Defining Intimacy

[differenceblog]

"Everyone knows" that men are either bad at intimacy (e.g. AZ Republic 2005), or define intimacy so much differently than women that it's not even the same concept (Elmore 2004). Salas and Ketzenberger (2004) found significant gender differences on average self-reported intimacy in same-sex relationships, but not in romantic relationships. Fehr (

Comments

[7kim_moon]

"Everyone knows" that men are either bad at intimacy (e.g. AZ Republic 2005), or define intimacy so much differently than women that it's not even the same concept (Elmore 2004).

If you define "aggression" in terms of physical confrontation, the conclusion is inevitable that men are far more aggressive than women are, but this begs the question: is "aggression" being defined in terms of masculine expressions of aggression? Certainly there are feminine expressions of aggression; anyone who has been through high school or college with eyes open knows how viciously and cruelly women can manipulate social networks and use malicious gossip, shunning, and belittlement to seek to hurt others. But the physical-confrontation sense overwhelms this more complete picture, and so we have a circularity: aggression is defined in terms of masculine expressions of aggression, and so the conclusion that men are more aggressive than women is inevitable.

I have a feeling that we may have done the opposite with "intimacy": defined the concept so heavily in terms of feminine expressions of intimacy that the question has a predetermined answer.

In general, whenever we make statments of the form "Men are (more | less) $QUALITY than women", we need to critically examine the definition of $QUALITY for gender-blindness -- that is, ask the question, "Is our understanding of $QUALITY gender-loaded in a way that will distort our conclusions?"

[differenceblog]

oh that's certainly an issue. See the posts on aggression for discussion of that definition.