technoculture314-09

The part of this week's lecture that caught my eye was Proitz’s study about the subconscious feminization of teenage male texters during a budding romance. A few months back I also conducted a similar informal survey about the conscious feminization of adult males.

One day when I sneaked a peak at my boyfriend’s phone while he was texting, I realized that the style my boyfriend used when texting his mates was significantly different from the style used when texting me. Like the observations from Proitz’ study, the texts to his male friends were “shorter and more ‘functional’ texts, and the texts to me were significantly longer with a plethora of emoticons. For example, all communication with his friends could be done with just ONE SINGLE word; when asking someone’s whereabouts the word “where” would be used, when asking someone to lunch the word “lunch” would be used, and when asked about his whereabouts unspecific words such as “city,” “café,” “restaurant” would be used.

However, the texts sent to me were considerably more descriptive and interesting. When I asked my boyfriend about the reasons behind the two polar-opposite styles, he informed me that he preferred the style used when texting his friends, but used a more feminized style when texting to me to match my level of “femininity.” He also added that if he would mistakenly text to me in the style of texting his friends, I would immediately ask if he were mad or angry. Because this new revelation (that my boyfriend, to some degree, fabricated his texts) had never even flitted across my mind, I further questioned my other male friends who had girlfriends if they also followed the same polar-opposite texting styles, and they did! Most said that they texted longer, more descriptive and “bubbly” texts just to please their girlfriends.

From my own observations I have learnt that with male adults, most seem to consciously feminize their texting styles in order to please their significant other. Of course, this observation was done on a select few, so in no way am I implying that this applies to the majority.