April 17, 2002
Gendered Close Relationships
Questions to answer – are men and women that different in how they approach close relationships?
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.
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: 1. Competition, which inhibits the ability to form friendships and also minimizes the ability to share vulnerabilities and weaknesses 2, the false need to be "in control," which forbids self-disclosure and openness 3. Homophobia, which inhibits displays of affection and tenderness toward other men and 4 lack of skills and positive role models for male intimacy.
Men, he argued, learn to avoid appearing weak an 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.
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.
How do we interpret this difference? Two perspectives:
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, Chodorw 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.
Historians – 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 ncreasingly “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 norelational 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 conformityKimmel means that homsexuals 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 nurturanceHomosexuality 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 en acting hypermasculine and women acting ultrafeminine.
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