In the past two weeks, I have thought carefully about my research question and what I need to discuss more in my research paper. I focused on possible causes of stereotypes of male roles and masculinity in China, so I have streamlined my research question to:
How can societal expectations of masculinity in China be addressed to promote dialog and challenge gender-role/male stereotypes?
I also created two different sets of interview questions, each set has 10 questions, I translated them into Chinese and invited people from China (aged 16-45) to answer them through Chinese social medias (Mainly WeChat Mini-Program). Both sets of questions ask the interviewees about their perceptions of gender roles, but one is more focused on male gender roles in China, the other is about female gender roles.
Each interviewee were asked to take both sets of questions and choose from 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly agree) under each question. By May 14th, there were over 50 responses in total, which I then analyzed and visualized into bar graphs to give a in-depth understanding of male and female’s perspectives in China
Here are the two sets of interview questions :
I then created 4 visualizations based on the data I received from the interview forms, they are: Male answering set A question, Male answering set B, Female answering set A, Female answering set B. Here are the graphs generated using the medium of the answers.
The graphs above showed a very interesting comparison between males and females perspectives of gender roles in China. The results were different than I expected, both male and female participants showed a certain level of understanding of the opposite gender’s societal expectations in the responses, and some of the more ‘traditional’ responses are mostly from interviewees that are over 40 years old (on average).
However, on some questions, most participants seems to still stick to the common gender role stereotypes, such as some of the male participants agrees more towards the females, should not remain single or childless; and most of the female participants agreed that male should probably prioritize their families over careers, which might be why there are always conflicts or argues between the two genders on Chinese social medias.
With that in mind, I initiated quantitative research by analyzing data from Chinese social medias including RED (similar to Instagram, mostly female users) Baidu Tieba (Baidu’s internet forum, mostly male users), Weibo (similar to (similar to Twitter, slightly more female than male users) etc. Searching for hashtags like #普信男, or #Feminism in these social medias to provide additional perspectives and dimensions for my research.
During my research, I found that there are many discussion posts across all 3 platforms about male and female relationships, which created a number of demeaning terms for both men and women, such as
‘下头男'(A male who ruins one’s mood)，
‘普信男’(Average but overly confident male)，
‘河童’ (a Japanese mystic monster called Kappa. usually used to describe a male who’s unattractive)，
‘虾系’ (A person who’s in good physical shape or have good taste, but doe not have an attractive face),
‘蛆’ (maggots)，
‘蝈蝻’ (Literally means ‘caddisfly’, but the word is also homophonic with ‘国男’, which means Chinese man. Both characters contain the radical ‘虫’ which means insect or worm.)，
‘恶臭’ (generally used to describe offensive and hateful speech (usually directed at women))，
‘女拳’，(straight translation would be ‘women’ fists’, but the word is homophonic as ‘女权‘, which translates to women’s rights or femnisim )
‘坦克’ (Means Tank, usually used to describe ‘overweighted’ females) etc.
Most of these terms are extremely offensive and disrespectful. And these terms are usually seen under gender and relationship related posts or under the posts’ comments.
Among them, Baidu Tieba, one of the biggest online forums in China, has a large number of insulting posts against women in Sun Xiaochuan Ba and these posts has sparked serious concerns about males in China.
Sun Xiaochuan was originally a gaming streamer, but he has been banned from most of China’s live game platforms due to his inconsiderate and inappropriate comments. But the forum, which bears his name, appears to have become a gathering place for wantonly commenting on, insulting or attacking women, which can be one of the contributing factors to the continued spread of negative male impressions.
Of course, what happened on Sun Ba Forum is not an isolated case. Many women have experienced verbal attacks or harassment in other social media in China as well as in real life. Coupled with the fact that some female users have learned about some men’s hate speech and behavior as a result of social media and big data pushing, it is natural to have a negative stereotype of the male population.
With the above quantitative and quantitative research results, we are back at my research question: How can societal expectations of masculinity in China be addressed to promote dialog and challenge gender-role/male stereotypes?
My initial ideas of intervention towards my topic is to increase children and youths awareness and knowledge about genders, improve sex education and invited experts on gender roles to create a series of podcasts or a documentary. Also to seriously enforced online platform language guidelines etc. All of which serves educational purposes.