gender expectations

Space, Another Final Frontier... Gender and Occupying One's Own Personal Space

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2010-09-01 20:46

An old blogging friend I just rediscovered, who took her blog private a few years ago (it’s here but you need a login) says

You all may know that I’m kind of handsy. Tactile. PDA machine. But. I have recently decided to start being more assertive about my personal space. I think most women struggle with this because we’re always making ourselves smaller based on some old patriarchal something or other — cross your arms, cross your legs, let someone pass before you go, move to the side when you pass someone, etc. Well, fuck that. Men don’t do that. They just walk past. They spread out their legs. And I want to do that to.

So I am. I stand my ground on the sidewalk and in halls. Make space for me — ESPECIALLY if you are part of a group! Suck it up and realize you’re in a town with narrow sidewalks and you can’t walk in a group like in Reservoir Dogs. I go first. I make eye contact with drivers (the law says you MUST stop for pedestrians in crosswalks in MA … yeah, ALL crosswalks without lights) and cross in front of them. I take the FULL seat on the T. I even do the spread leg thing (not the huge obtuse angle version that some guys do that goes beyond their seat boundary.

I am reclaiming my space. Not all the space. Just what I can rightfully grab.

I understand why she’s private, and she’s always been more of a diarist than a pundit anyway. But it’s great how she can just put her finger on the pulse.

What’s great about it is that while I’m a big guy I tended small and sickly for my age as a kid. I still see myself as almost invisibly small (when I sat sideway in class the teacher counted me absent, ba-da-da-bump.) It’s only been the last few years that I realized I ought to occupy my own space more responsibly.

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Non-controversial Testosterone Research Story Still Surprises: Expectation May Produce Stronger Results Than the Hormone

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-12-14 19:55

Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science passes along some fun news about gender, hormones, and “biology is destiny” memes. Questions of accuracy and bias arise in any study, and any news account of a study, but the information to assumption ratio in Yong’s piece is wonderful. Here are his opening paragraphs (emphasis his.)

What do you think a group of women would do if they were given a dose of testosterone before playing a game? Our folk wisdom tells us that they would probably become more aggressive, selfish or antisocial. Well, that’s true… but only if they think they’ve been given testosterone.

If they don’t know whether they’ve been given testosterone or placebo, the hormone actually has the opposite effect to the one most people would expect – it promotes fair play. The belligerent behaviour stereotypically linked to testosterone only surfaces if people think they’ve been given hormone, whether they receive a placebo or not. So strong are the negative connotations linked to testosterone that they can actually overwhelm and reverse the hormone’s actual biological effects.

He said it here.

That’s actually pretty consistent with…

  • findings related to testosterone levels in a variety of animals (but not, interestingly, the rats most of the early “confirmation” studies were done on) where aggressive and/or risk-taking behavior is undertaken to elevate testosterone levels in males, not as a result of elevated testosterone.
  • findings related to people’s reactions when they’re led to believe they’ve been given (or haven’t been) doses of other behavior-modifying compounds like alcohol and caffeine where for instance, going back at least as far as the 1960s where people are more likely, say, to act drunk when told they’ve been given more alcohol than they thought, or less drunk when told they’ve been given only a small amount.

And I’m inclined to trust the reporter not least because he seems to have done actual analysis reporting instead of regurgitating lurid bits. I’m inclined to trust the researcher because a) he doesn’t seem to be talking about the effect of a hormone on people rather than trying to prove gendered mandates and b) while his subjects were women that appears to be mostly because women respond more consistently and predictably to measured doses of testosterone than do men. (Which would also be consistent with findings that in men behavior changes a lot more in relation to relative rather than absolute amounts.)

I did say trust, though. Since the research appears to be gated behind a commercial firewall I can’t verify. So all I can say is it sounds interesting. And sounds measured. And sounds more like basic reporting on basic science than expectation-driven “just so” stories.

(Via Mackenzie at Geek Feminism Blog.)

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Self-Perception vs. Partner Desire Deepens Our Beauty/Worthiness Traps

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-09-05 11:23

Anna N. of Jezebel references two studies, one a vague study on the benefits of larger thigh size (which may be a good proxy for overall muscle mass) and lifetime health, and then, getting right to the heart of the beauty trap (emphasis mine…)

A similarly mixed blessing is a survey (by research giants Date.com, Matchmaker.com and Amor.com), in which 85% of men agreed that, “A couple of extra pounds are fine by me.” We’re not sure if “a couple of extra pounds” means “as long as you’re not fat or anything,” but it’s nice to be reminded that most men don’t expect women to look like the cover of Self magazine.

...

The survey also found that 90% of women think “men find extra weight unattractive.” Says Shira Zwebner, “relationship adviser” for Date.com, Matchmaker.com and Amor.com, “Unfortunately, these types of misconceptions between the sexes are extremely common, and result in a lot of missed dating and relationship opportunities.” So don’t miss an opportunity! Join our dating sites today! Or, you know, love your body, and don’t try to make it smaller based on what you think men want — or bigger based on science that has yet to be confirmed.

Read the excerpts in context and follow the links here.

The same things can be said for men’s gendered worthiness-trap concerns about money, class, muscles, and (especially) penis size — it’s not that size, weight, clothes, or cars (or, breast or penile implants) don’t matter to our partners. It’s that they almost never matter as much to our opposite genders as we are led (or lead ourselves) to believe they do… “result in a lot of missed dating and relationship opportunities.”

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Burying the Lede: Breastfeeding Might Benefit the Mother

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-08-15 21:46

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors passes long a tidbit that was pulled out last week in the blogosphere but buried in the original NYT article. The upshot, Bartow points out, is women who breastfeed have…

...a 59 percent lower risk for these women with an immediate relative with breast cancer! Read the rest of the article for yourself here.  I helpfully provide the link because the story is difficult to find.  It’s not on the front page of the paper nor on the front page of the Science section.  It’s not even summarized on the front page of the online section of the Science section (only a link), apparently bumped by other, more newsworthy articles.  See (here) for yourself.

Interesting the placement of this article, considering how much front page attention the media has given to the benefits of breastfeeding for the baby (and all the guilt-tripping of those women who don’t).  The media message seems to be:   You should breastfeed if you’re a good mom (although we’re not going to make it any easier for you by actually giving you a place to breastfeed at work, for example…) but not because it’s good for mom.

She said it here.

In other nutrition-related news there’s much kerfuffling about recent studies showing that organic food isn’t any more nutritious to consumers. With proponents arguing that the studies not being rigorous enough, and skeptics noting that if the studies have to be rigorous to demonstrate benefit the benefits can’t be large. And yet, relevant to Bartow’s post, one very clear benefit of organic food production is it minimizes farmer, farmworker, and food-handler’s exposure to toxic materials in quantities that don’t require rigorous studies to measure the effects of.

In both cases society obsesses over sometimes very small benefits that might accrue to food consumers, while remaining peculiarly oblivious to even very large benefits to either maternal or agricultural food producers.

Update: But doh! See Sungold of Kittywampus for a take on a) just how small a subset fall into the category of beneficiaries and b) that women have been told about previous stories about cancer reduction in an attempt to encourage breastfeeding.

And darn it all! When I first composed this post I had a section about how news like this should be just one more data point when making decisions to nurse one’s children, not a deciding factor in itself. (See also similar reasoning about alleged or real benefits of other activities.)

And in retrospect I don’t think I made clear that the point for me (and, I think, Ann Bartow) isn’t so much that breastfeeding is some great breakthrough for some women as the fact that potential life or health benefits of any sort to mothers as benefits to mothers are tend to be stinted compared to the heaps of attention paid to potential benefits to their children.

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Excuse Me Myth, I Don't Believe We've Been Introduced

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-05-17 10:23

I can’t say how much I’ve been enjoying Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz’s He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It (which I first mentioned in passing here.)

It’s highly readable, following a familiar and conventional-for-relationship-books mix of case study, quotes, citation, and interpretation without a lot of deep theory or analysis. But if the form is familiar the content is eye-opening.

First of all: In just about half of all “sexless” heterosexual relationships (technically defined as fewer than ten sexual events together per year) it’s the man rather than the woman who’s less interested.

Second of all: the reasons couples give for men’s lack of desire are sometimes cliché, but when they are they’re cliché with a twist. Even better, the reasons men give for their lack of desire are interestingly different than the reasons women who’s partners lack desire give. One commonality though?

Although the men know (or at least think they know) the reasons for their voluntary celibacy but the women are only guessing, either way the situation is embarrassing and painful. It is therefor not surprising that both men and women agree most with statements that shift responsibility away from themselves.

And it’s not as though men are secretly beleaguered, saintly, and misunderstood… just human:

Indeed men indicate a lack of sexual adventure (hers, not his) as primary. It is difficult to believe that this lack of erotic excitement is completely one-sided, and that these men who identify their wives as unadventurous are themselves imaginatively passionate guys, just somehow mysteriously unable to inspire the one woman they chose to marry.

Another interesting tidbit…

Slightly less than half say they are interested in sex, but not with their partners.

...implies that slightly more than half aren’t interested in sex with anyone.

The authors bring a seriously interesting twist to another big reason that you’d think would be obvious: weight gain. Again with the nuance — read to the end of the excerpt before jumping back out. (Emphasis mine.)

It is always easier to obfuscate blame, especially when the problem is, at least in part, yourself. So, let us make this clear before we write another sentence — we aren’t talking about a few extra pounds, which, without question, are an excuse, not a reason. However, if a woman is more than around thirty pounds overweight, her partner maybe telling the truth. ... Mysteriously, whether or not they themselves have added extra pounds, too, is irrelevant [to the men’s responses.]

Obesity also diminishes libido, so an overweight person may not be as responsive a partner as he or she once was. There is also new evidence that correlates male obesity and impotence. Mix obesity, ED [another big factor discussed elsewhere in the book —fl] and low libido together and it may be easier to just stop trying.

So, again another instance where popular, gendered stereotypes about women’s weight and appearance get in the way of what might actually be going on. (A single anecdote is just an anecdote but the authors quote a woman who found her husband in bed with a neighbor who… was the same weight, age, and appearance as she. Which, if I’m not mistaken, is actually pretty common and which again suggests the most conventional “reason” may not an actual explanation.)

Another really important bit is that women surveyed revealed that their partners weren’t that into sex even before their relationships became permanent ones. So it’s not just the conventional explanation of familiarity breeding contempt.

And there’s more. Which I may post about later when I’ve finished the book. Which brings up a caveat: it’s risky to being positively reviewing a book before you’ve finished, and I’ve got a lot more to read. But the information and insights in those first few chapters seem worth the price of admission.

What I especially like about the authors so far is they’re wonderfully non-judgmental. They’re aware of stereotypes but not bound by them. Willing to pass along conventional ideas from authorities but not willing to swallow them whole. They’re on to something new, or, more accurately, something almost never discussed, and so, knowing there are already more than enough stories about gender expectations, they’d prefer not to prematurely make up their own.

Bottom line, though, is yet another half of what we “know” about libido imbalance in relationships, especially hetero relationships, turns out to be myth-based rather than, oh, say, true.

One more instance where what society tells us is true about men, women, sex, and relationships gets in the way of dealing with what’s actually happening inside the relationships!

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You're Daddy's Rich / And Your Momma's Good Lookin' / So STFU? No, That Would Be WTF.

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-03-26 09:22

Em & Lo of Sex. Love. And Everything in Between reprint a cool confession from an anonymous contributor that has a lot of bearing on standards of beauty and worthiness for both men and women.

I’m not attracted to attractive guys. Those Burberry-wearing, BMW-driving, weight-lifting, business-studying, fraternity hunks just don’t do it for me. At the end of the night, I know I’m booty-calling my chunky, red-haired, 800-dollar-car-driving, engineer boy — the guy that I’m actually attracted to.

Sure, we all know that beauty is only skin-deep and that the slightly doughy nerd makes a much better husband. But I’ve found that the conventionally unattractive guys make better booty calls, too. I’ve slept with my share of hotties, the head turners, and let me just say that they’re lucky they’re pretty.

She said it here.

It’s not a perfect post. She stumbles over a lot of the same words and phrases that inform all of our attitudes. The title’s not so hot: “Confession: Ugly guys make better booty calls.” And her closing line, “the best thing about the unattractive booty call? He always picks up” smacks to much of the old bluegrass chorus “She’ll never ever leave you / But if she does you won’t mind.” But if she’s not immune to the weight of cultural assumptions neither has she succumbed.

Textual speed bumps not withstanding she’s not saying she’s “settling“ for some schlub because body-building frat boys are overweening prigs. She says her partner the guy she’s actually attracted to.

It’s kind of good that I ran across this post actually. I was driving home from dropping of my children at school and that old Porgy and Bess tune Summertime popped into my head. The one that goes “your daddy’s rich, and your momma’s good lookin / so hush pretty baby, don’t you cry.” I knew there was something wrong with that and I wasn’t sure what. This post gave me the hook to work it out.

It’s like… it’s nice to have a rich daddy, or partner, or whatever. Or a good-lookin’ mom, or partner, or whatever. But the real freight in that song is carried by the word “so.” As in you shouldn’t cry because you’ve got a rich partner, or a beautiful one… like that defines happiness so STFU. It just seems to me Em & Lo’s anonymous correspondent sees the hole in that logic, and the corollary that if you can’t get rich and/or good looking you have to “settle” for something “less.”

Update: See also The Beautiful Kind’s post on along these lines.

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What's In It For All of Us

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2009-03-13 11:13

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, ripping on mocking, raging, anti-feminist slurs about Feministing’s Jessica Valenti’s impending marriage, says

The joke is that he thinks it must be exhausting to be a feminist who actually tries to be a good person, presumably because we’re all fighting our “true” desires to be shallow bimbos who don’t give a shit about anything important.  But honestly, I think the anti-feminist view of the world is a lot more exhausting, and it’s obviously alienating. The cynical belief that every man is an asshole and every woman is a bimbo strikes me as way more exhausting than believing that good people exist and that real love based on understanding and equality is possible. 

She said it here.

I think I’ve mentioned (only 1000 times) that my big breakthrough came (from one of Amanda’s posts no less) when I finally got not that feminism is so great but that anti-feminism is so Teh Suck. That was when I finally stopped wanting feminism to happen because I loved, liked, respected, and worried about all the women in my life and… started wanting it because on top of all that the alternative is an actuarially predicted lifespan of 87.3 years of loathing, humiliation, and kindergarten-level expectations for me and every other man on the planet.

Oh, and by the way, congratulations for the soon-to-be Ms. Valenti and her partner Andrew.

Update: Wow. In a follow-up to the post I linked to, above, Marcotte knocks one right out of the park! Kind of interesting, if also frustrating, if also not surprising, that one of the most passionate and articulate defenders of men’s real rights and potential in the face of anti-feminism turns out to be a woman. (Not, obviously, frustrating because Amanda’s a woman but because, y’know, perhaps because men spent so long holding our hands over our ears saying “la la la la la” any time feminism cropped up we’re still a little… ok, or maybe a lot… behind the curve.)

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Even *shorter* No-Sex Class: "You May Now Kiss the Bride"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-02-03 09:44

For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about the final sentence in the standard English-language wedding ceremony

“...you may now kiss the bride”

It’s is probably the shortest, purest distillation of the two rules of the No-Sex Class paradigm.

—-

The two rules, you may recall, are

#1: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire. #2: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.

Saying it any other way than “You may now kiss the bride” would violate the rules #1 and #2 in a number of obvious ways. It also commits the double slight of a) sexualizing the woman (who only gets to be kissable) and b) objectifying her (whatever her name is she’s always reduced to “the bride.”)

But actually what popped awake this morning wasn’t the “...kiss the bride” part, it was “you may now…” part because it speaks to the question (asked in comments by RemittanceGirl, here) of who benefits from the rules… who benefits from the paradigm… who, really, benefits from patriarchy.

The pat answer is usually “men.”

The more traditional answer though, and I think more accurate, is “their families.” Because for all the power we ascribe to men, the message we’re given is that (as our English teachers might put it) whatever they can do before marriage they may not.

—-

I write a lot about feminism aware of the ambiguities of doing so as a man. And I reconcile the ambiguity by trying to understand the impact anti-feminism a.k.a. the patriarchy a.k.a. the dominant paradigm has on men. And I feel it’s more accurate to say I’m thinking from a feminist perspective rather than one of the more traditional avenues of men’s studies or men’s rights because… well, it’s not just about helplessly flapping about how “patriarchy hurts men too so that’s why women don’t deserve this or that sovereignty.” Instead I’m trying to understand not that men are hurt too but how we’re hurt, and to explore how our perception of that hurt either adds to or distracts us from how to get it to stop hurting anybody.

It just seems like identifying how men are hurt, and trying to find the exits in a way that doesn’t involve stepping over anybody else to get there, is or ought to be a pretty crucial.

One of the more enduring problems is that it’s pretty clear that compared to women society privileges men way more than women… and yet when you talk to us it’s pretty clear that for all our very real privilege we don’t perceive it ourselves!

Since there’s probably nothing more dangerous than a powerful human being who thinks he or she is powerless that’s not good. At all.

Quick question: Given the weight of the institutions telling the groom “you may now kiss the bride,” who do you think it makes the most sense for men to fulminate about: women (either individually or collectively) or patriarchy?

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Math is Hard... When There's Cultural Noise

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-01-03 15:51

Doctor Spurt of Effortless Incitement says of a (said-to-be repeatable) study on the influence of context on gender differences. We’ve seen studies like these in the past but this one’s a pretty compelling. (Emphasis mine.)

This study looked at women’s performance at mathematics. The subjects completed a test including two mathematics sections separated by a reading comprehension section. The middle section was an experimental manipulation, with one of the following four essays:

(G) This essay argued that there were mathematics-related sex differences, and that the explanation was genetic.

(E) This essay argued that there were mathematics-related sex differences, and that the explanation was experiential.

(NS) This essay argued that there were no mathematics-related sex differences.

(S) This essay primed the question of sex without making reference to differences in mathematical ability.

The hypothesis was that in the second test participants in condition (G) and (S) would underperform those in condition (E) and (NS). This is just what they found, a result that was replicated in a schematically similar study where the manipulation was heard, rather than read. See the figure below.

This isn’t surprising at all – it’s consistent with a pile of established social psychology on the effectiveness of stereotypes. But it’s definitely important.

Read the quote in context here.

In other words women tended to perform poorly when gender differences were suggested, and well when gender differences were denied or excused as experimental error.

And while the study was conducted on women this isn’t (duh) an effect limited to women. Studies that similarly manipulate reminders of how men “should” behave have similar effects on men’s behavior.

Which, incidentally, reinforces this point by Lisa of Sociological Images who, pointing to a recent candy bar ad, reminds us…

This stereotype of guys as dumb, immature assholes isn’t doing anyone any favors

(Via Research Blogging)

She said it here.

(Oh, and think there are any self-confidence, body-image, or “does this make me look ‘gay’” implications in that study?)

Anyway, none of this suggests there are or aren’t innate, even genetic differences between men and women when it comes to mathematics. In fact it precisely doesn’t suggest it. Instead what it suggests is that cultural background noise is sufficiently loud to make it profoundly difficult to take seriously those who make such allegations lightly.

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Heteronormativity and the Effective Responses to Abuse

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2008-11-24 18:06

Final point (for tonight anyway) from Andrea Zanin of Sex Geek post, again in advice about mitigating abuse in the S&M community, but this time relevant to something Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) pay lots of lip service to but… don’t really seem to do very much about.

Remember that not everyone is fucking heterosexual already. Remember that abuse exists between gay men and between lesbians and among trans people of any orientation. (In fact the only person I can think of whom I would blacklist, if I believed in blacklisting, which I don’t, is a lesbian.) Stop talking about abuse as though it were just for top men and bottom women who necessarily play with only each other. This limits the discussion and leaves out vulnerable people.

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah when it comes to abuse “women do it too.” To male and female partners. And more to the point yes, men are often victims of abuse. From female and male partners. Back in the heyday of 2nd-wave and separatist feminism the former was a source of sometimes very angry pre-kyriarchy discourse. Which has been substantially overcome. That some male victims might be in abusive gay or trans relationships continues, I think, to dreadfully hamper the credibility of MRAs attempts to effectively deal with, let alone gain sympathy for, very real male victimization. (Hmm… and yet another example where prior efforts can poison the well for subsequent, more realistic and good-faith efforts.)

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