Do Lesbians Get Married More Than Gay Men?
When the Supreme Court this week decided not to take up several appeals against same-sex marriage—effectively legalizing it in 30 states—the news made the front pages of papers across the country. No surprise there. But Bloomberg Politics posted an interesting observation: Examining 35 newspapers in Oklahoma, Utah, Indiana, Wisconsin and Virginia, Bloomberg found that 29 featured photographs of women couples getting married, while three showed men, and three showed both.
A quick scan of other newspapers around the country shows that the pattern seems to hold, albeit not quite as emphatically. At The New York Times, for instance, an online search through roughly 200 recent articles about same-sex marriage found that, of those that were accompanied by photos of couples, 59 were of women, while 31 were of men. Not quite a landslide, but not exactly balanced either.
And on Saturday, the day after Supreme Court ordered Idaho to allow same-sex couples to wed, Idaho’s newspapers went the same route: three papers put a photo of a same-sex couple on their front pages. All threewere women.
You can make a lot of assumptions based on those numbers, and, indeed, many media critics made them on Twitter in reaction to the Bloomberg piece. Same-sex relationships between women have long been more palatable in the media in general, of course, from films and advertising to pornography, and I’ve no doubt there’s some of that bias at work here in the decision-making process for choosing art. But it also seems worth considering whether this was a case not of newspapers preferring lesbians to gay men, as one commenter on Twitter pointed out, but of lesbians, more than gay men, preferring marriage.
Unfortunately, numbers on how many same-sex couples have gotten married since it was first made legal in Massachusetts in 2004 are inexact.
“That’s one of the $64 million questions that nobody seems to be keeping track of,’’ said Carisa Cunningham, director of public affairs at GLAAD. That’s further compounded, she said, by “things moving so fast, especially this week.’’
But, she said, “anecdotally, there seem to be more female couples than male couples that get married.’’
And that seems to be the general consensus.
In Utah last year, when a ban on same-sex marriage was first overturned, 61 percent of the 1,234 couples were women, The Salt Lake Tribune reported. Mary Bernstein, a sociology professor at the University of Connecticut who studies LGBT issues, told USA Today that two-thirds of same-sex couples in Vermont are women.
“Because lesbian couples are more likely to have children, they’re also more likely to see marriage as an important way to protect their children,’’ she told the paper.
A couple of years ago, the Williams Institute think tank at UCLA, one of the primary groups doing such demographic studies nationally, found that two-thirds of married or legally registered same-sex couples are women, including 72 percent in New Hampshire, 59 percent in New Jersey, 71 percent in Oregon, and 63 percent in Massachusetts.
“Women are more likely to marry or legally formalize their partnership than are men,’’ the researchers found. “In eight states that provided us with data on gender and offer some form of legal status to same-sex couples, 62 percent of all same-sex couples who entered a legal status were female couples. However, only 54 percent of couples living in those states were female couples.’’
Around the time of the study, UCLA demographer Gary Gates also told NPR that lesbian couples are twice as likely to get married as gay men.
The Pew Research Center attempted to break down the demographics of same-sex marriages last year as well, and found that differences in reporting state by state, including that some no longer require a couple to state their gender, stymied the investigation somewhat. But, Pew concluded, “Lesbian couples accounted for over three-fifths of the more than 50,000 same-sex marriages that were identified by gender. In fact, female-female marriages outnumbered male-male marriages in every reporting jurisdiction except New York City.’’ (Which makes the Times’s photographic skew toward lesbians that much more of an anomaly.)
As for Idaho, though the Supreme Court denied the stay, same-sex marriages won’t be legal until the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals issues a final order striking down the state’s gay marriage ban. One county clerk began to issue marriage licenses anyway, and one of the six couples to receive them got married immediately. That couple happened to be women, and they were in two of the three state papers’ front page photos. The third was another female couple in line for a marriage license.
None of which should take away from the point of the Bloomberg piece, which is that we do seem to be a culture that is a lot more accepting of same-sex relationships, with the emphasis on the sex in particular, when it’s between two women.
But maybe the photos here show another sort of bias at work: Weddings are always about the bride.
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