Gendered Policies and Practices that Increase Older Men's Risk of Elder Mistreatment

SUMMARY

We aim to detail some of the ways that social policy and gendered practices put older men at risk of elder mistreatment. Research on the abuse and neglect that older adults experience has often focused on the characteristics of the victims and the dynamics within families, emphasizing factors such as the likelihood of an intergenerational cycle of violence, substance abuse and dependency, and older men's financial status as key risks in elder abuse. The effect on men from this type of analysis is that elder mistreatment remains an individual or family problem rather than being viewed as a larger societal concern. This article challenges the individualistic focus by outlining the importance of societal forces affecting older men's risk of mistreatment.     

The Glass Phallus: Pub(lic) Masculinity and Drinking in Rural New Zealand*

Abstract In this article I report the findings of an ethnographic study of men's pub drinking in rural New Zealand. By using the idea of hegemonic masculinity and incorporating theoretical ideas of gender performativity, the analysis focuses on aspects of drinking performance that are central to the establishment of hegemony by a particular version of masculinity in this community. Two important characteristics of pub drinking performance are conversational cockfighting and the disciplines of drinking. These combine to ensure that a particular version of masculinity, here called pub(lic) masculinity, is able to reproduce itself. A further finding is that masculinity in this kind of performative situation develops a degree of invisibility. Using the metaphor of the “glass phallus,” I engage with the difficulties of analyzing an invisible masculinity and argue that rendering masculinity visible is an important task for any sociological analysis of both public leisure sites in rural society and the embodied performance of alcohol consumption by men in public spaces.     

Attitudinal and Behavioral Factors Associated with Extramarital Sex Among Nigerian Men: Findings from a National Survey

ABSTRACT

Using couple data from a national survey, this article examines couple's characteristics associated with extramarital sex among Nigerian men. We found 15.4% of married men had extramarital sex in the past 12 months. Extramarital sex was significantly associated with men's attitude toward extramarital sex (OR = 1.7 [1.4–3.0]), early sexual debut (OR = 1.9 [1.6–2.3]), alcohol use (OR = 1.7 [1.4–2.1]), and intimate partner violence against wife (IPV) (OR = 1.4 [1.2–1.7]). Increased wife's education was associated with decreased husband's extramarital sex. Men living in rural areas and in the Central and Southern regions were also more likely to have extramarital sex. The findings suggest useful implications for HIV prevention programs in Nigeria. Interventions should focus on influencing social norms around protective behaviors for men to avoid risks associated with extramarital sex and IPV, helping men to change attitudes toward extramarital sex and IPV, and promoting delay in age at first sex among young men.     

Is Domestic Violence a Gender Issue,or a Human Issue?

Abstract

Domestic violence, like all violence, is a human issue. It is not merely a gender issue. Classifying spousal and partner violence as a women's issue, rather than a human issue, is erroneous. In domestic relations, women are as inclined as men to engage in physically abusive acts. Yet most reports appearing in the popular press, and in scholarly journals, have framed the issue as essentially a masculine form of assaultive behavior, thereby imbedding into the national consciousness a false and inaccurate view of the problem. This article presents the results of selected empirical studies that contradict the popular view of domestic violence, briefly focuses on the phenomenon as it relates to race, offers several elucidating case accounts, and suggests that the popular view of domestic violence not only contributes to men's increasing legal and social defenselessness, it also leads to social policies that obstruct efforts to address the problem of domestic violence successfully.     

“Behind Every Great Man…”: The Male Marriage Wage Premium Examined Qualitatively

Studies across diverse national contexts reliably show that married men earn more than unmarried men, but the mechanisms responsible for this are still disputed. This article explores the male marriage wage premium from a new perspective, using longitudinal qualitative data from Russia (N = 94). Qualitative research is particularly suited to identifying underlying processes and, by analyzing men's accounts of the influence of their marital trajectories on their work, the authors were able to reexamine existing hypotheses and develop new ones. They propose 4 mechanisms that they hypothesize can influence men's work motivation and performance: premarital planning, 2 distinct “breadwinner” effects using expectancy and self determination theory, and monitoring by wives. They integrate these mechanisms within gender theory, arguing that the treatment aspect of the male marriage wage premium is an outcome of the “coproduction” of masculinity within marriage. Their recontextualization of existing theory also enables them to reveal weaknesses in the specialization hypothesis.     

A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF VIOLENCE AND HOUSING INSECURITY

This study uses national longitudinal data from the Journeys Home survey to examine how violence and housing insecurity in one period affect disadvantaged Australians' chances of experiencing violence and housing insecurity in subsequent periods. Men experience much higher rates of violence and housing insecurity than do women. Our analyses show that housing insecurity in one period increases men's and women's subsequent risks of housing insecurity and that violence in one period increases their subsequent risks of violence. However, the multivariate results provide no evidence of one‐period crossover effects for women and only limited effects for men. (JEL J1, R2)     

Understanding Men's Health and Illness: A Gender-relations Approach to Policy,Research, and Practice

Abstract

Men's health has emerged as an important public concern that may require new kinds of healthcare interventions and increased resources. Considerable uncertainty and confusion surround prevailing understandings of men's health, particularly those generated by media debate and public policy, and health research has often operated on oversimplified assumptions about men and masculinity. A more useful way of understanding men's health is to adopt a gender-relations approach. This means examining health concerns in the context of men's and women's interactions with each other, and their positions in the larger, multidimensional structure of gender relations. Such an approach raises the issue of differences among men, which is a key issue in recent research on masculinity and an important health issue. The gender-relations approach offers new ways of addressing practical issues of healthcare for men in college environments.     

Inequality Regimes and Men's Positions in Social Work

The aim of this article is to contribute to the exploration of men's positions in professions numerically dominated by women through an in depth analysis of the gendering practices in groups of social workers. The empirical material consists of interviews with three work groups in Sweden, each with one man and several women as members. The analysis focuses upon gendering practices in the interview setting. It shows how the positions occupied by the men in the sample confirm or undermine constructions of masculinity as dominance. Furthermore, it is argued that to fully understand men's positions in these groups the analysis needs take other forms of inequality into account in addition to gender. It is shown that in the empirical cases under scrutiny men's positions are shaped by regimes of inequality where age and gender relations, as well as notions of professional experience, are interconnected.     

More Than Just Sex

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to identify behaviors in addition to those of an explicitly sexual or romantic nature that men and women define as unfaithful acts in the context of committed dating relationships. We also sought to identify possible gender differences in the proportions of men and women who have engaged in these unfaithful behaviors while in dating relationships. We examined 219 college men's and women's reported involvement in sexual behaviors, romantic attachments, sexual and nonsexual fantasies, sexual attraction, romantic attraction, flirting, and social participation in dyads and groups with someone other than their current or past dating partner. A sizable proportion of both men and women reported engaging in one or more of the behaviors at some point in their dating history. Proportionately more men than women indicated having engaged in sexual fantasies of various types about someone other than their primary partner and reported “hitting on” someone else while in a dating relationship. No other gender differences emerged. A unique aspect of this study is that we asked young men and women to determine what kinds of behaviors they considered to be unfaithful rather than only examining sexual and emotional behaviors as has been the case in past research. Further, the few significant gender differences we found indicates that the convergence of men's and women's attitudes about sexuality may now be show in their behavior.     

Still a “Stalled Revolution”? Work/Family Experiences,Hegemonic Masculinity,and Moving Toward Gender Equality

Hochschild described the “stalled revolution” in the late 1980s: women made great gains in labor force opportunities, particularly in stereotypically “masculine” fields, yet men did not move comparably into “feminine” roles. This article examines the current “stalls” in the gender equality movement regarding gendered experiences at work and home, including occupations, the gender wage gap, career trajectories, and the division of household labor. This article also discusses efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution. Pop culture solutions on the individual‐level and academic research on structural/cultural barriers often focus on women's access to historically “masculine” roles (e.g. representation in STEM fields). There is far less emphasis on men's involvement in historically “feminine” roles. Gender scholars examine hegemonic masculinity as the narrowly constrained expectations for men's “appropriate” behavior. While efforts to “unstall” the gender revolution focus largely on expanding women's opportunities, this article addresses why the gender revolution will remain incomplete and “stalled” without redefining hegemonic masculinity. Cross‐national research demonstrates that changing views of masculinity are critical for greater gender equality at work and home.     

Nobody’s business? White male privilege in media coverage of intimate partner violence

ABSTRACT

Portrayals of celebrities perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are ideal for understanding the association between gender and racial privilege in representations of social problems. Unlike prior scholarship on framing of IPV, with celebrity perpetrators, race can be analyzed as an important aspect. Using 330 news articles about 66 celebrities, I find patterns of reporting consistent with male privilege that sanctions men’s violence against women, whereas the differential treatment of Black men fosters a racialized interpretation that pathologizes Black men. Black men's IPV is more often criminalized, with criminal imagery included 3 times more often in articles about Black celebrities than White celebrities. By presenting violence as an escalation of mutual conflict and excusing it due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation, White men's violence is justified 2½ times more often than Black men's IPV. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of racial privilege in the social construction of IPV.     

Men in online eating disorder recovery spaces: Gendered barriers,content moderation,and narrative experimentation

Eating disorders (EDs), once considered solely a women's health problem, have increasingly affected men. Previous research on recovery from addiction has emphasized the importance of narratives, which help provide structure and make sense of events. While narratives are often important for an individual's recovery from hardship, hegemonic narratives can be invalidating and obstacles to wellbeing. The highly gendered nature of ED recovery narratives has posed a barrier to men adopting alternative, more successful narratives, particularly in female-dominated spaces. This study examines how content moderation policies and enforcement on Tumblr, Reddit, and an ED recovery website shape men's participation in ED recovery support groups dominated by women. We find that high degrees of moderation and censorship limit men's platform participation and narrative experimentation. However, platform rules without active censorship face the same challenges. Instead, narrative experimentation and greater participation from men occur during moderate regulation because they can share their experiences while also being encouraged to find salient aspects of other, healthier narratives. We observed that men were able to break from unhelpful recovery narratives when they could masculinize the suggestions from women with more productive approaches. While past research has shown that men are particularly reliant on hegemonic masculinity when their gender is challenged, we find that phenomenon is part of a more fundamental process of reconciling ideas into one's self-concept.     

Narratives of Spousal Support for the Careers of Men in Managerial Posts

This article analyses the narratives of men managers to see how they perceive their wives' support in relation to their careers. Our aim is to focus on different forms of spousal support and explore how the support can evolve in the course of the men's careers. We are also interested in what kind of gender relations men produce when narrating their experiences of spousal support for their career. The research material comprises interviews with 29 managers who are fathers. In contrast to many previous studies, the results here suggest that spousal support is not a fixed or uncomplicated phenomenon but is constructed as various and flexible by men: negotiated, enriching and declining. The narrative analysis, in which we detected three different story‐lines — romance, ‘happily‐ever‐after’ and tragedy — shows that the most positive narratives in terms of life satisfaction and career success were those in which spousal support was constructed as negotiated and men were willing to be flexible and adaptable in their gender relations with their spouse. More attention to a father's work and family integration is needed in the field of management and organizations.     

Gay men's digital cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE use in the gay Chinese diaspora of Australia

ABSTRACT

Recent research on gay men's digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. In the case of Australia, a country with an official multiculturalism framework in place and against a backdrop of significant levels of Asian immigration over the past several decades, a more pluralistic approach is needed to critically interrogate the dialectic between platforms, users and wider sociocultural complexities. To this end, the current paper presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia. Drawing on data from participant observation carried out over several months during late 2015 and early 2016 in an Australian-based LINE group for local Chinese gay men, we highlight here how LINE functions as an important intermediary for many Chinese men engaging with gay men's digital cultures in this context. In particular, we show how LINE plays a crucial role in Chinese gay men's engagements with gay men's digital culture in Australia by (1) mediating this group's navigations of new social and cultural environments and (2) remediating their experiences within other platforms central to the broader GLBT community.     

The gentle exercise of male power in rural Argentina

Why do women choose their own subordination, and how are their choices linked to structural characteristics of society and to conceptions and ideologies of gender? These are the central questions in this paper based on fieldwork in Santa Cecilia, a farm community in the northern part of Santa Fe province in Argentina. It portrays how power is exercised in face‐to‐face interaction between men and women, on the basis of the existing sexual division of labour in the household and in society at large, and on men's privileged access to crucial resources (material as well as organizational and ideological). It is significant that men's control over resources and women is not associated with conflict and grievances, but is based on shared values. It is argued that masculinity is hegemonic, and the paper aims at revealing the processes whereby hegemonic masculinity “naturalizes” gender inequality.     

Gender-Specificity of Women's and Men's Self-Reported Attention to Sexual Stimuli

Men's sexual arousal is largely dependent on the actor's gender in a sexual stimulus (gender-specific), whereas for women, particularly androphilic women, arousal is less dependent on gender (gender-nonspecific). According to information-processing models of sexual response, sexual arousal requires that attention be directed toward sexual cues. We evaluated whether men's and women's self-reported attention to sexual stimuli of men or women were consistent with genital responses and self-reported arousal. We presented gynephilic men (n = 21) and women (n = 22) and androphilic men (n = 16) and women (n = 33) with audiovisual stimuli depicting men or women engaged in sexual activities. Genital responses were continuously recorded and, following each stimulus, participants reported the amount of attention paid to the video and feelings of sexual arousal. Self-reported attention was gender-specific for men and gender-nonspecific for women, and generally mirrored genital responses and self-reported arousal. Gender-specificity of genital responses significantly predicted gender-specificity of self-reported arousal; however, for men only, this effect was significantly mediated by gender-specificity of self-reported attention. Gender differences in gender-specificity of sexual arousal may be partially accounted for by differences in gender-specificity of self-reported attention, although attention may play a greater role in men's sexual arousal than women's.     

Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender,Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care Work

Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender‐neutral violence; gender‐specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces.     

Balls Enough: Manliness and Legitimated Violence in Hell's Kitchen

This article presents one example of how masculinity and hierarchy are exercised through violence in organizations. It draws on the empirical data of 15 episodes from the US reality television series Hell's Kitchen, in which 15 cooks compete for the job of Chef in one of celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay's restaurants. Ramsay's task is to lead the cooks towards a hegemonic masculinity valid in the restaurant context. An important feature is the contestant's ability to deal with Ramsay's fiery temper and fits of rage. The winner is the person who succeeds in approaching Ramsay's standards in terms of culinary art and leadership qualities, which in his terminology is referred to as manliness. Ramsay's aggressive style of management is possible to recognize, explain and to a certain extent justify as a way of running a restaurant. But what if his tongue‐lashings are to be understood, not as a possible way to train skilled chefs, but instead are called violence? Gender‐oriented organizational studies stress the importance of paying attention to acts of violence in organizations rather than disregarding it as organizational culture or tradition. Using concepts and perspectives from masculinity theory and feminist studies on men's violence against women, the purpose of this article is to analyse the micro practices of how masculinity and hierarchy are exercised through violence in the restaurant environment. As will be argued, reality television can be understood, not so much as a reflection but rather as an exaggeration of real life. It can be seen as a distorting mirror that enlarges and at the same time perverts the micro practices of reality. The aim is dual; to investigate the link between masculinity and legitimated violence in organizations and to give prominence to the potential of reality television visualizing the normalization of violence in organizations.     

Status Compatibility,Physical Violence,and Emotional Abuse in Intimate Relationships

This article analyzing national data (N = 7,408) examines the connection between men's and women's relative economic contributions in families and the risk of husband‐to‐wife physical violence and emotional abuse. Family violence researchers have conceptualized the association between economic variables and the risk of intimate partner violence with respect to the structural dimensions of sociodemographic factors, whereas feminist researchers connect economic power to family dynamics. Marital dependency and stress frustration theories treat income, education, and employment as socioeconomic resources, whereas some feminist research points to the need for research that treats these economic variables as symbolic resources. Although income and educational attainment reduce women's risk of physical violence and emotional abuse by husbands, I find that status incompatibilities between partners that favor women increase the likelihood of emotional abuse.     

Identifying Male College Students' Perceived Health Needs,Barriers to Seeking Help,and Recommendations to Help Men Adopt Healthier Lifestyles

Abstract

Seven focus groups at a university campus were formed to identify college men's health concerns, barriers to seeking help, and recommendations to help college men adopt healthier lifestyles. Content analysis was used to identify and organize primary patterns in the focus-group data. Results of the study revealed that the college men were aware that they had important health needs but took little action to address them. The participants identified both physical and emotional health concerns. Alcohol and substance abuse were rated as the most important issues for men. The greatest barrier to seeking services was the men's socialization to be independent and conceal vulnerability. The most frequently mentioned suggestions for helping men adopt healthier lifestyles were offering health classes, providing health information call-in service, and developing a men's center. Implications of the results are discussed.