‘Beefeater sacked for harassing first female Yeoman’: A quick analysis of how gender is invoked as a resource for making sense of disputes.

Since Gilligan (1982) established the theory of moral development, feminist psychologists have provided some interesting analysis to show, not whether morality is essentially gendered, but rather, how morality can be invoked to warrant gendered complaints (Muntigl and Turnbull, 1998). For example Stokoe (2003) demonstrated, from interview transcripts of neighbour’s disputes, how female categories such as ‘mothers, ‘single women’ and ‘sluts’ were made relevant (both explicitly and implicitly) in order to judge each other’s moral behaviour (Stokoe, 2003:320). In the following extract from The Sunday Mail’s exclusive interview with the dismissed Yeoman, I will suggest that much of the Yeoman’s warrant for unfair dismissal rests on invoking his former female colleagues status as a ‘single woman’. Consider the following extract in which the Beefeater describes the appointment of the first female Yeoman.

‘What concerned me most, and what caused apprehension and shock among the wives of the Beefeaters, was that she was single.…I have seen a lot of very good friends’ marriages go down the pan in the Army, not because they have done anything, but because other people perceive they have done something…It is not difficult to see the potential for trouble in employing a single woman. Naturally there was some ribald speculation as to what she might look like and whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’.

In this extract the Beefeater constructs an interpretative frame within which to interpret her appointment. Notice that he deploys the category ‘single woman’. Such a categorisation carries with it a host of inferences that can be traded on, and made available, as a stock of common-sense knowledge about ‘single women’ e.g. being sexually available. However, this alone is not sufficient to provide an immoral account of her. One way in which this can be achieved is by implying that certain types of ‘single women’ are immoral based on their activities (Wowk, 1984). Since gender relations are managed by the norms of monogamy, women (but not men) who are perceived to be a threat to this rule can be held morally accountable. Although the Beefeater does not explicitly state that she was ‘sexually overt’, she is positioned as such through speculation of ‘whether she would wear high heels with her scarlet tunic’ and as a potential cause marital problems for male colleagues. In this way then, the female Yeoman’s ‘single woman’ status is linked to immorality.

Beefeater sacked for harassing first female Yeoman tells how her arrival caused ructions at the Tower… and cost him his job

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes

Polanski and the Perpetuation of Rape Myths

Immediately after the arrest of Roman Polanski, an overwhelming and surprising movement of support for a man convicted of drugging and raping a 13 year old girl in 1977 came from Hollywood celebrities to political leaders. In return the media has certainly responded with a backlash of criticism towards those who seem to expect Polanski to be treated differently because of his status or have actually defended his crime as being less appalling than the hard facts have suggested. In addition to being a sufficiently disturbing example of how many people still believe that being famous provides a free-pass from moral standards, the entire case also serves as a sobering reminder that rape myths are still predominant in the world despite the large amount of discourse examining them.

Rape myth was a term coined in 1980 to describe the false beliefs that people have about rape, rapists, and rape victims. These can include beliefs that only certain types of women are raped or that rapists are usually aggressive, desperate males. Many of the public comments from Polanski’s high-profile defenders have only worked to perpetuate some of these long standing beliefs about rape. One common rape myth is that only strange, scary men rape. Polanski just doesn’t fit that stereotype. Many celebrities may see him as part of their group, and it’s hard to imagine someone in our group doing something which we commonly ascribe to occurring elsewhere and “not to us”. So his “friends” were left with having to find ways to make his actions seem less immoral. Meanwhile, our love of “The Pianist” makes us unable to cope with the inconsistancy of our affinity for a man who created something we like and detest for his deplorable actions.

Some argued in Polanski’s defence by derogating the victim. Many people reporting on the incident said that Polanski couldn’t have known she was only 13 because she acted more like an adult than a child. All these statement work to further the myth that only certain types of women (and thus, only “other” women) are raped. Rape myths reflect people’s just-world needs. We need to make sense of something terrible that happens so we fall back on our desire to believe that the world is ultimately just and thus, those who were raped must have deserved it. Given the incredible sway and press that celebrities receive, their support for rape myths is particularly frightening. Unfortunately, time and time again these myths have been shown to not only be untrue, they are dangerous. They place blame on rape-victims which can lead to fewer women reporting sexual crimes and, as the case of Polanski has shown, can lead to less support for justice.

Read More: Lonsway, K. A., Fitzgerald L. F. (1994). Rape myths: in review. Psychology of Women Quarterly. 18, 2, 133-164.

Mothers, Sex Tapes and Gender Morality

Coleen Nolan’s recent televised revelation that she made a sex tape provides an interesting example of how talk and discourse is saturated with moral work. Her self-confession allowed for a host of consequential moral assumptions to be made about her making of a sex tape. These assumptions rest on the known-in-common attributes that are associated with gender categories. The apparent ‘shock’ experienced by her sons, panel and audience about the revelation allows us to see her actions as a ‘breach’ to the common-sense cultural knowledge about how ‘moral types of women’ (e.g. mothers) should behave.

Wowk’s (1984) research from a murder suspect interrogation and Stokoe’s (2003) neighbour disputes research provide interesting examples of this moral accountability in practice. Their data revealed that peoples’ perceptions of morality, in relation to women, were aligned with specific activities and characteristics for ‘good mothers’ (e.g. ‘sexually discreet’, ‘mother-as-childcarer’) and ‘bad mothers’ (e.g. ‘being overtly sexual’, ‘swearing’). They also found that moral judgments were often non-explicit and smuggled in through indirect references to illicit behaviour in order to subtly police moral boundaries. Coleen’s sons, the panel and the audience therefore, by their very (re)actions, can be seen to be unavoidably engaged in producing and sustaining a gendered moral order out of the particulars provided by Coleen.
Loose Women – Coleen Nolan

Coleen Nolan shocks the Loose Women TV audience – and her sons – as she admits to starring in a sex tape

Social Psychology and Discourse

Mothers, Single Women and Sluts: Gender, Morality and Membership Categorization in Neighbour Disputes

‘Teen girls abused by boyfriends warns NSPCC’: Standardised Relational Pairs and Membership Categorisation Analysis.

The ‘Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships’ research by the NSPCC and Bristol University provides us with an interesting (and alarming) glimpse at ‘standardised relational pair’ categories (Sacks, 1992) and the moral accountability attached to them (Jayussi, 1984). Sacks’ work on categories and their deployment found that certain categories go together like ‘boyfriend–girlfriend’. Members of these categories which form ‘standardised relational pairs’ have rights, responsibilities and duties to each other. In our example ‘boyfriend–girlfriend’, it is presumed that each person should provide a safe, supportive, caring and respectful relationship environment for each other to grow and develop. It follows then that category pairs and associated predicates (rights, responsibilities etc) are relational in the sense that one may be expected to follow the next with accountability as a moral-procedural requirement. Breaches between these categories and predicates ‘one in six said they had been pressured into sexual intercourse and 1 in 16 said they had been raped’, tend to generate moral outrage/alarm and interactional repair solutions ‘parents and schools can perform a vital role in teaching them about loving and safe relationships, and what to do if they are suffering from violence or abuse’.
Teen girls abused by boyfriends warns NSPCC

Gender-Based Violence

Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women: A Decade of Advances and Future Directions

A tutorial on membership categorization

Big Brother is watching you watch ‘Big Brother’

The latest series of the ‘reality’ television show ‘Big Brother’ is currently underway within the United Kingdom. Both the format and world-wide popularity of such voyeuristic entertainment mirrors the huge variety of streaming webcams available on the internet.

Somewhat hypocritically then, many of those who enjoy watching others go about their day-to-day lives are keenly concerned about their own privacy, as evident from controversy surrounding the blurring of public and private by recent advances in mapping technology. Together with privacy worries over the increasingly sophisticated use of computerised tracking and profiling of the general public, this reflects a general concern over the perceived rise of a surveillance society.

This ‘doublethink’ has recently been ironically highlighted by consternation over the development of a device that enables a television set to ‘see’ those viewing it, thereby being able to monitor them for audience profiling purposes, and so transforming the watchers into the watchees.

From a social psychology perspective, the ‘Big Brother’ TV programme format is interesting as it is a ‘popular psychology’ take on observational studies of intra-group processes examining phenomena such as successful team formation.

Consequently, the debate over the morality of watching and being watched, and the distinction between public and private, is similarly relevant to academic research design.

If, as with the ‘Big Brother’ house-mates, participants are aware that they are being observed, then there is a risk that their behaviour will be subject to demand characteristics, and so become an ‘unnatural’ performance. Whilst covertly observing unaware participants may therefore result in more accurate findings, however, this can clearly result in studies taking place that are ethically dubious.

Channel 4 ‘Big Brother’ Website

Wittenbaum, G. M. & Moreland, R. L. (2008). Small-Group Research in Social Psychology: Topics and Trends over Time

Strohmetz, D. B. (2008). Research Artifacts and the Social Psychology of Psychological Experiments

Sunar, D. (2009). Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality

Serious games

The latest instalment of the popular America’s Army (AA3) video-game series has recently been released to widespread acclaim. Whilst there are many similar ‘first-person shooters’ currently available, AA3 is unusual in that it is downloadable at no cost since it was developed by the United States (US) military as a recruitment tool.

This reflects an increasing use of combat video-games with ulterior motives, both by the world’s military as well as by those politically opposed to conflict. Indeed, the US army now has a dedicated hi-tech public-relations centre where the wider general public can experience such games for themselves. Since the use of video-games can be seen as specifically targeting children, however, this recruitment strategy has been fiercely criticised as unethical.

Such condemnation raises a number of important questions as to the social role of video-games. For example, the fundamental morality of trivialising an issue as serious as war by treating it as mere entertainment is highly debatable. This is particularly the case as such games rarely attempt to depict the suffering and human cost that is an inevitable consequence of military action, thereby sanitising the true horrors of war. The social consequences of such portrayals of violence within video-games have previously been the subject of much discussion.

Furthermore, a growing number of these games are based on ‘real’ rather than fantasy scenarios, and so can often be seen as rewriting history by presenting a simple dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, rather than accurately portraying the complex uncertainties faced by combatants during the actual fighting they claim to represent.

Alternatively, such games could be viewed as useful educational simulations that question the morality of war itself by giving a player the opportunity to experience a historical conflict from the perspectives of all the different parties involved.

Such issues have been the topic of recent heated debate surrounding the announcement and subsequent abrupt cancellation of a video-game based on the controversial battle for Fallujah.

‘America’s Army’ official website

‘US Army Experience Center’ official website

‘Six Days in Fallujah’ press release from Konami

Cancellation of ‘Six Days in Fallujah’ from the Guardian

Li, Z. (2003).The Potential of America’s Army the Video Game as Civilian-Military Public Sphere

Baldwin, M. W. & Dandeneau, S. D. (2009). Putting Social Psychology into Serious Games

‘Spanish practices’

Firstly it was bonus payments for bankers seen as largely responsible for the ‘credit crunch’, and then excessive expenses claims by members of parliament (MPs).

Although these activities were not necessarily illegal, the British public has been enthusiastically encouraged by the press to denounce them as immoral.

This common view that dubious morality is endemic amongst those in positions of power has been highlighted recently by the ironic election success of a Croatian politician with a campaign slogan of ‘All for me, nothing for you’.

From a psychological perspective, such beliefs illustrate the ultimate attribution error, where negative behaviours of individual members are seen as typical of an entire out-group.

On closer inspection, however, this simple moral dichotomy is more complex than it may first appear. For example, MP’s expenses have been likened to so-called ‘Spanish practices’, a derogatory British term that continues to be surprisingly widely-used despite its racist implications. Such practices are questionable non-contractual working arrangements that benefit the employee and have become accepted as normal over time. These typically occur within heavily unionised industries, and have previously been the subject of industrial disputes.

Rather ironically then, many of those claiming the moral high-ground in terms of MP’s expenses commonly take advantage of exactly the same kind of ‘unofficial benefits’, suggesting that morality is a somewhat flexible concept.

Interestingly, the very term (mis-)used to describe these practices is a further example of the ultimate attribution error, being one of a number of historic British slurs attributing negative behaviours to foreign nationality out-groups.

‘Spanish practices’ of MPs from the Mail Online

Sunar, D. (2009). Suggestions for a New Integration in the Psychology of Morality

Giles, D. & Shaw, R. L. (2009). The Psychology of News Influence and the Development of Media Framing Analysis