October 1, 2003 Gendered Close Relationships
Questions to answer – are men and women that different in how they approach close relationships?
Friendship
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, and marriage - 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.
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.
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 – 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 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.
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.
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.
How big are gender differences? Karen Walker says that research in friendship has taken ideology to be the same as behavior.
Karen Walker: “I’m Not Friends the Way She’s Friends”: Ideological and Behavioral Constructions of Masculinity in Men’s Friendships.”
"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.
Why do men 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?
Reasons –
First: When men do not conform to the masculine ideals about how they should act with their friends, they are occasionally censured.
Second: Social class influences men’s capacities for conforming to gender ideologies. Walker notes that professional men are somewhat more likely to conform to gender norms with respect to intimate behavior. And middle-class men are the primary group on which cultural stereotypes are based (the Hegemonic male).
Third, there are actual differences in women’s and men’s behavior and these differences reinforce stereotypes about gendered forms of friendship, even if the differences differ substantively from ideology. Example, Walker notes that men use the telephone differently than women. They tend to use the phone for instrumental reasons while women use the phone in expressive ways (to check on a friend). These practices support the idea that women are better at maintaining friendship and talking to friends about feelings even though men’s phone conversations did include personal matters.
Finally – “When men reflect back on their behavior, they emphasize those aspects of their behavior that give truth to their self-image as men. Masculinity is frequently reified and behavior that does not conform does not affect the overall picture of masculinity.” (still “real men.”)
She looks at the telephone use, jokes, the use of public space and how men talk about women helps to construct masculinity. She notes that differential finances, occupations, lifestyles and individual differences all impact on the concept of masculinity created.
Jokes – appeared to be more elaborated among the working-class men than among the professional men. Jokes were used to reaffirm values of friendship and generosity. They were used to affirm heterosexuality when physical and social circumstances created a level of physical and emotional intimacy culturally regarded as unmasculine. Jokes (teasing) are used as a form of social control (example not reciprocating in helping another man or the example of Christmas shopping). Men use jokes as a pseudointstrumental reason to call friends. And sometimes they used jokes to exaggerate gender differences and denigrate women.
Men’s use of public space – The use of public space for informal and apparently unplanned socialization is much more common among men than women.
Men’s Talk about women –Men construct their masculinity through their talk about what women are like. Men define who women are and who they (the men) are in contrast. (They reinforce that they are not women).
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:
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. 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 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.
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.
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.
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 sexual 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 1920 to 60% in 1991. Age of first intercourse has steadily declined for both boys and girls; ie 15 years of age for first intercourse.
Women’s increase in sexual agency, revolutionary as it is, 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.
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.
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 male 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.
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. 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.
"Strategies Men Use to Resist" Francine M. Deutsch -
Discusses the unequal division of labor at home.
Deutsch notes that men use indirect strategies to avoid sharing housework and childcare.
The strategies include:
Passive resistance by either ignoring or making it unpleasant.
Incompetence – Women give up when it takes more time and energy in doing-over or correcting. Men often acknowledge tht their lack of skills is the result of socialization. However, Deutsch says that there are two flaws to this reasoning. Most women don’t have many of these skills (esp. childcare) prior to becoming parents, but they recognize that they must learn. Second, the skills, are readily learned. The issue is not competence, but motivation.
Praise – Deutsch says that praise can be as way to avoid sharing. Praise may undermine women’s struggle for more help because they don’t want to lose the self-esteem they derive from husbands’ admiring accolades.
Different Standards – Men resist work at home by maintain different and lower standards. There are 3 days that couple could address this problem. Men could raise their standards to meet their wives.’ Women could lower their standards (which has happened). Or the person who cares more takes the responsibility and does the work. Women usually care more and assume more responsibility.
Denial – Men exaggerate their own contributions by comparing themselves to previous generations, attribute greater contributions of their wives to their wives’ personalities or preferences, and obscure who’s doing what by invoking rules and patterns that sound fair and equal.
Deutsch concludes that strong women and reasonable men resolve the conflict over domestic work by inventing equality. The strength and assertiveness of the equally sharing mothers is matched by the sense of fairness evident in the behavior of the equally sharing fathers.
She notes that this interaction can change over time. “Female strength and male reason are qualities that are sustained, lost, or developed in the creation of family life.”
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