Androcentric thinking assumes maleness to be normative, and attributes gender differences to females. A content analysis of articles reporting gender differences published between 1965 and 2004 in four APA journals examined androcentric pronouns, explanations, and tables and graphs. Few articles used generic masculine pronouns to refer to both women and men. However, explanations of gender differences within articles that mentioned such differences in their abstracts and titles referenced attributes of women significantly more often than attributes of men.

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Modern heterosexism has been described as a negative attitude that differs from ‘old-fashioned’ moral objections about homosexuality, but includes more abstract objections, such as the view that gay men and lesbian women exaggerate the importance of, or flaunt their sexuality (Morrison & Morrison, 2002). Modern heterosexists are likely to accept homosexuality per se, while feeling uncomfortable with people ‘doing’ homosexuality. Sixty-seven male and 68 female students read vignettes about either a gay, lesbian, or straight couple who were co-workers and who were dating explicitly or discretely. Participants expressed their acceptance of and comfort with the couple, and their reaction to a complaint made about them by a co-worker. Males scored higher than females on old-fashioned and modern prejudice. High scorers, but not low scorers, on a modern heterosexism scale preferred discrete to explicit homosexual couples. Additionally, men who perceived lesbianism as highly erotic were no more acceptant of lesbian than gay couples. Results are discussed and implications for future research are described.

We develop a critique of the social psychological hypothesis that media images of women engaged in same-sex activity have a positive effect on heterosexual men's general attitudes to lesbians. A content analysis suggests that British print media usually represent lesbians either in news stories that also include gay men, or in entertainment stories. In focus groups, both gay and straight men were presented with photographs of 'heteroflexible' representations from the 'lad mag' FHM and photographs of 'real' lesbians from Gay Times. Men were asked to define what made a woman a real lesbian. Straight men rejected the formulation that there was a single 'stereotype' of lesbians in favor of the claim that the FHM images did not represent real lesbians. Gay men came to agree that the heteroflexible women were not identified as lesbian. Our analysis suggests that both gay and straight men perform bounded sexual identities in response to heteroflexible images which are scripted to be attractive to heterosexual men.

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