Lauren Geiger
COMM 286
Ch. 9 Media Illustration
6-25-12
Gender Roles in
Interpersonal Conflict
I’ve been
interested in how gender roles impact the way men and women handle conflict,
and this assignment was a great alleyway toward further exploring them. I begin
my presentation with a cartoon drawing that demonstrates the ways I’ve
personally observed men and women tend to deal with conflict, both during and
in an ambiguous period of time afterward. Especially in high school, I became
really resentful of how my female peers approached conflict; I always saw them
as drawing out fights, arguments, disagreements, and what have you for way too
long after the actual conflict occurred. They would hold grudges like nobody’s
business over things that happened so long in the past that even they couldn’t
remember what happened. Sometimes I wished they’d just handle it like the guys
in my high school did—namely, to throw a few punches, get the fight out of
their systems, and then be friends afterward. This is why I included my first
clip: it shows the way I sometimes wish girls actually would fight like they do
in the clip. It would take so much less time and effort!
From there,
I’ll move on to outline some of the ways women in our culture typically respond
to conflict situations. According to our textbook, women tend to be much more
direct and willing to address conflicts than men are. Since women are
socialized into gender scripts that tell them they should be accommodating to
the needs of others, they rely more often on talking through issues as well as deferring
to the needs and desires of others and to make compromises in order to resolve
conflicts. At this point I’ll show a clip from Friends to demonstrate these concepts.
After this,
I looked at some of the ways it’s common for men in our society to handle
interpersonal conflicts. Our textbook describes that men are more likely to
withdraw from or minimize conflict because they are socialized to avoid
expressive communication. When they do address conflict, it’s not unusual for
them to use coercive verbal and physical tactics to either continue avoiding it
again or force their point on others. Wood (2012) suggests that this could be
because men experience more and longer-lasting physical responses such as
elevated heart rate and blood pressure during conflicts than women do. The clip
from an Austin Powers movie
illustrates some of these tendencies.
I’ll end my
presentation by reflecting that these gender roles are dynamic. Not all women
adhere to gender scripts for females in conflict, and the same thing can be
said for men. Both men and women can adhere to their prescribed roles or freely
move among them as they will. All of the clips I include in this presentation
exhibit not only tactics that are considered typical for their respective
genders, but also tactics more commonly shown by the opposite gender. My final
clip is from Mulan, which I think
demonstrates a comic mingling of male and female gender roles for interpersonal
conflict, especially considering the fact that Mulan is impersonating a male
soldier and trying not to get caught.
Works Cited
Wood, J. T. (2012). Interpersonal communication:
Everyday encounters. Boston, MA:
Wadsworth
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