1. Friendships

2.  Think back to your childhood. What did you do with friends?  Boys generally plays games with lots of rules and hierarchy/competition  Girls played games centered around relationships

3.  These early friendships set the stage for how friendships were developed later.

4. Male Deficit Model  Women are the relationship experts and feminine ways of forming and maintaining relationships the right way to intimacy  This model views personal, emotional, self-disclosure as the key to close relationships

5.  Men are either less interested in using or unable to engage in emotional self- disclosure in relationships.  Some theorists have suggested men need to be re-socialized to be more in touch with their feelings and to communicate more expressively

6. Alternate Paths Model  Asserts there are different routes to creating and sustaining close relationships, routes that are valid for bringing closeness between individuals

7.  Rather than presume that men lack emotional depth or the ability to interact closely with others, the alternate paths model holds that masculine socialization does not encourage masculine individuals to express their feelings verbally

8.  Masculine individuals, further, do express closeness in ways they understand and value, but through different ways than have been traditionally recognized

9.  Instrumental displays of affection are more typically engaged in and appreciated by masculine individuals; there appears to be a closeness that occurs in doing things with and for other individuals with whom one is connected

10.  Thus doing things with and for others becomes a form of disclosure for men

11. Values and Limitations  Male definition of closeness Female definition of closeness  Doing thingsbeing and talking  Activitiescommunication  Topics impersonaltopics personal  Cognitive informationAffective information  Seldom discuss relationshipsTalk about relationships  Narrower in scopeBroader in scope  Instrumental focusRelationship focus  Covert intimacyOvert Intimacy  Shared humor, friendly Free discussions about emotions Competition and comfortableand feelings companionship

12.  Is there a feminine ruler than measures closeness?

13. Self-Disclosure  Men and women have different reasons to avoid self-disclosure  Women want to avoid hurting the relationship  Men to maintain control and power

14.  Studies show that attractiveness has something to do with self disclosure:  Men who perceive themselves as attractive disclose more than do men who perceive themselves as unattractive  The opposite is true of women--women who are attractive have an advantage over women who are not, so they have more opportunities to interact, don’t need to self-disclose as much

15.  Men self-disclose to strangers more than women do  Women who self-disclose are liked more than women who do not  This does not matter for men

16. Listening  Men sometimes see listening as one down  Women see it as a way to empower others  Women listen to reflect understanding and support  Men tune out things they can’t solve right away or wonder why they should listen there isn’t a problem  Women listen to become connected with the speaker

17.  These differences in the way we listen can lead to frustration with the opposite sex

18. Female-Female Relationships  Taboo against displays of anger  Competition for males  Homophobia  Women accept the negative view society has of them  Women are gossipy  Untrustworthy  Uninteresting

19. Times Are Changing  Women’s friendships are being portrayed more positively  This will lead to changes in how women perceive each other

20. Male-Male  Male bonding is the butt of jokes  Intimacy means doing things with each other  Friends with a wider network of other males to meet different needs  Work friends, sports friends, drinking buddies

21. Obstacles  Competitiveness: hard to be supportive toward persons with whom one is competing--need to exhibit toughness, financial success, heterosexuality or dominance, one-upmanship  Men exaggerate strengths  Women exaggerate weaknesses

22.  Need to suppress feelings--keep a stiff upper lip, take it like a man--people become vulnerable by sharing feelings  Men disclose less than females about feelings of love, sadness and happiness-- especially to other males  Begin to cover up feelings by age 4  Men prefer to disclose to females, if they disclose at all

23.  Homophobia--fear of being thought a homosexual  Imagine one man asking another to come over an talk, not to watch TV, go to a bar, or play basketball  Stigma attached to anything vaguely feminine  Must get rid of homophobia so males can get closer

24.  Lack of role models  Lack of affection between fathers and sons  Lack of warmth and affection by fathers is major compliant, but sons tend to repeat the process

25. Male-Female Friendship Barriers  Gender segregation of activities  Sexualization of male/female relationships  Many people have difficulty believing in platonic relationships  Stereotypical personality traits, behaviors and ideology  Androgynous people have more opposite sex friends than sex-typed people