If younger generations are more likely to believe that there’s nothing wrong with gay and lesbian sex, does that mean they are more likely to have it themselves? They are: the number of young women who have had sex with at least one other woman has nearly tripled since the early 1990s. More men now report having had a male sexual partner as well (see Figure 9.3). It’s possible that more people are simply willing to admit to such experiences, rather than more actually having had the experience. Either way, reporting of same-sex sexual experience is on the rise.
Figure 9.3. Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have had at least one sexual partner of the same sex since turning 18. General Social Survey, 1989–2016.
There is a particularly large generation gap in lesbian sexual experience. Among women born in the 1940s and 1950s, only about six in one hundred had had a lesbian partner during her lifetime by 2014–2016. But among those born in the 1980s and 1990s, nearly one in seven already had even though she’d lived decades less. Millennial and iGen women are much more likely than their predecessors to have had sex with another woman.
Bisexuality—having sex with both male and female partners—is also on the rise. The percentage of adult Americans with bisexual experience during their lifetimes tripled between 1990 and 2016, from 3% to 11%. This might reflect recent trends on college campuses known as LUG (“lesbian until graduation”) or BUG (“bisexual until graduation”)—women who have lesbian relationships while young and then date and marry men (also called “hasbian”). Overall, the large increase in bisexual experience suggests that many people are having sex with both men and women without necessarily identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—generally, only about 4% of the population identifies as LGBT, but many more have had some experience with same-sex sexuality.
This flexibility around the gender of sexual partners has led some iGen’ers to say that people should no longer be labeled based on their sexual orientation. Twenty-year-old Georgia college student James says, “I’m not much of a label person. I would date someone because they make me happy, not because of what their gender is.” He told his parents he was gay instead of bisexual because, he told me, “I know they don’t understand that ambiguity that our generation deals with.” Several Millennial celebrities have also resisted labeling their sexual orientation. Raven-Symoné said, “I don’t want to be labeled ‘gay.’ I want to be labeled ‘a human who loves humans.’ ” Miley Cyrus says she’s had relationships “that weren’t ‘straight’ ” and notes, “I’m not hiding my sexuality. For me, I don’t want to label myself as anything. . . . I am ready to love anyone that loves me for who I am! I am open.”
Young and Trans
iGen will likely be the first generation to understand what the term transgender means from an early age, partially due to Caitlyn Jenner’s transition from male to female in 2015. Transgender individuals are coming out at younger and younger ages. In January 2017, National Geographic featured Avery, a 9-year-old transgender girl, on its cover. Jazz Jennings, 14, was born a boy but knew since she was 2 that she was really a girl. Diagnosed with gender dysphoria when she was 5, the iGen’er stars in her own reality show, I Am Jazz. She now questions the idea that she needed to be “diagnosed” at all. Looking up the definition on her phone during an interview for Cosmopolitan, she says, “ ‘Diagnose: Identify the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms.’ Do I look like I have an illness? Do I look like I have a problem? Being transgender is not a problem. It is not an illness. It’s just who you are.”
Full acceptance of transgender individuals may take some time. James has a transgender brother. At first his parents assumed his sibling was a lesbian. “Then, when he came out as trans, my dad was like, ‘What’s that?’ ” James says. The relationship between my brother and my dad was very, very rocky, and very awful for a long time.” His father just didn’t seem to understand what being transgender meant. “He said, ‘I have a daughter. That’s who she is.’ He would reference it as a game, [saying] ‘He goes around and he wants to be dressed as a boy, he wants to be dressed as male, and all his friends are playing along with it. He can say he’s male all the time, but when you take the clothes off you still have a biological female there.’ [My father] didn’t understand. He couldn’t comprehend that.”
Most of the teens I interviewed weren’t sure what to think about transgender issues, finding it difficult to reconcile their individualistic “be who you are” philosophy with the reality of someone who feels he or she is a different gender from his or her body. Emily, who supports same-sex marriage, is not as sure about her attitude toward transgender individuals. “I disagree about changing your gender, because I think you were born how you’re supposed to be,” she said. When I ask high school senior Kevin about transgender people, he replies, “Like Bruce Jenner? It’s kind of weird for me, because they actually change their own sex. They weren’t born that way. I feel like they’re denying their previous existence. They’re not true to themselves and I kind of don’t like it.” Athena, 13, says, “I don’t agree with being transgender because I think the way God made you is the way you should stay. God made everybody on this planet the way He wanted it. I don’t know why you would want to change the way God made you. They’re just confused.”
Other teens, especially those who had learned about transgender people in psychology classes or who knew a transgender person, were more understanding. Ben, the 18-year-old from Illinois, knew a transgender boy at his high school. Ben and his friends accepted him, but the process was far from easy; among other things, it took an extraordinarily long time for the boy’s name to be changed in all of the school records. And not everyone knew what to do. “Everyone wanted to be supportive, but no one really knew how to be supportive,” Ben said.
Leo, the Los Angeles high school freshman, disagrees with those who say things such as “God doesn’t make mistakes.” “It’s not their business to tell people what to do and what not to do,” he says. Transitioning “is something transgender people are doing for themselves and not hurting other people. If they want to be transgender, then they can be transgender.” Leo’s viewpoint will become increasingly common. Once iGen’ers understand more about transgender people—that by changing their sex they are being true to themselves—their acceptance will follow, and quickly. But many are not there yet.
Gender Roles: Who Does What?
Gender is not what it used to be. One Stanford University psychology professor asked her class to divide up into gender categories—whatever categories they chose, and it could be more than two. Most divided into male and female, but a sizable minority decided that their group would be called “Fuck Gender.” They didn’t want to be categorized into one gender, they said—they preferred no gender label at all.
Partially inspired by transgender individuals, there’s a nascent movement to declare that gender is “fluid”—not just changeable but also not easily contained by just two categories. Will Smith’s son Jaden, 16, caused a sensation in 2015 when he wore a skirt to his prom. College senior Justice Gaines, interviewed for the student newspaper at Brown in 2016, asked to be identified with the pronouns xe, xem, and xyr; thus, the article contained the sentence “xe felt pressure to help xyr peers cope with what was going on, xe said.” Others prefer to use “they” as a pronoun for a single person, such as Miley Cyrus’s 2015 date Tyler Ford, whom she described on Instagram as “a queer, biracial, agender person, whose pronouns are they/them/theirs.” “My whole life I was led to believe that there were only two genders,” Tyler said. “I thought I had to shrink myself to fit into a box that was never going to contain me.”
This movement toward gender fluidity may be picking up steam, but it’s still far from the average response or average experience. In the public eye, you are either male or female, and there is no acceptable in-between state. When Caitlyn Jenner transitioned from male to female, she did an interview with Diane Sawyer as a man—in which she had slightly longer ha
ir but wore men’s clothes—and then went underground for four months to modify her appearance to become female. She conformed to the traditional idea of gender as a binary—one interview as a man, then a sexy, barely clothed Vanity Fair cover as a woman. She was not allowed (or didn’t wish) to be in between, at least not publicly.
Not only is gender not fluid, but American society continues to struggle with gender equality. Many debates center on family responsibilities: Who takes care of the baby? Who cleans the house? Who goes to work? In a video I show to my psychology classes, young children asked these questions don’t hesitate: they point to the Barbie doll for who takes care of the baby and who cleans the house and to the Ken doll for who goes to work.
The movement toward accepting working mothers has been fruitful but incomplete. Between 1977 and the mid-1990s, more and more Americans agreed that working mothers could have just as warm a relationship with their children as mothers who did not work (see Figure 9.4). After 2010, support for working mothers steadily grew until three out of four high school seniors believed a working mother could have just as good a relationship with her children as one who stayed home.
Figure 9.4. Percentage who agree that working mothers can have just as warm a relationship with their children, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and young adults ages 18 to 24 (General Social Survey), 1976–2016.
In addition, a majority of iGen’ers disagree that “A preschool child is likely to suffer if the mother works” (see Figure 9.5). Priscilla, 18, sees benefits for both mothers and children when mothers work. “Kids get a lot out of going to preschool and socializing with other kids their age,” she wrote. “As much as I can’t wait to have a child, I know that I will also want to continue to work. I think a child will see their mother’s work ethic and develop strong ones of their own.” iGen’ers are unprecedented in their beliefs in gender equality. That might be due to their own childhood experiences: two-thirds of 2015 high school seniors said their mother had worked all or most of the time when they were growing up—more than double the number of Class of ’76 Boomers who had that experience.
Figure 9.5. Percentage who disagree that “A preschool child will suffer if his or her mother works,” 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and young adults ages 18 to 24 (General Social Survey), 1976–2016. (Note: This question did not appear on the 8th and 10th grade surveys.)
However, supporters of gender equality shouldn’t celebrate too soon. The surveys also ask whether it’s best for the man to achieve outside the home and the woman to take care of the family. Disavowing such rigid family roles peaked during the early 1990s but then lost ground. Twelfth graders who disagreed that “the husband should make all the important decisions in the family” also peaked in the 1990s (at 70%), falling to 61% by 2015. Even set against the backdrop of the previous gains, it is shocking that two decades of progress for women in the workplace have resulted in more traditional attitudes toward family roles. However, there are early signs, just since 2014, that iGen teens and young adults are turning this trend around, bringing it into line with their other views of gender equality and banishing the backlash created by Millennials (see Figure 9.6).
Figure 9.6. Percentage who disagree that “it’s best for the man to achieve outside the home and the woman to take care of the home and family,” 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and young adults ages 18 to 24 (General Social Survey), 1976–2016.
It’s possible that this shift toward the traditional stems from the trends we explored in the last chapter: with fewer young people in relationships, teens may view male-female partnerships in increasingly traditional terms. If you want to avoid these gender roles, they might think, don’t get married or even live together. Or perhaps iGen’ers believe that working mothers don’t harm children but it’s still “best” (as the question puts it) when she can stay home. Alternatively, sociologists David Cotter and Joanna Pepin point out that these two questions, unlike those about working mothers, explicitly mention men, suggesting the shift toward conservatism may be due to a longing for men to return to their traditional role as breadwinners. Women may have to work, they seem to say, but wouldn’t it be great if men could be men again?
Some iGen’ers think it would be best to have a traditional division of labor, but they also recognize that’s not always economically feasible. “Personally if I had a kid I would like to stay home at least until they were in school, but that’s just me and I’m one person. Other people have different needs and desires,” wrote Carly, 19. “I’m sure a lot more women would stay home if they COULD, but they can’t, because nowadays both parents have to work and families are still just barely making ends meet.” Vanessa, 19, isn’t sure she could both work and have kids. “Even if you get, say, 6 hours of free time after work, you’re going to be completely exhausted and won’t be able to pay as much attention to your kid as they maybe need. I think maybe it is best if at least one parent doesn’t work, but that might not be realistic,” she wrote. Twelve-year-old Harper told me, “I feel like it would be pretty stressful trying to work and have little kids at the same time because, like, you never really get a break because you’re at work and then you have to come home and work with them. I would rather just take time off of work and stay home than be tired all day and then having to deal with, like, three kids.” Studies find that children do just fine, both academically and emotionally, when both parents work, but these iGen’ers seem more concerned with the effects on themselves and their partners. They sound tired before they’ve even begun.
Just as with LGBT attitudes, we can look at recent data to see the generation gaps as they are right now. They show a surprise for gender roles: only small generation gaps between iGen’ers, Millennials, and GenX’ers. Not until you reach the Silent generation in their seventies do attitudes shift decisively toward the more traditional. At least on these questions, iGen’ers and younger Millennials are only a little more progressive in their gender views than GenX’ers in their forties are, and indistinguishable from older Millennials in their late twenties and early thirties (see Figure 9.7).
Figure 9.7. Gender-role attitudes, all adults, by age/generation groups. General Social Survey, 2014–2016.
In other words, the generational change in gender-role attitudes has stalled. This is in contrast to LGBT issues, where iGen’ers and Millennials show a notable generation gap from previous generations.
Race: All Together Now, but Somewhat Reluctantly
“All that crap about people’s race or sexuality or whatever—no one our age cares about any of that,” said a young man in a college course recently, according to the New York Times. The professor of the class says that’s the norm—she’s continually impressed by “the total ease [with] which black, Hispanic, Asian, and white students of all ethnicities interact with one another. Over several years, I’ve never had a single incident of disrespect.”
Yet that same school year, protests over racial issues rocked college campuses around the country. Men driving by in a truck yelled the N-word at the student body president of the University of Missouri. At Clairmont McKenna College in California, a Latina student posted on Facebook, “I feel uncomfortable as a person of color every day on this campus.” University of Wisconsin students started a Twitter hashtag (#TheRealUW) to tell their stories of racism on campus: “Frat boys telling you you’re cute for a black girl,” “When you get told to ‘go back to Mexico’ by a person in your class,” “I hear racist things toward Asians every day on campus but no one here cares. I’ve never felt fully respected here.”
Depending on whom you believe, iGen is either the most racially equal generation in history or rapidly ushering in a return to old-fashioned racism. Which view is right?
Mostly the first, but there’s still a long way to go. On the subject of iGen’ers supporting racial equality, they and the Millennials are much more likely to support Black Lives Matter than are older generations—in a 2016 Pew Research Center
poll, 60% of white adults ages 18 to 30 said they supported Black Lives Matter, compared to 37% of 50- to 64-year-olds (GenX’ers and Boomers) and 26% of those 65 and older (Silents). “I am white and I support the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it is important that people express frustration with the way police are treating minorities in this country,” wrote Jason, 20. “I think it is good that attention has been called to corruption and poor policing—it probably should have happened sooner.”
On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Several other high-profile cases of blacks shot by police followed, and teens’ attitudes about the police and racial tensions shifted abruptly. In just one year—from the spring of 2014 to the spring of 2015—29% more 12th graders believed the police were doing a poor job, and two and a half times as many thought that black-white race relations had gotten worse, attitudes last seen during the racially charged 1990s (see Figure 9.8). This rise in racial discomfort in 2015 also presaged the racially polarizing presidential campaign of 2016 and the rise of the white nationalist “alt-right.” For a decade or so, it looked as though Americans had worked things out—we’d elected a black president, anointed Beyoncé the queen of all media, and flocked to Shonda Rhimes dramas on ABC. But it was a fragile truce—and by all appearances it’s over. In a March 2016 Gallup poll, 54% of college students said there had been protests on their campus about diversity and inclusion in the last school year.
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