Gendered Agendas: Dealing with Dating in the Shadow of Patriarchy

• In Event: 306 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 08. Relationships

Abstract

Do young heterosexual men and women anticipate and account for gender inequality in their love lives? Because sexual ideology is a major mediating link between identity and social structure, heterosexual institutions are key sites for identifying specific mechanisms working to reproduce patriarchy. Though marital delay is increasingly prescribed as a model life strategy, the widening period of the lifecourse between adolescence and marriage is culturally unsettled and open to ideological contestation. This presents a rich sociological opportunity to investigate the process of heterosexual institutionalization as it’s lived. However, prescribed singlehood and dating culture are empirically underexamined and culturally undertheorized. I interview 87 straight, single, college-educated men and women between the ages of 25 and 35 in Boston and San Francisco to explore how singlehood, dating, sexuality and marriage are situated into the lifecourse by the structurally most advantaged. I find gendered approaches to heterosexual development. Men reconcile an ideological contradiction between the independence demanded by manhood and the commitment demanded of adulthood by splitting their singlehood years and fitting them with distinct ontological schemas. Women, conversely, experience no such gender crisis that must be resolved with the delay of intimacy and commitment. Though they adopt nominally identical goals for family and marriage, men and women as groups unequally subscribe to the cultural mandate of instrumental singlehood. The consequences of this gender difference in lifecourse design are manifest both quantitatively and qualitatively in the lived navigation of single adulthood and help explain ongoing reproduction of gender conflict and sexual domination.

Author

• Holly Michelle Wood, Harvard University