Anyway, Walker explores the tension between the ideology of friendship (expectations, stereotypes, etc.) and actual behavior (how people actually live their friendships). According to Walker's limited research (see the article for her data set), some men will say they don't open up to other men or don't call them on the phone to talk about personal things or whatever. That would be too feminine, they protest. "Women talk on the phone to each other about their problems," a man might say. "We guys don't." These self-disclosures usually fall along stereotypical lines. On the other hand, men do sometimes report doing precisely what they say they never do. And when they do report this behavior, e.g., talk about their feelings with another man, they tend to downplay it, joke about it, or interpret it away as something that came up during a conversation that was instrumental rather than personal. A man might say, "Well, I called to ask about the time of the game and he asked how things were going here at home. So we talked a bit. But I didn't call to open up to him." Then the man might mimic a woman talking to her friend on the phone and have a good laugh about it all.
Walker tries to understand how the ideology and behavior gap can coexist. And in her attempt to explain it, she says something that I think could apply to a great many issues in human behavior. Here's what she says:
Sometimes ideology and behavior match---such as when men talk about gender differences in telephone use and report behavior that differs from women's behavior. [Walker finds that generally men don't call friends on the phone to talk about personal matters, though she notes exceptions that men then explain away.] Sometimes ideology and behavior do not match. When there is a mismatch, the interesting problem of how ideology is sustained when behavior contradicts it emerges. I argue that, in the specific case of friendship, specific behaviors supported men's gendered ideologies. Men discounted or ignored altogether evidence that discredited a distinctly [ideological] masculine model of friendship. This occured because gender is a category culturally defined by mulitiple qualities. When men included themselves in the masculine gender category based on some behavior, they tended unreflectively to accept as given the cultural boundaries of the entire category even if other of their behaviors contradicted those boundaries (emphasis original).
If you don't get it, let me simplify. If there are multiple behavioral features that contribute to how one identifies with a particular ideological notion of friendship, as long as one can point to some behaviors that fall within the boundaries of that ideology, all contrary evidence can be or tends to be denied or rejected. It's a kind of confirmation bias. Although Walker is only talking about her research into male friendship, I think the point is generalizable to many other areas of human behavior: we tend to give prominence selectively to items that confirm what we think and then explain away all others that might contradict or refute what we (want to) think. There's probably a mountain of cogi-pysch literature on that issue. But the paragraph cited above is what got me thinking about it today from the particular perspective of male friendship.
I'm kind of looking forward to talking to my students about this tomorrow.
As a postscript, I think Walker's notion of "ideology of friendship" here could qualify as a form of cultural myth: what goes without saying about what "male friendship" ought to be.
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