Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Zits strip of 5/12, in which Jeremy invests an enormous amount of time and attention devising a remarkable hammock leisure environment for himself — something really important to him — while neglecting to wash any of his dishes, not even rinsing out his cereal bowl — something routine and of no significance to him. His attentional focus in on the cool stuff, the stuff he cares about, while he neglects the everyday stuff, which he views as just a nuisance (well, to look ahead, it’s just a nuisance because it’s a woman’s job):

There seem to be (at least) five elements — they’re all of highly context- and culture-bound and they’re often at odds with one another — that can contribute to the personal value of a task to someone doing it and can therefore engage their attentional focus:

— the (intrinsic) satisfaction of the task: how “interesting” / “cool” / etc. it is; creating a complex leisure-time system is very high in value to Jeremy in this regard

— the ease of the task (often running directly counter to intrinsic satisfaction, but obviously of value in many contexts)

— the utility of the task’s product for the person doing the task

— the common good — the utility of the task’s product for its users; the two utilities can easily be at odds (a piece of computer software can be easy for a programmer to create and maintain, but demanding and difficult for people to use to achieve their goals)

— the symbolic values of the task; many sorts of these, but the one of immediate relevance to the Zits cartoon is symbolic gender — some tasks (like technological invention and grilling meat) are widely viewed as masculine, others (like clothing design and baking cakes) as feminine; these associations are then converted into differential valuing of certain tasks for certain people (so that it’s a characteristically guy thing in our culture to value tech projects and neglect most household tasks because they’re women’s work — see Jeremy, above)

Now, all sorts of provisos have to be made. I said a characteristically guy thing, but even if a lot of guys share these values, a fair number of them do not, and sometimes it will depend on the context; and some women share these values. But Jeremy in the Zits strip is certainly acting like a stereotypical guy.

This entry was posted on May 14, 2024 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.