They can’t tell if conservatives are googling this more often than progressives. They can’t tell if dads are Googling this any more than moms. Due to the unique type of data being analyzed, researchers don’t really know much about the people on the other end of these Google searches. Of course, there are limitations to their study, which has not gone through peer review. Men’s sexuality, understood in this context, warrants more questions. Caudillo and colleagues suspect that all of this results in people being curious and even concerned about the sexuality of the boys and men in their lives. On the other hand, men can be labeled as gay or bisexual base on a single experience even if they don’t identify that way. Most women can have the freedom to maintain a heterosexual identity even if they’ve had same-sex sexual encounters. There’s also evidence that men’s heterosexuality is much more easily questioned than women. While women can participate in “women’s work” without judgment, men face harsh social penalties for doing the same. To be feminine is, in short, to be undervalued. Women earn lower wages in fields that require care-taking and nurturing qualities, such as teaching and counseling. It makes sense then that parents place a stronger emphasis on their their sons exhibiting stereotypically gendered traits than their daughters.īut why is masculine conformity so strongly policed? Femininity has also been devalued historically. Pascoe, refers to as “fag discourse” - a specific form of gender policing where boys are teased for being gay when they don’t exhibit masculine qualities during their youth.
“To really understand the patterns in Google search behavior we discovered, you need to understand the ways three interrelated theories of gender and sexual inequality overlap and work together,” Caudillo explains.įirst, there is a strong link between masculinity and heterosexuality in American culture that is enforced through what sociologist C.J. (To put it in perspective, the search volume for “Is my daughter gay/lesbian?” is more comparable to the search volume for “Is my dog gay?” than it is to the searches about sons.) They also find that people ask Google “Is my husband gay?” more than two times more often than “Is my husband abusive?” or “Is my husband happy?” “We find that people ask Google whether their sons are gay about twice as commonly as whether their daughters are gay or lesbian,” Mishel told Fatherly. Google searches dating back to 2007 (when Google had more than 50 percent of the American search engine market), paints a picture. Although the research has yet to be published and released to the public, researchers close to the project say the deep-dive into data on all U.S. Now, researchers are teaming up for a massive follow-up study designed to draw conclusions about what these Google searches say about the traditional masculinity standards boys and men have to live up to - and the social consequences they face when they don’t. People even typed “Is he gay?” - a fairly bizarre search - into Google more commonly than “Is she gay?” People had more questions about husbands, dads, uncles, and grandfathers than about wives, mothers, aunts, or grandmothers. After Bridges first started looking at search volumes for “Is my son gay?” in 2016, fellow sociologist Mónica Caudillo and doctoral candidate and Emma Mishel extended that research and noted that the same gender gap apparent in searches about children’s sexuality was also noticeable in regards to searches about adults. Still, parents have clearly not stopped Googling this question behind closed doors. That’s partially why experts warn that there’s one sign of homosexuality parents should look out for. While some progressive parents might be curious about their effeminate sons, it seems likely (given that rankings are affected by clickthrough rates for stories) that genuinely anxious parents are turning to search engines for help.
It is probably not a coincidence that the top search ranking for “Is My Son Gay?” is a bigoted Focus on the Family post about mourning. Essentially, the attempt to figure out if young kids are gay is a stereotype-fueled fool’s errand at best and a stigmatizing act of insecurity at worst.