This is an interesting article - here is a good summary of the findings:

The researchers found that male participants tended to partake in more essentialist thinking than their female counterparts, regardless of the group to which they were assigned. They also found that all participants, regardless of condition or their own gender, held stronger stereotypes about males than about females. "People," Eidson explained, "are less willing to accept violations of the male gender role than of the female gender role."

This is why I keep doing this blog - men are much more locked into strict gender roles than are females, and it's both sexes who enforce these expectations.

That's an important finding - if women really want men to change, they have to support those changes.

The thinking behind gender stereotypes

by Angela Herring | Medical Xpress

Associate professor of psychology John Coley, right, and R. Coley Eidson, a doctoral candidate in Coley’s lab, recently released a paper overturning a body of research on the way we think about gender roles. Credit: Brooks Canaday

If you ask a kid what it means to be male or female, you'll likely get a pretty stereotypical response. Boys, kids tend to think, are inherently interested in boy-like things—trucks, baseball, and construction work—while girls are inherently interested in dolls, dress-up, and tea parties. Boys like to build things and go fishing and want to be football players when they grow up. Girls like to sew, wear makeup, and want to be ballerinas. For the young examinee, the behavioral tendencies of boys and girls are just as fundamental as their physical attributes.

Most research has found that this stereotypical, or "essentialist," thinking tends to fade as we get older. According to associate professor of psychology John Coley, the academic literature has suggested that by the time we're in elementary school we start to see environment as playing a large role in the manifestation of gender roles. We learn that girls aren't inherently more inclined to be teachers and nurses, but that our environment and our experiences urge us into such gender-normal behaviors.

But new research from Coley and R. Cole Eidson, a doctoral candidate in his Categorization and Reasoning Lab at Northeastern, suggests that we retain some of our childlike, essentialist-thinking into adulthood. In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Cognition and Development, the duo repeated earlier studies of children using a group of undergraduate students, but they added a twist.

Eidson explained that if you could strip away an adult's years of cultural learning—in which they collect a better understanding of people's individuality and how they think and behave—"then you might still find essentialist thinking lurking beneath the surface." To accomplish this, they gave the study's participants a time constraint.

First, they presented the 36 male and 33 female participants with four characters: a girl raised by only women, a girl raised by only men, a boy raised by only women, and a boy raised by only men. Then, just as with the earlier studies on children, they asked the participants how the individual would behave in a particular situation or what kinds of physical attributes the person would have as an adult. But unlike the earlier studies, Eidson and Coley split their participants into two groups with two different directives. Half of them had to wait 10 seconds before making their decision about the character while the other half had to make a snap judgment, answering the question in less than two seconds.

The constraint made a significant difference. Those who had to reply quickly tended to respond with more stereotypical answers, just as a pre-elementary-school child might do. The participants who had more time to consider their replies tended to respond with more socially-acceptable answers.

"This work shows that essentialist thinking is automatic and deeply-rooted, but that people can overcome this bias given time and cognitive resources," Coley said.

The researchers found that male participants tended to partake in more essentialist thinking than their female counterparts, regardless of the group to which they were assigned. They also found that all participants, regardless of condition or their own gender, held stronger stereotypes about males than about females. "People," Eidson explained, "are less willing to accept violations of the male gender role than of the female gender role."

Coley and Eidson can only speculate on why this might be the case, but perhaps, Coley said, it has something to do with the fact that female gender roles have undergone a determined shift over the past century.

This research continues the work being done in Coley's lab examining the way humans categorize their world. But this study is among the first to look at the cognitive processes underlying the way we categorize our fellow humans based on gender.

The work, Eidson said, has implications for dealing with social phenomena such as prejudice and stereotyping. If we believe that different groups have different inherent properties and we start assigning values to those properties, "then really quickly you can move into a place where one group is less desirable than another," he said. "Even adults are still doing this, it's just under the surface. Understanding that may give you some kind of inroad to dealing with those kinds of issues."

Explore further: The brain's reaction to male odor shifts at puberty in children with gender dysphoria

More information: 
Eidsona, RC & Coleya, JD. (2014). Not So Fast: Reassessing Gender Essentialism in Young Adults. Journal of Cognition and Development; 15(2). DOI: 10.1080/15248372.2013.763810

Provided by Northeastern University

What Does Manhood Mean in 2013? (from New York Magazine)

From New York Magazine, Ann Friedman looks at what it means to be a man in 2013 - and she uses four press items from the weeks preceding the September 20 article. One of the cool things she included is the Life of Men from Esquire magazine - check it out.

Here is a summary of what she finds in the confusion of men today around definitions of masculinity:

The JWT report gives an overall impression that, just like femininity, masculinity is increasingly defined by both playing to and against type. It's growing a really impressive beard and ordering a kale salad for lunch. It's knowing Super Bowl trivia and being an emotionally supportive partner. But if this makes it sound like men are joining women in having a less gender-bound view of their sense of self, it’s not that simple. According to the JWT research, even though millennial men are, more than older men, okay with using concealer and learning to poach eggs, they also say they're more frustrated with not knowing what it "means" to be a man.

The confusion around masculinity, as far I am concerned, is a good thing - it indicates that the old stereotype of the rugged, emotionally distant, and potentially violent male is no longer a given, no longer the gender role in which boys are automatically embedded as they grow into men. There are now masculinities - and that makes a better world for men and women.

What Does Manhood Mean in 2013?

By Ann Friedman
9/20/13

What does it mean to be a man in 2013? Consider four data points from recent weeks:

1. Tech entrepreneur Bryan Goldberg, who became an Internet laughingstock last month when he issued a stupendously tone-deaf announcement for Bustle, his new site aimed at women, was bashed all over again this week following a New Yorker profile in which he appeared to be overcompensating for his prior gender gaffes. “We didn’t want pink everywhere,” he told the magazine, noting that women seem to be interested in all kinds of things, from earrings to Zumba to Amanda Bynes to Syria. Women, in Goldberg’s view, have complex desires and interests, some of which conform to classic feminine stereotypes, but many that do not. And what of men? According to Goldberg, they like sports and financial markets and ... not reading books. A man is a simple creature.

2. Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, declared the end of patriarchy. In an era when middle-class men are struggling to hang onto their jobs and cultural relevance, it’s only feminists who keep the concept of male dominance alive, she argued, by purposefully highlighting the “statistics that make women look most beleaguered.” In other words, how can we be living in a patriarchy if the definition of “male” no longer carries with it a guaranteed level of social and economic status? Without such power, man is over.

3. Esquire revealed its “Life of Men” project, a photo gallery and accompanying questionnaire that aims to “create a living portrait of the American man right now.” There’s a healthy dose of masculine swagger among the subjects, but if there’s one common theme, it’s family. Over and over, these men — some of the most professionally accomplished specimens in America — name their children as their greatest achievement, their best day as the one on which they met their wife. A man is a nurturing partner and father.

4. That theme was echoed somewhat in a new report from the market-research firm JWT on male consumers and masculinity, which found that “emotional support for family” ranked just behind “financial support for family.” The JWT report says two thirds of men would make their work schedule more flexible or stay home with their family full-time if they could afford to. This was confirmed by a new Pew study this week, which declared that there are more men on the “daddy track” than ever before — though not always, it took pains to note, voluntarily. “Men’s ideas,” reported NPR, “have shifted closer to what many women have long felt.” But still, a man is a provider.

What’s striking isn’t the lack of consensus on what defines masculinity now, but the utter confusion about how to go about doing so. That’s because America is finally getting around to having the conversation about what it means to be a man that, decades ago, feminism forced us to have about womanhood. Women still face social consequences when they don’t conform neatly to gender norms, but many of even the most ideologically progressive men are just now starting to talk about how to break with masculine stereotypes and still hang onto a sense of gender identity. Goldberg and Rosin, in using traditional definitions of manhood (the simple, stoic breadwinner), declare him dead, or at least less marketable to advertisers. Men’s magazines, which now peddle facial moisturizers but still often shy away from heartfelt confessionals, have spotted how hard it is for men to balance both embracing and rethinking masculine stereotypes — and they’ve made some attempts to address it, but mostly ended up documenting the confusion.

And much of that confusion can be traced back to the fact that we’re still adapting to an expanded definition of what it means to be a woman. “The most complicated aspect of manhood is dealing with antiquated social norms about gender roles,” says my friend Eric Uhlir, who lives in D.C. “Society, at least American society, still hasn't realized that it's not just a woman's job to raise a child but everyone's job in a sense. We just drop it in women's laps and men just pretend like it's not even a problem. That feels like the most pervasive gender stereotype the world's brohemians don't seem to understand or just choose to ignore.”

Brohemian is an apt term: The JWT report gives an overall impression that, just like femininity, masculinity is increasingly defined by both playing to and against type. It's growing a really impressive beard and ordering a kale salad for lunch. It's knowing Super Bowl trivia and being an emotionally supportive partner. But if this makes it sound like men are joining women in having a less gender-bound view of their sense of self, it’s not that simple. According to the JWT research, even though millennial men are, more than older men, okay with using concealer and learning to poach eggs, they also say they're more frustrated with not knowing what it "means" to be a man.


JWT’s millennial men were more likely to answer affirmatively to statements like "Men can't be men anymore.” These guys have never lived in an era of rigid gender rules. The report says they seek the perceived trappings of manly men of the past to reinforce their masculinity while they pursue the other, more traditionally feminized lifestyle choices they also desire. This theory might explain why you can often find rugged pickaxes in high-end clothing shops of urban America.


“One of the reasons that I think facial hair — mustaches and beards, specifically — have come so much back in vogue is because there seems to be an almost primal urge to reclaim our right to be men and to look like men,” says Phil Walker, a gay man who lives in D.C. and has been known to sport an impressive mustache.


Sometimes the thick beard and the artisanal pickax on the mantel betray the fact that — gender enlightenment aside — a man may not be completely ready to abandon the traditional greatness of being a guy. Even if he wanted to, it would be tough to pull off. “How can guys pick themselves up by their bootstraps and bring home the bacon when we're also embracing the idea that everyone is entitled to whatever bacon they want, however they want to get it?” asked my friend Dylan Lathrop. The real challenge is compromise and balance.

And this is why I think Rosin is wrong about the end of patriarchy. “Patriarchy” doesn’t just mean concrete systems that ensure only men have access to the upper echelons of power; it also encompasses our ingrained cultural understanding of what men should be and how they show dominance. If it looks like we’ve reached the “end of men,” that’s only because patriarchy (alive and well!) tells us the only way to be a man is to be The Man — economically, politically, and socially. If patriarchy were really over, stay-at-home dads wouldn’t be the death knell of an entire gender. They’d just be … men. They are men.

Ultimately, confusion about modern masculinity is a good thing: It means we’re working past the outmoded definition. Men are increasingly comfortable breaking masculine gender stereotypes, but want to hold on to certain gender signifiers? They're uneasy about living in such a mixed-up, muddled-up, post-gender world, but don't want to go back to the rigid roles of the past? Welcome to where women have been since second-wave feminism! It's confusing out here.

Hmmm . . . There were some things I liked about the original Tough Guise, and there were some things that really bothered me about that film. It felt to me that Jackson Katz fails to understand the complexity of the issue he was addressing. I wrote this back in 2009:

I have my issues with Jackson Katz’s “Tough Guise” video - it feels to me like the pathological side of the postmodern, relativist developmental stage, otherwise known as the Mean Green Meme in integral circles. I'm not sure such a beast actually exists (see here), but there does seem to be a tendency in this developmental stage - which is focused on group harmony, expression of emotion, and other communal manifestations of development - to reject any and all expressions of violence. I'm not sure this is realistic.

While as a Buddhist I reject violence, this is not necessarily a universal belief, even among Buddhists. Many hundreds of years have shown that Buddhists will take violent action in order to protect the weak and the dharma - the killing of a few to save the many has been the argument.

When the Chinese invaded Tibet, the few "soldiers" that existed tried in vain to fight off the invaders. This might be seen as the dark side of the complete opposition to violence and force. If they had taken seriously the realities of a world in which not everyone shares their values of peace and compassion, they might have been more prepared to defend those values by whatever means necessary.

Perhaps this is not good Buddhist doctrine. Or perhaps this is a more integral understanding of the need for right use of force. The "right use" part is crucial - I am not for the glorification of violence in film and TV. I do not think that boys should be taught that violence is how to resolve issues. I do not think that the military should be deployed unless our borders are threatened or unless we can protect the weak from genocide by the few who are ignorant and violent.

But I do know that we should be able to defend ourselves and those we love if there is no other option. Is there ever a time when there is no other option? I'm not sure.

So I'm not sure how I feel about his making of a sequel, from which there is a short clip below. Maybe over the past 14 years he has become more accepting that there are some masculine traits that are results of our biology and hormones . . . and evolution. That we still have these traits when they have ceased be relevant does not mean that they are wrong.

Whether violence is wrong or necessary depends on the context.

'Tough Guise 2': The Ongoing Crisis of Violent Masculinity

In a follow-up to his powerful 1999 documentary, Jackson Katz argues that men are actively taught to be violent creatures.

October 24, 2013 • By Lisa Wade

A still from Tough Guise 2. (PHOTO: COURTESY OF JACKSON KATZ)

In 1999 Jackson Katz headlined a documentary that powerfully revealed the mask of masculinity, a pretense of stoicism and readiness for violence that many men feel compelled to put on, at least part of the time. The film, Tough Guise: Violence, Manhood, and American Culture, became a staple in classes on gender across the country.

It’s no use arguing whether the media, the military, or the gun industry are responsible for rates of violence, he observes, since they’re in cahoots.

Last week marked the release of Tough Guise 2 and SocImages was given the honor of debuting an exclusive clip from the new film. In the segment below, Katz explains that men aren’t naturally violent but, instead, often learn how to be so. Focusing on socialization, however, threatens to make invisible the socialization agents. In other words, Katz argues, men don’t just learn to be more violent than they otherwise would be—they are actively taught.

He begins with the fact that the video game and film industries both take money from companies that make firearms to feature their products. The U.S. military then uses the video game Call of Duty for recruitment and training. It’s no use arguing whether the media, the military, or the gun industry are responsible for rates of violence, he observes, since they’re in cahoots. These extreme examples intersect with the everyday, mundane lessons about the importance of being “real men” that boys and men receive from the media and their peers, parents, coaches, and more.

This update of the original will tell the compelling story about manhood and violence to a new generation and remind older ones of the ongoing crisis of masculinity in America.



This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site.

Slate Reviews Hanne Blank's "Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality"

I knew that the term homosexual was a relatively recent invention (the word was "coined, in 1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against "unnatural fornication" being written into the Prussian penal code"), and this book - Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality - looks in detail at that topic. [This is not to say that the behaviors we identify as homosexual are new - they aren't - only that we did not have specific words to classify them as somehow different than other forms of sexual expression.]

However, she also looks at the way our sexual orientation is created through absorption of social norms - we do not consciously create our heterosexuality as much as we inherit it. True, much of it seems to be biological, which it even more striking that people can override their "indoctrination" to identify for themselves how their sexual preferences are enacted.

This sounds like a very good book.

No Hetero: Hanne Blank’s lively history of straights.

By Troy Patterson | Posted Thursday, Feb. 9, 2012

How much of sexual orientation is what we've been taught to call ourselves?

You quondam liberal-artists out there—veterans of lit-crit and queer theory, men and womyn formerly fluent in what Said said and all that Lacan cant—may yet remember that we live our lives according to a system of social constructs. The idea of race did not exist until colonialism required it. The notion of the self was thoroughly obscure until the Enlightenment dawned. The teenager didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution told him to get off its lawn.

Now from Hanne Blank comes a chewy piece of scholarship—Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Beacon)—that puts a spin on the hip-hop catchphrase "no homo," explaining that there was no hetero until social science and pseudo-science invented a need in the middle of the 19^th century. Anyone who's done time at a British public school or a progressive women's college can tell you that matters of sexual orientation are not strictly either/or. But this book twirls that “/” with panache, spinning a generous handful of yarns about the stories we tell ourselves about sex, love, and identity.

Straight covers an impressive bit of social-historical ground despite being, true to its subtitle, a compact production. It runs 264 pages, including index and footnotes. There are no illustrations, lamentably, so let's start with the author bio. Hanne Blank is "an independent scholar," earlier the author of Virgin: The Untouched History, and her "work has been featured everywhere from Out to Penthouse"—a gamut that would seem to exclude both Oui and Playgirl. She is, on the evidence, a rigorous thinker. Tracing the history of the word heterosexual and homosexual—coined, in 1868, by a pamphleteer opposed to the laws against "unnatural fornication" being written into the Prussian penal code—she is calm and clear. Tracing the way those coinages and the ideas animating them radiated into general discourse—by way of Kraft-Ebbing and Kinsey and Freud—she is deft and nimble. Shuttling back and forth through time to chat about related issues—including matrimony and sodomy, the economics of nonsexual bed-sharing and the history of romantic love—she exhibits the handsome confidence of a popular historian. And dragging herself into it, she uses a light touch to make us question the pronoun she.

In the acknowledgements, Blank thanks her partner for "being such such a good sport about being made into a framing device for a history book." The author is a woman who claims "no deep personal attachment to labeling myself in terms of sexual orientation," and her better half is, in terms of sexual organs, a man. But does the manhood make the man? He is diagnosed with Klinefelter Syndrome, "one of the most common sex-chromosome anomalies," meaning that his DNA reads XXY. His looks are androgynous, and his testicles are no help to the perpetuation of the species, but everything's peachy … until you start wondering whether this couple's love would traditionally be allowed to speak its name.

It would be orthodox to say that he is a man and that their relationship is heterosexual, but Blank is most compelling when talking about doxa. One of her few resorts to jargon, it’s a necessary one. "When anthropologists talk about this 'stuff everyone knows,' " she writes, "they use the term doxa. Doxa comes from the Greek for 'common knowledge,' and that's a pretty good description of what it is: the understanding we absorb from our native culture that we use to make sense of the world. … We all create it, together, mostly unintentionally." The doxa of straightness was created by tribal leaders and trial lawyers, by old wives and Viennese witch doctors, and it is being created by me as I write and you as you read. Blank has some questions for us, and they originated, it seems, with an intimate inquiry she confronts at the health clinic when wondering which box to tick, "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual," "transgender," or "heterosexual."

The book's impetus may be personal but its passions are strictly philosophical. One mission of Straight is to argue with people identified, with a Cornel West flourish, as "our right-wing brothers and sisters"—some of whom, mostly scarily those running for president, assert that heterosexuality is all about procreation. But Black's argument isn't against them. Rather, it's an engagement with the whole system of thought that allows and encourages right and left wings to take flight.

If I fail to convey the book's central point, that is because the book has no center. It's possible that Blank isn't the tenure-track type because her prose style is too good for too many of the departments that go in for her kind of thing—too free of weedy rhetoric to take root in the groves of academe. But also, Blank, though eminently reasonable, is not committed to sustained linear reasoning. The book hops among a useful riddle about "marked categories" (if we say that prude is the opposite of slut, then what are we saying about the person who is neither?), some thoughts on a court case involving the jazz pianist Billy Tipton (a woman who passed as a man, which was news to his widow), and a consideration of the metaphorical "wide stance" of Larry Craig ("he straddled the border of what was permissible for a man in a position of power"). Elsewhere, there are mini-essays on the cultural shift from courting to dating, the Defense of Marriage Act, the advent of no-fault divorce. … It's all smart, and it's all over the place.

And there are wrinkles in the text that would have benefited from the steam-ironing of peer review. Blank, for instance, spends time fruitfully considering degeneration—a perversion of Darwin that lay behind some lethal pseudo-science—but she neglects to mention the famous Max Nordau book of that title. But am I succumbing to the tyranny of doxa in lodging such complaints? Isn't there something perfect in the fact that Straight zigzags in connecting its dots?

New Study Reveals Messages About Gender In Boy Scout And Girl Scout Manuals

Wow, imagine that. Boy Scouts have been around for more than 100 years - and although they have evolved a little bit, their purpose is still to produce loyal, traditional Americans. One need only look at their battles to keep gay men out of the Scouts. The promote traditional Christian values - which by definition supports hegemonic gender roles.

Despite the heteronormative values being taught, the boys are getting some destructive messages that the girls are not:

Denny found that the boys' handbook "fosters intellectual dependence and passivity." Boys are routinely instructed to look for answers in the back of their guide, while girls are encouraged to do original research.

This is effed up - no wonder boys are not doing as well in school.

Time Magazine even got a little snarky about this study:

Shocker alert: The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts are a bit archaic when it comes to gender stereotypes.

***

Alright, so perhaps it's not that surprising that such an old organization still adheres to such old-fashioned gender roles. And while it's definitely not ideal, NewsFeed can't help but feeling more surprised by the fact that approximately 5 million children still participate in Boy and Girl Scouts groups. Who knew?

Here is the info on the study:

Kathleen E. Denny. (2011, Jan. 20). Gender in context, content, and approach: Comparing gender messages in Girl Scout and Boy Scout handbooks. Gender & Society, vol. 25 no. 1; 27-47. doi: 10.1177/0891243210390517

Abstract

I explore gender messages in Boy Scout and Girl Scout handbooks through an analysis of how gender is infused in the context and content of Scout activities as well as in instructions about how the Scouts are to approach these activities. I find that girls are offered more activities intended to be performed in group contexts than are boys. Boys are offered proportionately more activities with scientific content and proportionately fewer artistic activities than are girls. The girls’ handbook conveys messages about approaching activities with autonomous and critical thinking, whereas the boys’ handbook facilitates intellectual passivity through a reliance on organizational scripts. Taken together, girls’ messages promote an “up-to-date traditional woman” consistent with the Girl Scouts’ organizational roots; boys’ messages promote an assertive heteronormative masculinity that is offset by facilitating boys’ intellectual passivity.

Since it is not an open access journal, here is a good summary from Medical News Today.

New Study Reveals Messages About Gender In Boy Scout And Girl Scout Manuals

Nearly 5 million American children participate in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but until now no one has looked at the gender messages young people get when they start collecting those coveted badges.

Kathleen Denny, a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland, College Park, analyzed scouting manuals and found that - despite positive aspects - today's scouts are being fed stereotypical ideas about femininity and masculinity. Her findings were recently published in Gender & Society, the highly-ranked journal of Sociologists for Women in Society.

Girl scouts, for example, are steered away from scientific pursuits while boys are discouraged from pursuing artistic interests. While gender has been analyzed in children's books and television, it has rarely been examined in scouting manuals.

"The disproportionate and gendered distribution of art and science projects aligns with the large body of research that finds girls being systematically derailed from scientific and mathematical pursuits and professions due to cultural beliefs and stereotypes about their relative ineptitude in these areas," says Denny.

Among Denny's other key findings:

• Girls are more likely than the boys to be offered activities involving art projects; Girls' art activities make up 11 percent of their total activities.
• Scientifically-oriented activities make up only 2 percent of all girls' activities, but boys science activities take up 6 percent of their scouting time.
• Girls are offered proportionately more communal activities than boys; 30 percent of the girls' badge work activities are intended to take place in groups, either with or for others.
• Boys are offered proportionately more self-oriented activities than girls; Less than 20 percent of the boys' activities are intended to take place with others.
• Despite her findings of stereotypical notions of femininity, Denny found that the boys' handbook "fosters intellectual dependence and passivity." Boys are routinely instructed to look for answers in the back of their guide, while girls are encouraged to do original research.

Denny also found that the names of Scout badges convey strong messages about gender. Stereotypical ideas about "embellished femininity and stoic masculinity" are communicated in the level of playfulness (and the lack thereof) that characterize the different badge titles.

• Some 27 percent of girls' badge titles use playful literary techniques such as alliteration and puns, while 0 percent of boys' badge titles do so.
• All 20 boys' badges (100 percent) have descriptive titles without using any playful wording, while only 73 percent of the girls' badges have descriptive titles. The boys' badge dealing with rocks and geology, for example, is called the "Geologist" badge, while the comparable girls' badge is called the "Rocks Rock" badge.
• Denny found boys' badge titles use more career-oriented language (such as Engineer, Craftsman, Scientist), whereas girls' badge titles consistently use more playful language with less of a career orientation. (Instead of the boy's "Astronomer," the comparable girls badge is called "Sky Search." Instead of "Mechanic," a similar girl badge is called "Car Care.")

"When boys speak to others about their Geologist badge, they have a legitimate career title to use and are likely to be taken more seriously in conversations than girls discussing their achievement of a 'Rocks Rock' badge," Denny says.

She also found that the types of activities the badges entail are "the most explicitly gendered dimensions in the girls' handbook." Examples of badges that have to do with stereotypically feminine activities include: Caring for Children, Looking Your Best, and Sew Simple. In addition to activities about personal hygiene and healthy eating, the Looking Your Best badge offers activities such as a "Color Party" that asks the girls to "take turns holding different colors up to your face [to] decide which colors look best on each of you." That same badge also offers the activity option of an "Accessory Party" where the girls "experiment to see how accessories highlight your features and your outfit."

These badges are not offered in the Boy Scouts; the boys' Fitness badge, the only one approximating a personal-style badge, offers activities such as completing a weeklong food diary and telling a family member about the dangers of drugs and alcohol.

Tags: boys, girls, stereotypes, gender stereotypes, socialization, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, manuals, badges, traditional values, hegemony, heteronormative masculinity

William Quincy Belle - Excellent Overview of "The Riverview Center" Controversy

For those who do not follow such squabbles, The Riverview Center offered a Bingo card for Super Bowl viewers to track instances in commercials where negative images about women, with spaces such as “Woman Portrayed as Stupid,” “Man Abusing Woman,” and “Woman as Sex Object.”

The advertisement and the Bingo card sent people to their website, whereupon they found a year-old commercial created by Josh Jasper, the president and chief executive officer of Riverview Center, in which a young boy is shown while a voice-over speaks:

"He’s tough. He’s strong. He’s aggressive. He’s powerful. And he raped his girlfriend. But he wasn’t always this way. What are you teaching your son? Redefine what it means to be a man because ending sexual violence begins with him."

Naturally, this sent the men's rights activists into a tizzy, accusing the ad of being an example of blatant misandry, when all it really says is that violence (against women, in particular) is a learned behavior, not an inborn trait that all men have.

Since, it went viral, the men's rights, men's studies, and feminist blogs have all been going nuts - including threats by Paul Elam to destroy Jasper's life (he has asked his followers to dig up an information they can find: "any embarrassing, disgraceful detail of this misandric lowlifes life, and use it to cripple his ability to continue with this kind of evil."

There have also been physical threats of violence - because, you know, the best way to stop violence is with more violence, right?

Anyway, I don't have the time to give you the whole ugly story, so fortunately, William Quincy Belle has done the work for us, presenting all sides of the issue and seeming to me to come down on the more sane side of the issue (an issue where sanity seems to be in short supply).

Check it out: Men aren't violent and I'll kill you if you disagree

Tags: men, masculinities, gender roles, rape, media, socialization, The Riverview Center, Josh Jasper, Paul Elam, men's rights activists, Bingo card, Super Bowl, violence, William Quincy Belle, Men aren't violent and I'll kill you if you disagree, misandry

Sexual Harassment Is Not about Being Male: It’s about Gender Socialization

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago in response to some discussion going on over at The Good Men Project site - it was intended for posting on their blog, but it grew and grew and got to be too big for their format (and most others). Plus, I don't think they wanted it. Minor details.

Fortunately, I have no problem posting long and unwieldy articles here. Especially if they are mine. Comments welcome.

* * * * * * * *

Sexual Harassment Is Not about Being Male:
It’s about Gender Socialization

Over at The Good Men Project Magazine, there has been a discussion revolving around men harassing women through cat-calls and wolf-whistles, among other ways. Katie Baker began the discussion with an article a week or so ago, A Good Man’s Guide to Catcalling, which generated a good amount of feedback and a follow-up from Ryan O'Hanlon, blog editor for the Good Men Project, entitled Are Men the Victims of Catcalls, Too?

A central element of the discussion is that men are perpetrators of harassment, that they sexualize and objectify women. Ms. Baker offers the following observations:

Go ask any woman in your life whom you respect—mother, sister, cousin, lover, or friend—how it makes her feel when she’s loudly and publicly objectified, the recipient of obscene comments like “suck my cock,” or followed down the street. I promise you that it doesn’t make her feel good or beautiful or respected.

Street harassment has a negative effect on us all. No single man wants the actions of a few to be attributed to his entire gender, but studies show that male harassers impact victims’ perception and reaction to men in general. Still, most street harassers aren’t “bad men”—they don’t fully realize why their actions are hurtful or disrespectful to the female population. Sometimes they don’t even realize they are harassing women at all.

That’s why it won’t end until both men and women start engaging with harassers.

She’s correct – male objectification of women has terrible consequences for female self-esteem, especially in terms of body-image (Strelan & Hargreaves, 2005), and even their cognitive performance (Gay & Castano, 2010).

In fact, it is so much a part of our culture that women are judged, admired, and valued for how they look physically, that most women engage in self-objectification – they have internalized the external evaluations as a measure of their own self-worth, which is a powerful factor for some women in their experience of eating disorders (Moradi, Dirks & Matteson, 2005).

It is actually the process of self-objectification that causes the drop in cognitive performance for women who are prone to this behavior (not all women engage in self-objectification). Gay and Castano speculate that the drop in cognitive function is a result of brain energy being split between seeing the self as a unique individual and also as an object (apparently, Fredrickson & Roberts had identified this originally in a 1997 paper). Essentially, a woman sees herself as both an individual and a generic sexual object, which creates a cognitive discomfort, “with a resulting decrease in the availability of cognitive resources for the tasks the individual engages in."

So far it’s not looking good for men.

Sexual Harassment in Children

On the other hand, men learn these objectifying behaviors as boys – but so do girls.

In a 2000 study, Murnen and Smolak looked at sexual harassment in 3^rd and 5^th grade children, finding that the “majority” of boys and girls experienced harassment about equally. Bryant (1993), who looked at students in grades 8-11, also found high numbers – although girls are more likely to be harassed by adults (teachers and school employees), which is especially alarming:

Of over 1600 students in grades 8–11, 76% of the boys and 85% of the girls reported experiencing sexual harassment. Girls were more than twice as likely as boys to be harassed by a teacher or school employee. Approximately 12% of the boys who were harassed did not want to attend school and 13% reported that they talked less in class because of the harassment. Because of the harassment, fully one third of the harassed girls no longer wished to attend school, 32% reported that talking in class was more difficult, and 20% said they had received a lower class grade. Girls also reported altering their behavior to decrease the likelihood of harassment by avoiding certain people or places and even giving up attendance at school events.

In both cases, and even more so as boys and girls age, the girls suffer more from the impact of harassment and seek avoidance behaviors (the only exception might be gay boys and transgendered youth, who likely suffer more than either straight boys or girls). Some researchers attribute this disparity to the differences in perceived agentic power – i.e., males feel more able to fend off harassment while females feel the only solution is escape.

In another study, McMaster, et al (2002), looked at early adolescent harassment behaviors. While boys and girls seemed to experience relatively equal amounts of harassment, boys were more likely to self-report perpetrating harassment. Interestingly, they found boys more often also to be the victims of certain behaviors (boys, 42%; girls, 38%), especially homosexual slurs (“fag,” “queer,” “dyke,” or “lezzie”) and exposure to pornographic and sexual images – both of which are likely perpetrated by other boys. Overall, the study found that boys were more likely to report perpetrating harassment and also report being the target of harassment than were girls.

McMaster’s team also broke down harassment into same-gender and cross-gender. For this statistical analysis, they reduced the ten factors in their study to three general categories: a) verbal harassment, b) visual harassment, and c) physical harassment. They found a strong correlation between same-gender and cross-gender harassment, but they also found that these should be examined as distinct phenomena. In essence, the ways that boys harass boys is different from how they harass girls, and the same is true of girls.

However, what boys and men don’t realize in perpetrating these behaviors is that girls and women have a tendency to generalize those behaviors to all males (Chaudoir & Quinn, 2010). These researchers found that women who witness cat-calls directed at other women feel more gender allegiance, more anger toward men, and more likelihood to generalize that anger to men in general – this was manifested as a desire to move away from men (escape, just like grade school girls) and not to move against men (retaliation).

Generalizations about Gender Socialization

What we learn from these studies with children is that both boys and girls have a tendency to harass each other . . . and their own gender. The crucial difference is that girls (and homosexual adolescents, especially boys) are more damaged by this behavior than are boys.

The obvious question is why? The difference is likely in how boys and girls are socialized.

Please understand that the following observations are not meant to imply that boys are more independent and girls are more communal, which is often what is believed in the essentialist models of gender development. Moreover, transgender people and other gender-queer identities call into question the entire binary model of gender identity (Campbell & I’Anson, 2005). Boys are not significantly more individualistic, and girls are not innately more interpersonally dependent – there are mild differences at birth while differences in adults are largely socially constructed traits.

Boys are taught from a very early age to be tough, self-reliant, and not like girls. David & Brannon (1976) described four standards of hegemonic American masculinity:

(1) “no sissy stuff” - Distance self from femininity, homophobia, avoid emotions
(2) “be a big wheel” - Strive for achievement and success, focus on competition
(3) “be a sturdy oak” - Avoid vulnerability, stay composed and in control, be tough
(4) “give ‘em hell” - Act aggressively to become dominant

Ronald Levant, et al (1992), offered an even more specific model of hegemonic masculinity, defining it in eight principles:

(1) restrict emotions
(2) avoid being feminine
(3) focus on toughness and aggression
(4) be self-reliant
(5) make achievement the top priority
(6) be non-relational
(7) objectify sex
(8) be homophobic

In order for boys to grow up within the dominant model of masculinity, they must adhere to these guidelines. To do otherwise is to be teased, bullied, and harassed – called a little girl, a fag, a mama’s boy, a queer, and so on. The socially constructive power of these forms of harassment should not be underestimated – even sensitive boys will become more “macho” to get along with peers. Furthermore, the power of imitation of older boys should also not be overlooked. Younger boys see older boys cat-calling and they imitate that behavior and then reinforce similar behavior among their peers.

However, there is also another perspective on this process – the psychodynamic model.

According to this model (Bussey & Bandura, 1999), boys and girls both identify with their primary caregiver until around the ages of three to five – the “caregiver” is generally the mother, or at least a female. At this point they begin to identify with the same sex parent. For boys, this means rejecting the mother (and because children at this age are concrete thinkers, female traits in general are shunned), but for girls, nothing really changes – they continue to model their behaviors after their mother.

The process of identification is depicted as one in which children undertake wholesale adoption of the characteristics and qualities of the same-sex parent. Through this process of identification, children become sex-typed. Because identification with the same-sex parent is stronger for boys than girls, boys are expected to be more strongly sex-typed. (Bussey & Bandura)

The original psychodynamic model (Freudian) is based on fear (castration and all that nonsense) but there is no evidence supporting Freud’s drive theory. Still, the basic process, as described above, is useful. Nancy Chodorow (1978) offered a crucial update on the model:

During the course of development, girls continue to identify with their mothers and they also psychologically merge with her. As a consequence, the daughter’s self-concept is characterized by mutuality and a sense of relatedness that orients her towards interpersonal relationships. This interpersonal orientation is the main reason why women engage in mothering. They seek to establish a sense of interpersonal connectedness reminiscent of their relationship with their mother but absent in their adult relationships with men. This pattern of development contrasts with that of boys who increasingly separate themselves from their mothers and define themselves in terms of difference from females. They begin to denigrate femininity in an attempt to establish their own separateness and individuation. (Cited in Bussey & Bandura)

Chodorow explains with this conceptualization why girls are more interpersonally inclined and why boys are more individually inclined – it’s a product of psycho-cultural gender socialization.

In this explanation there is also some contextualization for sexual harassment. In order for boys to become men, under the hegemonic view of manliness, they must reject and objectify all that is feminine. This same behavior is part of David & Brannon’s model, as well as Levant’s model. As mentioned above, objectification contributes to sexual harassment.

The Origins of Sexual Harassment

In Baker’s article for The Good Men Project, she makes the following claim about men harassing women: “it won’t end until both men and women start engaging with harassers.”

This may be true for the percentage of men who cat-call and wolf-whistle and are truly unaware that this form of attention is often unwanted by women. Yet, it’s also important to note here that many “men’s rights activists” (MRAs) would simply say that it’s not a big deal to be whistled at, so enjoy that men notice you. Some women agree with that position. But they’re wrong, based on the research, and Baker’s suggestion is only a partial solution. Despite objections from the MRA guys, the studies do show that women are negatively impacted by this kind of attention – and that alone is reason enough to stop it. However, simply confronting the perpetrators is not going to get anyone very far.

There needs to be a more integrative understanding of why men act this way and how they are shaped by the culture to act that way.

One of the first steps is to acknowledge that men also are being increasingly objectified by women in this culture. Even if men are not as psychologically impacted by this as are women, it contributes to an atmosphere where people are treated as less than unique human beings and are instead valued for their body-parts or their looks.

As evidence that men also are objectified, a brief Google search turned up the following articles:

Depressed, repressed, objectified: are men the new women? (The Guardian UK; August, 2003)

The Beefcaking of America: Everyone knows women who have body image issues. The secret: men have them too. (Psychology Today: Nov. 1994/Oct. 2009)

Shirtless Scene: The most common form of fanservice for women and gay men. (TVTropes.org)

The Women of The View Love to Objectify Men (Gawker; July, 2009) – The video is a little disturbing

Objectifying Men (Sociological Images; November, 2008)

From a fashion shoot for Elle Magazine (July 2008)

As women gain more power in the culture, they seem to be adopting more traditionally male behaviors (watch the video of the women from The View). Advertisers have been using naked women to sell products to men for ages, now they know it works with women as well.

Harassment, which grows out of objectifying bodies and sexuality, needs to be seen as the complicated result of social and cultural constructions that it is, and not as a “men are pigs” and “women are victims” issue – this helps no one.

Another step is to look at where boys learn these behaviors. It is not an exaggeration to say that as long as women are still the primary caregivers for our children, the solution starts with them. All of those restrictive, emotionally deadening behaviors that are demanded of boys (see the lists above) often start with caregivers – the mothers (this is not blaming because, quite often, mothers have no idea how their own unconscious beliefs shape their children).

How many times have you heard a mother say to her young boy – after he has fallen or been startled by a stranger – that “Big boys don’t cry”? I heard this from my own mother many times growing up, and from teachers, and coaches, and peers, and my father. Boys get these messages about how to be men from day one. In fact, studies have shown that mothers are more attentive and more interactive with female infants than with male infants (Eliot, 2009), even though male children require more attention to be soothed and comforted (Eliot, 2009; Weinberg, Tronick, & Cohn, 1999).

There are small differences between boys and girls at birth (Baron-Cohen, 2003; Eliot, 2009; Fine, 2010), but nearly everything parents traditionally have done in raising children serves to accentuate and amplify those differences. For example, boys tend to be fussier than girls as newborns (a generalization, of course, but poll 100 parents and ask their opinion). For caregivers, it’s easier to be positive in their responses to female infants, who tend to be happier, than to the fussier boys. The result is that girls get support and boys get more “shushing” – over time this sends negative messages to boys about expressing feelings. According to Eliot (2009), similar shaping (behavioral conditioning) occur throughout childhood.

From a social constructionist approach (which assumes that a large portion of our gender identity is socially constructed and not essential to our biological sex), who we become as adults is the result of our cultural context and our interpersonal attachment as infants and toddlers. All of the available evidence shows that if we raise our boys (and girls) differently, we can reduce or even minimize sexually harassing behaviors.

Be the Change

Once again, I support Baker’s suggestion that we need to engage with those who harass – both men and women. However, as I mentioned, this is only a partial solution. It may stop one person at a time – and that is where change often begins – but it will not prevent future harassers.

A third step in creating change is raising our children to have access to their own feelings, which is a crucial element of feeling empathy for others. Infants are inherently empathic – they cry in response to other infants crying. Female infants cry longer than male infants, and this slight difference become a slightly more substantial difference in adulthood (McClure, 2000). The difference is not in empathic ability, it’s a result of how boys are socialized not to feel their own feelings, making it much harder to empathize with others. McClure speculates that females are born with slightly more mature brains and that this difference becomes minimal in later childhood, only to widen in adulthood.

Heinz Kohut, the founder of Self Psychology, speculated that if the parents fail in their empathic response to the child, then the development of the child is arrested – it is in these circumstances that the child begins acting more aggressively to control its environment (cited in Rifkin, 2009). The work of Kohut, along with Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Ainsworth developed into attachment theory and eventually became the currently evolving field of interpersonal neurobiology.

Attachment theory looks at the ways a child bonds with its caregiver, creating either a secure attachment or one of three basic forms of insecure attachment. Securely attached children tend to grow up emotionally healthy and are much less likely to engage in aggressive behaviors. Insecurely attached children may become bullies (Eliot & Cornell, 2009), stalkers and partner abusers (Davis, Ace & Andra, 2000), or even victims of harassment (Bernstein & Watson, 1997).

If we want to raise kids who possess empathy and are securely attached, we need to change the way we raise our children. Some very recent research suggests that fathers need to become more involved – when they are actively involved and not absent, their children are less likely to suffer emotional troubles, become aggressive, experience addictions, or have run-ins with the law (Mossop, 2010).

Being present and being empathic is crucial, but it’s not the whole story.

The hardest part of changing how we raise our children is changing our own perspectives. Parents pass their own beliefs on to their children who then grow up and pass them on to their children. If we want to break the cycle, we need to examine our own biases and stereotypes about gender and identity, about compassion and acceptance. We need to teach our children to accept others, to honor differences, and that hurting anyone, even verbally, is never acceptable.

This may sound easy, but try it for a few days. Try to be exceptionally mindful of what you say, how you act, and what values you are communicating. Then remember that children – especially young children – are sponges, and they absorb everything we model to them.

It’s a tremendous responsibility. But raising a human being who is humane is a wonderful gift to the world. The change begins with us – ending sexual harassment of all kinds ends with me, and you, and our children.

References:

Baron-Cohen, S. (2003). The essential difference: The truth about the male & female brain. NY: Basic Books.

Bernstein, J.Y. & Watson, M.W. (1997, Aug.). Children who are targets of bullying: A victim pattern. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 12 no. 4, 483-498. doi: 10.1177/088626097012004001

Bussey, K., & Bandura, A. (1999). Social cognitive theory of gender development and differentiation. Psychological Review, 106, 676-713.

Bryant, A. (1993). Hostile hallways: The AAUW survey on sexual harassment in America’s school. Journal of School Health, 63, 355–357.

Campbell, J.J. & I’Anson, C. (2005). Beyond gender essentialism and the social construction of gender: Redefining the conception of gender through a reinvestigation of transgender theory. Retrieved December 29, 2010.

Chaudoir, S.R. & Quinn, D.M. (2010). Bystander sexism in the intergroup context: The impact of cat-calls on women’s reactions towards men. Sex Roles, 62:623–634. DOI 10.1007/s11199-009-9735-0

Chodorow, N. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkekey: University of California Press.

David & Brannon. (1976). The Forty-nine percent majority: The male sex role. NY: Addison-Wesley.

Davis, K.E., Ace, A. & Andra, M. (2000). Stalking Perpetrators and Psychological Maltreatment of Partners: Anger-Jealousy, Attachment Insecurity, Need for Control, and Break-Up Context. Violence and Victims, Vol. 15, No. 4, p. 407-425(19).

Eliot, L. (2009). Pink brain, blue brain: How small differences grow into troublesome gaps – and what we can do about it. NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

Eliot, M. & Cornell, D.G. (2009, April). Bullying in middle school as a function of insecure attachment and aggressive attitudes. School Psychology International, vol. 30 no. 2 201-214. doi: 10.1177/0143034309104148

Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Fredrickson, B. & Roberts, T. (1997). Objectification theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21, p. 173-206.

Gay, R. K. & Castano, E. (2010, March 3). My body or my mind: The impact of state and trait objectification on women's cognitive resources. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40: 695–703. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.731

Levant, R., et al (1992). The male role: An investigation of norms and stereotypes. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 14, 325-337.

McClure, E.B. (2000, May). A meta-analytic review of sex differences in facial expression processing and their development in infants, children, and adolescents. Psychological Bulletin, 126(3):424-53.

McMaster, L.E., Connolly, J., Pepler, D. & Craig, W.M. (2002). Peer to peer sexual harassment in early adolescence: A developmental perspective. Development and Psychopathology, 14, 91–105.

Moradi, B., Dirks, D. & Matteson, A.V. (2005). Roles of sexual objectification experiences and internalization of standards of beauty in eating disorder symptomatology: A test and extension of objectification theory. Journal of Counseling Psychology, Vol. 52, No. 3, 420–428. DOI: 10.1037/0022-0167.52.3.420

Mossop, B. (2010, Aug. 17). The brains of our fathers: Does parenting rewire dads? Scientific American, retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-brains-of-our-fathers

Murnen, S.K. & Smolak, L. (2000). The experience of sexual harassment among grade-school students: Early socialization of female subordination? Sex Roles, Vol. 43, Nos. 1 & 2. DOI: 0360-0025/00/0700-0001

Rifkin, J. (2009, Dec. 31). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. NY: Tarcher/Penguin.

Strelan, P. & Hargreaves, D. (2005, May). Women who objectify other women: The vicious circle of objectification? Sex Roles, Vol. 52, Nos. 9/10, p. 707-712. DOI: 10.1007/s11199-005-3737-3

Weinberg, M.K., Tronick, E.Z. & Cohn, J.F. (1999). Gender differences in emotional expressivity and self-regulation during early infancy. Developmental Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 1, 175-188. DOI: 0012-1649/99153.00

Tags: objectification, sexual harassment, men, women, cat calls, wolf whistles, Kohut, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, Ainsworth, attachment, development, children, teasing, gender differences, psychology, empathy, gender socialization, The Good Men Project, Katie Baker, Ryan O'Hanlon, sexualization, gender studies, socialization, traditional masculinity