotypes. As Carlos said: “It might be nice to be a girl because then you wouldn’t have to be emotionless.”A central dilemma for boys growing up in the United States is how to get the intimacy they want while still maintaining their manliness.

During early and middle adolescence most boys, according to my research, do have close male friendships in which they can share their “deep secrets.” It is only in late adolescence—a time when, according to national data, suicides and violence among boys soar — that boys disconnect from other boys. The boys in my studies begin, in late adolescence, to use the phrase “no homo” when discussing their male friendships, expressing the fear that if they seek out close friendships, they will be perceived as “gay” or “girly.” As a consequence, they pull away from their male peers and experience sadness over the loss of their formerly close friends.

Michael, a participant in one of our studies, told his interviewer that friendships are important because, “if you don’t have friends, you have no one to tell your secrets to. Then it’s like, I always think bad stuff in my brain ‘cause like no one’s helping me and I just need to keep all the secrets to myself.” Asked why friends are important, Danny said to his interviewer, “you need someone to talk to, like you have problems with something, you go talk to him. You know, if you keep it all to yourself, you will go crazy. Try to take it out on someone else.” Kai implicitly concurred in his interview: “without friends you will go crazy or mad or you’ll be lonely all of the time, be depressed…You would go wacko.” Asked by the interviewer why his friends are important, Justin said, “‘cause you need a friend or else, you would be depressed, you won’t be happy, you would try to kill yourself, ‘cause then you’ll be all alone and no one to talk to.” Faced with the prospect of having no close friends, Anthony said to his interviewer, “who you gonna talk to? Might as well be dead or something. I don’t mean to put it in a negative way, but I am just saying—it’s like not a good feeling to be alone.”

Over the past three decades, studies, such as those done by epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett, have found that adults without close friendships are more likely to experience poor mental and physical health and live shorter lives than those with close friendships. Despite the growing body of data that underscores the importance of close friendships for everyone, harmful stereotypes that ignore boys’ social and emotional needs and capacities abound. According to the boys themselves, these stereotypes significantly contribute to their isolation, loneliness, and depression. As they get older, boys get stripped of their humanity. They learn that they are not supposed to have hearts, except in relation to a girl, and then it should be a stoic heart and not too vulnerable.

We must allow boys to be boys in the most human sense of the word, nurture their natural emotional and social capacities, and foster their close friendships. We need to make relational and emotionally literacy an inherent part of being human, rather than only a “girl thing” or a “gay thing.” The boys and young men in my studies know that what makes us human is our ability to deeply connect with each other. We must figure out how to help boys and young men strengthen rather than lose these critical life skills. Only then we will be able to address the psychological and sociological roots of this crisis of connection and the negative consequences associated with it.

Homophobia in Boys’ Friendships

by C.J. Pascoe

According to media reports, we are in the midst of a bullying epidemic whose primary victims are gay kids. But young people’s homophobia is more complex than such popular views suggest. Much of it is perpetuated by and directed at straight-identified boys. As the school resource website Teach Safe Schools, documents, 80 percent of those on the receiving end of homophobic epithets identify as heterosexual. While GLBQ youth are certainly harassed in school settings, these homophobic insults also play a complex role in heterosexual boys’ friendships.

Researching teenage boys over the past decade, what I found is that boys’ homophobia is not only about sexuality, or about pathological bullies going after gay boys; their homophobia is as much about making sure that boys act like “guys” as it is about fear of actual gay people. Through homophobic banter, jokes and harassment, straight boys define their masculinity in ways that are hostile both to gay boys and to straight boys who don’t measure up to a particular masculine ideal. Insulting each other for being un-masculine, even for a moment, reinforces expectations of masculinity and also provides space for straight boys to forge intimate ties with one another, while affirming to themselves, and to each other, that they are not gay.Boys’ homophobia is as much about making sure that boys act like “guys” as it is about fear of actual gay people.

Homophobic insults, talk, and jokes — or what I call “fag discourse”— permeates boys’ relationships. Different behaviors or attitudes, such as being too touchy, too emotional, dancing, and caring too much about clothing, can trigger this “fag discourse.” Boys try fervently to escape the label of “fag” by avoiding these behaviors or directing the epithet toward someone else. “Fag” is likely to be the most serious insult one boy can level at another. As Jeremy, a high school junior, remarked, “To call someone gay or fag is like the lowest thing you can call someone. Because that’s like saying that you’re nothing.”

For many boys, calling someone a “fag” does not necessarily mean that they are gay. As J.L., a high school sophomore, explained, “Fag, seriously, it has nothing to do with sexual preference at all. You could just be calling somebody an idiot, you know?” Furthermore young men who engage in fag discourse often simultaneously support the civil rights of actual gay men, and condemn those who would harass them. Jabes, a senior, said, “I actually say fag quite a lot, except for when I’m in the company of an actual homosexual person. Then I try not to say it at all. But when I’m just hanging out with my friends I’ll be like, ‘Shut up, I don’t want to hear you any more you stupid fag.’” Simple homophobia is too crude a concept for characterizing what is going here, because these insults seem to coexist with rising support for gay rights.

If these epithets are simultaneously reducing boys to “nothing,” and are not necessarily about homosexuality, what are these boys talking about? The answer lies in high school senior David’s statement: “Being gay is just a lifestyle. It’s someone you choose to sleep with. You can still throw a football around and be gay.” In other words, a gay man can still be masculine. What boys are doing as they lob these epithets is reminding one other that to be acceptably masculine is to be dominant, powerful, and unemotional. Violating those expectations can trigger a round of “fag discourse.”

Thus, homophobia in boys’ friendships is not only about some global fear of same-sex desire (though certainly, for all of the protestations about equality, fear, disgust, or loathing of same-sex desire between men still exists), it is also a way in which boys define themselves and others as masculine. When we call these interactions between boys homophobic bullying and ignore the messages about masculinity in these insults, we risk divorcing these interactions from the way they perpetuate restrictive and sexist definitions of manhood. We also fail to appreciate how boys carve out moments of intimacy, and that complexity, beauty and complicated ideas about masculinity lay at the heart of many of their friendships.

Embracing Intimacy

by Mark McCormack

When we think of boys’ friendships, we tend to think of rough and tumble physical energy. But research conducted over the past three decades warns that rough and tumble play often leads to aggression and violence, and that shallow friendships have resulted in boys being emotionally stunted. Another pernicious element of boys’ friendships has been virulent homophobia. Given the cultural conflation of masculinity with heterosexuality, where acting feminine is perceived as being gay, boys go to great lengths to act “manly” and avoid homosexual suspicion. Homophobia prevents boys from expressing emotion, and makes them keep considerable physical distance from each other.

The centrality of homophobia to this damaging dynamic of friendship implies that as attitudes toward homosexuality change, so will the ways boys interact. I found this to be the case in ethnographic research that I conducted in high schools in England. Several studies indicate that homophobia has decreased at a greater rate in England than in the United States. For example, the most recent data from the British Social Attitudes survey show that only 29 percent of adults think same-sex relationships are wrong, down from 46 percent in the year 2000. Research from 2007 also finds that 86 percent of the population would be comfortable if a close friend was gay. Comparing BSA data with the American General Social Survey, in his book Inclusive Masculinity, Eric Anderson showed that American attitudes are approximately 20 percentage points less favorable than British ones, and that young people have the most progressive attitudes toward homosexuality.Teenage boys are embracing once feminized traits of emotional openness and physical intimacy.

In the three government-run schools I studied, heterosexual male students — aged 16 to 18 — espoused pro-gay attitudes and condemned homophobia. They often had openly gay friends; some criticized their schools for their lack of openly gay role models. This inclusive culture has led teenage boys to redefine masculinity; as a result, their understanding of friendship is quite different than what one might expect.

The male students at these schools were proud of their close friendships and frequently demonstrated that publicly. For example, Jack had been away for the weekend and upon seeing his best friend Tim, he shouted, “Timmo, where were you all weekend, I missed ya!”, and exuberantly kissed Tim on the top of his head. Then they talked about their weekend in a style best described as gossiping.

More frequent than this kind of boisterous demonstration of friendship, though, were the touching behaviors that occurred during quiet conversations. Here, boys used physical touch as a sign of friendship. Ben and Eli, for example, stood in a corner of the common room, casually holding hands as they spoke, their fingers gently touching one another. Halfway through the exchange, Ben changed his embrace, placing an arm around Eli’s waist and a hand on his stomach. This kind of behavior was commonplace among the majority of boys; hugging was a routine form of greeting in these schools.

The boys also valued emotional support. Tim said, “I talk to my best friends about everything, if I’ve got girlfriend trouble, or when I’m upset or stressed. It’s really important for me to be able to do that.” Boys also openly recognized the closeness of their friendships, sometimes addressing each other as “boyfriend” or “lover” as a way of demonstrating emotional intimacy. Phil said, “Yeah, I call him boyfriend and stuff, but that’s just a way of saying he’s my best mate.” Similarly, Dave commented, “I’ll sometimes call my best mates ‘lover’ or something similar. It’s just a way of saying, ‘I love you,’ really.”

The friendships and social dynamics of the boys from my research are also evident in popular culture. Youth TV shows in the UK, such as Skins and Hollyoaks, show similar displays of physical and emotional intimacy between boys, and the latest boy band sensation, One Direction, models this new youth masculinity. While there are variations according to class, ethnicity, geography and other factors, the friendships I documented signify that a profound social change is occurring. Teenage boys are embracing once feminized traits of emotional openness and physical intimacy, rejecting the homophobia and violence that once characterized male friendship. This is directly related to a decline in homophobia, and boys no longer caring if they are socially perceived as gay. This has enabled them to redefine masculinity and friendship for their generation. It is something we should celebrate.

Love Wanting

by Amy Schalet

Michael, a high-school senior, is not a fan of commitment. His ideal is “more than one girl, basically.” Proud of his own sexual experience, he’s excited that his current girlfriend is a virgin: “It’s cool to be the first one…it probably feels better too.”

Tall, athletic and a “little rowdy,” Michael would appear to epitomize the American teenage male.

Except that he doesn’t. In my research on attitudes and experiences of sex and romance among high-school aged white middle-class American and Dutch boys, I found most American boys, like Dutch boys, want more than just sex; they want meaningful intimate relationships.

My findings are echoed in other studies that have surprised researchers. For instance, the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancies, found that when asked to choose between having a girlfriend and no sex, or sex but no girlfriend, two-thirds of American boys and young men surveyed choose the girlfriend over sex. A large-scale study published in the American Sociological Review in 2006 found that American boys are as likely as girls to be emotionally invested in romantic relationships—but feel less confident navigating them.Most American boys, like Dutch boys, want more than just sex; they want meaningful intimate relationships.

Boys in the United States and the Netherlands face very different cultural environments in which to make sense of their romantic feelings. For Dutch boys, falling in love is normal— something everyone experiences while growing up. In the Netherlands, the notion that everyone falls in love is so taken for granted that in a 2005 national survey on youth and sex, researchers thought nothing of asking boys, ages 12 to 14, whether they’d been in love — finding that 90 percent said yes.

But in the United States, even if most boys do want romantic relationships, their romantic stirrings are culturally coded as feminine. Boys are seen as motivated by “raging hormones,” not by a desire for intimacy. As one American father puts it, “teenage boys want to get laid at all times at any cost.”

The popular stereotype of boys as acting only from hormones eclipses their desire for emotional intimacy as a normal part of maturation and masculinity. When boys do want or feel love, they think they’re alone. Sixteen-year-old Jesse says his first priority in life is being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.” But he imagines these feelings make him very different from “most teenage boys” who “are pretty much in it for the sex.”

To counteract stereotypes about them, American boys sometimes distance themselves not only from other boys, but also from their own sexual desires. Patrick, for instance, says, “if you really care about someone, you don’t really care if you have sex or not,” echoing a theme from American sex education curricula that teach youth to separate love from lust.

Unlike American culture and sex education, Dutch sex education curricula, with titles like “Long Live Love,” encourage boys to view love and lust as intertwined. The Dutch boys I interviewed readily acknowledged being interested in sex, but they also connected physical pleasure closely to emotions and relationships. About the excitement he felt going through puberty, Gert-Jan says: “It also has to do with having feelings for someone…You’re really in love.”

It’s not just in school that cultures diverge, it’s also at home. American boys are typically taught to view their sexuality as something symbolizing and threatening their freedom—for instance with an unintended pregnancy. While boys may receive tacit approval to pursue sexual interests away from home, most parents draw firm boundaries between the family and the exploration of sexuality, and rarely permit high-school aged boys to spend the night with their romantic partners at home.

Dutch culture, by contrast, places a premium on “gezelligheid” or “cozy togetherness,” which validates their enjoyment of platonic and sexual relationships. In the Netherlands, teen boys and girls are typically allowed to have sleepovers in their parents’ house. This interweaving of sexuality and domestic life teaches boys that physical pleasure and emotional intimacy— familial and romantic — are not at odds. As eighteen-year-old Ben says about his girlfriend sleeping over in his room, “if my mother thinks it’s gezellig, then why not?”

Still, Dutch masculinity does constrain boys in some familiar respects. For instance, national surveys of youth show that Dutch boys face, and engage in, more strictures against same-sex sexual behavior than do Dutch girls. But Dutch boys receive more support at school and home to integrate different aspects of themselves that American boys are often encouraged to separate — love, lust, participation in family life and sexual exploration.

Much of the debate around teenagers and sexuality in the United States focuses on what we should teach them about their bodies. Access to accurate information about anatomy, pleasure, and contraception — the usual hot-button topics — is critical. But just as important are the conversations about intimacy and emotions, and the question of how we can define and model manhood so those on its cusp might feel more empowered and equipped to love.

Time to Bloom

by Freeden Oeur

In the United States today, single-sex classrooms and schools are increasingly making their way into public schools. Nationally, about 560 K-12 public schools offer some single-sex academic classrooms, and about 80 more are entirely separated by sex.

Debates over single-sex schooling usually center on questions of gender equity. Supporters claim that they accommodate boys’ and girls’ different learning styles; critics charge that they perpetuate gender stereotypes. My own ethnographic research shows that in schools that serve predominantly poor young black men, the relationships boys have with one another, and with adult male staff members are key. A school I call Perry High—one of the schools in an East Coast city where I conducted my research — serves a predominantly poor and black student population, grades 7 through 12. Led by an administration made up of nearly all black men, the staff has made it a priority to cultivate more positive notions of manhood among the students.

Perry administrators believe that a school where black men care for black boys can be empowering. At Perry High, some of the boys assumed that being “put with other boys,” as seventh grader Lenny told me, meant they were in trouble. Mass incarceration of African Americans led these boys to fear all-male institutions — prisons, along with the city’s disciplinary schools, where boys who commit major offenses are sent. Administrators and teachers focused on earning the trust of their students, and on strengthening relationships among men and boys.

A common stereotype of young black men is that they resist authority. But at Perry High, many boys were open to having close relationships with men, especially if the men first opened up to them. The boys believed they needed those relationships in order to thrive in school. Referring to the adults in the building, Dante, a 12th grader, told me: “We need you. You don’t need us.” The youngest boys, from 12 to 14 years old, particularly doted on male teachers, shadowing them throughout the building and sticking around after school just to hang out. Groups of young boys were eager to connect with teachers who were willing to teach them a new hobby like playing the guitar, or spoken word poetry.

Mr. Westbrook, an administrator, remarked, “I see a lot of kids, especially the younger kids, who really cling onto certain adults for attention, and you become that surrogate father that so many of them are looking for.” Male staff members used this as an opportunity to share visions of responsible adulthood. Gerald, an eighth grader, observed that what it meant to be a man was “to have a job and to be able to do important stuff like taking care of a family.”

To instill a sense of responsible adulthood, a new mentoring program matched male adult professionals in the community with ninth graders. The organizers targeted this group because of the high dropout rates among black boys after ninth grade. At a meeting of mentors and mentees, Raymond spoke eloquently about how the program had impacted him and his peers. Usually when male visitors came to the school, they aggressively relayed the message that the boys should avoid heading down a “dead-end street,” he said. But Raymond appreciated that the mentors were not trying to scare the boys. Instead, they helped the boys to create positive visions of themselves: going to college or vocational school, contributing to the community instead of being a threat to it. Speaking directly to the male mentors in the room, he asked for their continued guidance and patience. “We’re still learning how to be men and we need your help,” he said. “Give us some time to bloom.”

The mix of boys, encompassing six grades, meant that younger and older boys had opportunities to interact that they may not have had outside of school. The older boys felt the need to respond to seventh and eighth graders who were aching for male guidance. The younger boys tried to “play off,” or imitate, older boys. Just as they did with male teachers, groups of young boys followed boys much older than them around the school. The older students took the younger students under their wing, looking after them as though they were their own siblings.

At this unique all-boys public school, rather than forge relationships of fear, older boys and men took responsibility for and invested in the lives of the younger boys. In this environment, young black boys are able to envision themselves, in turn, as responsible men who will one day hold steady jobs and care for boys who need them. Should more of these single-sex schools open, we’re likely to find that it’s for reasons that go beyond that of gender equity, reasons such as the opportunity to foster caring, mentoring relationships.

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Sociologist Ann Mullen explores what it means that women now earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. Rather than seeing this as a sign of a “male crisis” in higher education, this article concludes that the gender integration of higher education is far from complete.

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Sociologist Andrea Press discusses the recent firing of President Teresa Sullivan, the first woman and first sociologist serving this role at the University of Virginia, by Helen Dragas, the first woman rector directing University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors. She analyzes the role of gender in these events and also examines the importance of social media in relation to facilitating faculty governance.

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Recommended Reading

To learn more about Teresa Sullivan's firing at the University of Virginia, Andrea Press recommends the following resources:

• The UVa Rector’s Peculiar Approach to Free Expression, Bruce Holsinger
• Anatomy of a Campus Coup, Andrew Rice
• A Much Higher Education, Siva Vaidhyanathan
• Charlottesville Right Now Interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan

Most craft beer enthusiasts will tell you that the right beer can enhance your food, complement the seasons, and improve a casual evening with friends. But can craft beer also reinforce gender? Yes it can, say experts.

Food choices establish boundaries in a variety of ways. In the craft beer scene, which focuses on small-scale and independently produced beers, these boundaries are becoming increasingly gendered: women and novices are steered towards fruit beers, hefeweizens, blonde ales, and wheat beers; men are encouraged to try double IPAs, bourbon aged stouts, and high-alcohol winter warmers. Styles normally associated with women and novices are often seen as a good introduction to craft beer. Less challenging to the palate, they tend to be described as fruity, refreshing, light, crisp, slightly sweet, or lightly spiced. Typically, women are not expected to move beyond these styles. Bolder flavors—hoppy, bitter, thick, resinous, or warm with alcohol—tend to be reserved for men, who are encouraged by their “beer geek” peers to
advance beyond “girlier” offerings.

Psychologists Thomas Alley and Jeffrey Burroughs (Journal of General Psychology, 1991) say that this is expected: men are more attracted to new and unusual foods, while women are more likely to seek familiar foods. However, owning a uterus certainly doesn’t prevent one from exploring the manliest of beers.

Social scientists Alice Julier and Laura Lindenfield (Food & Foodways, 2005) remind us that gender-specific food choices are about gendered performances, not ingrained preferences. The girl who says she only likes hefeweizens and the guy who pretends to enjoy the 18% imperial IPA are both reinforcing dominant notions of masculinity and femininity.

Gendered food choices are also subject to change; today’s butch brew may be tomorrow’s feminine fermentable. Personal experiences, such as exposure to different types of food, can alter the relationship between gender and food.

Such complexities make the future of gendered craft beers uncertain. Will advertisers solidify these norms by marketing styles to each gender? Will female beer geeks rise up and challenge these norms?

One would hope that, one of these days, everyone will just be able to relax, let go of gender, and have a beer.

In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai’s, Melanie Heath’s,and Jennifer Randles’s research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.

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Further Reading

• The Council on Contemporary Families
• Alternatives to Marriage Project
• Building Strong Familie
• ACF Healthy Marriage Initiatives
• Healthy Marriage & Responsible Fatherhood
• Johnson, Matthew D. 2012. “Healthy marriage initiatives: On the need for empiricism in policy implementation.” American Psychologist, Vol 67(4), May-Jun 2012, 296-308
• Thomas E. Trail and Benjamin E. Karney. 2012. “What’s (Not) Wrong with Low-Income Marriages.” Journal of Marriage and Family 74, 413-427.

An interview with Joan Acker, professor emeritus at the University of Oregon. Acker’s work has been on the cutting edge of feminist scholarship for more than 35 years. Acker talks about such topics as her theoretical training, welfare reform, feminist sociology, and her informal campaign to end football.

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