Lecture notes, lecture 9-10,12 PDF

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Chapter 9 Kimmel, M. & Holler, J. (2011). The gendered society (Canadian Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. The Gendered Media Difference and Domination Glamourized  The media is an institution , that (1) reflects existing gender differences and gender inequalities, (2) constructs those very gender differences, and (3) reproduces gender inequality by making those differences seem 'natural' and not socially produced in the first place  Media reflect existing gender differences and inequalities by targeting different Often, women and men don't use or consume the same media—there are women's  Often, women and men don't use or consume the same media  The Media as Socializing Institution o The media is a primary institution for socialization o The 1970s, you would find that there were three major institutions tasked with the socialization of children: family, religion, and education o The five primary institutions of socialization: family, schools, and religious institutions, to be sure—and also peer groups and the media. o Media are quite unlike other social institutions  The media are not based on personal interaction (think of school, religion and family) and direct communication; as is obvious, they are mediated communication, and until recently, their influence seemed to go in one direction only  In some ways, the media are considerably more complex  The media, in contrast, are comparatively multi-various and lawless o McLuhan, father of media studies, famously claimed that 'the medium is the message," meaning the medium of communication inevitably affects the user and the messages received  How the medium (form or technology) affects us o The question is never whether or not the media do such and such, but rather how our interactions with those media  'His' and 'Hers' Media: Separate and Unequal o One way to look at it is that he has 'his' media, but she can also share 'his' media —that she seems to have more choices than he does  Or you could say that he wouldn't be caught dead consuming her media, whereas the penalties when she crosses over into his media are far less severe o His and Hers TV  Canadians watch slightly less TV than Americans, averaging about 21 hours per week  Young men watch the least television, at about 12 hours a week, while women 60 and over watch the most, averaging almost 36 hours in front of the screen  Most of the television Canadians watch is American  Women used to be depicted in stereotypical roles, now there somewhat betterwomen as doctors, lawyers, judges, etc.  These changes in women's real and media-depicted lives have not been matched with parallel changes in the depiction (or the realities) of men's lives  Men still seem to troop off to work, as ambitious and motivated as ever, but maybe not as respected  More openly gay people now  Television images generally mirror North American ambivalence ae about change

Less soap operas now Executives now worry about the 'feminization of prime time' Late at night, though, it's a steady parade of men: Letterman, Leno, Kimmel Networks want men because they are the consumers everyone wants to land  Network executives are trying desperately to recapture these guys, who are bailing out for the Internet, cable, video games, and other media  Canadian children watch an average of 14 hours of television per week  By the time a Canadian child graduates from high school, he/she may have spent more hours watching television than going to school.  Infant television watching is increasing  Violence is ubiquitous (61 per cent of all shows contained some violence and that typically it is perpetuated by a white male, who goes punished and shows little remorse but it is humorous  Boys are the centrepiece of a story  Girls serve as backdrop, are helpful and caring,  Commercials during kid shows are always showing gender stereotypes  Worse then the show itself His and Hers Print Media  In the literary world, women outnumber men in the purchase of every single genre (except war and sports stories), and they also buy 80 per cent of all fiction sold in the United States and Europe  4/5 novels bought by women  Most men don't read fiction  One side says women's magazines enslave women to household drudgery, and the other side says such magazines offer them liberal propaganda and false freedoms.  Women's magazines do both  Women's magazines offer polyvocality—multiple voices, differing perspectives  Men's magazines in comparison are as monotonal as you can get.  On the front cover of virtually every issue are bikini-clad buxom babes  Overwhelmingly male {16 per cent), unmarried (71 per cent), and young  Everywhere, even on campus, the magazines tell us, men are entitled to look at naked women—and the women volunteer to do it  Men must avoid the 'taint' of association with anything feminine  Gender equality has come almost entirely from women entering 'male' spheres formerly closed to them Gender, Race, Rap, and Rock  Women and men are pretty much consuming 'his' media—at least a lot more than they are consuming 'her' media  Most hip-hop consumers are white  Measure of authenticity His Console or Hers? Gender and Gaming  Canadians are starting to spend more time at their home computers than watching television  The average age is 35 and rising  Women 18 and older now represent a much larger proportion of the game-playing population than do boys 17 md under  Sports and adventure games come close to women    

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Girl gamers are thereby encouraged to adopt the position of 'watcher', allowing male relatives to master games  Playing action games for only 10 hours produced significant gains in mental gains in mental rotation and spatial attention abilities (two areas generally perceived as gendered; gains made by women were more significant than those made by men  Women are a relative rarity in video games  Presented as eye candy o Where His Does Hers: 'Mainstream' Pornography  Women have always been present as performers, of course, in numbers roughly equal to men  Women are consuming far more pornography than ever  Women can enter the men's space, but men dare not enter women's  5 per cent of workers say they or their co-workers visit pornographic websites or engage in other sexually oriented Internet activities on their work computers during office hours  Makes men more prone to rape or gives men a cathartic release that makes them less prone to rape  Neither hypothesis turns out to be confirmable, nor does porn evidently make men dislike feminism or wish to limit women's rights  Orgasm= money shot  Porn certainly lies to men  The major lie is that every woman really, secretly, deep down, wants to have sex with them  And if they do say no, well, they really mean yes Convergence and Equality o Despite all the ways in which women have begun to enter formerly all-male domains. And men have retreated in the face of this new media equality o On-line, for example, women and men are roughly equal users of the Internet  Different purposes.  Equally use the Internet to buy products and do their banking on-line, men are more likely to pay bills participate in auctions, trade stocks, and buy digital content (like Internet pornography)  Men search for information more often than women; women use e-mail to maintain relationships  Women locate health, while men locate government data 

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Chapter 10 Kimmel, M. & Holler, J. (2011). The gendered society (Canadian Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Gendered Intimacies Communication, Friendship Love, and Sex  The Historical 'Gendering' of Intimate Life o Men are most adept to friendships according to Wollstonecraft  Hunting and warfare, the domains of male activity, required deep and enduring bonds among men for survival, and thus close male friendships hi became a biologically based human adaptation o Identifying four 'barriers' to emotional intimacy among men: (1) competition; (2) the need to be 'in control; forbids self-disclosure and openness; (3) homophobia; and (4) lack of skills and positive role models for male intimacy  Men are no longer seen as 'better' at friendship and love than women o Separation and individuation are more difficult for women; connection and intimacy more difficult for men. o Men tend to be instrumental—focusing on tasks or shared activities rather than selfdisclosure— in their relationships with other men  In their friendships, men have come to 'seek not intimacy but companionship, not disclosure but commitment' o The separation of spheres also positioned women as the domestic experts: Women became increasingly expressive-adept at emotional communication as men were abandoning that style  Divided the mental and social world into two complementary halves  Men were to express the traits and emotions associated with the workplace— competitiveness, individual achievement, instrumental rationality— whereas women were to cultivate the softer domestic virtues of love, nurturance, and compassion  Love itself changed meanings, coming to mean tenderness, powerlessness, and emotional expression o The idea of companionate marriage became the norm in Western society, replacing earlier, more pragmatic views of the institution  We viewed 'love' as the primary purpose of marriage,  The romantic love they described was generally experienced outside marriage; in fact, the most typical form of courtly love emphasized a young man's service to and love for a married lady o Dowry for their daughters (a custom that persists in many places, as does the different but related system of bride price) o In the nineteenth-century marriage manuals, love is rarely mentioned as a reason to get married  In fact, love is presented more as a product of marriage than its prerequisite  Romantic love 'has since been regarded as the most important prerequisite to marriage o Homophobia became increasingly significant in men's lives  Gendered Communications o Men and women use language differently and for different goals  Argues that talk between men and women is 'cross-cultural communication'

Men, she argues, use language to establish their position in a hierarchy To men, conversations 'are negotiations in which people try and achieve and maintain the upper hand if they can  Women, by contrast, use conversations as 'negotiations for closeness in which people try and seek and give confirmation and support, and to reach consensus o Content of speech often varies by sex  Men disclose less personal information, use fewer intensifiers, and make direct and declarative statements  Women negotiate in private, ask more questions to maintain the flow of conversation, and use more personal pronouns o Styles of speech  Men's voices are simply weeper as a result of size and structural differences  When women speak, they sometimes end a declarative sentence with a slight rise in tone, as if ending it with a question mark  Women tend to 'hedge'—to express tentativeness—and to 'backchannel'—using words or making sounds that confirm listening and encourage the speaker to continue speaking  Men interrupt women far more than women interrupt men  It's not the gender of the speaker, but rather the gender of the person to whom one is speaking that makes the difference  Men talk more, particularly in public  Grow silent within intimate relationships- a response to a particular situation Gender Differences in Friendship: Real and Imagined o Whereas men respond to stress with the now-famous 'fight-or-flight' response, women look to friends or allies as a source of emotional sustenance in a response labelled 'tend and befriend'  Because men respond to stress by releasing testosterone, which causes the fight-orflight response, whereas women release oxytocin, which produces a calming effect and a desire for closeness" o Men were almost twice as likely to say they preferred 'doing some activity' with their best friend and looked for friends who liked 'to do the same things' as they did o Women, by contrast, were more likely to choose someone 'who feels the same way about things' as a friend and to favour just talking' as their preferred mode of interaction  Women were twice as likely to talk about personal issues with their friends  Still, women and men are far more similar than different in both providing and responding to supportive communication from a friend during 'trouble talk'-that is, when they are feeling some relationship distress o Women have more friendships  Many married men identified their wives as their best friends, wives almost never identified their husbands in this way o Women seem far more likely to share their feelings with their friends than were men; to engage in face-to-face interactions instead of men's preferred side-to-side style; and to discuss a wider array of issues than men do o Women's friendships seem to be more person-oriented; men's, more activity-oriented  Women's friendships appear to be more 'holistic', and men's more 'segmented'  And even when women seem to have fewer friends, as some studies s have found, those they have are more intimate  

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However, there is much more similarity than dissimilarity Men are just as likely to defend their friends, to ask for help when needed, and to go out of their way to help their friends o Ethnicity, for example, directly affects both men's and women's experiences of friendships, not only b because we tend to choose friends of our own ethnic group, but because racialized groups may develop their own modes of friendship against the backdrop of a racist society.  Black men- survival strategy o Working-class black male friendships are often self-disclosing and close  Yet middle-class black men have fewer friends, and those they have are less intimate, than do their working-class counterparts o Unmarried men are more likely to maintain close and intimate friendships with both women and other men than are married men o Three gender differences in friendship  Sexual tension  Emotional disclosure - men don’t disclose to other men o Similarities in the same-sex friendship patterns of gay men and lesbians  Two differences stood out to the researchers  Gay men, for example, are far more likely to sexualize their same-sex friendships than are lesbians  Like straight men, then, they experience more sexual tension in friendships with people to whom they might conceivably be attracted  On the other hand, '[l]ike their straight sisters, lesbians can have intensely intimate and satisfying relationships with each other without any sexual involvement'  Gay men, after all, also report far more cross-sex friendships than do lesbians, who report few, if any, male friends  Lesbians' friendships tend to be entirely among women—straight or gay  Gay men, by contrast, find their friends among straight women and other gay men  'Lesbians apparently feel they have more in common with straight women than with either gay or straight men Gendered (Romantic) Love o Romantic love is characterized by a strong attachment to, physical attraction to, and idealization of another person; in the grips of romantic love, we may feel exhilarated, obsessed with, and absolutely focused on uniting with our love object  Including the elevation of dopamine levels o The existence e and experience of romantic love is seen as nearly universal o Our culturally scripted experience of romantic love is supposed- perhaps some 'heartbreaks' along the way-to lead to marriage, after which-we will settle down into a less passionate but still, ideally, deep romantic attachment o Men answered that they wouldn’t marry without being in love, whereas women wouldn’t deter from marriage if they had all the things they were looking for o Women's economic independence now affords women, too, the luxury of marrying for love alone o The experience of falling in love is governed by rules of attraction that draw deeply on gender stereotype o o

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Most women and girls are attracted 'up': that is, to men and boys who are in some way 'above' them, whether that be in terms of wealth, worldly power, age, achievement, or simply body size; men, traditionally, have been attracted 'down, to women of lesser achievement, size, and age  Bourdieu calls this our culture's (and women's) 'spontaneous' acceptance of male domination; it's spontaneous because no one has to force us o Men are more likely to respond to ephemeral qualities such as physical appearance when they fall in love and are far more likely to say they are easily attracted to members of the opposite sex  Yet most studies have found men to be stronger believers in romantic love ideologies than are women (and more cynical)  Men, it seems, are more likely to believe myths about love at first sight, tend to fall in love more quickly than men, and are more likely to enter relationships out of a desire to fall in love  Women, on the other hand, show a more 'pragmatic orientation' toward falling in and out of love and are more likely to also like the men they love  Experience more intense than men o Despite the fact that men report falling out of love more quickly, it's women who initiate the majority of break-ups  And women, it seems, also have an easier time accepting their former romantic partners as friends than men do  After a break-up, men—supposedly the less emotional gender —report more loneliness, depression, and sleeplessness than women o Men's way of loving-'the practical help and physical activities' Gendered Desires: Sexuality o According to the double standard, women were essentially uninterested in sex and were held to a high standard of sexual behaviour, while men experienced powerful sex drives js that found 'natural' outlets for which men were not to be blamed o The double standard makes sex something men 'get' from n and do to women, as is recognized by the crude expression, 'he did her' o Heterosexual women tend, on average, to be more sexually selective o Heterosexual men report many more partners than do women  'Women need a reason to have sex' but 'Men just need a place'  Men claimed to have had an average of 23 sexual partners compared to women's 10  Men more likely to cheat, as are gay men, people in cohabiting relationships, people with permissive sexual attitudes, and members of some ethnic groups  Gay men vary likely o Men's orgasmic focus leads to a greater emphasis on the genitals as men's single most important erogenous zone  If men's sexuality is often phallocentric-- -revolving around" the glorification and gratification of the penis—then it is not surprising that men often develop elaborate relationships with their genitals  Few women name their genitals; fewer still think of their genitals as machines o The definition of vaginal intercourse as real sex often results in complex rules about what constitutes a 'technical virgin', and permits the fudging of questions about sexual activity  So when they think about sex, heterosexual men and women are often thinking about different things.  Men think about it very frequently, whereas women don’t 

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Men, straight and gay, seem to want more sex than do women  At virtually every age and relationship stage, heterosexual men tend to want more sex, whereas women tend either satisfaction with the amount of sex they are having or a desire for less frequent sex o Women fantasize less frequency and about fewer partners  Men tend to fantasize about strangers, often more than one at a time, doing a variety of well-scripted sexual acts; women tend to fantasize about setting the right mood for lovemaking with their boyfriend or husband but rarely visualize specific behaviors o Men also report more interest in masturbation  Earlier and more often o Men are also more sexually adventurous than are women  Men are much more represented among those attracted to abnormal sexual practices, or paraphilias o Men are significantly more likely I to use pornography to stimulate sexual fantasy and as a masturbatory aid  Expressed a culture-wide hatred and contempt for women  Pornography exaggerates the masculinization of sex o Pornography tells lies about women (and, one would add, racialized subjects) but it 'tells ...