665 be socialised in a kind of “emotional literacy” in relation to love and romance – through romantic novels, magazines, or watching television drama serials – while men do not. As a result, “women often find men emotionally illiterate, precisely because men have not learnt to construct and direct emotional narratives or discourses on emotion” (Ibid: 216). From this it can be deduced that there are no natural reasons why women are better at reading emotions but rather that it is gender acculturation, including the discourses to which they have access, which forms the ability to identify and experience emotions64. It is perhaps due to this that it is easier for the women, than for their husbands, to talk in terms of love and intimacy and to identify the signs of love communication65. In actual fact, we should point out that, the archetypal male of the beginning of the 21st century, at least in the rural west of Spain, is the non-emotional man who forms them, and which acquires its significance in opposition to the emotional woman. This model of masculinity represents man as more rational and with greater control and therefore more suited to the public sphere (Lupton, 1998: 113)66 while the private sphere, appropriate for emotional 7
In fact, the diffusion of romantic love would not have been possible without literature, in particular the romantic novel that imposed the model on its readers (Leites, 1990). 8 Barthes in another of his works, The grain of the voice (1981) states that “the man in love is the wild semiologist in a pure state! He spends all his time reading signs. He does nothing else: signs of happiness, signs of unhappiness; in the face of the other, in her behaviour. He is truly victim of the signs” (Ibid: 309). Perhaps we should substitute “the man in love” for “the woman in love”. 9 This differentiation between the emotional woman and the non-emotional man in our society is set within the distinction
RBSE – Revista Brasileira de Sociologia das Emoções, 11 (32): Agosto de 2012