Ah! A Spider!

I work as a pharmacy technician, and the staff at my pharmacy is made up of all females. The other day while at work I was talking to another tech and one of the store managers. I was telling him that I am going to be moving at the end of next month, and asking him to hold some of the big cardboard boxes with handles that product is shipped to the store in from the liquor department. He said that he would, but he also suggested that I ask someone in the farm stand department to hold some banana boxes for me as well, as they are quite large. I told him that there was no way I wanted anything to do with those boxes because one time I was talking to a guy who worked in that department and he said that they often find large (usually dead) tropical spiders in those boxes. Another tech overheard me say something about spiders and got nervously asked us if there was a spider around. I told her what we had been talking about, and then the manager said to her that he had seen one a few minutes ago in our bathroom (the pharmacy has its own bathroom in it). She asked him if he killed it, and he said no. She asked him to go in there to find and kill it (she hates spiders). He said one of us could do it if it bothered us, and she replied by saying "but we're all girls, and thats what men are for! to kill spiders!"

While doing the reading assignment for this week the connection from the reading to the personal experience that I drew was from chapter one in Media, Gender and Identity. On pages 2-3 the author talks about media influences on our expectations of human behavior. One thing the author observes is that "domestic or romantic dramas (including soap operas) show us how neighbors, friends and lovers interact" (Gauntlett 3). I would be willing to be that my co-worker had at some time in her life seen in a movie or on a TV show an interaction where a female was frightened by spider and demanded that a man kill it for her. The killing of spiders and other creepy crawlies are part of the stereotypical roles of a man, to defend and comfort women. I wonder how men who are afraid of spiders deal with this social expectation of them to be the exterminators?