Did you hear what she did to me? Female friendship victimization disclosures offer reputational advantages

Four studies (N = 1,653) tested the hypothesis that sensitivity to victimization in friendships is a mechanism through which women covertly transmit negative social information (gossip) about same-sex peers. In Study 1, women were more likely than men to question a same-sex friendship following violations denoting a friend’s lack of commitment or kindness. In Study 2, women were more likely than men to report disclosing such friendship violations to others. In Study 3, first-person disclosures about one’s own victimization were more trusted and approved than third-person disclosures about others’ victimization, suggesting such statements are not readily recognized as gossip. In Study 4a, men and women reported their female friends disclosed all types of friendship violations more frequently than did their male friends, but especially those surrounding commitment and replacement risk. In Study 4b, female perpetrators suffered worse reputational damage than did male perpetrators following divulgence of their poor treatment of same-sex friends. Taken together, these results suggest women disclose their victimization by same-sex friends, and such disclosures effectively impair same-sex peers’ reputations. These patterns raise the possibility that the greater fragility of female (versus male) friendships results, in part, from this effective, yet covert intrasexual competition strategy.

Discourse on Adolescent Deviant Behavior on Social Media Facebook: Indonesian Youth Group Caption

This study aims to determine the content or discourse of deviant behavior by teenagers on Facebook social media and to find out which vocabulary is most widely used by Indonesian teenage grub caption members. This type of research is qualitative with content analysis methods. The subjects of this study were members of the Indonesian Youth Caption group, while the informants used the internet. Based on the results of the analysis and discussion of the data, it shows that the discourse on deviant behavior by teenagers in the Facebook Social Media Grub is: (1) Sharing pornographic videos in the form of adult films or real videos of teenagers who commit deviations, out of habit, and follow what other grub members do, (2) Share pornographic links that can be accessed by members via YouTube or WhatsApp and vent things they cannot do in their daily life, (3) Share pornographic photos for entertainment, are influenced by uploads fellow members, get audience and attention. Then the vocabulary that is often used by teenagers on the Facebook Social Media Grub, namely: (1) Sange, a sentence for men who already understand the adult world, is often used in everyday life, especially teenage boys, slang, and words. which leads to negative and dirty things, (2) Whatsapp media is used to get videos that are is viral, (3) Chat for women because they are used to seeing uploads made by young women, are interested, and feel bored with male friendships.

Bosom Friends

The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791–1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786–1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither one ever marry? Might they have been gay, or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day “bromance”? Then, as now, they have intrigued by the many mysteries surrounding them. In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse. They developed a friendship that blossomed into a significant political partnership. Before the Civil War, each man was elected to high executive office: William Rufus King as vice president in 1852, and James Buchanan as the nation’s fifteenth president in 1856. This book recounts the story of their bosom friendship through a dual biography of Buchanan and King. Special attention is given to their early lives, the circumstances of their boardinghouse friendship, and the political gossip that has circulated about them ever since. In addition, the author traces their many contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the debates over slavery, while finding their style of politics to have been disastrous for the American nation. Ultimately, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were, and continue to be, an important part of success in the clubby world of American politics.

Hardening, 1820–1834

Chapter 2 turns to how Buchanan and King established themselves within the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson. In both cases, the chapter stresses the roles of intimate male friendships and the Washington boardinghouse, or mess, in developing a cross-sectional, though partisan, approach to their politics. Equally, it looks at important moments of conflict in each man’s life: King’s factional fighting with Democrats in his adopted state of Alabama, where he established a plantation called Chestnut Hill near Selma, and Buchanan’s struggles against the various elements of the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania. It also recounts Buchanan’s experience as the American minister to Russia, highlighting the ways in which his foreign exile connected him to King and prepared him for his future role as senator and secretary of state. These formative experiences served to harden their future political convictions and bespoke the continued need for intimate male friendships in their future endeavors.

The Solitary Observer

This chapter argues that typical Clarke protagonists are not bland, but merely solitary and reticent men who primarily function as observers of events, not participants, as seen in Prelude to Space (1951) and elsewhere. After early stories about completely isolated individuals, Clarke’s science fiction increasingly explores ways for these men to ameliorate their loneliness, such as important tasks, close male friendships, connections to larger communities, and families that are far away but remain in touch. Perhaps perceiving that Stanley Kubrick reshaped the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to criticize his characters as unemotional and unfulfilled, Clarke produced stories in the 1970s emphasizing that his characters, in 2001 and other works, are actually emotionally complex and perfectly content with their solitude.