Sexual Bargaining in the Digital Era: Crafting a New Normal

By John H. Scanzoni

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. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785277450

Book preview

Sexual Bargaining in the Digital Era

Sexual Bargaining in the Digital Era

Crafting a New Normal

John H. Scanzoni

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © John H. Scanzoni 2021

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946521

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-743-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-743-X (Hbk)

Cover image: By ART PAL/Shutterstock.com

This title is also available as an e-book.

For my Granddaughters Sarah and Morgan, and for all women everywhere pursuing autonomy—whether straight, gay, other—and for their partners.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.What’s a ‘Normal’ Family, Anyway?

2.What Went Wrong the First Time Around?

3.Getting It Right This Time Around—The Economic Sphere

4.Getting It Right This Time Around—The Sphere of Sexualities and Reproduction

5.Getting It Right This Time Around—Negotiating Women’s Autonomy

6.Getting It Right This Time Around—Creating Social Policies and Programs in Sync with the New Normal

7.The Arc of the Moral Universe […] Bends Toward Justice

References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am profoundly indebted to the numerous colleagues and students (grad & undergrad alike) who over the years offered incisive critiques of my work alongside warm encouragement. Apart from their valued inputs this book could never have happened. The book also rests on the shoulders of giants from the past as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Engels, who were among the first to question the viability of the Old Normal, and then got us thinking as to what a New Normal might look like.

INTRODUCTION

While relaxing near the complimentary coffee dispenser at my local supermarket (pre-COVID-19), an African American man, whom I had never seen before nor have seen since, approached from out of nowhere. Mid-life and middle class, he had a warm smile and an entirely disarming demeanor. After the obligatory exchange of pleasantries, Hello, how are you?, what he said next took me by complete surprise: You look like someone who’s been around for a while, and maybe you can tell me what’s happening. With all this bad stuff going on everywhere you look, what do you think the world’s coming to?

I have no idea why he thought to confront a total stranger with a ponderous existential question debated since the days of the ancient Greek philosophers. I could see he wasn’t joking, but he did have an agenda: He was hoping I’d agree with his premise that the world is in fact getting worse by the day and that the old cliché really is true—we’re going to hell in a handbasket! Although it did not occur to me at the time, I wondered later if he thought I might perhaps join him in reciting the now infamous mantra, Make America great again!

He reminded me of those students in my university classes on families, genders, relationships, and sexualities who share an equally downbeat view of life. To counter their pessimism, I pose a decidedly upbeat possibility: "Over the long haul might things actually be getting better?" But when I suggested that idea to my acquaintance he immediately lost interest, and with a disappointed glance he turned around and vanished into the crowded store as suddenly as he’d appeared.

I regret that I failed to ask him what America was like before it started going to hell. I wonder what he would have said. A 2019 study from the Gallup research group offers a partial glimpse into what America looked like during the decades prior to the celebrated August 1969 Woodstock music festival compared to what it looks like today. Called "10 Major Social Changes in the 50 Years since Woodstock," the author observed that Woodstock wasn’t so much a catalyst for change as a signal that it was coming. Woodstock was […] symptomatic of major societal changes underfoot.¹ The author continued,

Gallup trends indicate that in 1969 the majority of Americans were very religious, disapproved of premarital sex and frowned on interracial marriage. Half opposed first-trimester abortions, and many likely thought gay relations should be illegal. Additionally, bias against women and blacks who might run for president was pervasive, and a majority of women preferred to be homemakers rather than work outside the home. Americans’ stances have since changed on all of these matters, in some cases markedly so. However, except for the decline in religiosity and preference for smaller families, these changes didn’t happen abruptly after Woodstock, but evolved over several decades."

I suspect that if my acquaintance saw that Gallup report he would argue that it provides undeniable evidence that America is indeed careening down an immoral, and slippery, slope into the abyss.² Nonetheless, in support of the contrary thesis that, in many respects, America and other Western societies are moving in a direction that is more rather than less moral, I might have pointed my acquaintance to a recent biography—called Romantic Outlaws—about Mary Wollstonecraft and daughter Mary Shelley.³ Wollstonecraft lived mostly in England during the latter years of the eighteenth-century Age of the Enlightenment, while Shelley lived mostly in England during the early years of the nineteenth century as the Industrial Revolution was reshaping both Europe and America.

I might have suggested to him that we use the lives of those two women as a baseline and ask if smart, hardworking women are in fact better off today than they were, say, more than 200 years ago. As I see it, the answer must surely be yes. I might also have cited my two granddaughters (one having studied in Europe, the other teaching in China) as but two examples of the many thousands of today’s younger women seizing opportunities never before even dreamed of by their foremothers.

Sadly, both Wollstonecraft and Shelley suffered enormous adversities throughout the course of their entire lives precisely because they were smart and hardworking. They struggled mightily against male indifference and bullying from both inside and outside their families. The men around them were at best indifferent to, and at worst resented and stoutly resisted, their efforts to gain for all women the right to be autonomous, that is, to be in charge of both their economic life and their sexual/reproductive life. Shelley was, for example, compelled to publish the first version of her iconic novel Frankenstein anonymously because, said her publisher, no reader would ever believe that any woman could write a work of such rich literary merit.

To be sure, I’d have to concede to my acquaintance that although many of today’s women do in fact possess far more opportunities than did their foremothers, #MeToo and similar happenings demonstrate that for all too many women gender equity in its fullest sense remains an elusive goal.⁴ As I see it, the ancient patriarchal family patterns that severely inhibited both Wollstonecraft and Shelley have not gone away. They remain a big reason for continued gender disparities.

If I had thought of it, I might also have mentioned that I was working on a book that describes those patriarchal patterns as the Old Normal. And, naturally enough, Old Lights refers to persons who believe in and support the Old Normal. They make up a noticeable though declining slice of the population.⁵ Paradoxically, though the tide of history may be running against them, during the Trump presidency their political influence far surpassed their long-term prospects.

Perhaps curious labels such as Old Normal and Old Lights might have amused my acquaintance and prompted him to wonder if the book also talks about New Normal and New Lights. It does indeed, and as their name implies, New Lights have for some years been busily crafting New Normal ways of refashioning our personal lives—genders, sexualities, relationships, marriages, parenting, and families. I could have added, furthermore, that the tide of history is running with them—they are a wave of the future. The 2019 Gallup report could be viewed as a partial accounting of the long-term evolutionary development from Old to New Normal.

If he’d asked why the tide of history favors New Lights I could have said that they have a lot going for them because, for one thing, while they’re busily crafting new normal ways of doing our personal lives, a lot of smart people are actively inventing new normal ways of fashioning our work lives. That new normal style of work lies at the heart of what is known as the Digital Era, or what some call The Second Machine Age.⁶

MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, as do many other economists, argue that the Digital Era is steadily displacing the Industrial Age including the old normal style of work central to that waning period of history.⁷ The Industrial Age was many things, and one of its central features was that it was driven largely by muscle power using, first, the tool of steam and, later on, electricity. Physically strong men labored long and hard at the dangerous work of building the skyscrapers, factories, highways, tunnels, bridges, and railroads that came to dominate the physical and urban landscapes of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western societies. During those many decades, it was thought that women were unable to perform such physically demanding labor and were thus largely excluded from the kinds of work that typically offered ample levels of both tangible and intangible rewards. Their exclusion reinforced the second-class status to which women had been relegated for countless millennia.

No doubt my acquaintance was well aware that, unlike muscle power, the Digital Era is driven instead by brainpower—the exercise of which is steadily becoming the New Normal way of doing work. To be sure, access to the New Normal ways of doing work is not yet equitably distributed, and a major theme of this book is how to reduce that inequity.

In any case, women confronting the Digital Era are not shortchanged in the same ways they were during the Agricultural and Industrial Ages—men’s and women’s little gray cells are not dissimilar. For the first time since the Agricultural Revolution surfaced over 10,000 years ago, women have finally come upon what Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and many other women (and their male allies) on both sides of the Atlantic have craved—the possibility of a level playing field on which to have a fair shot in their struggles with men for gender equity.⁸

The shape of that contemporary playing field is in part influenced by the fact that growing numbers of today’s women (particularly the better educated) draw on their New Normal status within the work world as a bargaining chip to negotiate men into fashioning a New Normal status within their personal world—a New Normal far more equitable than their Old Normal personal world.⁹ I might also have mentioned to my acquaintance that the two faces of the New Normal reinforce each other—they are two sides of the same coin. Performing effectively in the new normal work world tends to facilitate women’s effective performance in the new normal personal world; and performing effectively in the latter tends to enhance their performance in the former.

Finally, I could have mentioned to my acquaintance that the social evolution from Old to New Normal—especially in work life but also in personal life—is progressing more rapidly and is thus more pervasive, among privileged segments of our society (upper middle class) than among less-privileged persons (lower middle class, working class, and poor; and Latinx; and persons of color). Consequently, in the interests of social justice, the book argues that the right and moral thing for privileged citizens to do is design and implement social policies and programs that might enable less-advantaged persons to access the New Normal.

The growing disparity between privileged and less-privileged persons in the United States was underscored vividly and tragically by the COVID-19 pandemic. Described as the Unequal Distribution of Damage from Covid-19, a 2020 Gallup report showed that while many privileged persons were able to keep their jobs and work safely from home, many less-advantaged persons (especially women and particularly those of color) were likely either to be laid off or lose their jobs and then—adding insult to injury—be blindsided in their efforts to obtain government benefits.¹⁰ Furthermore, among children/youth stuck at home during the COVID-19 shutdown, those from advantaged households had ready access to technology and Wi-Fi enabling them to reap optimal advantage from the instruction offered online by their school. On the other side, children/youth from less-advantaged households were more likely to encounter a range of technological barriers to meaningful participation in those online educational programs.¹¹

In any event, it is said frequently that the devil is in the details, and my acquaintance would undoubtedly raise numerous questions re how those many disparate threads could possibly be woven together into a cohesive and compelling narrative. Importantly, he would want to know why a New Normal vision of our personal world—like the one implied by the 2019 Gallup report—serves the Greater Good any better than the Old Normal vision with its traditional imagery re genders, relationships, sexualities, and families. Though we may be powerless to stop the advancing Digital Era, do we not, he might ask, have the capacity to celebrate and retain the traditional ways of doing the personal world? Indeed, he would no doubt claim that tinkering with our personal world is a sure sign of our moral depravity, and that those types of deviations prove my point that America is indeed going to hell.¹²

My response would be to invite him to read the book and then judge for himself as to which course of action is more humane and moral, and thus best serves the Greater Good: Is it to persist in mean-spirited efforts to force the social clock backwards toward the good old days, which, it turns out, were not so great after all? Or is it instead to develop innovative policies and programs that, among other things, attract less-advantaged citizens to and prepare them for the New Normal—in both work life and personal life?

1 Saad 2019.

2 Stewart 2021.

3 Gordon 2015.

4 New York Times Editorial Staff 2019.

5 Phillips 2016; Levin 2019.

6 Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014.

7 Ibid.; Galbraith 2014.

8 Wollstonecraft 1792; Flexner 1970.

9 Scanzoni 2015.

10 Rothwell 2020.

11 Woolley et al. 2020.

12 Stewart 2021.

Chapter 1

WHAT’S A ‘NORMAL’ FAMILY, ANYWAY?

Way back in 1965, renowned Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons published a widely read essay called The Normal American Family.¹ For him, normal was comparable to what today’s nurse means when he reports that the patient has a normal body temperature of 98.6. For instance, during the 2020 COVID-19 epidemic, certain facilities measured body temperature by requiring would-be entrants to stand before a device that cast a beam on their forehead. A screen on the device then displayed a number alongside its verdict—it told the nurse that the person’s body temperature was either normal (98.6) or not normal (e.g., 103.9).

A reading of around 98.6 reveals two features about the person, both of which were analogous to what Parsons meant by the normal family. First, the person’s body is deemed to be functioning at an optimal level. S/he is assumed not to be unhealthy. Positive things are probably going on inside the patient’s body. On the whole they seem to be in good health; it is unlikely that anything menacing (like COVID-19) is lurking inside them.

Second, not only is s/he assumed to be in a healthy state, s/he gives no obvious evidence of potentially harming the health of those around her/him. And the flip side of assuming a nonnegative influence is the further assumption of a positive influence—besides doing no harm, s/he may be contributing in various positive ways to the health and well-being of others around her/him, that is, the Greater Good.

In the middle of the twentieth century, Parsons (as did most social scientists and laypersons) believed that normal marriage and normal family were limited to legally joined heterosexuals and were, in essence, one and the same entity. Indeed, we might coin the phrase marrfam to capture that single entity. Persons successfully doing marrfam were perceived to be normal, that is, they were seen as socially healthy persons. Not only did their normality benefit them personally, but being normal also benefitted their surrounding social context. They served the Greater Good mainly by, among other things, producing children that they then socialized to become normal members of society. In effect, normal meant best for individuals and best for society. Marrfam was normal in the sense that it was the best possible, that is, most desirable, arrangement for sustaining strong adults and for producing healthy children—thus resulting in a healthy, that is, robust, vigorous society.

The normal marrfam of that era relied on what Parsons said was a sharp role differentiation between the genders. The husband/father was what he called the instrumental task leader of marrfam. He served as the sole (typically) provider/breadwinner of its material needs as well as the final authority over all disputed issues. Marrfam was thus patriarchal in the sense that it was designed first and foremost to serve his occupational interests. (His sexual interests too, as described in later chapters.) The assumption was that the more his interests were being met, the better off the entire family as well as society would be.

The wife/mother was, said Parsons, the socioemotional or expressive task leader of marrfam—she nurtured her children and encouraged her husband as he struggled to succeed in the marketplace.² She supported him emotionally, and he in turn provided her with the economic wherewithal necessary to properly socialize their girls and boys: girls, to become the next generation of effective wives/mothers; boys, to become the next generation of successful workers/breadwinners within the Industrial Age marketplace. In sum, almost everyone understood what a normal marrfam was all about. Normal meant not just usual or typical; normal also meant that marrfam was optimal for the well-being of its straight participants and also beneficial for the larger society.

Furthermore, Parsons added that the normal marrfam of that era was self-sufficient: Ideally speaking, it did not rely on the inputs of family members beyond itself. Unlike many husband-wife units during the prior Agricultural Age, the normal twentieth-century husband-wife unit was not obliged to look to its blood kin for resources in order to function successfully within either the economic or emotional realm. It was a self-sufficient unit of parents and children belonging to—though not dependent on—the wider kin network to which it was linked by blood.

Finally, Parsons believed that the normal family (male-centered and male-controlled) meshed flawlessly with the normal post-World War II industrial economy that was also male-centered and male-controlled. He painted an idyllic landscape in which the normal family and the normal economy blended seamlessly the one into the other.

Brilliant though he was, Parsons failed to envision any circumstance that might perhaps gnaw away at the foundations of the post-World War II normal industrial economy and/or the mid-twentieth-century normal family. For him, both the economy and the family of his day had reached their zenith—the culmination of their shared social evolution that began in earnest around 1800 at