Module II 500 word blog post

Gender Differences in "Social Portraits" Reflected in MySpace Profiles is an article written by Melissa Magnuson and Lauren Dundes elaborating on gender roles which become evident even upon MySpace. Magnuson and Dundes use an experiment as support for their opinions. The experiment consisted of 100 individuals, 49 of which were male, and the remaining female. In order to provide an accurate experiment, profiles were simply viewed without asking questions to prevent inaccurate data. While looking at peoples profiles between the ages of 17 to 29 they took note of different parts of the profile, such as: personal quote, age, gender, relationship status, education level, containment of significant other in profile picture, number of times significant other was mentions in both the "About Me" and "Interests" sections, number of opposite sex friends in Top Eight, and the number of total friends. For most of the previously listed, gender differences were unapparent, the results remained the same for both sexes. Though distinct differences became present with regard to mentioning your significant other in your profile. As with males, 43 percent didn’t' mention their significant other at all, almost half, 43 percent mentioned them once, and only 14 percent mentioned her more than once. Compared the females, where 16 percent didn't mention their significant other, 47 percent mentioned him once, and 37 percent mentioned him more than once. Magnuson and Dundes conclude that this conveys the idea women revolve their lives around men, and that women feel they must be the partner who is more devoted in the relationship. They go on to mention how women tend to use men to define their identity while men seem to treat women as another section in there already completes life. I agree with their idea, from personal experience it seems that women seem to glorify the fact of them having a boyfriend. While guys, whose are in no rush lose any of their masculinity, continue about their normal rituals with the incorporation of a female into their schedule. When watching sitcoms on television consider the role that the male plays, in most cases he is the insensitive jerk who tends to put his “guys” first. You typically see this character ditching his wife for a football game, or showing up late because he was at the bar with his friends. No wonder these gender roles are so apparent, because even the media instills them upon us. This is not to say that these really are sensitive or don’t care as much about their significant other as she does for him, but it is just roles which must be maintained due to fear that he will feel emasculated by showing this behavior. Aside from gender roles there is another perspective to be examined when considering why girls mention guys more then guys mention girls. Perhaps guys are more insecure than women and the fact that they mention their significant other less increases the chances of another feel approaching the man. Thus, providing means to boost his ego. When someone receives the label of “taken” they become a lesser object of interest to the opposite sex, maybe men still want to feel desired by more than just their girlfriend. The females are most likely more susceptible to mention guys because they take pride in having a significant other and like to parade this to everyone else. MySpace provides a great basis to show many of these, but drawing the conclusions can become vague, only one thing is for certain and that being that there are great differences between genders.