March 2, 2005 – Gendered Close Relationships -
Do men and women differ in how they approach close relationships?
Friendship – Conventional perspectives
One view –
Lillian Rubin (psychologist/sociologist) - "Women’s friendships with each other rest on shared 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). She draws heavily on Nancy Chodorow’s work. She says the 2 reasons that men’s friendships are different are: first, boys are socialized for competition and girls are socialized to pay attention to relationships. Secondly, she says the psychic development of girls leads girls and women to develop permeable ego boundaries and relational, nurturing capacities that encourage them to seek intimacy with other females. Boys and men are threatened by having close, intimate friendships because it touches “that feminine part of their psyche that they were forced to repress in early childhood. According to Rubin, share activities and competition are compensatory structures for men that prevent them from becoming too intimate.”
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. Personal disclosures are the crux of intimacy; women have more intimate relationships than men. Males’ friendships lack the emotional depth of females’ friendships, and males focus on activities to avoid intimacy.
Psychologist Robert Lewis says there are 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 and finally
Lack of skills and positive role models for male intimacy.
From this perspective, the solution recommended is for men to overcome masculine socialization by getting in touch with their feelings and learning to communicate openly and expressively.
Another perspective: 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.
Men’s Friendships: Closeness in the Doing.
Scott Swain - men’s perceptions of their close friendships. He asserts 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 – for example, engaging in sports, watching games, working on projects.
Paul Wright - women tend to engage each other face to face, while men usually interact side by side.
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.
Men’s relationships are distinguished by what Swain labeled “covert intimacy.” In contrast to the overt expressions of caring between women, he says that men tend to signal affection through indirect, nonverbal means. These include joking, affectionate punching, backslapping, engaging in friendly competition, razzing, and being together in comfortable companionship. Susan Oliker disagrees with this definition of intimacy since both men and women define intimacy in terms of self-disclosure and warmth.
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.
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. Women share details about their daily lives and activities. By sharing details of lives women feel intimately and continuously connected to one another.
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. 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.
How big are gender differences? Alternative View: Stacey Oliker concludes that the friendships of men and of women with one another may be more alike than they are different.
Stacey Oliker looks at 4 theoretical perspectives to analyze the differences ad similarities in the friendships of men and women: social psychology, socialization, Social structures, and interaction.
Social Psychological Perspective:
Gendered internalized dispositions toward friendship 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 suggests that males and females thus develop different types of friendship style.
Socialization: Social learning and Social Roles – Significant others influence through modeling, negative or positive reinforcement how we think and feel about friendship styles.
Social Structures: Constraints and Opportunities. Current situations encourage individual to think and behave in the ways they do. Current circumstances constrain choices. Social statuses and positions provide resources that influence the actions of individuals or friendship pairs. Oliker points to life-cycle structures that might influence friendship styles. For example, married women with young children are constrained by time and opportunity to develop many friends.
Macrostructural Change – Oliker cites Mary Ryan’s work. Historians like Mary Ryan assert that the separation of home and workplace in the nineteenth century polarized gender roles and feminized friendship and love. Economic production gradually moved out of the home and became separated from personal relationships as capitalism expanded. Husbands increasingly worked for wages 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. 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. Men drew on resources to develop forms of individualism that emphasized autonomy, competitiveness, and emotional toughness to suppress personal concerns when they acted as workers and citizens. Women drew on resources to develop forms of individualism that emphasized introspection, self-disclosure, and emotional expressiveness.
Men’s camaraderie took place in public spaces that afforded them little privacy for intimacy. Women on the other hand developed intensely romantic friendships (Smith-Rosenberg)
Interaction: (Social Constructionism). Interactional explanations emphasize the ways in which the ongoing interactions of friendships shape and reshape friendship patterns. An interactional approach considers how each friend’s beliefs ad behaviors affect the other’s. Interactionists show how social structures, social roles and stereotypes shape each friend’s interpretation of the other’s needs and actions.
Studies show that people describe their own friendships in stereotypical characteristics. Yet when they are asked about what they actually do with their friends, the differences between men and women are minimal. (Karen Walker)
Why do men and women maintain their belief that men are less open than women in the face of considerable evidence that they do discuss their feelings with their friends?
When women and men do not conform to the masculine ideals about how they should act with their friends, they are occasionally censured. Such disapproval reinforces gender norms. (Gender accountability)
Further, women and men sometimes do not see the disparity between behavior and ideology because they do not reflect on their behavior. When men and women reflect back on their behavior, they emphasize those aspects of their behavior that give truth to their self-image as men and women. So that behavior that does not conform does not affect the overall picture of femininity or masculinity.
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 proposes 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: Like Oliker, Cancian points out the social psychological perspective put forth by Nancy Chodorow and the macro-structural perspective put forth by Mary Ryan.
Cancian points out that there are negative consequences of the feminization of love. She says that 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.
The feminized perspective on love reinforces this power differential by leading to the belief that women need love more than do men.
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 first 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.
Despite the fact that men report falling out of love more quickly, it’s women who initiate the majority of break-ups.
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.
Sexual behaviors have grown increasingly similar. Average age of first intercourse for both boys and girls is 15 years.
Women’s increase in sexual agency has not been accompanied 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.
Homosexuality as gender conformity. Michael Kimmel says 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 male couples are less monogamous and more tolerant of extra-relationship sexual involvements , are 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. This model may have to do with the social constraints that are placed on gays, particularly gay men.
The Family as a gendered institution
Two-earner families in which both adult partners are in the paid labor force now make up the majority of married couple households.
While the proportion of households composed married couples with children has decreased in recent decades, there has been dramatic growth in other types of households, many of which consider themselves families such as single-parent families, domestic partnerships - both heterosexual and homosexual couples.
Gendered Marriage - Marriage benefits men. All psychological measures of indices of happiness and depression suggest that married men are much happier than unmarried men are, while unmarried women are somewhat happier than married women are.
A greater proportion of men than women eventually marry; husbands report being more satisfied than wives with their marriages; husbands live longer and enjoy better health benefits than unmarried men, as well as better health than women; and, fewer men than women try to get out of marriage by initiating divorce. After divorce, men remarry much more quickly than women do and widowers die sooner after the death of a spouse than widows do.
The Gendered Politics of Housework and Child care.
Men's participation in family work has been "surprisingly resistant to change." – About 1/5 of what women do in the household. The type of work they do is very different, ie. His and her work. . Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs at home. Wives experience more time constraints because of the types of household chores they do, whereas husbands have more control over when they will do their chores (cooking a meal vs. cutting the lawn). What’s more, men tend to see their participation in housework in relation to their wives’ housework; women tend to see their wok as necessary for family maintenance. Men “pitch” in or “help.”
Some men are doing more than others. For example African-American men do significantly more housework than white men. Working class men do more than middle-class men (blue vs. white collar).
The presence of children increases the gender gap. Mothers spend far more time with children than fathers do especially when children are infants and about 50% more time with children in kindergarten through fourth grade.
Studies show that positive father involvement is beneficial to children and that fathers who spend time along caring for their infant children remain more involved as parents in the ensuing years.
Women tend to be the kinkeepers in the families; that is, they link the generations within families. They are more likely to be the caregiver of aging parents. However, men also participate in care giving as well when their wives participate in care giving of aging parents. What they do might be different, e.g. home repairs for the parent.
Kathleen Gerson “Moral Dilemmas, Moral Strategies, and the Transformation of Gender.”
Gerson has been studying families for over 20 years. In this study, she analyzes the “Children of the revolution,” children whose parents came of age in the 70s and ‘80s and made significant changes in gender, work, and family life. She is interested in understanding how this generation will balance the need for autonomy against the need to establish commitment to family.
She studied how these children felt about their family of orientation. The majority agreed that having a working mother and father was important, “Across race, class, and gender groups, they believe that two incomes provided the family with increased economic resources, more flexibility against the buffeting of economic winds, and greater financial security….”
They largely felt that the mother’s employment was beneficial. “Whether in a two-parent or single-parent home, women and men agree that an independent based enhances a mother’s sense of self, contribute to greater parental equality, and provided an uplifting model.”
In contrast those who grew up in a largely traditional household expressed more ambivalence. Although half felt fortunate to have had a mother devoted primarily to their care, the other half would have preferred for their mothers to pursue a more independent life. They also appreciated their breadwinning fathers, but felt frustrated by their own father’s distance.
Across the range of personal family experiences, most also agree that children suffer more from an unhappy home than from separated parents.
Many men have become skeptical of work-centered definitions of masculine identity. However, one-third of the men preferred traditional arrangements over all others. The majority of women held more flexible views of gender for themselves and their partners.
Gerson wants to understand what changes this generation will make. How will they balance work and family, autonomy and commitment?
Gerson says these children of the revolution are aware that egalitarian relationships are not always reached. According to her research, “if an egalitarian commitment proves unworkable, most young men would prefer a form of “modified traditionalism” in which they remain the primary if not sole family breadwinner and look to a partner to provide the majpr share of domestic care. Women, in contrast tend to look toward autonomy as preferable to any form of traditionalism that would leave them and their children economically dependent on someone else.
For men, work remains central to constructing a masculine identity, but it is difficult to find work that offers either economic security or good opportunities for family involvement. “This modified traditionalism provides a way for men to cope with economic uncertainties and women’s shifting status without surrendering some valued privileges. It collides, however, with women’s growing desire for equality and rising need for economic self-sufficiency.“
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