Male Viewers Research Articles

Can user privacy and recommendation performance be preserved simultaneously?

In online systems of videos, music or books, users’ behaviors are disclosed to the recommender systems to learn their interests. Such a disclosure raises a serious concern in the public for the leak of users’ privacy. Meanwhile, some algorithms are proposed to obfuscate users’ historical behavior records to protect users’ privacy, at the cost of degradation of recommendation accuracy. It is a common belief that such tradeoff is inevitable. In this paper, however, we break this pessimistic belief based on the fact that people's interests are not necessarily limited to items which are geared to a certain gender, age, or profession. Based on this idea, we propose a recommendation-friendly privacy-preserving framework by introducing a privacy-preserving module between a recommender system and user side. For instance, to obfuscate a female user's gender information, the privacy-preserving module adds a set of extra factitious ratings of movies not watched by the given user. These added movies are selected to be those mostly watched by male viewers but interesting the given female user. Extensive experiments show that our algorithm obfuscates users’ privacy information, e.g., gender, efficiently, but also maintains or even improves recommendation accuracy.

Other “Ways of Seeing”: Female Viewers of the Knidian Aphrodite

In his 1972 book Ways of Seeing, art historian John Berger claimed: Men look women. Women watch themselves being looked at (47). Such was certainly the case for Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite Knidos, arguably the most famous sculpture in antiquity. Although most commentators, ancient and modern, have assumed a male spectator, women were also viewers of the Knidia. (1) A reassessment of the nudity of the Knidian Aphrodite suggests that women were in fact her primary intended audience, and that the statue would have held particular significance for hetairai. Although the fourth-century BCE marble statue by Praxiteles does not survive, its appearance is known from dozens of copies in various media and from literary descriptions of the statue, all of which postdate Praxiteles' work by several centuries. (2) Generally hailed as the first monumental female nude in western art, the Knidia stands in contrapposto, with her head turned to the left. (3) Her right hand covers the pubic area in the so-called pudica gesture; her left hand grasps a voluminous piece of cloth. (4) A vessel her feet suggests that the goddess has removed her garment in order to bathe. (5) Her hair is neatly arranged with a central part and chignon, with a fillet encircling her head. Many copies represent her wearing jewelry, most frequently a bracelet on her upper left arm. Male Commentators, Ancient and Modern Ancient commentators on the Knidian Aphrodite were primarily concerned to explain her scandalous nudity, which elicited uncontrollable lust on the part of her male viewers. According to Pliny the Elder (HN 36.21), a young man was so overcome with passion for the Knidia, he hid himself in the temple night and her, leaving a stain of semen: ferunt amore captum quendam, cum delituisset noctu, simulacro cohaesisse, eiusque cupiditatis esse indicem maculam (They say that a certain man was once overcome with love for the statue and, after he had hidden himself [in the shrine] during the nighttime, embraced the statue and that there is a stain on it as indication of his lust). (6) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Most modern commentators have taken the ancient sources face-value and assume that the intended viewer of the Knidia was male. The satirical account of the writer known as Pseudo-Lucian (Am. 13-4) suggests that the statue was equally desirable for both hetero- and homosexual viewers: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] ... Charikles, indeed, shouted out in a mad and deranged way, Happiest of all gods was Ares who was bound for this and with that he ran up and stretching his neck as far as he could kissed it on its shining lips. But Callikratidas stood silently, his mind numbed with amazement ... Well, the Athenian, when he had looked on quietly for a little, caught sight of the love parts of the goddess, and immediately cried out much more madly than Charikles, Heracles! What a fine rhythm to her back! Great flanks! What a handful to embrace! Look the way the beautifully delineated flesh of the buttocks is arched, neither too wanting and drawn in too close to the bones themselves, nor allowed to spread out excessively fat.... (7) The passage ends with the anecdote about the stain that Pliny also reported. (8) Despite the satirical and formulaic nature of the literary sources, and the cultural and temporal distance of their authors from the original statue, the textual evidence has generally been taken face-value. Modern commentators have focused on the nudity of the statue and its erotic effect on her male viewers. Robin Osborne (1994, 85) identified the Knidian Aphrodite as an uncommonly powerful work. Citing the supposed responses of male viewers recorded in the ancient literary sources, he concludes (1994, 85): Rich though the message of this statue is about male sexuality, it has very little to say about female sexuality. …

State-Dependent Choice Model for TV Programs with Externality: Analysis of Viewing Behavior

This study analyzes TV program content for viewers with respect to the following three properties: primary utility (intrinsic value by genre, cast, and so on), macro externality, such as the effect of others' past behavior (audience ratings), and state dependence, or the viewer's past actions that determine whether to watch the program. Focusing on the effects of macro externality and state-dependence on viewer behavior, the authors construct a hierarchical Bayesian model and derive an individual utility function. Applying their method to the choice of TV programs in Japan, they estimate the effects of macro externality and state dependence on an individual's viewing behavior, and illustrate the distribution of these effects. The authors find that macro externality has a strong overall effect on the total number of viewers and the state-dependence effect has a slightly positive effect. Moreover, comparing the attributes revealed that male viewers tend to show a lower effect of ratings and higher state dependence than females. They find that the older the viewers are, the higher the effect of state dependence. Further, using utility function data obtained by our estimation, they conduct a simulation to measure the dynamic effects of macro externality and state dependence.

‘Am I supposed to say how shocked I was?’ Audience responses to Mad Men

This essay is the result of an audience research study of the US television series Mad Men. Based on the assumption that there is a postfeminist sensibility embedded within the show, the study uses data drawn from focus groups and email questionnaires with US, UK and Spanish viewers of Mad Men, to determine to what extent this sensibility is felt and shared – if at all – by different viewers. The essay concludes that the postfeminist sensibility might be an entrance gate to the show, but later engagement with the series differs, especially with regard to gender. Although the postfeminist spirit might have feminist consequences in female viewers’ interpretations, male viewers tend to read the show in more unproblematic ways. On the other hand, national distinctions have turned out to be very slight.

When Sharing Less Means More: How Gender Moderates the Impact of Quantity of Information Shared in a Social Network Profile on Profile Viewers' Intentions About Socialization

This study summarizes the results from a 2 (low vs. high information) × 2 (female vs. male profile) experiment that investigates the impact of quantity of information shared on a Social Network Site (SNS) profile on viewers’ intentions to pursue further interactions with the profile owner. Quantity of information had no statistically significant effect on intentions to further socialize online. The two-way interaction between information quantity and profile gender was such that for male profiles more information increased profile viewers’ intentions to further socialize with the profile owner, whereas for female profiles the opposite was the case. The three-way interactions among quantity of information, profile gender, and profile viewer's gender underline a tendency for male profile viewers to respond more positively to higher information shared by profiles from their own gender. For female viewers, this effect, although in the same direction, was smaller.

Click Culture: The Perils and Possibilities of Family Guy and Convergence-Era Television

Recent media scholarship has devoted considerable attention to the progressive role that controversial, satirical humor can play in American public discourse. Programs such as South Park, The Simpsons, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart have been the subjects of numerous academic studies and have received considerable popular acclaim. This article considers the case of Family Guy, a show often discursively associated with the pro-social satire of the aforementioned programs but rarely the subject of close critical consideration. Through a combination of textual and industrial analyses, the article contextualizes Family Guy's use of highly fractured narratives and remarkably incendiary representations of marginalized identity groups in its comedy. These tendencies combine, we argue, to limit Family Guy's potential for productive satire while attempting to maximize its appeal to commercially desirable young male viewers. Conceptualizing the impact of the American television industry's efforts to reassert the medium's centrality in the contemporary era of media convergence, we offer the descriptor “click culture” as a means of understanding the aesthetic and industrial discourses of Family Guy, as well as those of similarly structured programs.

What the audiences of performing arts find most important: An examination of the attitudinal and relational marketing strategies

The audiences of performing arts events are changing, together with wider economic and cultural changes. A questionnaire survey of three folklore performances was conducted in 2008, and yielded a response of 1,470 theater audience members in Taiwan. Traditional folklore performances are usually seen as appealing by old male viewers. However, the findings showed that the audiences of the performances comprised fewer men and a considerable number of women. With the successful transformation of the art organization in relationship marketing, young and collegiate respondents were shown to be frequent and loyal viewers of this folklore performance. The school channel in this study was found to be an effective way to disseminate performance-related information to the young audiences. In addition, age was found to be the predictor for building relations of the emotional bond. This paper contended that building relationships required emotional bonds with the art organization. For long-term true relationships, it was suggested to be driven by the goal of directed emotional quality perceived by the audiences. The discussion on the future studies and limitations were concluded.

Advertising Masculine Vulnerability: Cocaine and Cigarettes after the First World War

This article examines Alfred Priest's (1874–1929) ‘problem picture’ Cocaine, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1919, and an advertisement for Kenilworth cigarettes, which was published in The Graphic only a month before a photograph of Cocaine was reproduced in that same periodical. Despite the differences in media, there are striking similarities between the images. In both the painting and the advertisement a man and woman lounge together on a couch in a domestic interior, and in both, the author argues, the men are using addictive substances to obliterate, or at least temporarily repress, memories of the First World War. The differences between the images unveil questions of gender and power. In Priest's painting the woman sits upright while the man lies unconscious with his head in her lap, and in the Kenilworth advertisement it is the man who sits upright while the woman leans into his body. While Cocaine appears to subvert traditional heteronormative gender relations, the Kenilworth advertisement set out to re-establish pre-war gender roles in order to evoke a sense of familiarity for male viewers in 1919. It will be argued that both the painting and the advertisement solicit a consideration of the complex relationships between war, masculine vulnerability, visual culture and addictive substances.

Predicting audience gender in online content‐sharing social networks

Understanding the behavior and characteristics of web users is valuable when improving information dissemination, designing recommendation systems, and so on. In this work, we explore various methods of predicting the ratio of male viewers to female viewers on YouTube. First, we propose and examine two hypotheses relating to audience consistency and topic consistency. The former means that videos made by the same authors tend to have similar male‐to‐female audience ratios, whereas the latter means that videos with similar topics tend to have similar audience gender ratios. To predict the audience gender ratio before video publication, two features based on these two hypotheses and other features are used in multiple linear regression (MLR) and support vector regression (SVR). We find that these two features are the key indicators of audience gender, whereas other features, such as gender of the user and duration of the video, have limited relationships. Second, another method is explored to predict the audience gender ratio. Specifically, we use the early comments collected after video publication to predict the ratio via simple linear regression (SLR). The experiments indicate that this model can achieve better performance by using a few early comments. We also observe that the correlation between the number of early comments (cost) and the predictive accuracy (gain) follows the law of diminishing marginal utility. We build the functions of these elements via curve fitting to find the appropriate number of early comments (approximately 250) that can achieve maximum gain at minimum cost.

‘We need a committee for men's rights’: reactions of male and female viewers to reverse gender discrimination in Korean comedy

This study investigates the ideological implications of Nambowon (‘the Committee for Men's Rights’), one of the most popular sketches in a live comedy series entitled Gag Concert in Korea. The sketch humorously criticizes women who take advantage of men in various situations and always ends with a funny slogan demanding equal rights for men and the end of reverse gender discrimination. We treat Nambowon not as an idiosyncratic text but as part of Korean television programs that portray the rising social status of women as well as gender differences. Previous studies of gender and comedy have typically focused on textual meanings, and relatively little work exists to explain the audience's reception. Thus, we explore why audiences enjoy the show and whether and why there are differences in the reactions of male and female viewers to the portrayal of gender in Nambowon.

The effect of advertisement choice, sex, and need for cognition on attention

A recent study showed that choice of advertisement content affected attention for female but not male viewers (Nettelhorst & Brannon, 2012). This study extended that work by assessing the effect of choice difficulty and the moderation of viewers’ need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) on attention. Participants were either allowed or not allowed to choose which advertisement to watch after watching a television skit. Next, participants watched an advertisement and rated their amount of attention towards it. Results showed that males were not influenced by the choice manipulation, but females had significantly greater attention after making the difficult choice. Similarly, high need for cognition individuals were not influenced by the choice manipulation, but low need for cognition individuals had significantly greater attention after making the difficult choice. These results suggest that choice in of itself is not a sufficient means of increasing viewer attention towards an advertisement. Instead the choice must be between options which are attractive to the viewer. In addition, advertisement choice should be an effective marketing tool particularly for female viewers or those with low need for cognition in general.

Athlete or Sex Symbol: What Boys Think of Media Representations of Female Athletes

Little research has investigated males’ reactions to non-objectified media images of women, including those that depict women in instrumental activities like playing a sport. Using a survey methodology, this study examined U.S. adolescent boys’ open-ended responses to images of performance athletes, sexualized athletes, and sexualized models. Participants were 104 adolescent boys from California (ages 12–17, primarily European-American). They remarked on the performance athletes’ physical competence and focused on the athletic context depicted in the photograph. In contrast, participants focused on the physical appearance and attractiveness of the sexualized athletes and sexualized models. Overall, findings suggest that performance images of women evoke instrumental evaluations of women from male viewers, while sexualized images induce objectified appraisals.

CEO Interviews on CNBC

We investigate whether media attention systematically affects stock prices through the trading of individual investors by exploiting the substantial discrepancy between perceived and actual information content of 6,937 CEO interviews on CNBC. The average cumulative abnormal stock return over the [-2, 0] trading day window is 1.62%, yet prices exhibit strong reversion of 1.08% over the following ten trading days. The magnitude of price response is positively correlated with the viewership as well as the language tone of the CEO. We find that individual investors are net buyers on the interview days, and that they keep on buying if the interview was both carried out by attractive anchorwoman and was watched by more male viewers. The price reversal is attributable to abnormal short-selling volume on interview day. Moreover, we find that the price run-up before the interviews is largely driven by individual investors that are excited even at the pre-announcement of the interview. We also find evidence of asymmetric attention cascade coming from CNBC interview upon the tone of media coverage of the firm, tilted towards the negative. JEL classifications: G14, G12.

(Un)funny women: TV comedy audiences and the gendering of humour

Based on data from an empirical study of TV comedy audiences in Britain and Norway, this article examines the ways in which focus group participants constructed gendered distinctions in relation to comedy. Analysing talk about two sketch shows dominated by female performers, it argues that both male and female participants represented such ‘women’s comedy’ as having limited appeal for male viewers. The article explores the assumptions underlying this perspective, and highlights a perceived conflict between femininity and comedic performance. Focusing in on the minority of participants who explicitly devalued female comedy performers, it examines how these viewers employed discursive strategies to promote this view while negotiating the focus group setting. The article draws on feminist work on humour and comedy, as well as studies of taste and television audiences.

Queer Persona and the Gay Gaze in Brokeback Mountain: Story and Film

Using Jungian and queer theory, this article examines the queer personas of Ennis and Jack, whose queer archetypes fit into a context that had not generally been thought to contain those archetypes. For perhaps the first time a major motion picture appealed to and depicted what Steven Drukman calls the “gay gaze.” Ennis and Jack conform to socially constructed gender roles (as “masculine,” married men), but they are essentially gay. The queer archetype they fit is that of likes: the double of Plato's Symposium, yet both are bereft of gay icons and supportive archetypal stories. Before Brokeback Mountain, never had a mainstream motion picture with such wide appeal directed gay men's attention to the frank love, and lovemaking, of two such nonstereotypically gay and attractive young men. When they first look each other over outside Joe Aguirre's office, Ennis and Jack are unknowingly objects of each other's gay gaze. As gazers, gay men can appreciate these two young men for who they are, not for whom we'd like them to be, as is the case in other mainstream movies. For once we and our sympathetic heterosexual sisters are bearers of the look. To gaze at images that reflect our “inner selves” is a powerful and profound experience, all the more so for its rarity among gay male viewers.

The Role of Gender and Sensation Seeking in Film Choice

This study demonstrates the significance of individual difference factors, particularly gender and sensation seeking, in predicting media choice (examined through hypothetical descriptions of films that participants anticipated they would view). This study used a 2 (Positive mood/negative mood) × 2 (High arousal/low arousal) within-subject design with 544 undergraduate students recruited from a large northeastern university in the United States. Results showed that happy films and high arousal films were preferred over sad films and low-arousal films, respectively. In terms of gender differences, female viewers reported a greater preference than male viewers for happy-mood films. Also, male viewers reported a greater preference for high-arousal films compared to female viewers, and female viewers reported a greater preference for low-arousal films compared to male viewers. Finally, high sensation seekers reported a preference for high-arousal films. Implications for research design and importance of exploring media characteristics are discussed.

The Effect of Sport Commentator Framing on Viewer Attitudes

An experimental analysis was conducted to determine the effects of involvement, commentator framing, and gender on viewer attitudes toward female athletes. The sample was comprised of 112 students at a mid-western university in the United States. Hypotheses and research questions were tested through a 2 × 3 multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA). Results indicated the overall MANCOVA was significant. Involvement was positively related to viewer attitudes’ towards the dependent variables and explained 27.8% of the variance. Gender explained 39.3% of the variance in attitudes as male viewers had significantly lower mean scores on all dependent variables. Male viewers had significantly lower scores than female viewers in the positive framing condition; the interaction explained 8% of the variance in viewers’ perceptions of respectability of female athletes.

Assessing the Influence of Gender and Sexual Self-Schema on Affective Responses to Sexual Content in Advertising

This investigation contributes to work on emotion-based advertising by testing responses to three types of sexual stimuli in commercials: ads featuring women, men, or both women and men. As expected, affective and attitudinal responses were most favorable to opposite-sex stimuli, followed by mixed-sex stimuli, with same-sex imagery evaluated least favorably. In addition, the relationship between Sexual Self-Schema (SSS) and emotional response revealed that SSS significantly predicted females' affective reactions to commercials featuring opposite sex models and couples, but not same-sex models. For male viewers, only a marginal link existed between SSS and affect in response to female models. The findings provide evidence that both gender and predispositions to sexual stimuli should be considered when assessing emotional reactions to sex in advertising.

Men's Experiences Viewing an HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Film by and for Women

The purpose of this study is to understand (a) the experience of men viewing the film Women's Voices Women's Lives (WVWL), a prevention education film for and by heterosexual African American women living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, and (b) the perceived needs of male viewers on how to best access effective HIV/AIDS prevention messages. A postviewing structured written survey was completed addressing the experience of viewing the film and HIV prevention services in the community, respectively (N = 16). Responses include stunning realization and anger that motivated viewers to get immediately screened for HIV. In addition, the men felt they were informed about HIV risk through the courage and candidness of the women describing their experience. Participants reported that a film similar to WVWL should be made for heterosexual/bisexual men. The authors conclude film prevention messages are a powerful means to convey health education ideas.

The Content of Reality Dating Shows and Viewer Perceptions of Dating

This research utilized a content analysis of 64 hours of reality dating shows and a survey of 197 young adults to determine the extent to which the content on these shows was related to actual dating attitudes, preferred date characteristics, and dating behaviors of viewers of that genre. Results show that male viewers, those who perceived higher realism in the shows, and those with higher average viewing scores were more likely to endorse attitudes found within the programming. Dating characteristics were portrayed infrequently, and no relationship between viewing and endorsement of those characteristics was found. Viewing reality dating shows was related to self-reports of drinking alcohol and using hot tubs early in the dating relationship.