“Dirty old men” or asexual seniors? Research on sexuality and old age paves the way for a new view of masculinity.
“Elderly people’s sexuality is a taboo subject. Many films depict romantic relationships between older people, but they don’t explore sexual relations,” says Linn Sandberg.
Sandberg was one of the presenters at the seminar “Threatening Masculinities, Threatening Men” organized by the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at the University of Bergen. She based her talk on her doctoral thesis from 2011 on elderly men’s masculinity and sexuality.
One of the questions she asked in her thesis was how ideas about elderly men’s sexuality can challenge our view of masculinity.
“Older men are seen either as asexual or as the stereotypical ‘dirty’ old man,” she says.
Sandberg wanted to explore what underlies these stereotypes and how men view their own sexuality. [continue reading…]
PsychologistPhilip Zimbardo asks, “Why are boys struggling?” He shares some stats, suggests a few reasons — and asks for your help! Watch his talk, then take his short 10-question survey. http://on.ted.com/PZSurvey
t. These are the conclusions of a new article by University of South Florida psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello. The paper is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“Gender is social,” says, Bosson. “Men know this. They are powerfully concerned about how they appear in other people’s eyes.” And the more concerned they are, the more they will suffer psychologically when their manhood feels violated. Gender role violation can be a big thing, like losing a job, or a little thing, like being asked to braid hair in a laboratory.
In several studies, Bosson and her colleagues used that task to force men to behave in a “feminine” manner, and recorded what happened. In one study, some men braided hair; others did the more masculine—or gender-neutral—task of braiding rope. Given the options afterwards of punching a bag or doing a puzzle, the hair-braiders overwhelmingly chose the former. When one group of men braided hair and others did not, and all punched the bag, the hair-braiders punched harder. When they all braided hair and only some got to punch, the non-punchers evinced more anxiety on a subsequent test.
Aggression, write the authors, is a “manhood-restoring tactic.” [continue reading…]
Time to get out those boxing gloves… who says women are bigger hypochodriacs but that the “man flu” really does exist? A Cambridge University study has indicated that men might be less capable of fighting disease than women.
With men having long been accused of turning a cold into a bed-worthy illness, the research provides evolutionary support for the existence of the infamous ‘man-flu’. The study states that the male immune system is weaker than that of the female. [continue reading…]
