Relationships in Nightlife: Cultural Analysis from a Gender Perspective

Our way of understanding relationships has a large learned component In this case, I am going to focus on the social dynamics that occur in relationships in nightlife venues (bars, discos, pubs…) in Western countries.

Learning through culture

The enculturation processes define in the social character (shared among several majority social groups) what it means to be an adult, its significance, and all the imperatives that it entails. They are a series of socially accepted and valued patterns in partner search situations by people who share this cultural paradigm, among others. One of these desirable characteristics is having a well-rounded personality that is stable over time.

Based on my experience and the observer role used in nightlife venues, I detect an expression that is repeated mostly among people of the male gender, without exempting other genres. How we see people and interpret them has a cultural component, and the prevailing culture determines what is beautiful, acceptable and desirable and what is not.

Monogamy: a starting point for cognitive dissonance

Within Western culture, the belief in monogamous relationships is established, and different ways of conceiving personal and emotional relationships are rejected. The expression when observing female people “is that I like them all”, causes a conceptual incongruity between the absorbed culture and the hedonic needs of the moment, creates a homogenization of people’s perception and gives the point of started with the construction of gender, with the explanation that when one has a belief, it is really the belief that possesses the person, regardless of the reasoning subsequent to this expression.

Essentialist positions are destroyed by this statement, since there is no reality, but rather it is constructed. And this construction makes us see reality as we see it, through learning and enculturation processes.

Traditional culture and gender roles in nightclubs

This expression responds to a traditional culture pattern, which is characterized by a homogeneous vision (beliefs, who is inside and who is outside) and are stable over time. In addition to this, Western culture is constantly reformulated under the same parameters but with different aesthetics, so It can give the impression that gender roles and relational attitudes are different, but they are really covert strategies. An example of this may be machismo dressed and perpetuated as romantic love. We change the use of language, but structurally it contains a meaning equal to the previous reformulation.

These types of traditional cultures are also characterized by patterns with little variability, which translates into a greater degree of imperativeness. This degree, as the word says, has different levels in terms of the adverse reaction to situations that must be complied with by people immersed in that culture. The cognitive dissonances regarding the modernist versus postmodernist cultural clash cause internal conflicts, and following the parameters of a traditional culture, also creates guilt in the other.

Cultural influence also affects the conclusions we draw from facts, therefore the interlocutor can be interpreted as someone who does not understand you or rejects you, depending on whether the sender complies with the prevailing canons, focusing the responsibility for the negative on the other and justifying one’s own actions as correct. The other is the one who is to blame, thus making invisible, through excessive psychologization, the structural and cultural component of behavior. In this type of situation, added to the fact that the environmental characteristics are not ideal for having a communicative process, an intersubjective negotiation of meanings that allows understanding the discourses of both parties beyond the subjective projections and interpretations of the other, seen from the glasses of cultural imperatives and what should be.

Explaining the contradiction

On the one hand we have cultural imperatives, and on the other the desire for other people, consummated or not. Why could this attitude be due?

Beauty canons on gender roles mark the appropriate behaviors for each gender, in addition to their physical appearance. Environments where it is not easy to maintain a conversation, added to the visual nature of the human being, make vision become the sense that receives the greatest attentional resources and, therefore, yes and becomes the first tool to make value judgments He gender, understood as a social construction and in a learned way, makes us pay attention to the people conceived as beautiful according to these canons. Cultural canons, from a Western point of view, understand gender as man and woman only, but from the postmodernist vision new ways of understanding gender, sexuality and interpersonal relationships beyond the pre-established ones are encompassed.

The woman as a mere object of desire

Nightlife venues are governed by certain aesthetic standards for access, like any company, they seek to project an image and, furthermore, that like-minded people advertise for free. Without leaving aside the passive role that is intended to be given to women as objects of consumption and advertising, we can see how both men and women respond to certain patterns of clothing for these occasions.

If people who comply with these cultural canons of beauty enter a fashionable establishment, and access is restricted to those who do not comply, It is easy to understand that nightlife venues become a setting for enculturation where roles and behaviors are learned socially accepted by the prevailing culture, in this case, modernist and traditional. It does not differ beyond aesthetics, and having learned what is desirable for each gender role, it is understood that one can feel more physical attraction for different people in the same place, in addition to choosing the clothing and behaviors that are supposedly more adaptive for each social situation within the premises.