11/6/02 Gendered Close Relationships
Questions to answer – are men and women that different in how they approach close relationships?
One view –
Paul Wright - - There is much more similarity than dissimilarity in the manner in which women and men conduct their friendships. Both women and men are looking for intimacy, acceptance, trust, and help.
Another view: Lillian Rubin - at every life stage between 25 and 55, women have more friendships, as distinct from collegial relationships or workmates than men and the differences in the content and quality of their friendships are marked and unmistakable. "Women’s friendships with each other rest on share intimacies, self-revelation, nurturance and emotional support. By contrast, she argues men's friendships are characterized by shared activities and conversations center on work sports, or expertise (e.g. fixing a car).
If so, what are the differences and why?
There are notable differences in the ways women and men, in general, approach close relationships. The gendering of intimate life - of friendship, love and sex - is the result of several historical and social developments.
Male Deficit Model - The male deficit model maintains that men are not adept at intimacy because they are less interested and/or able than women to disclose emotions, reveal personal information and engage in communication about intimate topics.
The solution recommended is for men to overcome masculine socialization by getting in touch with their feelings and learning to communicate openly and expressively.
Personal disclosures are the crux of intimacy; women have more intimate relationships than men boys’ friendships lack the emotional depth of girls’ friendships, and males focus on activities to avoid intimacy.
Psychologist Robert Lewis examined four "barriers" to emotional intimacy among men:
Competition, which inhibits the ability to form friendships and also minimizes the ability to share vulnerabilities and weaknesses
The false need to be "in control," which forbids self-disclosure and openness
Homophobia, which inhibits displays of affection and tenderness toward other men
lack of skills and positive role models for male intimacy.
Men, he argued, learn to avoid appearing weak and vulnerable in order to maintain a competitive edge.
Alternate paths model - The alternate paths model agrees with the male deficit model that gendered socialization is the root of differences in women’s and men’s typical styles of interacting. It departs from the deficit model, however, in important ways. First the alternate paths viewpoint does not presume that men lack feelings and emotional depth, or that relationships and feelings are unimportant in men’s lives. Rather, this explanation suggests that masculine socialization constrains men’s comfort in verbally expressing some feelings and, further, that it limits men’s opportunities to practice emotional talk. A second important distinction is that the alternate paths model argues that men do express closeness in ways that they value and understand - ways that may differ from those of feminine individuals but that are nonetheless valid.
Gendered Friendships
Commonalties in Men’s and Women’s Friendships
Both women and men value intimate same-sex friends, and both agree on basic qualities of close friendships: intimacy, acceptance, trust, and help.
College students - Mayta Caldwell and Letitia Peplau - men and women - the same number of close and casual friends, and spent about the same amount of time with their friends, they often have different ways of expressing and achieving intimacy with them.
Differences between Women’s and Men’s Friendships The fact that women use talk as a primary way to develop relationships and men generally do not underlies four gender-linked patterns in friendship. First, communication is central to women friends, while activities are the primary focus of men’s friendships. Second, talk between women friends tends to be expressive and disclosive, focusing on details of personal lives, people, relationships, and feelings; talk in men’s friendships generally revolves around less personal topics such as sports, events, money, music, and politics. Third, in general, men assume a friendship’s value and seldom discuss it, while women are likely to talk about the dynamics of their relationship. Finally, women’s friendships generally appear to be broader in scope than those of men.
Men’s Friendships: Closeness in the Doing.
Scott Swain - men’s perceptions of their close friendships. He discovered that men develop a closeness “in the doing” - men engage in activities not as a substitute for intimacy, but, in fact, as an alternate path to closeness.
Paul Wright - women tend to engage each other face to face, while men usually interact side by side.
Men do not generally express intimacy through self-disclosure. Many men create and express closeness more through action than through talk. Activities, rather than conversation are generally the center of most men’s friendships. - particularly sports.
Scott Swain “closeness in the doing”. Engaging in sports, watching games, and doing other things together cultivate a sense of camaraderie and closeness between men.
Whereas women tend to look for confidantes in friends, men more typically seek companions.
Growing out of the emphasis on activities is a second feature of men’s friendships: an instrumental focus. Many men like to do things for people they care about. Swain describes men’s friendships as involving a give and take of favors, skills, and assistance. Because masculine socialization discourages verbal expressions of affection and stresses concrete action, men generally regard doing things as a primary way to demonstrate affection.
Instead of being the focus of interaction, for men talk tends to accompany activities and be about impersonal topics, especially sports. Between men, there is often a sense of reciprocity, where one offers expertise in repairing cars and the other provides computer skills - an exchange of favors that allows each man to hold his own while showing he cares about the other. The masculine inclination toward instrumentality also surfaces in how men help each other through rough times.. Rather than engaging in explicit, expressive conversation about problems as women often do, men are more likely to help a friend out by distracting him from troubles with diversionary activities.
The masculine emphasis on doing things together may explain why men’s friendships are less likely to last if one friend moves away.
Men’s relationships are distinguished by what Swain labeled “covert intimacy.” In contrast to the over expressions of caring between women, men tend to signal affection through indirect, nonverbal means. These include joking, engaging in friendly competition, razzing, and being together in comfortable companionship. Affectionate punching and backslapping
Men’s friendships are often, although not always, more restricted in scope than are women’s Men tend to have different friends for various spheres of interest rather than doing everything with any single friend. Overall, men’s friendships involve shared activities, instrumental demonstrations of commitment, covert intimacy, and limited spheres of interaction.
Also, There is also increasing evidence that talking about problems may be less effective than diversionary activities in relieving men’s stress and enhancing their feelings of closeness.
Women’s Friendships -
Women use talk to build connections with friends. They share their personal feelings, experiences, fears, and problems in order to know and be known by each other. Share details about their daily lives and activities. By sharing details of lives women feel intimately and continuously connected to one another.
Talk between women friends tends to be personal and disclosive. In general, for women feeling close is facilitated by knowing each other in depth. To achieve this, women tend to talk about personal feelings and disclose intimate information. They act as confidantes for one another, respecting the courage required to expose personal vulnerabilities and inner feelings. Women’s communication is expressive and supportive. Typically, there is a high level of responsiveness and caring in women’s talk ,which enhances the emotional quality of women’s friendships. The more permeable ego boundaries encouraged by feminine socialization cultivate women’s ability to empathize and to feel a part of each other’s life.
Because women are socialized to be attentive, supportive, and caring, certain problems may arise in their relationships. Clinicians have pointed out that feminine norms of communication make it difficult for women to deal with feelings of envy and competition. It is not that women do not experience envy and competitiveness but rather that they think it’s wrong to have such feelings.
Women may repress or avoid talking about envy and competitiveness and thus create barriers and distance.
It’s also the case that women may find it difficult to override socialization’s message that they are supposed to be constantly available and caring. Thus, when women lack the time or energy required to nurture others, they may feel guilty and self-critical.
In summary, women’s friendships tend to develop out of the central role accorded to communication, which allows disclosures, expressiveness, depth and breadth of knowledge, and attentiveness to the evolving nature of the relationships. Because they know the basic rhythms of each other’s life, women friends often feel interconnected even when not physically together which allows women’s friendships to continue even when not geographically close.
Homophobia is one of the central organizing principles of same-sex friendships for men, and virtually nonexistent for women.
Gay men, report far more cross-sex friendships than do lesbians, who report few, if any male friends. Yet lesbians have far more friendships with heterosexual women than gay men have with heterosexual men. Lesbians’ friendships tend to be entirely among women – straight or gay. Gay men finder their friends among straight women and other gay men.
Stacey J. Oliker "Gender and Friendship"
"Are men's and women's friendships different? Both observation and self-accounts show on the average, men and women behave differently in friendships, especially in their practices of expressive, self-disclosing intimacy. However, being old or educated or gay or responsible for child rearing or not makes a much bigger difference in friendship patterns than being a man or woman.
The most frequently established difference between men's and women's friendships is in the exchange of self-disclosing, emotionally expressive intimacy.
What is meant by gender differences in intimacy? Intimacy means the mutual sharing of private experience, feelings, and understandings, and beliefs.
Oliker disagrees with what she terms the "different but equal" theorists (What others call the Alternate Paths Model) who believe that actual intimacy in friendships is distorted if we only identify intimacy with the "feminized" meanings associated with women's friendships and not include the intimacy that men get by getting to know one another in the course of shared activities. In this model different gendered routes to closeness, mutual knowledge, trust, and commitment arrive at the same destination.
Oliker does not agree with the "different but equal " argument. She says that both women and men define intimacy similarly in terms of self-disclosure and emotional warmth and yet they act differently.
She says that "different but equal" theorists tend to polarize the sexes and portray women friends as specializing in talk and shared disclosure and men as specializing in intimate bond-creating shared activities. However, women are similar to men in rates of doing things together and women friends help each other more than men do. In the classic male-bonding settings of sports, female athletes express bonding more than men do.
Some people become intimate while they do things together. Intimate disclosure and shared activity can overlap and both can yield understanding, affection, and trust among friends who do them. But some things are not knowable unless they are disclosed, so the most observant friend may not learn what matters most unless it is shared.
Women are better than men at such observational decoding and at expressing affection nonverbally. Attentiveness is a practice associated with expressive, disclosing intimacy rather than being an alternate path toward closeness.
Learning about another only by observation and developing shared understandings without discussion take a lot of time, especially if the shared activity for example watching a game, diverts attention from the friend. So while shared activities alone could lead to intimacy, the route is slower and less certain.
Finally differences in intimacy matter mostly because of what intimates accomplish and some accomplishments are probably unattainable without intimate talk. For example, problem-solving intimate talk with friends.
How big are gender differences?
When the documented gender differences are small, it means that the biggest differences in intimacy or patterns of talking and sharing activities are among women and among men rather than between the two groups. Women's and men's friendships are more similar than different. Some would answer that we find small differences because we still do not understand the subtleties of friendship well enough to measure them well,
Oliker asks "Why is people's sense of gender differences so much greater than many studies show? Her guess is that gender stereotypes are very powerful. Stereotypes about gender are so powerful in shaping people's beliefs about men and women that they influence our perceptions, both of others and of ourselves. Studies show that people describe their own friendships more stereotypically than their answers to questions about what they actually do with friends bear out.
Many of people's impressions and stereotypes are formed by the startling patterns at the extremes of social behavior.
Why are men's and women's friendships different?Whether gender differences in friendship are big or small, the question remains: What causes them?
Social Psychology: Traits and Disposition.. An example of this perspective is Nancy Chodorow’s psycho-dynamic theory
Both boys and girls form intense attachments and original identifications in the mother, a woman., Both must relinquish their infant passions of the mother. Boys accomplish this difficult task by repressing identification with and attachment to the mother and identifying instead with the father. They repress their needs for emotional closeness and develop personalities centered on autonomy and independence instead of close connection of others. Girls are not motivated by fear of the father they do not need to repress their dependency needs. They continue development of identification with their mothers, girls express intimacy, affection, and dependence - all the relational pleasures that make boys anxious. In contrast to boys, it is autonomy that makes girls anxious, while intimacy makes them comfortable.
Rubin and Messner draw on Chodorow's theory to explain their findings on friendship.
Psychoanalytic theory is just one brand of explanation that sees causes in internalized dispositions. Other social-psychological theories of gender personality and dispositions are just as applicable to the topic of friendship. However, Oliker says that these theories are not useful since research on personality traits and dispositions demonstrates even fewer gender differences than research on friendships does. It is possible that early gendered dispositions are formed in the manner that the theories predict but that individuals' encounters with social roles, social constraints or social interactions reshape dispositions or incite people to ignore them in behavior.
Socialization: Social learning and Social Roles: People may be inclined to behave in gendered ways even if psychological motives or personality traits do not move them to do so. One nondispostional explanation is that they may behave in gendered ways in their friendships because they have learned to do so by watching and imitating others or accepting others' ideas about how to behave.
According to learning and role theories people may internalize a surrounding culture by identifying with cultural patterns or fervently believing in them, but these patterns are not as deeply inscribed in people's personalities as dispositional explanations. Imply. Something that is learned from lessons or role models can be cast aside when more appealing lessons or role models appear.
Learning theories are supported by research findings of cultural differences in evidence showing a male-female difference in intimacy. Such differences do not appear or they may even be reversed in countries and cultures where gender norms favor intimacy between men.
Are we learning about supposed friendship norms or actual friendship practices? Oliker gives the example of the man who said men friends fish and hunt together when in reality he had never hunted or fished with friends.
Social Structures" Constraints and Opportunities
Social-structural explanations point to contemporaneous source of behavior. Social structuralists suggest that before sociologists consider individuals' dispositions or even their learned patterns, they should examine how individuals' current situations encourage them to think or behave in the ways they do or how current circumstances constrain their choices. Social statuses and positions provide resources that influence the actions of individuals or friendship pairs.
Women and men occupy different and unequal social positions and statuses and therefore they have differential access to resources. Positional differences in constraints and opportunities may shape differences in men's and women's friendships perhaps more so than dispositions and learned roles.
Life cycle structures - Fischer and Oliker
For example, gender differences in friendship patterns at different stage of the life cycle. One stage where gender differences increase is child rearing: married men with children have more friends than married women with children. Oliker and Fischer attributed men's advantages at the child-rearing stage to the greater constraints of primary care of children on women's time and opportunities. Even employed mothers have fewer friends than employed fathers.
Network Structures: - Fisher and Oliker
Another effect of the division of labor in child rearing: employed mothers form friendship networks composed more heavily of neighbors, kin and other mothers, while fathers form more diverse networks and include more co-workers. They suggest that men's looser-knit and more work-focused networks give men better access to information and contacts that advance their careers. Women's denser network and more neighborhood-focused relationships offer women more resources for child rearing but fewer resources for career advancement.
Macrostructural change: (Structuralism) At a broader level of social structure, massive societal changes can shape gender patterns of friendship by reorganizing the social relations of men and women. Example the shift from an agricultural, family-based economy to an industr9al, market-based economy with a converging set of religious, political and philosophical ideas that overlaid this separation of en and women so that the public life was considered the natural and proper sphere of men and the private life of family and intimacy the proper sphere of women.
Institutions and intimate culture:
In the institutions of public life - the competitive market and the democratic polity - men drew on resources to develop forms of individualism that emphasized autonomy, competitiveness and the emotional toughness to suppress personal concerns whey they acted as workers and citizen. In the institutions of private life - most important, the family - women drew on resources to develop forms of individualism that emphasized introspection, self-disclosure, and emotional expressiveness. These qualities helped them conform to the new ideal of attentive, nurturant, emotionally, responsive and morally exemplary motherhood.
Separate spheres and intimacy. Thus, in the 19th century , gendered, institutionalized spheres, men and women employed their different adaptations of individualism to the pursuit of friendships. Male friends met in clubs and taverns, where they could develop camaraderie but where little privacy was afforded them for intimacy. The demands of expressive intimacy conflicted with the practice of emotional reserve and toughness that were expected of them in their primary work roles . For women, exclusion from the public sphere constrained their access to forms of autonomous individualism. But their confinement to the sphere of family life and the new moral and emotional responsibilities they assumed there allowed them to pioneer new forms of self-disclosing intimacy with children, husbands, and friends.
Interaction (Symbolic Interactionism, Social Constructionism): Emergent and Unstable Differences.
Interactional explanations emphasize the ways in which the ongoing interactions of friendship shape and reshape friendship patterns. They also consider how each friend's beliefs and behaviors affect the other's. The interaction itself creates something new. Interactions show how social structures, social roles, and stereotypes shape each friend's interpretation of the other's needs and actions. Gender ideology and gendered roles and structure enter friendships and produce gendered patterns even among individuals who are not primed by disposition or prompted by roles or prodded by structural constraints. For example in cross-sex friendships men are more disclosing than they are in same-sex friends.
Gendered Love
Francesca Cancian "The Feminization of Love"
We identify love with emotional expression and talking about feelings, aspects of love that women prefer and in which women tend to be more skilled than men. At the same time we often ignore the instrumental and physical aspects of love that men prefer, such as providing help, sharing activities and sex. This feminized perspective leads us to believe that women are much more capable of love than men and that the way to make relationships more loving is for men to become more like women.
Cancian propose an alternative, androgynous perspective on love, one based on the premise that love is both instrumental and expressive.
Why do men and women express love differently? Two perspectives:
Social psychology: traits and disposition. Nancy Chodorow (Carol Gillligan) Infants, both boys and girls have strong identification and intimate attachments with their mothers. Since boys grow up to be men, they must repress this early identification, and in the process they repress their capacity for intimacy. Girls retain their early identification since they will grow up to be women, and throughout their lives females see themselves as connected to others. As a result of this process, Chodorow argues “girls come to define themselves as continuous with others…boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct.” This theory implies that love is feminine – women are more open to love than men – and that this gender difference will remain as long as women are the primary caretakers of infants.
(Macro-structural change - Historians like Mary Ryan have analyzed the separation of home and workplace in the nineteenth century polarized gender roles and feminized love. Their argument begins with the observation that in the colonial era the family household was the arena for economic production, affection and social welfare. The integration of activities in the family produced a certain integration of expressive and instrumental traits in the personalities of men and women. Both women and men were expected to be hard working, modest, and loving toward their souses and children, and the concept of love included instrumental cooperation as well as expression of feeling. Economic production gradually moved out of the home and became separated from personal relationships as capitalism expanded. Husbands increasingly worked for waged in factories and shops while wives stayed at home to care for the family. This division of labor gave women more experience with close relationships and intensified women’s economic dependence on men. As the daily activities of men and women grew further apart, a new worldview emerged that exaggerated the differences between the personal, loving feminine sphere of the home and the impersonal, powerful, masculine sphere of the workplace. Work became identified with what men do for money while love became identified with women’s activities at home. As a result, the conception of love shifted toward emphasizing tenderness, powerlessness, and the expression of emotion.
Negative consequences of the feminization of love. It is especially striking how the differences between men's and women's styles of love reinforce men's power over women. Men's style involves giving women important resources, such as money and protection that men control and women believe they need, and ignoring the resources that women control and men need. Thus men's dependency on women remains covert and repressed, while women's dependency on men is overt and exaggerated; and it is over dependency that creates power, according to social exchange theory.
The feminized perspective on love reinforces this power differential by leading to the belief that women need love more than do men.
The cultural script:
Women should be attracted to men, and men should be attracted to women.
More feminine women and more masculine men are desirable.
Men should initiate, plan and direct activities and have greater power within the relationship.
women should facilitate conversation, generally defer to men, but control sexual behavior.
Men should excel in status and earning money, and women should assume primary responsibility of the relationship, the home, and the children.
The conventional heterosexual dating script calls for women to be passive and men to take initiative. Although many people, especially women, claim not to believe in these gender stereotypes, research suggests that most heterosexuals conform to them. Conformity seems to reflect both our internalized sense of how we are supposed to be and the belief that the other sex expects us to meet cultural gender ideals. Thus, women tend to play feminine and men tend to play masculine, each reflecting and perpetuating established social views of gender.
There are exceptional to compliance with cultural scripts. Androgynous individuals . Less role-playing between gay men and even less between lesbian women.
Within love involvements, women are generally expected to assume the role of “relationship expert.”
Most studies have found men to be the stronger believers in romantic love ideologies than women. Men, it seems are more likely to believe myths about love at firs sight, tend to fall in love more quickly than women, are more likely to enter relationships out of a desire to fall in love, and yet also tend to fall out of love more quickly. Romantic love to men is irrational, spontaneous and compelling emotion that demands action. Women show a more pragmatic orientation toward falling in and out of love, and are also more likely to also like the men they love.
Despite the fact that men report falling out of love more quickly it’s women who initiate the majority of break-ups. Married men live longer and emotionally healthier lives than divorced or single men; unmarried women live longer and are happier than married women.
Americans marry for love – this has changed over the years, women are more like men – perhaps because their economic independence now affords women the luxury of marrying for love alone.
Gendered Sexualities –
As friendship and love have become “feminized” – that is, as the model of appropriate behavior has come to resemble what we labeled as traditionally “feminine” models of intimacy – sexuality has become increasingly “masculinized.” The “masculinization of sex” – including the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, the increased attention to orgasm, the multiplication of sexual partners, the universal interest in sexual experimentation and the separation of sexual behavior from love – is partly a result of the technological transformation of sexuality (from birth control to the Internet) and partly the result of the result of the sexual revolution’s promise of greater sexual freedom with fewer emotional and physical consequences.
Double standard that developed in Victorian times ….The sexual double standard is itself a product of gender inequality of sexism, the unequal distribution of power in our society based on gender. Gender inequality is reinforced by the ways we have come to assume that men are more sexual than women, that men will always try to escalate sexual encounters to prove their manhood, and that women – or rather- “ladies” – either do not have strong sexual feeling or that those they do must be constantly controlled lest they fall into disrepute. With such a view, sex becomes a contest, not a means of connection; when sexual pleasure happens, it often seen as his victory over her resistance.
The sexual double standard is far more rigidly enforced than any ideological difference in men’s and women’s patterns of friendship and love. As a result, we are far more likely to observe significant gender differences in sexuality. Examples –what counts as sex, sex equals they develop. entire encounter for women – men focus on the orgasm. Intercourse and orgasm are more important forms of sexual expression for men than they are for women. …Men’s fantasies are idealized renditions of masculine sexual scripts: genitally focused, organs centered, and explicit in the spatial and temporal sequencing of sexual behaviors. Women’s sexual imaginations are impoverished at the expense of highly developed sensual imaginations, by contrast, men’s sensual imaginations are impoverished by their high sexual imaginations… These differences hold for both heterosexual and homosexual women an men, a further indication that the basic component in our sexual scripts is gender, not sexual orientation
Gendered sexual socialization – where does the sexual gender gap come form? Though we are constantly bombarded with sexual images in the media and receive lessons about sexuality and morality from our patents, our teachers and our religious institutions, most of our sexual learning comes during adolescence, and most of our adolescent sexual socialization is accomplished by our peers. We teach ourselves and each other about what feels good and why, and then we practice performing those activities until they do feel that we’re told we’re supposed to feel.
Young men and young girls have sexual experiences for reasons other than intimacy and pleasure has been a truism in sex research.
Closing the sexual; gender gap. Despite the persistence of gender differences in sexual attitudes and behaviors, the sexual gender gap has been closing in recent years, as women’s and men’s sexual experiences come to more closely resemble one and other’s. Or, rather, women’s has come to resemble men’s.
Part of this transformation has been the result of the technological breakthroughs and ideological shifts that have come to be known as the sexual revolution. Since the1960s, the pursuit of sexual revolution. Birth control and legal abortion make it possible to separate fully sexual activity from reproduction.
Sexual behaviors have grown increasingly similar. Teen-age boys sexually experience has remained virtually the same since the mid-1940s, with about 70% of all high school aged boys having had sexual intercourse – girls from 5% in 19202 to 60% in 1991. Age of first intercourse has steadily decline for both boys and girls. For adults rates of premarital and the number of sex partners seem to be moving closer.
Women’s increase in sexual agency, revolutionary as it is, has not been accompanies by a decrease in male sexual entitlement, nor by a sharp increase in men’s capacity for intimacy and emotional connectedness. Thus, just as some feminist women have celebrated women’s claim to sexual autonomy, others – therapists and activists have deplored men’s adherence to a “nonrelational” model of sexual behavior. As with friendship and with love, it’s men who have the problem, and psychologists like Ronald Levant seek to replace “irresponsible, detached, compulsive. And alienated sexuality with a type of sexuality that is ethically responsible, compassionate for the well-being of participants, and sexually empowering of men.”
The notion of nonrelational sex means that sex is, to men, central to their lives; isolated from other aspects of life and relationships; often coupled with aggression; conceptualized socially within a framework of success and achievement; and pursed despite possible negative consequences. Sexual inexperience is viewed as stigmatizing.
Psychologist Gary Brooks pathologizes male sexual problem as a “centerfold syndrome.” Symptoms include: voyeurism, objectification, and sex as a validation of masculinity, trophyism, and fear of intimacy. Ron Levant calls it “alexithymia: - the inability to feel or express feelings. Objectify and even violate the partner who is treated more as a prop. The idea of nonrelational sex as a “problem” for men is relatively recent, and is part of a general cultural discomfort with the excesses of the sexual revolution.
Homosexuality as gender conformity Kimmel means that homosexuals act on their gender orientation not on their sexual orientation. – In lesbian couples, partners tend to take mutual responsibility for nurturing the dyad and for providing emotional direction and support. Because both women are likely to have internalized feminine identities, both are attentive to intimate dynamics. Gay couples (males), on the other hand, are least likely to have a partner who nurtures the dyad and provides emotional leadership.
Following the best-friend relationships with the added dimensions of sexuality and romance, lesbian relationships tend to be monogamous and high in emotionality, disclosure, and support. Gay couples are less monogamous and more tolerant of extrarelationship sexual involvements , keenly sensitive of power issues, and lowest of all relationships in expressiveness and nurturance Homosexuality is deeply gendered and that gay men and lesbians are true gender conformists. … Gay men have the lowest rates of long-term committed relationships, while lesbians have the highest, and lesbians place much greater emphasis on emotional relationships than gay men. Thus, it appears that men –gay and straight – place sexuality at the center of their lives, and that women- straight or lesbian – are more interested in affection and caring in the context of a lover relationship.
Homophobia reinforces the gender of sex, keeping men acting hypermasculine and women acting ultrafeminine.
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