Couples Watching Television: Gender, Power, and the Remote Control

Abstract

sought to confirm that partners in close relationships (West & Zimmerman, 1987) and exercise power (Komter, 1989) even in their ordinary everyday behavior and specifically in their selection of television programming via a remote control device (RCD). Individuals in 36 couples (86% heterosexual, 14% gay or lesbian) were interviewed. Men in heterosexual couples use and control RCD more than women, and their partners find RCD use more frustrating than they do. Heterosexual women also are less able than men to get their partners to watch a desired show. The results confirm that couples create and strengthen stereotypical notions of gender through exercise of power, even in mundane, joint, leisure activity of watching television. Key Words: close relationships, gender, leisure, power, remote control device, television. Five years ago, my parents bought a second television set because my mother refused to watch television with my father any longer. I can't stand way he flips through channels, she said. Note that my father actually has use of new television, and my mother has been relegated to den with older model. Nevertheless, mother now has her own set, and conflicts about remote control device have been reduced considerably. Several years ago, journalist Ellen Goodman (1993, p. 181) published an essay in which she described RCD as the most reactionary implement currently used to undermine equality in modern marriage. Because family scholars rarely study such mundane, everyday life experience, there is little research available to confirm Goodman's sentiments or to assess prevalence of solutions to television-watching disagreements such as that employed by my parents. RCD use, however, presents a challenging arena in which to examine gender and relationship issues in experience of daily living. Over past 20 years, feminist scholars have shown that ordinary, routine, run-of-the-mill activities that take place inside homes every day bear an uncanny resemblance to social structure. For example, distribution of household labor and of child care is gendered in same way that paid work is gendered: The more boring and less desirable tasks are disproportionately performed by women, and status has a way of reducing men's, but not women's, participation in these tasks. (See Thompson & Walker, 1989, for a review.) Examining television-watching behavior is a way to extend feminist analysis to couples' leisure. Despite fact that television watching is dominant recreational activity in United States today (Robinson, 1990), there is little research on this topic in family studies literature. Indeed, there is little family research on leisure at all (but see Crawford, Geoffrey, & Crouter, 1986; Hill, 1988; Holman & Jacquart, 1988), although scholars often mention that employed wives and mothers have very little of it (e.g., Coverman & Sheley, 1986; Hochschild, 1989; Mederer, 1993). Recently, Firestone and Shelton (1994), using data from 1981 Study of Time Use, confirmed that married women have less overall leisure time than married men. They also demonstrated gender-divergent patterns in connection between paid work and both domestic (in-home) and out-of-home leisure time. Women who are employed have less out-of-home leisure time than men do, but men who are employed have less domestic leisure time than employed women. Specifically, they found that employment hours do not affect amount of leisure time that married women have at home. To explain this surprising finding, Firestone and Shelton speculated that leisure at home appears to be same for employed and nonemployed wives because leisure is compatible with household chores and with child care. In other words, women combine family work with leisure activities. For example, they iron while watching television. …