Chapter 4 Reading Notes PDF

**Chapter 4**: Intimacy, Commitment, and Family Formation NOTES FROM TEXTBOOK: Introduction: - family networks now often include parents, stepparents, same-sex partners, children conceived biologically or by artificial insemination, close friends, ex partners, and ex sons and daughters...

**Chapter 4**: Intimacy, Commitment, and Family Formation NOTES FROM TEXTBOOK: Introduction: - family networks now often include parents, stepparents, same-sex partners, children conceived biologically or by artificial insemination, close friends, ex partners, and ex sons and daughters in law. - Intimacy can mean strong emotional bonds, such as love. - Intimacy consists of a distinct social relationship governed by norms, based on emotions, and situated in a specific social location. - Sexual intimacy can be an important component (although not necessary condition), and scholars point to the ways that sexuality has evolved to become an expression of the self. - Commitment to someone involves a very different dimension of positive feelings for a partner and to a relationship over time. - Intimacy can take multiple forms, including queer intimacies that combine cisgender, transgender, and/or nonbinary identities, as well as those involving multiple simultaneous consensual relationships. Family formation, social structures, and change: - there are vast changes in marriage and divorce rates and in the influence of changing trends in cohabitation, sexual behavior, childbearing, and women\'s work outside the home. - Family demography involves the study of changes in family structure- married couple families (with or without) children, cohabiting couple families (with or without children), single parent families, stepfamilies, and so forth to understand both individual and societal behavior. - The majority of all families live as married or common law couples in either heterosexual or same-sex relationships. - Canada has experienced substantial increases in rates of divorce, remarriage, and single parenthood, and today there is more societal acceptance of non-marital unions. - One way in which family life has changed substantially is a decrease in marriage rates. This can be linked to economic trends. - Another marker of growing diversity in Canadian families is a substantial decrease in the number of couples living with children. - There has been a substantial increase in multigenerational households- households that include at least three generations of the same family. These reasons are that: - Canada's changing ethnic cultural composition that includes more multigenerational households among indigenous and immigrant populations - the high cost of living in some regions of the country, which may compel multiple generations to live together. - There has also been an increase in and married Canadians. - Lone-parent homes have also increased for the last four decades. - The majority of Canadians reporter after divorce or separation. Remarriage, however, is now less common because of the increasing propensity to cohabit after divorce. - Almost half of all step families are blended families that include at least one child from a previous relationship plus one created in the current relationship. - Cohabitation, also known as common law or consensual unions, has become prevalent in Canada, especially among Canadian youth who commonly cohabit before marrying. - Common law unions in the rest of Canada more closely aligned with the US, where individuals with fewer years of education and lower incomes are more likely to cohabit and less likely to marry. - Cohabitation is often seen as the probationary relationship before marriage and not always as an acceptable environment in which to raise a child. - The feminist movement has had a stronger history in Quebec than in other parts of Canada, pushing a culture of greater equality between women and men. - Cohabitation leads to more sharing of domestic work than does marriage, and cohabiting women are more likely to participate in the labor market. Intimacy: meaning and theories: - One key transformation in family life is the increasing separation of sexuality from the constraints of reproduction, a process that has gathered great speed with the rapid innovation and reproductive technologies and contraception. - Reproductive technologies encompass a broad range of technologies that seek to facilitate, mediate, or disrupt the process of reproduction, including conceptive technologies such as in vitro fertilization- a procedure in which eggs from a woman\'s ovary are removed and fertilized with sperm in a laboratory, antenatal testing- diagnostic procedures performed before the birth of a baby, surrogacy, egg donation, and sperm donation. - Malleable eroticism offers a form of self-expression at the individual level and within the realm of social norms. Sexuality is not only increasingly detached from reproduction, but it has also been largely freed from the constraints of patriarchy- a social system structured by male headship, religion, and other means of social control. - Plastic sexuality results not only from the sexual freedom made possible by contraceptive and new reproductive technologies, but by the increasing economic and social and dependence of women. - A pure relationship can be defined as confluent love which is a relationship of sexual and emotional equality between partners. It is more contingent on the emotional satisfaction and pleasure that a relationship offers at any particular moment. Women and men are now free to participate in the pure relationship as long as it offers satisfaction. - Social change in the way that intimacy is organized influences the wider organization and structure of sexuality. - Romantic/sexual intimacy is fuelling what social theorists have called detraditionalization- the decline or reconfiguration of tradition- in the late modern era. - Meaning-constitutive traditions- common sense understandings passed down from one generation to the next- still reinforce the regulative tradition of heterosexual marriage as the dominant ideal. Marriage debates: legal structures and cultural privilege: - children raised in two biological parent married families tend to have better educational, social, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes than children from married step, cohabiting, and single parent families. The differences in these family types are modest, however, and there are mediating factors in the relationship between marriage and better outcomes, including economic resources, parents own socialization, and family conflict/stress. - It is not marriage that causes financial success and happiness; Rather, individuals who are happier and financially secure are more likely to marry. - Children raised by lesbian parents fare as well as those raised by heterosexual married parents; Less is known at this stage about children of gay male parents. The changing legal path of marriage and cohabitation: - while the goal of these policies is to reduce poverty by encouraging marriage, there is no evidence that these programs have increased marriage rates or strengthened unions between unmarried parents. - Regulating families was also a tool used to control indigenous populations of Canada. - Indian women who married non-Indian men were denied their Indian status, their band membership, education and treaty rights, and the right to pass on status to their children. - An Indian man who married a non-Indian woman kept his Indian status, and the non-Indian woman and her children received status - It remained largely patriarchal, with most married women economically dependent on their husbands. Obtaining a divorce was very difficult, and children born outside of marriage were thought of as illegitimate. - Canada became the 4th country in the world to legalize same sex marriage. - New family sponsorship policies seek to reduce the risk of women being mistreated by considering the men\'s criminal record or history of domestic violence, reducing the number of years of required sponsorship, and adding language to sponsorship contracts outlining women\'s rights. - Non-English proficient women did not fully understand the conditions of sponsorship and were subject to more severe abuse and neglect. - If parents did find something seriously objectionable about the partner, the young adults expressed their willingness to reconsider their choice. The changing landscape of young adult relationships: dating and hooking up: - Independent life stage: encompasses a period of relative social independence. - Dating involves social activities between two people over time to discover the possibility of a committed relationship. - Men asked women to go out, paid for the date, and initiated intimacy and sex. - Today, online technologies have transformed dating and courtship rituals to further disrupt what was formerly a clear pathway to adulthood, from dating to courtship to marriage. - Social media provide greater opportunities for sexual expression and have been part of the evolution of greater tolerance, openness, and debate over sexual expression and pleasure. - There has been an increase in the incidence of oral sex: over half of American adolescents have either received or performed oral sex. - The most basic change in the script for sex between women and men. - Hooking up can be defined as when partners get together for a physical encounter and don\'t necessarily expect anything further. - Many of these hookups involve relatively light sexual activity- 1/3 included sexual intercourse, and the other two thirds involved other activities like oral sex or just kissing and non-genital touching. - While hooking up in college student anxiety, the issue is not the hookup itself but the culture surrounding it, which perpetuates limiting gender stereotypes does reward masculine callousness and punished kindness. - Sexual scripts refer to the cognitive models and cultural patterns that inform desire and influence behavior. - Sexual double standard- the idea that women should limit their sexual activities to committed relationships while men have the liberty to pursue sex within or outside of a relationship. It labels women who have casual sex as sluts, whereas men who hook up are just doing what guys do. - There is gender inequality by privileging men\'s desires and needs over those of women - student responses to a vignette that described a heterosexual hookup followed by a first date that did not involve sex. They found that students viewed both women and men as sexual beings with desires that could be fulfilled through hookups, a semi anonymous, casual, and mutually pleasurable affair that carries few long term consequences. - The risk of intimate partner violence increases for young adults who use online dating apps to seek sexual encounters or relationships. - The party and bar scene facilitate a sexualized environment in which women kiss each other in public for the enjoyment of male onlookers and sometimes leads to threesomes that involve same-sex sexual practices between women. Techno transformations: Internet dating and cybersex: - men often search for hookups that end up in committed relationships. Women seek more equal relationships in their interactions on digital spaces. - Social exchange theory understands interpersonal relationships according to the social psychological principle of minimizing costs and maximizing rewards. - Interactions that take place face to face or in cyberspace involve interpersonal exchanges that seek positive rewards, but differences in online forms of communications do exist, including less need for a spatial proximity, greater anonymity, and more emphasis on self-disclosure. - A sense of intimacy can develop between women using apps based on their shared experiences. - When choosing a prospective partner, online daters tend to make decisions based on racial preferences. White people exclude black people, Latinos my Asians, those of Middle Eastern descent, east Indians, and indigenous people as potential dating partners. - White men are more willing than white women to date nonwhites; However, among those with stated racial preferences, white men are more likely to exclude black people as possible dates. White women are more likely to exclude Asian people. - Same sex couples predominantly meet their partners online rather than through an in-person introduction. - Cybersex- including more current incarnation such as sexting- has also come of age with the advent of the internet. It involves two or more people engaging in online sexual talk and may include masturbation and orgasm. - Almost 1/3 of men and women said they had engaged in cyber sex - Significantly more women and men reported participating in cybersex with a primary partner rather than a known non partner or stranger. - More women engaged in cybersex with their primary partner than men. - Online and electronic communication is shaping the global marketplace of buying sexual services. Sex workers increasingly advertise online and set up appointments with prospective clients via the Internet, no longer requiring middlemen. Living alone, families of choice, and living apart together: - households consisted of one person, more than the percentage of couples with children, couples without children, single parent families, multiple family households, and all other combinations of people living together. - Friendships have also been an important component of families of choice. - Families of choice can be defined as skin like networks of relationships, based on friendship and committed beyond blood. They can include blood relatives, but the importance of these relationships is based on choice rather than just on blood or legal ties. - People\'s friendship patterns also change over time period younger people choose their closest friends outside their family, but this tendency changes as people age, and the proportion of individuals who name their relatives as friends increases. - LAT= Living apart together, an intimate relationship with a partner who lives somewhere else. They do not live apart only due to necessity in terms of housing or labor market constraints, but rather that many choose not to live together even when it would be possible for them to do so. - Some choose LAT\'s because they are not ready to take the step of living together. Others had external constraints on living together, including affordability or the job and education market. Some intentionally choose to live apart as a more desirable solution to the complexity of modern life. Conclusion: - even though heterosexual relationships have become more gender egalitarian, there are still persistent gendered inequalities, especially within heterosexual marriages where research has found an equal participation between men and women in household and parental tasks.