The Business of Emotions, Essay Example

Part One: Unit 1

Gender plays a major role in how we express emotion, especially in the workplace.  Men and women both encounter stereotypes regarding which emotions are considered appropriate, dependent on the context.  For example, our culture frowns on Hilary Clinton’s tears during the lead-up to the New Hampshire Primary, but looked favourably on politicians (male and female) who got equally teary after 9-11.  Clinton was held to a higher standard, I believe, than her male counterparts because of her gender; she straddled a difficult emotional line in that she was castigated for expressing too much emotion, and equally vilified for appearing too ‘masculine’ when she did not express emotion.  During the video clip, Clinton states, “This is very personal for me.  It’s not just political.  It’s not just public” (Clinton, 2008).  I believe that such an admission demonstrates her willingness to appear vulnerable in the public eye.  The interesting question is whether her tears were authentic or calculated to give her that ‘womanly’ touch that was considered necessary to offset her perceived lack of emotion.

While men and women do experience the same emotions, which are all human emotions,  we are encouraged from birth to express our feelings in different ways that are entirely dependent on gender.  I don’t believe that a male politician would have received the same amount of scorn for tearing up while talking about how much he cared about his country.   However, Clinton’s emotional ‘outburst’ (which really wasn’t very dramatic at all) illustrates that gender is one way in which we judge our political candidates.  The public reaction to her tears (which was heavily driven by the media) illustrates Ben-Ze’ev’s discussion in Chapter 12 regarding pleasure-in-other’s-misfortune.  He writes that “a major reason for being pleased with the misfortune of another person is that this person’s misfortune may somehow benefit us; it may, for example, emphasize our superiority” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 355).  Clearly, Clinton’s display benefited her opponents by ‘proving’ their point that women are too emotional to be in the White House, thereby emphasizing the superiority of the male candidates.

References

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2001). The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

“Hilary Clinton Cries on the Campaign Trail.” (7 Jan., 2008). YouTube. Retrieved from    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vQA92XlnM&feature=player_embedded

Part Two: Unit 1

Response to Student 2 (Tayawh)

I definitely agree that it’s difficult to try and determine how much of a role environmental and biological elements play in our use of gender stereotypes when dealing with emotions.  The nature versus nurture debate strikes me as one of those arguments that will never be entirely solved.  I have friends who’ve tried to raise their children using non-gendered toys and gender-neutral clothing, only to find that their daughters want to wear pink and their sons use sticks as toy guns.  Is that the influence of their peer groups or what they see on television and in the actions of the people around them?  It’s hard to know for sure, and maybe it’s more productive to accept that children (and adults) are driven to a certain extent by gender stereotypes.  One way to help male and female children effectively express both positive and negative emotions may lay in fully understanding Ben-Ze’ev’s discussion of the “use of emotion-regulating means” (2001, pg. 238) to deal with difficult circumstances and emotions.  The ways in which we teach our children to express themselves, whether it’s through “cognitive means such as rumination” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 238), which he attributes to women, or “distracting behavioral means” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 238), which he sees as a more male tendency, will allow them to become functional and healthy adults.

Response to Student 3 (Heather)

I would agree with you that context is everything when it comes to looking at the emotions expressed by politicians, especially in the case of Hilary Clinton.  I’d take it one step further with Clinton, however, and suggest that no matter what emotion she expressed she would be criticized.  The gendering of emotions in the political arena seems designed to keep the status quo intact.  Marsden writes in our study guide that “our felt emotions in response to what politicians say and do” (Unit 1) is the biggest way in which true emotions (as opposed to the scripted ones that politicians express) play a role in politics.  However, I think that we are ‘trained’ to react to political event and politicians themselves by the way emotions are regulated through the media.  News programs formulate their programs and politicians script their speeches in a manner that is designed to get viewers to react in a very specific way by triggering our emotions in order to distract us from the real issues.

Response to Student 5 (Jennifer)

It must be very difficult to be in a profession like police work where so much of your training and your daily experiences condition you to react in an unemotional way.  I can see where it would be helpful, in the heat of the moment, to not let your emotions overwhelm you, but that must often leave you (and your fellow officers) with few outlets to express your personal reactions to the traumas that you witness every day.  Ben-Ze’ev writes about using cognitive means to deal with stressful situations in the workplace, stating that “in modern service work, one cannot use behavioral escape devices such as avoiding clients” to regulate emotions (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 238).  It strikes me that you must encounter this in your work all the time–it isn’t as if you can just go and hide out somewhere quiet when your emotions are running overtime.  It’s no wonder that you find yourself compartmentalizing your emotions and reacting with less compassion than you might’ve in the past–it sounds like a survival strategy to me.

Response to Student 7 (Frances)

The business world doesn’t seem to value emotional responses that have been considered traditionally ‘feminine’.  Emotions such as compassion and mercy seem to be associated with ‘helping’ professions like nursing and social services–when I think of people working in the corporate world, these aren’t emotions that I would immediately attribute to them.  Perhaps that’s because, as you said, business environments have been dominated by men for a long time, whereas professions like nursing and social services have been considered to be female jobs.  Ben-Ze’ev writes that “both pity and compassion encompass the desire for the other’s relief.  This desire is connected with our belief that the other person does not deserve such severe misfortune.  It seems, however, that in pity we wish for the relief of the other’s suffering, but not of the other’s inferiority” (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001, pg. 331).  I think that compassion is, in a sense, antithetical to the corporate mindset because so much of that world is based on competitive aspects that value success above all else.