Men’s decision to remain childfree is shaped by a combination of personal, relational, and societal factors and often evokes social disapproval. This disapproval reflects traditional norms of masculinity in Türkiye, where fatherhood is regarded as a central marker of male identity. This qualitative study explored how men understand and experience being voluntarily childfree within this sociocultural context. Ten men aged 26–43, all of whom had chosen not to have children, participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, four main themes emerged: (1) fatherhood as an ethical/identity risk, (2) living childfree: freedom, economy, and future uncertainty, (3) negotiating pronatalist expectations, and (4) imagining fatherhood through the father. Participants described their choice as influenced by feelings of inadequacy, lack of support, and perceptions of the world as an unsafe or unfavorable place for raising children. While childfree choice was associated with material comfort and personal freedom, men also anticipated potential future loneliness. Their own father–child experiences, whether characterized by authoritarian or caring relationships, significantly shaped these choices. These findings highlight how men”s reproductive decisions are embedded in cultural expectations of masculinity. The study”s contribution is to identify an emergent ethical masculinity, in which men ground their claim to manhood in accountability for the consequences of their actions. The concept extends work on caring masculinities to men whose moral claim rests on declining a caregiving role rather than taking one up.
Black women sit at the intersection of sexualized gender and racial oppression which shapes how Black women are socialized and influences how their images are (mis) represented in the media. Guided by sexualization scholarship, the critical media effects (Ramasubramanian Banjo, 2020) and intersectional (Crenshaw, 1994/2013) frameworks, this study investigated the impact of sexualized social media content on Black women. A sample of 872 Black women (ages 18–81) residing in the United States was recruited to participate in this study. Participants viewed sexualized (vs. non-sexualized) social media images of other Black women whose skin tone varied (darker brown vs. lighter brown). Results indicate that participants made less amiable attributions about sexualized (vs. non sexualized) and lighter brown (vs. darker brown) skinned women. In addition, findings revealed nuances in how Black women perceive representation across media; lighter brown skinned women were viewed as more prototypical representations of Black women in both traditional and social media. Sexualized women were seen as more prototypical in traditional media. Implications and future directions for more culturally sensitive technology research are discussed.
Latrinalia, or the study of messages left in restrooms, provides a unique record of shared communication among message writers within gendered spaces. Drawing on a conventional content analysis of 1,378 messages left in the women’s restroom of a mid-sized Midwestern university from January 2022 through November 2023, this study contributes to an understanding of women’s lived experience by identifying themes that illuminate how restroom users enact, resist, or reinterpret gender roles, especially within gendered spaces. Emerging themes include: Affirming (n = 1040), Negative (n = 11), Miscellaneous (n = 8), and Unable to Categorize (n = 319), with additional subcategories in some areas. The results demonstrate messages of social justice, sharing resources, emotional support, and engagement of religious and political matters. These findings provide valuable insight into topics important to women today and encourage reflection on how feminist scholars might direct this energy toward advocacy and community engagement. Using a critical feminist lens for analysis, the findings of this study challenge longstanding stereotypes of women’s communication as trivial or powerless and instead reveal that communication in gendered spaces is rich, robust, and community-focused.
Entertainment media reflect and construct gender norms, yet most media content analyses focus on Western media, limiting knowledge of gender norms from a global perspective. To address this limitation, we conducted a preregistered content analysis of posters from movies produced between 2014 and 2023 in the United States (N = 200) and in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA; N = 200). Beyond numeric representation, we examined subtle nonverbal cues signaling women and men’s unequal power and social prominence. Of 1697 characters, approximately 64
