Relationships in nightlife: a gender analysis

Our way of understanding relationships has a large learned component. In this case, I am going to focus on the social dynamics that occur in relationships in nightlife venues (bars, discos, pubs ...) in Western countries.

Learning through culture

The processes of enculturation define in the social character (shared between several major social groups) what it is to be an adult, its significance, and all the imperatives that it entails. They are a series of socially accepted and valued patterns in the situations of partner search by people who share this cultural paradigm, among others. One of these desirable characteristics is having a personality made and formed and stable over time.

Based on my experience and the observer role used in nightlife venues, I detect an expression that is mostly repeated among people of the masculine gender, without exempting the other genres. How we see people and interpret them has a cultural component, and according to the prevailing culture, what is beautiful, acceptable and desirable and what is not is determined.

Monogamy: a starting point for cognitive dissonance

Within Western culture, the belief in monogamous relationships is established, and different ways of conceiving personal and affective relationships are rejected. The expression when observing people of the female gender "is that I like all of them", causes a conceptual incongruity between the absorbed culture and the hedonic needs of the moment, creates a homogenization of people's perception and gives the starting point to the gender construction, with the explanation that when one has a belief, it is really the belief that possesses the person, regardless of the reasoning after this expression.

Essentialist positions are crumbled by this statement, since there is no reality, but rather it is constructed. And that construction makes us see reality as we see it, through learning and enculturation processes.

Traditional culture and gender roles in nightclubs

This expression responds to a traditional culture pattern, which is characterized by a homogeneous vision (beliefs, who is inside and who is outside) and they are stable over time. In addition to this, Western culture is constantly reformulated under the same parameters but with different aesthetics, so can give the feeling that gender roles and relational attitudes are different, but they really are covert strategies. An example of this may be the sexism dressed and perpetuated as romantic love. We change the use of language, but structurally it contains a meaning equal to the previous reformulation.

These types of traditional cultures are also characterized by patterns with little variability, which translates into a greater degree of imperativity. This degree, as the word says, has different levels in terms of the adverse reaction to situations that must be enforced by people immersed in that culture. The cognitive dissonances As for the modernist versus postmodernist culture clash, it provokes internal conflicts, and following the parameters of a traditional culture, it also creates a guilt in the other.

Cultural influence also affects the conclusions we draw from the facts, for this reason, the interlocutor can be interpreted as someone who does not understand or rejects you, depending on whether the sender complies the prevailing canons, centering the responsibility for the negative on the other and justifying their own acts as correct. The other is the one who is to blame, thus making him invisible, through an excessive psychologization, the structural and cultural component of behavior. In this type of situation, added to the fact that the environmental characteristics are not suitable for having a communicative process, an intersubjective negotiation of meanings that allow us to understand the discourses of both parties beyond the subjective projections and interpretations of the other, seen through the glasses of cultural imperatives and what should be.

Explaining the contradiction

On the one hand we have the cultural imperatives, and on the other the desire for other people, consummated or not. Why can this attitude be due?

The Beauty canons On gender roles, they mark the appropriate behaviors for each gender, in addition to their physical appearance. The environments where it is not easy to have a conversation, added to the visual nature of being human, they make sight become the sense that receives the greatest attention resources and, therefore, so much, se becomes the first tool to make value judgments. The gender, understood as a social construction and in a learned way, makes us look at people conceived as beautiful according to these canons. Cultural canons, from a Western point of view, understand gender as male and female only, but from the point of view postmodernist includes new ways of understanding gender, sexuality and interpersonal relationships beyond the preset.

The woman as a mere object of desire

Nightlife venues are governed by certain aesthetic standards for access, like any company, they seek to project an image and, in addition, that like-minded people advertise for free. Without neglecting the passive role that is intended to be given to women as an object of consumption and advertising, we can see how both men and women respond to certain dress patterns for these occasions.

If people who comply with these cultural beauty standards enter a fashionable place, and access is restricted to those who do not comply, it is easy to understand that nightlife venues become an enculturation scenario where roles and behaviors are learned socially accepted by the prevailing culture, in this case, modernist and traditional. It does not differ by more than aesthetics, and having learned what is desirable for each gender role, it is understood that one can feel more physical attraction to different people in the same place, in addition to choosing the costumes and supposedly most adaptive behaviors for each social situation within the local.