The Future of American Sexuality and Family: Five Key Trends
by Mark Regnerus, Public Discourse:
The tenth anniversary of Public Discourse makes for a good opportunity to take stock of what has happened in the past decade in the domains of sexuality and family. One would think that ten years is not a very long time to measure change in such timeless matters as family and sexuality. But these are not ordinary times.
The gap between 2008 and 2018 has been far more dynamic than most decades. As a sociologist, my specialty is behavior, so that will be my main focus. Here are five noteworthy narratives from the past decade. Each story constitutes a profound change, or reflects changes occurring within our most intimate relationships.
- Same-sex marriage becomes law in all fifty states.
This is the easiest to identify, and arguably most significant, shift in the marital landscape. Around two out of every three Americans approve of same-sex marriage today.
How many Americans have entered into civil same-sex marriages? It’s hard to say, since same-sex households themselves have never been simple to count. The Treasury Department, leaning on tax returns, identified about 250,000 same-sex marriages (filing jointly) in 2015, a figure that characterizes just under one-half of one percent of married tax filers in the United States. The Census Bureau estimates that the true figure is about 60 percent higher, and the Williams Institute thinks it’s higher still.
What are these couples like? Their tax returns suggest they’re generally younger and less likely to have dependent children—especially the men. They are also well-to-do. The average adjusted gross income of male couples was nearly $166,000, a number well above the $118,000 for female couples and the $115,000 for different-sex couples. What is more striking is the income reported by male couples with dependent children, clocking in at an average of $264,000. This is more than double what opposite-sex married couples with children tend to report ($122,000). Such couples tend to congregate in major coastal metropolitan areas. But even there we tend to overestimate the presence of married same-sex couples. In San Francisco, for instance, same-sex couples comprise only about 1.5 percent of all marriages, in a city not known for its embrace of matrimony. And that’s the highest rate among American cities.
Will same-sex marriage rates increase? As I wrote in Cheap Sex, I doubt it. Gallup data reveals a modest uptick in Americans reporting being married to someone of the same sex—six-tenths of one percentage point—between the first and second years after Obergefell. That’s not exactly the outcome you’d expect from pent-up demand. Some hold that the Obergefell case is enabling yet further changes in American family and sexual behavior. Toward that end, there is evidence of rising same-sex sexual behavior at levels outpacing that of growth in the share of Americans who identify as gay or lesbian.
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