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A Gender Gap?

nk0825's picture

Today in class got me thinking a little bit more about the instantaneous perception of images in graphic novels. A point not brought up today was that of gender. Men and women think differently. So, what if gender made a difference in the immediacy of image perception? Are men more visual, thus making pictures easier for them to read--more easy for them to understand? This would follow the same line of thought that women are more complicated. Maybe the complicated nature of a woman can partly explain our dependence on words..? Unfortunately we don't have any males in our class to tell us if THEY thought the images in A Game of You were more immediately helpful than the words....I think this would be an interesting concept to pursue. 

Also,  here is a site where the class can view the House episode "Private Lives."

Comments

nk0825's picture

In response!

 In response to you Shayna S. I'm not quite sure. I suppose the  more I think about it the more I believe I am questioning whether a certain gender in respect to biologic functioning creates differences in how two different sexes process or possibly receive and interpret images--does being a male versus a female affect our natural preference towards images or words? Spleenfiend's response is interesting, maybe it is simply an assumption of men being visually aroused and it could have nothing to do with graphic novel images...I just found it to be an entertaining question when asking myself why I preferred the words in graphic novels to the provided images.

spleenfiend's picture

gender roles?

i feel like the stereotype about women being more "complicated" is really more about having attention to detail, which would apply to pictures as well as words.  it has also been said women have "an eye for beauty."  some of the pictures in A Game of You were just as complex as the words.  so even if women prefer more "complicated" things, that wouldn't mean they'd have to prefer words over pictures, would it? 

i think we may be assuming women prefer words because we're a class of women and many of the women in our class are majoring in the humanities (as opposed to being art students).  i could be completely wrong.  i've heard women are (statistically?) more verbal than men, but i also think might be rooted in gender roles: women are expected to be more articulate and share their emotions in more words.

 the idea that men are more visual has more to do with men being more sexually aroused by visuals than women are.  i'm not sure if it means men are more visual in general and would comprehend pictures better than women do.  could it?  every response to the google search "men more visual than women" has to do with sexual arousal.

now i am actually very curious about gender roles and how they might effect how we read words and pictures.

Shayna S's picture

Gender Gap?

Interesting question. But what are you really asking? Are you asking if, biologically, some of us perceive images differently than others? Or by placing oneself within a specific gender role, one's processing of images differs from that of someone in a different role?

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