Man's Efforts Research Articles

Men's Rights and Feminist Advocacy in Canadian Domestic Violence Policy Arenas

This article examines government and advocacy group texts on three recent Canadian domestic violence policy moments. Drawing on governance, feminist poststructuralist, and social movement perspectives, it examines men's rights advocates' and feminists' discursive actions and their influence on officials. The research aim is to explore the provisional, intrinsically incomplete, and indeed questionable success, to date, of Canadian anti-domestic violence advocates' strategies and tactics of resisting men's advocates' efforts to delegitimize gendered constructions of domestic violence. At the level of political action, the article contributes to efforts by feminists internationally to safeguard protections and supports for abused women and children in a political context marked by the increasingly prominent influence of men's rights and associated antiprogressive backlash.

Men's reproductive investment decisions : Mating, Parenting, and Self-perceived Mate Value.

Using questionnaire data completed by 170 men, we examine variation in paternal investment in relation to the trade-off between mating and parenting. We found that as men's self-perceived mate value increases, so does their mating effort, and in turn, as mating effort increases, paternal investment decreases. This study also simultaneously examined the influence on parental investment of men's mating effort, men's perception of their mates' fidelity, and their perceived resemblance to their offspring. All predicted investment. The predictors of investment are also tested independently for men who are still in a relationship with the mother of their children and those that are separated from her. Finally we examine how self-perceived mate value affects how men respond to variation in paternity confidence. Men with a self-perceived low mate value were less likely to respond to lowered mate fidelity by reducing their parental investment compared with men with a self-perceived high mate value.

Generativity as Second Chance: Low-Income Fathers and Transformation of the Difficult Past

Few studies have focused on disadvantaged men's efforts to seek a second chance to remake their lives. In this article, we examine expressions of generativity in life history interviews with a diverse sample of 77 Black and White low-income fathers. We explore what constituted "the difficult past" of men's failures as providers, partners, students, sons, and even parents. Fathers in the study attempted to make up for the difficult past through acting generatively as parents. We identify two narrative types: second chance for self in which fathers remake their own past failures and second chance for family in which fathers redo painful experiences during their own childhoods and repair broken generational ties. Finally, we consider how social disadvantage—through race and class differences—shapes fathers' narratives of second chances. The past is difficult, you know? Pain is never ending. If you know what it feels like, if anything has been taken away from you and you've been at the bottom of the bottoms … it's hell. You can't make up for it. You can take different bits and pieces from the past to reinsure a hope that your future does not go into the same thing that already happened. Otherwise, it hurts. You're living in the past and can't change it.

Race, Class, and Shame in the Fiction of Philip Roth

A central irony that runs through Roth's work is that where his protagonists attempt to evade the importance of ethnicity, they ultimately make it the defining element of their personal relationships. The characters in Portnoy's Complaint (1969), My Life as a Man (1974), The Professor of Desire (1977, and The Human Stain (2001) attempt to find through their intimacy with the cultural Other some element of their essential identity, the "true self," that they believe is stanched through the ethnic or racial associations that define them. In his three initial novels depicting elements of his own marriage gone sour, as well as later in The Human Stain, Roth portrays characters who attempt to escape what they perceive as a shameful element of their cultural heritage through their relationship with one of the many embodiments of his late wife, Margaret Martinson Williams. These men's efforts to escape the associations of their ethnicity through the cultural Other ultimately alienates them from the identity that they hope to realize.

From the Margins to the Center

How can research data about gender role strain in gay fathers improve clinical work with all men? This article describes a qualitative research study of 25 primarily White, middle to upper middle class gay fathers who had children in the context of a heterosexual marriage, and later established a gay identity. The fathers were interviewed using a semi-structured questionnaire in a focus group format. The data were analyzed using a grounded theory methodology. The narrative data chronicles the men's efforts to integrate their fathering identity and their gay identity. The findings are discussed using the theoretical framework of gender role strain. The authors propose that research on gay fathers has the potential both to challenge stereotypes about gay men and also to expand the fathering role for all men. The authors use clinical examples to illustrate how research findings from minority groups can expand knowledge about mainstream populations.

Mothers and Non‐Mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men's reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The paper argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively.

The Haunting of Bluebeard—While Listening to a Recording of Béla Bartók's Opera “Duke Bluebeard's Castle”

A tall dark-haired man sits at a black, desklike, rolling cart in the center of a large empty room. Paint chips off the white walls, and dead autumn leaves cover the floor. The man is clean shaven and wears a black overcoat and black pants, but no shoes. Without speaking, he plays a tape recording of the overture to Béla Bartók's opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Herzog Blaubart's Burg). As the music begins, he rises and stands over a small dark-haired woman in a red dress, who lies on her back among the leaves, her arms stretched upward as if simultaneously reaching and waiting for something. The man hurls himself on top of her, and she drags his heavy body across the floor, her effort clearing a path through the leaves. As the overture becomes louder, the man rises and stops the tape player, rewinds it, and begins again, returning to his curled position on top of the woman's body. She drags him toward the chair, and as the music reaches the opening line, the man's efforts to stop, rewind, and fall onto her become more frantic. Suddenly he stands, lifting the tiny woman onto her feet and embraces her. Her hand creeps from under his arms and up his torso, inquisitively searching the surface of his chest, neck, and finally his face.

The Terentian Marriage Plot: Reproducing Fathers and Sons

In this study, I examine what it means to be a father, a son, and the father-son relationship in three Terentian comedies, the Andria, Self-Tormentor, and Adelphoe. Like the Menandrian originals on which they are based, these plays all employ a marriage plot centring on a young man's efforts to win and or retain his beloved in marriage or a temporary union. In each case, the story (or stories) about the romantic union of a young man and woman takes a back seat to a story about the negotiations between men needed to forge that union. As in Menander's plays, this homosocial orientation invests Terence's marriage plot with a dense network of cultural and ideological concerns. These concerns surface most clearly in the characterisation of the obstacle to the young man's relationship. In the plays under consideration here, the primary obstacle to the marriage or love relationship is the young man's father. In most cases, the fathers only object to their sons having relationships with non-marriageable women when they (the fathers) decide that it is time for their sons to marry. Significantly, the perceived status discrepancy does not operate as an absolute barrier to the young man's romantic relationship in the father's eyes (as in Menander's extant plays and fragments). Rather, the problem arises when the son's desire to remain in the relationship conflicts with his father's desire that he marry a respectable woman. Because the obstacle is framed in this way—as a direct confrontation between the discordant desires of fathers and sons—Terence's marriage plots provide an important window on the ideology of the Roman family and its kinship structure.

Leadership

Leadership

Constructing the black masculine: identity and ideality in African American men's literature and culture, 1775-1995

In seven representative episodes of black masculine literary and cultural history - from the founding of the first African American Masonic lodge in 1775 to the 1990s choreographies of modern dance genius Bill T. Jones - Constructing the Black Masculine maps black men's historical efforts to negotiate the frequently discordant relationship between blackness and maleness in the cultural logic of American identity. Maurice O. Wallace draws on an impressive variety of material to investigate the survivalist strategies employed by black men who have had to endure the disjunction between race and masculinity in American culture. Highlighting their chronic objectification under the gaze of white eyes, Wallace argues that black men suffer a social and representational crisis in being at once seen and unseen, fetish and phantasm, spectacle and shadow in the American racial imagination. Invisible and disregarded on one hand, black men, perceived as potential threats to society, simultaneously face the reality of hyper-visibility and perpetual surveillance. Paying significant attention to the socio-technologies of vision and image production over two centuries, Wallace shows how African American men - as soldiers, Freemasons, and romantic heroes - have sought both to realise the ideal image of the American masculine subject and to deconstruct it in expressive mediums like modern dance, photography, and theatre. Throughout, he also draws on the experiences and theories of such notable figures as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, and James Baldwin. Combining literary theory, visual art theory, race and ethnic studies, psychoanalysis, and performance studies, this book will interest students and scholars of race, literature, gender studies, and American history and culture.

Obituary/Notice Necrologique

Dr. Lloyd George Reeds was one of the founding fathers of Canadian geography. Although not the first geographer at McMaster University, he effectively created the Department of Geography there, and steered it successfully through its first dozen years. Lloyd was born on a farm near Lindsay, Ontario, and agriculture remained his principal academic specialty throughout his career. In 1940 he received his B.A. from Toronto University, and was awarded the Canadian Geographical Society Scholarship. He received his M.A. from Toronto University in 1942 with the thesis 'The Agricultural Geography of the Lindsay-Peterborough Region'. After a brief stint teaching at the Ontario Agricultural College, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and served for the duration of the war. Following the war he returned to Toronto University to commence work on his doctorate. It was Professor George Putnam who assigned him the task of analyzing the agriculture of Southern Ontario. Dr. Putnam is reputed to have said: I have taken care of the geomorphology of Southern Ontario; now you handle the agriculture. In pursuing the research, Lloyd drove along every road in Southern Ontario and interviewed hundreds of farmers. The result was the impressive thesis, 'The Agricultural Geography of Southern Ontario', for which he was awarded a Ph.D. in 1956. Prior to this in 1948 at the request of J. Wreford Watson, then the geographer at McMaster University, Reeds came to McMaster to teach. Within a year Dr. Watson had left to head the Geographical Branch in Ottawa, and Reeds was left alone not only with geography but also with anthropology. As only an acting chairman (Watson was technically on a leave of absence), Reeds faced the awesome task of establishing a department while scrounging for both space and personnel, and yet continuing his own thesis research. It is important then to realize that the highly respected department that ensued was a product of this one man's vision and efforts. He and his colleagues were required to teach a number and breadth of courses which would strike a current academic with horror. He introduced field work in the surrounding area, both rural and urban, and shared a September field camp with the University of Toronto. The future of a department is often determined by the quality of its initial permanent appointments. Within his twelve year span as chairman, Lloyd Reeds created a first rate honours program and a Masters' probram, and the first course approved in the province for Type-A teaching certification (for high school teachers). By the time he stepped down from the chairmanship in 1961 a solid core of five members had been formed as a basic cadre for the great expansion that was to follow (these were Lloyd himself, Harold Wood, Lou Gentilcore, Derek Ford and Andrew Burghardt). In the 1960s, the department expanded and deepened, and a doctorate program was begun. …

Hunting, healing, and hxaro exchange : A long-term perspective on !Kung (Ju/'hoansi) large-game hunting

The question of why hunters target large game knowing that most of the meat will end up far beyond their own hearths is an intriguing one. It raises the issue of whether foragers pursue nonnutritional goals in food procurement and which goals they pursue. Here, I will use data from studies that have been carried out over a 34-year period among the Ju/'hoansi (!Kung Bushmen) to evaluate four hypotheses concerning why foragers target large game: reciprocity, costly signaling, nepotism, and long-term political goals aimed at bringing about conditions conducive to cooperative breeding. I will propose on the basis of qualitative and quantitative data that (1) all four hypotheses identify benefits that are gained by Ju/'hoansi through producing and distributing a surplus of meat, (2) different benefits might be important at different stages of a man's life, and (3) the pursuit of broader political goals merits serious consideration in accounting for men's work effort.

Filipino Navy Stewards and Filipina Health Care Professionals: Immigration, Work and Family Relations

Drawing from in-depth interviews of more than 100 Filipino Americans in San Diego, California, this article analyzes the migrations and changing family relations of Filipino Navy stewards and Filipina health care professionals. The first section details the racialized and gendered experiences of Filipino Navy stewards, paying particular attention to the men's efforts to reclaim their masculinity in both the private and public spheres. Focusing on Filipina health professionals, the second half of the paper explores how marriage and family relations are reconstituted in the United States when it was the wives who pioneered migration.

Conquest by Force: A Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Rape and Sexual Coercion

Men's efforts to force women to engage in unwanted sexual activity can be explained by a combination of reactance theory and narcissism. Reactance theory suggests that deprivation of specific sexual options will cause men to desire them more, to try to reclaim them by forcing sex and by aggressing against the woman who has refused them, and assorted findings support this analysis. Narcissism is proposed to moderate the link, especially because coercion is relatively rare in response to sexual refusals. Evidence about sexually coercive men supports the narcissism hypothesis, such as by showing self-serving cognitive distortions, an excessive concern with being admired, an inflated sense of entitlement, selectively low empathy, and a broadly exploitative approach to heterosexual relations.

Men's Collective Anti-violence Activism and the Struggle for Gender Justice

Michael Flood argues that men's anti-violence activism is an important element in the project of ending violence against women (VAW). Men's groups focused on gender-based violence have emerged in over a dozen countries. In such mobilizations, members of a privileged group act in ways which undermine that same privilege. Men's efforts to end men's violence embody partnerships across gender lines and enhance gender justice.

The Shaman's Apprentice: Ecstasy and Economy in Wilson's Joe Turner

In his book August Wilson and African American Odyssey, Kim Pereira briefly engages theories of renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade in order to understand events and characters of Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone (82-83). Recognizing that drama includes a search for self-actualization by a group of African Americans migrating north in second decade of twentieth century, Pereira asserts that it is only through acceptance of their dual cultural heritage that characters are able to recover from degradations of their past and renewal (56). The allusion to shamanic rituals, for Pereira, signifies this cultural reconstitution. Loomis reconnects with his African self and thus encapsulates Black experience (81). Pereira is certainly accurate in his recognition of characters' quest for self-affirmation, as well as importance of reconnecting with their non-Western cultural heritage, but he does not acknowledge centrality of shamanism to structure of drama. The events of Joe Turner dramatize election and education of a shaman, as power to heal and to manipulate spirit world is passed from one generation to next. The action of Wilson's play takes place in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. The setting is appropriate to subject matter since most of characters are displaced people, whether uprooted by desire to find economic opportunities in industrial North or compelled to flee the eyes of watchful tyranny in South. However, their search is not motivated entirely by practical considerations--sustenance and safety; they are also driven by desire for spiritual renewal. The names of many of characters reveal their longings for edification. Bynum is a man whose craft is devoted to reunion of lost and separated persons whom he binds physically and spiritually. Having attained spiritual illumination, he is capable of facilitating same in others. Yet racial ideology of play suggests that, in spite of his knowledge of African folk and spiritual customs, he is nevertheless torn between two worlds. Bynum does not bind people exclusively; he also unifies cultures. His visionary sequence reveals conjunction of African and Christian motifs (Pereira 71). His quest for shiny man is search for an individual whose own spiritual awakening exceeds his own, uncompromising African Man. This paradigm of cultural resurgence is, of course, Loomis, who recognizes Bynum's negotiation with ideology that enthralls and exploits people of African descent and who lashes out at conjure man's effort to bind him as he was bound to Joe Turner's chain gang for seven years: ...Harold Loomis ain't for no binding (91). Loomis lost his religion when Turner captured him, depriving him of his family and his freedom. Loomis now recognizes collusion between religion and racist state and cannot bring himself to celebrate white man's God, who has demanded such sacrifices from him. Thus he wanders, physically and spiritually, in search of his wife and his beginning. The illumination that is implicit in Loomis's name is not divine madness of Christian saints; it is derived from a more ancient source--the ecstasy of shaman. Loomis's refusal to remain in company of his newly recovered wife, Martha Pentecost, reveals his aversion to Christianity and particularly to Western ecstatic traditions. The name Pentecost, of course, suggests visitation of Holy Ghost upon disciples of Christ (Acts 2:1). Martha has maintained her faith in spite of forced dissolution of her family. Loomis has sought her out only to deposit their child in her care and to make contact once again with period of contentment and confidence that characterized their lives together. However, Loomis's journey into past stretches beyond gratifications of those happier times. …

Ben Tillman and Hendrix McLane, Agrarian Rebels: White Manhood, "The Farmers," and the Limits of Southern Populism

IN OCTOBER 1892 J. HENDRIX MCLANE, SOUTH CAROLINA'S MOST SUCcessful proponent of interracial agrarian radicalism, left a People's Party rally exhilarated by great and a righteous movement. But McLane did not spend the rest of the night planning strategy with South Carolina's other Populist leaders. For one thing, he was not a Populist: a decade earlier, the biracial agrarian coalition that McLane had led against the state's Democratic Party had been destroyed before it won a single office, and by 1892 McLane identified himself as a reform Republican. For another, South Carolina Populists were as dejected as they were scarce. Although only a few weeks remained before the November elections, the state lacked even a slate of People's Party candidates; instead, the mantle of agrarian rebellion in South Carolina had been seized by Benjamin R. Tillman, a wealthy planter, terrorist, and anti-Populist Democrat. But more to the point, McLane had taken up a role common to southern dissidents--that of exile. After listening to other men's speeches at Tremont Temple that October night, McLane made his way home through the streets of Boston.(1) Like other frustrated white radicals, McLane had been unable to contend with southern white men's fear of Negro domination and had given up on biracial political action.(2) Tillman's white supremacy had triumphed. But a close analysis of McLane's defeat and Tillman's ascendancy suggests that not simply race, but a racialized conception of manhood, shaped the fate of each man's efforts. Both Tillman and McLane, like their counterparts in other states, drew on their common experiences and expectations in appealing for political support. But while McLane and other radicals urged white men to think beyond their racial identity and build political coalitions on the basis of economic interest, Tillman used the history and language of white manhood to suggest that only white male producers were entitled to govern. McLane and his white allies failed to rebut this presumption. They failed in part because of the brutal violence committed by Tillman and other white supremacist Democrats, but the radicals were not defeated by armed force alone. Time and again, as McLane and men like him urged other white men to join their biracial movement--and, later, as they sought explanations for their failure--they spoke the same language of white manhood that Tillman and others had been using against them, a language of citizenship, productivity, and self-assertion that drew its power from southern white men's historically rooted expectations of political, economic, and social primacy. Beginning in the 1880s Tillman forged a white supremacy movement that rested on the racialized notion of manhood as much as on the enforcement of racial hierarchy; his radical opponents, however, proved unable to imagine or articulate a vision of manhood that was not also defined and delimited by race. Understanding white manhood in terms strikingly similar to those used by their opponents, they could not persuasively rebut the charge that their efforts would put that precious legacy at risk. For generations, political, economic, and social authority in the South had been the almost exclusive province of white men. Most slaveholding and non-slaveholding white men shared a system of law, custom, and metaphor: as the master of a small farm household--or of a vast family, black and white--a white man was an independent citizen, soldier, and voter; normatively, white women and children, and black men, women, and children existed only in various states of dependence on particular white men.(3) This was, of course, more an ideal than a uniform social reality. A significant minority of white men lacked economic independence and a political voice. Men of modest means had fought for decades to achieve even the nominal equality of citizenship and in some respects still remained politically disadvantaged. …

Envisioning Fatherhood: A Social Psychological Perspective on Young Men without Kids*

Envisioning Fatherhood: A Social Psychological Perspective on Young Men without Kids* Using in-depth interviews and a purposive sample of 32 men ages 16-30 who have not yet fathered a child, our grounded theoy study examined how men envision aspects of fatherhood. Informed by symbolic interactionist and life course perspectives, our interpretive data analyses yielded two interrelated substantive dimensions: fatherhood readiness and fathering visions. We introduce five interrelated theoretical themes to sharpen our understanding of these dimensions, and discuss how' these dimensioirs, and discuss how the se dimensions and themes inform intenentions aimed at heightening young men's procreative responsibility. Key Words: fatherhood, grounded theory, male responsibiity, paternity, social psychology. Interest in the social psychology of fatherhood has grown significantly in recent years (Marsiglio, 1998). Much of the scholarship in this area focuses on how individuals construct meaning in relation to paternity, fathering, and the negotiation of family roles. Research on men's evolving identities as fathers, and their commitments to their children, is critical for understanding these social processes and the micro-level dimensions to the fatherhood terrain. This work is particularly vital when considering the diverse paths men take on their way to acknowledging and embracing their fecundity, paternity; and father roles, respectively. While much of the research germane to this area focuses on men who have already become fathers, we extend this literature by studying young single men's subjective experiences who have not yet, to their knowledge, sired a child or, in the case of most of our participants, impregnated a woman. Our analyses build upon earlier work with these data that focused on how males become aware of their perceived fecundity, experience themselves as procreative beings once they become aware, and view responsibility issues while orienting themselves toward their sexual and potential paternal roles (Marsiglio, Hutchinson, 8e Cohan, in press. We now focus on several issues that relate more directly to the social psychology of fatherhood. In particular, we highlight two main interrelated dimensions associated with men's efforts to envision aspects of fatherhood: sense of readiness for becoming fathers (fatherhood readiness); and views about the ideal fathering experience, images of the good or ideal father, and visions of future fathering experiences (fathering visions). In a more limited fashion, we discuss men's fantasies about what their children might be like and the comparative appraisals they use to organize their thinking about fatherhood. Throughout our discussion, we also emphasize how gender and relationship commitments can influence the way some men perceive specific issues. Because paternity, and in many instances social fatherhood, can be viewed as joint accomplishments involving a man and woman, we explore how men's orientation to prospective fatherhood is sometimes influenced by their involvement with particular romantic partners. We examine young men's thoughts about the prospects of fatherhood codependent of specific romantic relationships as well. Consistent with our grounded theory perspective, we have read our data with an eye toward capturing distinctive features of the way men express their thoughts about procreation, social fathering, and children. Our analyses revealed, for example, several preliminary themes that appear to cut across the dimensions listed above that characterize men's efforts to envision fatherhood. We introduce and define these themes when we analyze men's sense of being ready for fatherhood. These themes provide an explicit organizational structure for this section. Further, because we suspect that men's sense of readiness is linked to their image of what represents a good or ideal father, we then selectively use three of these themes to illuminate men's views about fathering in general, and more specifically, their visions about how they themselves plan to act as fathers. …

Spectacles of Intimacy: A New Look at the comédie larmoyante

Spectacles of Intimacy: A New Look at the comédie larmoyante Deborah Steinberger IN LE PHILOSOPHE MARIÉ (1727), Philippe Néricault Destouches blends comic and serious scenes in his portrayal of a young man's efforts to keep his marriage secret. The hero, Ariste, wishes both to avoid ridicule from his bachelor friends and to remain in the good graces of an ornery relative from whom he expects to inherit. The play features comic elements in the tradition of Molière: a lighthearted dépit amoureux, a clever soubrette. But it also shows us a son in tears at his father's knees, begging forgiveness for a marriage contracted without his consent, and a loving husband and wife threatened with separation at the hands of a tyrannical uncle. These sentimentally charged situations, featuring pathos built on family ties, are a novelty for French comedy of this period: they mark a break with the affective atmosphere of the comedy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , dominated by Molière and Dancourt. This mixture of the serious and the comic makes Le Philosophe marié one of the first examples of the comédie larmoyante. Along with Nivelle de La Chaussée, Destouches pioneered this new type of comedy, devoted to the private sphere, and depicting family harmony and marital fidelity as the greatest sources of happiness. The plays of Destouches and La Chaussée portray the family home with an innovative blend of realism and idealism. On the one hand, they show us characters at home engaged in ordinary daily activities: writing and reading for business and pleasure (Destouches's Le Philosophe marié and Le Glorieux), squabbling with a sister (Le Philosophe marié), organizing entertainment for guests (La Chaussée 's Le Préjugé à la mode). On the other hand, these authors idealize the domestic space as they celebrate the power of family, which educates and reforms individuals, and transforms a house into a home. The comédie larmoyante has long been vilified, or at best neglected. Gustave Lanson, who wrote in 1887 the only book-length study of this genre, condemns its "fade sensibilité," and calls the works of La Chaussée "à peu près illisibles aujourd'hui."1 This last remark makes immediately clear the shortcomings of his critical approach. The plays of Destouches and La Chaussée were obviously created not to be read, but seen: any attempt to analyze these works must consider them above all as spectacle. Here, for example, I study the dramatic space and stage settings of these plays. The comédie larmoyante, 64 Fall 1999 Steinberger I believe, represents an advanced stage of a movement I call "the domestication of French comedy": starting in the 1660s, one notes a gradual transformation of stage settings from public square to domestic interior, from public to private space.2 This "domestication" of the stage is in turn linked to a phenomenon which has been documented by Philippe Aries, Roger Charrier and many others: the evolution of new patterns of social space in early modern France, with increased differentiation of the public and private spheres.3 Recognition of the growing allure of the private and domestic may help us to understand the enormous success the comédie larmoyante enjoyed before contemporary audiences. Despite their putative literary shortcomings, these works held undeniable appeal for the theatergoing public. As the Abbé Desfontaines wrote in 1737, "Cessons de médire de ces fausses comédies; elles sont goûtées de notre siècle."4 With 20 performances each in their first run, Destouches's Le Philosophe marié and La Chaussée's Le Préjugé à la mode qualify by the period's standards as real successes; La Chaussée's La Fausse Antipathie and Mélanide were performed over 20 times; and Destouches's Le Glorieux enjoyed a triumphant total of 30 first-run performances, a record held by only four other plays produced between 1715 and 1750.5 Their election to the Académie—Destouches in 1723, La Chaussée in 1736—indicates that these authors had earned the respect of their peers. Yet, despite their immense popularity and their distinguished standing among their contemporaries , modern studies...

Gender and Social Loafing in Japan

The author investigated gender differences in social loafing among 18 men and 18 women in Japan. The participants were divided into groups of 9 members. Ropes were connected to strongly built steel frames set near the ceiling of the laboratory. Each participant had to pull the rope as through arm wrestling. The participants engaged in 12 trials—2 individual trials and 10 group trials. In the group trials, the participants believed that only the group's power, but not individual participants' power, was being gauged. The difference between the data from individual trials and the data from group trials was adopted as a measure of social loafing. The women tended to loaf less than the men, and the men's effort suddenly declined when the situation was changed from an individual to a collective work setting. However, the women did not show that change. The author interpreted the findings from the viewpoint of gender difference in the quality of achievement motivation among Japanese participants.