Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic

Abstract

We examine how men's shared understandings of women's physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals-descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011-we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive women as irresistibly appealing and as destructive to men. Men engage in two types of collective responses: First, men work to discipline themselves and each other, reframing attractiveness as illusory and unworthy of pursuit; and second, men endeavor to discipline attractive women themselves, portraying them as evil temptresses that must be suppressed and reasserting their masculine dominance through harassment and violence. These findings reveal how men's classifications of women as sexual objects operate as forms of symbolic violence, legitimating and naturalizing their gendered domination over women.

A Tool Kit for Relation Induction in Text Analysis

“…The dictionary is a simple data structure containing pairs of values and keys and is widely used in the social sciences (e.g., Snefjella and Kuperman 2015, Goldberg et al 2016, Kovács et al 2017, Flores 2017, Frye and Gheihman 2018, Nelson 2020, Paxton et al 2020, Franzosi 2021, Bhatt et al 2021, Cheng et al 2023. In computer-assisted text analysis, both qualitative and quantitative, the key is usually a unique string of characters-keyword, token, term, word, phrase, n-gram-which is matched and then tagged with an associated value.…”

In pursuit of the potential of sexual field theory: A research agenda

“…The transformation of the erotic habitus of gay men who come to enjoy BDSM after patronizing leather clubs is perhaps the clearest example (Hennen, 2008, 2014). This focus on attraction, however, “is not enough to understand how sexual life is structured,” write Frye and Gheihman (2018: 619), “because sexuality is shaped by risk and domination as well as by desire and pursuit.” Their research describes Malawian men who fear that beautiful women—by virtue of being irresistible and untrustworthy—pose a risk to their reputation, health, and finances. In response, some encourage each other to resist the power of women’s sexual capital, inculcating a habitus in contrast to the structure of desire, made possible by their own ambivalence.…”

“…In the years since, however, sexual field theory has not moved far beyond these environs. Weinberg and Williams (2010) added men seeking trans women, Hammers (2008) extended the theory to queer women’s spaces, and a few scholars have studied fields in which men seek out women and vice versa (Farrer, 2010; Frye and Gheihman, 2018). Beyond this, almost all engagement has been limited to research on men seeking men.…”

Pathways of Global Cultural Diffusion: Mass Media and People's Moral Declarations about Men's Violence against Women

“…This feature takes its cue from the British tabloids The Sun and The Daily Star, which featured a topless "page three girl" in each edition (Interview with Limbani Moya, February 14, 2019). This type of media content was largely unprecedented and garnered much attention given Malawi's history of a strict dress code for women during Banda's presidency, and as evidenced by cases of men that public harassed or raped women and said they did so because to teach them a lesson for wearing pants or miniskirts in public as opposed to an ankle-length chitenge skirt ("Bingu condemns attack on women," The Nation, Frank Namangale, January 20, 2012;Frye and Gheihman 2018). Moya told me that he had never seen a woman in a miniskirt before coming to the United States for his journalism training program in 1994 and that he felt quite uncomfortable.…”