Sexual Bargaining Power Politics In The American Marriage

Is the institution of marriage in America breaking down? Is marriage as we have known it largely irrelevant? Are the forms of marriage changing? Are the changes in women's roles in society related to the breakdown, irrelevance, and formal alteration of marriage? In this updated edition of his fundamental study of modern marriage, John Scanzoni challenges the widespread assumption that marriage is a dying institution. By analyzing the "reward seeking" which generates conflicts between males and females, he shows that marriage indeed has a future but that its form will continue to change as sex-role equality emerges both within and outside of marriage.

Sexual Bargaining in the Digital Era follows the evolution of genders/sexualities and so on away from their Old Normal (ON) pattern, which prevailed during the Agricultural Age and the Industrial Age, and into the New Normal (NN) pattern which is currently surfacing in concert with an emerging Digital Era. ON was based on the ancient traditional script governing how women, men, children ought to behave within the spheres of genders/marriages/families/relationships/sexualities. Over the centuries, ON eventually modified into the familiar 1950s’ style (nuclear) patriarchal, cisgender, husband/wife/with children and family. And now that style itself is fading away into NN. NN is based not on script but on improvisation—it is essentially a continual work-in-progress. To make it function the partners engage in ongoing negotiation governed by the principle that “everything is negotiable except the principle that everything is negotiable.” NN has thus far been pursued most frequently by persons (New Lights) who are educated and relatively advantaged. ON has been pursued mostly by persons (Old Lights) who are less educated and relatively less advantaged. ON is also strongly embraced by persons of a traditional religious bent—persons who tend to be rigid and unbending in their religious views. Currently, they tend to be extremely right-wing evangelicals and extremely right-wing Catholics. Importantly, their political clout far exceeds their relatively modest numbers within the larger population. In brief, the shift from ON to NN is a move away from the sanctity of a particular structure to the primacy of persons engaged in ongoing processes of inventing (and reinventing) certain arrangements of genders/marriages/families/relationships/sexualities, enabling them to fulfil their needs for primary (intrinsic/emotional) satisfactions such as liking, loving, empathy, companionship, sexual and so forth. Among other things, this shift replaces the preeminence of the historic binary or cisgender approach—heterosexual, legal, children and so on—in favor of the diversity/variety/multiplicity approach which incorporates under one conceptual umbrella all persons of whatever genders, sexualities and so on. All persons are thus engaged in a common struggle to achieve personal satisfactions as well as contribute to the Greater Good.

Despite much progress in the past ten years, American medical schools have woefully inadequate sex education curricula. While some have a reasonable amount of lecture time, few have clinical opportunities for students to develop practical skills in working with patients who are struggling with sexual problems. It is my impression that the same is true in medical and gynecological residencies, as well as in graduate schools of psychology, counseling and social work. This book was specifically written to help fill that gap. This is a book for clinicians, and it will provide a wealth of practical clinical knowledge and skills in dealing with the gamut of patient's sexual concerns, problems and dilemmas. Twenty-four experts have contributed eighteen chapters which address both the common and unusual sexual issues encountered in practice. These include sexual concerns from childhood to old age; gender identity and sexual preference; sexual dysfunction, including that of the physically ill and disabled; counseling with students, premarital, marital, and divorced patients; fertility and infertility; and chap ters dealing with rape, incest and other sexual contacts between adults and children. Of particular importance are chapters on human sexuality in American minority popula tions, a chapter on alcohol, medication and other drugs, and a chapter on medical management of sexual problems in the gay population, a subject long-ignored by the profession. The focus on practical intervention and skill development is amplified by the concluding four appendixes devoted to patient management problems.

In the past, a woman would routinely be asked what her husband did for a living. Increasingly, a man is likely to be asked what his wife does for a living. It's a small switch, but it signifies a revolution in gender roles and family life. Leonard Beeghley uses historical and international data to explain the dramatic changes in the way women and men organize their lives together.Beeghley looks at four issues?premarital sex, abortion, divorce, and employment and income?and discusses how gender roles and family life affect and are affected by changes in each. The key to his analysis is the distinction between individual and structural levels of explanation. At the individual level Beeghley shows how personal characteristics and experiences influence individuals' decisions. At the structural level he shows how changes in social organization?such as industrialization, urbanization, increasing participation of women in the labor force, decreasing fertility rate, and the rise of feminism?have altered the range of available choices. Speculating about the future, Beeghley discusses the way fundamental structural changes in American society are transforming gender relations and family life.

In a time when the American family has undergone dramatic evolution, change among African Americans has been particularly rapid and acute. African Americans now marry later than any other major ethnic group, and while in earlier decades nearly 95 percent of black women eventually married, today 30 percent are expected to remain single. The black divorcee rate has increased nearly five-fold over the last thirty years, and is double the rate of the general population. The result, according to The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans, is a greater share of family responsibilities being borne by women, an increased vulnerability to poverty and violence, and an erosion of community ties. The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population. Editors M. Belinda Tucker and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and the contributors take a hard look at the effects of chronic economic instability and cultural attitudes toward the male role as family provider. Their cogent historical analyses suggest that the influence of external circumstances over marriage preferences stems in large part from the profoundly damaging experience of slavery. This book firmly positions declining marriage within an ominous cycle of economic and social erosion. The authors propose policies for relieving the problems associated the changing marital behavior, focusing on support for single parent families, public education, and increased employment for African American men.

tion addressed by this analysis centers on the reciprocal relation between 1 household domestic and market work efforts. It should be obvious by now that this chapter is not concerned ex plicitly with the contributions of individual members to household or mar ket activity, nor does it examine the mechanisms by which work tasks or time is apportioned among them. To reiterate, households per se are the unit of analysis; the division of labor within, with respect to either household or market activities, is ignored. In this chapter, one must pre tend that the social relations within the household productive unit, which critically shape both the nature of work and its allocation, are hidden from view. To return to the earlier metaphor, households establish a to tal household "pie," made up of all the market and domestic chores that they will undertake and the time required for them. Only after that "pie" is created can it be sliced and the pieces doled out to individual members. 2 The household and market pie defined and described here can be roughly conceptualized as the total productive capacity of the household, or as the result of a pooling of individual talents and resources. Indeed, were a measure of the time available for leisure incorporated into the measure of the pie, the household's full income (budget) constraint (i. e. , the total productive potential of the household) could be described.