We have studied the operation of the male gaze in the aesthetic evaluation of contemporary artistic photographs containing explicit male and female nudity among heterosexual men and women. Apart from explicit evaluations, we also tracked the time it takes respondents to express their opinion as an indicator of cognitive deliberation, to see to what extent expressed opinions rely on nondeclarative inclinations or rather declarative considerations. We find that both men and women aesthetically prefer female nudity-in line with the male gaze-but men's preference is more outspoken. Moreover, people's values affect evaluation as well, with sexual conservativeness lowering the liking of artistic nudity in general and artistic sympathies increasing appreciation of male nudity in particular. Although neither respondent gender, nor sexually conservative values affect response time, people with more sympathetic values towards the arts think longer when assessing the beauty of male nudity. Our findings indicate that both the male gaze and sexual conservativeness operate as nondeclarative frames of reference that lead to routine reactions in aesthetic appreciation of artistic nudity, but values of sympathy for the arts operate as a form of declarative personal culture, which leads to a cognitive effort to overrule the male gaze.
Music consumption imbues a city's neighborhoods with a character all their own, contributing to a vibrant and dynamic map of urban cultures. Brick‐and‐mortar music retailers remain an important site for this consumption, persisting despite challenges posed by digitization. But the landscape of contemporary cultural consumption has been shaped by urban inequality over time. Using a unique dataset of record store locations derived from city directories, and census tract data from the Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB), this article presents maps and regression results that suggest that the current pattern of music retail has undergone radical shifts between 1970 and 2010 in the cities of Milwaukee, Chicago, and Detroit. Record stores were once more highly clustered in predominantly black areas than they are today. An analysis of record store failure further suggests that in the period between 1980 and 1990, record stores outside of majority white areas had significantly higher probabilities of failure than those within them. This study contributes to scholarship on cultural consumption and urban change by accounting for how segregation shapes the retail landscape.
We employ a cognitive sociological perspective to empirically assess how the evaluation of music fragments – electronic dance music (EDM) in particular – is affected by the perceived attractiveness of a DJ, in relation to their gender. Using a survey experiment based on randomized vignettes within a sample of the US population ( n = 2710), in which respondents evaluate music fragments randomly paired with images of DJs, we assess to what extent music evaluations are affected by artists’ 1) gender, 2) perceived attractiveness, and 3) the interaction between these traits (while controlling for race/ethnicity and respondent characteristics). We find a strong positive relationship between artists’ perceived attractiveness and how ‘their’ music is evaluated. While this is true regardless of DJ gender, attractiveness benefits male artists slightly more than female artists. These findings provide further empirical support for the notion that audiences include non-musical traits about artists in music evaluation processes.
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