preview

A Discussion On Social Control Essay

Decent Essays

Our project topic was centered on Social Control, as discussed in Chapter 8 of the Kottak textbook. Social Control is defined as “maintaining social norms and regulating conflict” (Kottak 2013; 165). More specifically, we decided to focus on the phenomenon of “slut-shaming.” According the Oxford Dictionary Online for American English, “slut-shaming,” is defined as the “action of stigmatizing a woman for engaging in behavior judged to be promiscuous or sexually provocative.” Although Oxford singularizes women in this phenomenon, the practice of slut-shaming is inclusive to both genders. It is the stressed implication that women are more targeted that begged us to question: are women more likely to follow societal regulation in regards to their sexual acts than men? In other words, are women more likely to follow the social norms of the culture regarding their sexual activities than men? Shame and gossip are informal forms of social control that are usually practiced in small communities, which further correlates with the idea that women will follow the informal regulations put into place in order to avoid these consequences. With such ideologies in mind, we hypothesized that in American culture, men are less likely to be confined to sexually-charged social constraints than women. We selected slut-shaming as our focus because we wished to see how people would respond to the social cues brought on by shame and gossip. According to Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict (1946), shame

Get Access