7-Gender of Friendship and Dating Flashcards

Week 7 – The Gender of Friendship and Dating

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the influence of gender on friendship dynamics across different life stages.
• Examine the role of gender in modern dating practices and relationship expectations.
• Analyze the impact of changing gender roles on contemporary marriages.
• Reflect on personal experiences and societal trends related to gender in relationships.
• Develop strategies for fostering equitable and healthy relationships regardless of gender.

Love, Inside and Outside the Family

• Friendship and Romantic love encompasses all types of love that exist between human beings outside the family.
• There's a division between familial and nonfamilial relationships, with close friends sometimes considered like 'twins,' demonstrating the closeness and importance of these bonds.
• Kin refers to relationships to people.
  • Biological: Refers to blood relatives.
  • Adoptive relationships: Refer to adoptive parents and step siblings.
• Relationships outside family: The line in the sand between love inside and outside family is not easy to draw.

Love, Inside and Outside the Family: Expectations

• There are many expectations from family members whom we don’t get to choose, unlike friends.
• Choice and obligation:
  • These two criteria make friendship unique and 'better' than other types of relationships.
  • We choose our friends with a freedom that doesn’t exist in other relationships.

Love, Inside and Outside the Family: Choosing Friends

• We choose our friends with a freedom that doesn’t exist in other relationships.
• Once the choices are made, friendship, is enjoyment of another person’s company.
• Friendship: Voluntary and altruistic; voluntarily chosen may be subject to specific limitations.

Love, Inside and Outside the Family: Friendship, Social Structure, and Gender

• A sociological approach to friendship helps us understand the ways in which friendship is influenced by social structure.
• Gender is important in understanding how much we actually do get to choose the people with whom we’re friends.
• Balance and equality:
  • Friendship exists between two equals.
  • Whatever the particular system of exchange is in a friendship, balance should be maintained.
  • Friendships can be in trouble when the balance is off.

Defining Friendship

• Sentiment and sociability: We have an emotional attachment to our friends, and we like spending time with them, enjoying their company with no ulterior motive.
• Traits of a friend: Trust, honesty, respect, commitment, safety, support, generosity, loyalty, mutuality, constancy, understanding, and acceptance.

Love, Inside and Outside the Family: Sociological Definition

• Friendship: A voluntary, informal, and personal relationship according to the common definition in sociological literature.
• Informal and personal friendships:
  • Friendships may form in formal settings, such as the workplace.
  • Friendship is more likely to be a relationship between status equals, two people on roughly the same social level.
  • Equality is the main factor in friendships, though no two people can be exactly equal.
  • The reciprocity of people identified as friends casts some doubt on the personal nature of these relationships.

My Friend Jane Versus My Friend Joe: Who’s Better at Being Friends?

• The characteristics of friendship are intimacy, trust, caring, and nurturing.
• Women will be chosen by many people.
• Mask of masculinity:
  • Men and boys are forced to wear masks that make forming intimate friendships difficult.
  • Boy code: Equates masculinity with being emotionally stoic, invulnerable, physically tough, and independent.
  • As boys reach adolescence and early adulthood, this “boy code” becomes the “guy code.”
  • The friendships of men and boys are assumed to lack intimacy and sharing.

My Friend Jane Versus My Friend Joe: Who’s Better at Being Friends? - Equating Emotions to Femininity

• Closeness and intimacy in friendship are associated with femininity; boys would avoid it at all cost.
• Young men felt effeminate if they even feel emotions.
• Myths about female friendships:
  • All female friendships must be bitchy, toxic or competitive; designed to slow women down.

Friendship in Historical Perspective

• Masculinity and model friendships:
  • Men’s friendships were viewed as the model, while women were seen as incapable of higher form of association.
  • The important characteristics linked to friendship in many historical writings are bravery, loyalty, duty, and heroism.
• Friendship misinterpreted as romance:
  • The expression of intimacy and tenderness toward their male friends would probably cause us to assume they were romantically or sexually involved.

Friendship in Historical Perspective - View of Woman Friendships

• Women were considered to be unable to commit to other women and incapable of forming close bonds.
• Women’s friendships were:
  • Perceived as likely to be easily abandoned in favor of male companionship.
  • Plagued by jealousy and competition over men.
  • Considered less capable of commitment.

Friendship in Historical Perspective - Men's Relationships and Feminism

• Men’s friendships were more public and viewed as more important than the relationships in the private sphere of women.
• Feminism and its after effects:
  • With the emergence of feminism, what happens in women’s lives has become important.
  • Whether women were lousy at friendships is a subject to debate.

Friendship in Historical Perspective - Status of Women

• Women and their friends were no longer alive to tell their tales firsthand.
• Talking in depth to people about their friendships is an important way of uncovering the truth about friendships.
• Importance of women in the society:
  • Women’s friendships were less visible.
  • The view of women as inferior friends can also be understood as evidence of a long history of patriarchy in Western society.
  • Perceiving women as better at friendship now is precisely because friendship in general is viewed as less important than it was in the past.

Gender Differences in Friendship

• There are many contradictions and points of disagreement in research about men’s and women’s friendships.
• Important similarities in women’s and men’s styles of friendships; variations in friendship styles among different groups of women and different groups of men.
• Abstract qualities in friendship: Intimacy, acceptance, trust, and help are wanted by both genders.

Gender Differences: Face-to-Face and Side-by-Side

• Face-to-face: women’s friendships.
  • The face-to-face describes the degree of conversation and emotional sharing that takes place in women’s friendships.
• Side-by-side: men’s friendships.
  • Men are side-by-side since they participate in activities together but not necessarily engaging in the kind of conversational intimacy like women.
• Intimacy and self disclosure.

Intimacy and Self-Disclosure

• Men are less likely to disclose intimate information about themselves to their friends than women.
• Women are more uncomfortable when their friendships lack intimate self-disclosure.
• Men and women are comfortable with non verbal cues and physical intimacy like hugs.

Psychoanalytic Theory and Gender

• Girls develop a sense of femininity directly through their relationship with their mother.
  • They never have to sever this close connection with their mothers to become feminine; connection with other women is much easier.
  • This is because women have relatively weak ego boundaries.
• Boys learn masculinity by denying their connection to their mothers.
  • They develop ego boundaries more than their females which makes connecting intimately with others more difficult.

Hegemonic Masculinity

• Hegemonic masculinity sets up a bar men must meet to pass a kind of cultural masculinity test.
• It dictates that men be competitive and rational.
• Qualities of hegemonic masculinity make intimate disclosure in friendships more difficult.

Masculinity and Heterosexuality

• Hegemonic masculinity suggests that real men do not engage in any behavior that suggests affection for other men.
• Close friendships and intimacy with other men can lead to questions about a man’s sexuality and suggestions of homosexuality.
• Boys learn about gender identity at an early age through the patrolling of masculinity in the gender transgression zone.

Friendship and Social Structure

• Structural requirements to friendship.
  • Geography provides the simplest level of structural constraint.
  • Physical space and communication technologies too have limitations.
• Social segregation: Separation of some realm of social life into different groups based on some category.

Friendship and Social Structure - Segregation

• Residential segregation:
  • The kind of separation in terms of where people live based on race, class, religion, ethnicity.
  • Socially constructed spatial boundaries can result in different groups rarely coming in contact with each other.
• Material resources and money too influence friendship.
• Link between friendship and body size:
  • Researchers found that as body mass index increased, the likelihood of being nominated by schoolmates as a friend decreased.
  • This relationship was more pronounced among girls than among boys.

Child-rearing, Social Networks, and Friendship

• Housewives have reduced outside contact.
  • Women who do not do paid work outside the home can face the constraints of having reduced contact with people in that outside world.
  • Being in contact with parents of other children can help offset this.
• Time constraints:
  • Working women do household chores in addition to their job which makes them work extra time.
  • Second shift: The extra burden experienced by working women at home cooking dinner, doing housework, and taking care of children.
  • This gives them less time for the socializing required to make and keep friends.

Child-rearing, Social Networks, and Friendship - Social Networking

• Men have larger social networks because their experiences in the workplace bring them contacts of a broader range of people.
• Women have smaller networks on average, and there tend to be more kin in those networks.
• Men’s networks are helpful in finding jobs and obtaining promotions.
• Workplace demands on men and women:
  • A kind of self-sufficiency, ambition, and independence.
  • A successful man in the business world cannot become dependent on anyone; a potential rival.
  • A person defined primarily as a wife and a mother has less need to be competitive, independent, or ambitious.

Gender Similarities in Friendship

• On average, men may be less likely to disclose intimate information in their friendships with other men.
• Questioning the friendship styles of women, and their similarity with men’s ways of being and having friends.
• Gender: Gender is a residual effect of the particular shape and content of the network in which we are embedded.

Social-Structural Position and Friendships

• Gender differences in friendships exists when women and men are positioned more similarly to each other in terms of their social networks and in relation to the social structure.
• When middle-class women oriented toward their careers are compared with their male counterparts, both groups report an aversion to being intimate with their same-gender friends.
• Long lasting friendships:
  • When researchers examine longer-lasting friendships, the differences between women and men begin to disappear.

Gender Similarities - Aging and Marital Status

• As women and men age, friendships among elderly men and women also become more similar in many ways.
• Older widowed men spend more time with their friends than do older married men.
• Single men tend to be more involved with their male friends than are married men, especially married men with children.
• Married men also report being less close to their friends and disclosing less to them than do their single counterparts.

Friendships Across Gender Boundaries

• Both women and men value trust and authenticity in their friendships; focus on the importance of communication, intimacy, trust, and interpersonal sensitivity.

Global Questions About Friendships

• How do you define friendship?
• Do you think men’s friendships differ from women’s friendships?
• Are you likely to tell your friends when you are feeling sad or upset?
• Global questions like these tell us a great deal about our cultural expectations of friendship, even when our actual experiences do not conform to those expectations.

Masculine Friendships

• Men share activities such as fishing, baseball, playing softball, and hunting, and they discuss retirement, their wives, their children, and their shared interest in sports.
• Men with working-class lifestyles with a wife and kids invited friends over and they drank and watched TV together.
• Men also had conversations about their wives’ preferences for courtship and physical intimacy.
• Women and shared activities:
  • Women worked out together, took aerobics classes together, or belonged to a local sports team, and they defined the actual activities they were engaging in as unimportant.

Intersectionality of Friendship and Gender

• Social class needs to be taken into account when examining gender differences in friendships.
• As one moves up the social ladder in terms of their income, education, and prestige, they find there are fewer status equals to choose in their network.

Friendships in the Working Class

• The working-class talked more about financial difficulties, substance abuse problems, family problems, and health issues.
• The ability of working-class individuals had to discuss their problems with their friends made their lives more stable in many respects.
• Non conformity to the norms:
  • A successful performance of gender has to be perceived as accountable by everyone involved in the interaction.
  • Both women and men violated the norms for friendship perceived as appropriate to their gender and that they themselves claimed to perceive as appropriate to their gender.

Friendship in Global Perspective: Choosing Friends

• Criteria to choose friends: Individuals who like each other and have a sense of obligation to each other’s welfare, share common sentiment, similar interests, and personality.
• Limitations in choosing friends:
  • In some societies, social structure limits the possibilities of whom we can befriend.
  • The idea of having someone else pick your friend for you is contradictory to the most basic notions of a friend.

Friendships in Differing Cultures

• Fictive kin: Friends become fictive kin, or symbolic family members; seen in Latinos and in many Latin American cultures.
  • These relationships tend to place more emphasis on the godparents’ responsibilities to the child rather than on their relationship with the child’s parents.
• Blood brothers: Blood ceremonies are common in many cultures as a way to cement friendships ritually.
• Drawing the line: friendships and romance:
  • Just friends becoming something more than friends.
  • Although we believe the lines between friend, family, and lover are clear-cut and easy to draw; the cases of man–man and woman–woman marriages demonstrate that making these distinctions may not always be so simple.

Families of Choice

• Families of choice are often used in LGBTQ communities.
  • This involves the construction of elaborate friendship networks to compensate for the lack of supportive family ties.
  • Composed of partners, former partners, and friends as well as biological family members.
  • Important to those within the LGBTQ community because they have often been denied access to support from families of origin due to rejection; cross lines of gender and sexual orientation.

Cross Gender and Cross Sexual Friends

• For both types of cross-gender, cross-sexual identity dyads, friends relied on each other for financial and emotional support.
• These financial and emotional ties led friends to expect familial-like levels of commitment.
• Transitions after marriage:
  • For straight women, getting married affected their promise to be surrogates for their gay male friends.
  • After marriage and kids, life goes in another direction.

The Rules of Attraction

• Basic question of attraction: What makes people attractive to each other?
  • Attraction is both physical and emotional.
  • Physical attraction criteria varies across different cultures across the globe.
  • Attractiveness is an important and fairly simple component of relationships that lead to things like dating and marriage.

Romantic Love

• Romantic love: An intense attraction in which the love object is idealized, there is an erotic context, and the relationship is expected to be long lasting.
  • Romantic love comes before marriage, and being in love is like the green light to proceed to marriage is assumed in many parts of the global North.
  • In other cultures romantic love is something assumed to come after marriage.
• Marriage:
  • Marriage is an economic or political arrangement.
  • In some cultures, love and intimacy are to be found in friends or other relatives but not with the person you will marry or to whom you’re already married.

Courtship to Dating

• Dating and love:
  • Dating and courtship is a ritual through which true love is found.
  • Courtship as an institution has an impact on how people experience their gender.
  • It is a top-down perspective on gender.
• Change in dating rituals:
  • Rituals of dating and courtship have changed rapidly since about the 18th century, and now due to the emergence of hookup culture.

Calling

• Courtship in 19th-century America involved men coming to call at the homes of their potential love interests.
• They spent the evening chaperoned by their parents, usually on the front porch or in the family parlor.
• A man could not come calling on a woman unless she had invited him to do so and he had received the approval of her mother.
• The system of calling was almost entirely under the control of women.
• Challenges in calling for lower classes:
  • Calling required space where the courting couple could ideally sit together, with chaperones.
  • Working-class families crowded together in urban neighborhoods, had no such space for entertaining in their homes.

Dating

• Dating emerged first from the lower classes; it then trickled up into the upper classes and, finally, down into the middle classes.
• Dating moved the act of courtship into the public world.
• Dating moved courtship out of women’s realm inside the home and into the public realm of men.
• Privileged young women of the upper classes realized the advantages of dating and the amusements of urban life.
• Shift in power of courtship: Power in courtship shifted from women to men in another way with the emergence of dating.

Economic Factor

• The act of courting itself didn’t require any output of money; with dating, this situation changed.
• During this transition period, men often deeply resented the financial burden that came with a woman’s company.
• The outlay of money carried certain expectations of reciprocity in the form of favors, including sexual favors.
• Columnists strictly instructed that suggesting a date was inappropriate for a woman because you were asking a man to spend money on you.

Rating, Dating, Mating Complex

• Dating was based on a system of ranking in which both boys and girls aspired to date someone whom they rated as a bit higher than themselves in terms of dating desirability.
• For girls, a good date preserved her reputation by not leading her to engage in any sexual activity.
• For boys, a good date meant gaining sexual experience.
• It is primarily a way to make yourself more popular.

Going Steady

• Changes were brought about in part as a result of the demographics of the time period.
• During World War II, there were suddenly fewer men available to date.
• Demographically, this points to the importance that the gender makeup of a society.

Sexual Compatibility and Current Trends

• Beginning in the early part of the 20th century, the idea of sexual compatibility in marriage began to gain importance.
• Today, the assumption that a healthy sex life is an important part of a successful marriage is fairly widespread.
• Thus it made sense for couples to be able to have some sexual experiences prior to marriage.
• Current trends:
  • Dating means that one has been seeing one person exclusively in a long-term relationship, or that you’re going out on dates with several people in succession.
  • The broad terrain of contemporary slang: talking, talking to, hanging out, seeing, hooking up, friends with benefits.

Hookup Culture

• A hookup is a sexual encounter, usually lasting only one night, between two people who were strangers or brief acquaintances.
  • Generally spontaneous, these do not lead to a continuing relationship.
• Hookup culture is widely prevalent on college campuses.
  • The pattern of hooking up is something different than mere casual sex.
• There has been a decline in dating.

Sexual Activity in Hookups

• Men report more hookups that involve sexual intercourse.
• Women report more hookups that involve sexual experiences outside intercourse.

Regret and Shame After Hookups

• Both men and women sometimes regret hookup experiences.
• Women experienced regret that centered on shame and self-blame, often connected to not knowing their partner.
• Men expressed regret about their bad choice of a hookup partner, usually because the partner was unattractive or undesirable.

Double Standards

• Women engaging in hookups would experience lower self-esteem than men who engaged in hookups.
• Women will be judged more harshly for having sexual experiences outside of marriage or a close intimate relationship.

Sexual Convergence

• The trend for the norms and ideals surrounding women’s sexuality to become increasingly similar to the norms and ideals of men’s sexuality.
• Expectations for sexual behavior between the two genders have begun to converge and become more similar.
• This convergence is reflected in ideals about virginity and masturbation.
• Birth control for women.
• Many feminists emphasized the important connection between sexuality and power.
• Sexual empowerment is an important goal for women of feminism.

Friends With Benefits

• Having sex in a nonromantic friendship.
• In one study:
  • One tenth of the friends with benefits relationships went on to become actual romantic relationships.
  • One third of the relationships, the sex eventually ended while the friendship continued.
  • One in four of the relationships broke off both the friendship and the sex.
  • The rest of the respondents continued with both the sex and the friendship.
• A 'Friends With Benefits' relationship may be seen as a safer, less risky relationship.
  • Women and men in this study seemed motivated to enter into these arrangements because they were perceived as a safer type of relationship, free of the commitment level assumed in a typical romantic relationship.
  • In most other ways, the relationships truly resembled friendships more than any other type of relationship.

Change in Norms

• Prohibitions against sex before marriage have generally loosened.
• Neither hooking up nor friends with benefits seems to be an activity oriented toward the task of finding a life partner.
• Friends with benefits become easy ways to fill the time spent in between with minimal hassle.

Romantic Love in Friends With Benefits

• Contradictory and unclear evidence.
• Many college students still have romantic relationships; most people will eventually end up married.

Romantic Love in Cross-Cultural Perspective

• Romantic love is an important cultural feature of many societies outside Anglo-European society.
• Societies: individualistic and collectivistic:
  • In individualistic societies, the needs of the individual outweigh the needs of any collective.
  • In a collectivistic culture: the needs of the collective are perceived as more important than individual needs.
  • Marriage in collectivistic societies is viewed less as a coming together of two individuals based on free choice and more as a strategic alliance that should provide some important benefits to larger groups.

Conjugality

• The personal relationship between husband and wife.
• In a collectivistic orientation: conjugality is secondary to the collective interests of larger groups.
• An emphasis on conjugality: transition away from collectivistic orientations toward a more individualistic view.
• Beneficial marriage arrangements occur in societies such as the Igbo.
  • Marrying someone from a neighboring village helps to:
    • Maintain peace between the two villages.
    • Create potential allies in the event of warfare with a third village, and
    • Facilitate networks of trade and other potentially profitable relationships.
  • Families and village members have practical reasons to encourage these alliances between geographically close villages.
• Romantic love has real limits and barriers placed on it in all cultures.

Love Without Gender

• Romance culture in the United States tells us that love overcomes all obstacles and defies gender.
• Violence against transgender people:
  • Romantic and sexual encounters for transgender people, and especially trans women, can be deadly.
  • Since 2013, more than 130 transgender and gender-expansive people have been killed in the United States.
  • The overwhelming majority of perpetrators of violence against transgender people are cis men.

The One-Act Rule

• One same-gender sexual encounter makes you categorizable as homosexual.
• The need to defend both the gender identity and the sexual identity of cis men explains acts of violence.
• Prejudice against transwomen:
  • The gender identity of trans women is ignored.
  • Widespread cissexism exists transgender people are not seen as potential romantic and sexual partners.
  • Prejudices against trans women: trans men are perceived as more datable than trans women.

Summing Up

• The basic idea of love and intimacy are present in almost all cultures, which plays as a rewarding human life with important experiences. However, it is defined in particular ways for different cultures.
• Hierarchy for types of love in the United States:
  • Love for family might be most important, or closely tied with the romantic love one feels for a partner.
  • Next might be the love one experiences for friends, or for extended family such as aunts and grandparents.
• Unique hierarchy in different countries:
  • In traditional Indian society, the relationship between a mother and a son would probably have much greater importance than the relationship between a husband and a wife.
  • Among the Bangwa in Cameroon, male friends perform funeral rites, and this friendship is trusted above the family, where relatives are perceived as scheming and self-interested in ways that friends are not.
• Influence of gender in friendship, love, and marriage:
  • Friendship is considered as a gender-segregated phenomenon in which it is considered as the relationship between two women or two men.
  • Gender plays an important role in love and even leads individuals into institutions like marriage in particular paths.