“Because men's idea of masculinity can rarely be realized at work they have developed a masculine style for their leisure and social activities that consists of excessive signs of masculinity in an exaggerated and compensatory display. The same gap between the ideological ideal and social experience also explains the sexism and aggressiveness of much adolescent male style, for, like lower-class men, young boys are also denied the social means to exercise the power that our ideology tells them is the prerequisite of their masculinity.”

“The alienated audiences was one that was aware of the performance as an arbitrary construction of the real, of the difference between players and characters, and was therefore aware that the people and incidents on stage were there to perform social an ideological actions that could only be understood in terms of their relationship to the dominant ideology. Alienation produced a thinking, interrogative socially aware audience.”

“In the economies of late capitalism leisure displaces labor, consumption displaces production, and commodities become the instruments of leisure, identity, and social relations.”

“Thus, gender ideology no only creates ides about femininity but it also shapes conceptions of masculinity.”

“...the new man cannot exist without the old monster masculinity. All the new men are aware of how masculinity is constructed and therefore how they differ from its traditional form...new men do not have to "lack" the attributes of real men, and therefore make them more appealing to viewers, but it also closes down some of their potential for a revisioning of masculinity.”

“On the other hand, identification as a relationship of audience to performance disguised the arbitrarily constructed nature of the performance and encouraged the audience to experience the representation as though it were the real, and, in particular, to see characters as individually real people. This blurring of the distinction between the representation and the real disguised the fact that people and incidents were on stage to perform ideologically determined actions and made them appear as innocent, objective relections of reality. It made them appear prodcuts of nature, not of culture.Identification encouraged the audience to share the experiences and emotions of the characters and thus produced a feeling audience, not a thinking one, an accepting not an interrogative one, and one that understood incidents and actions through individual experience rather than through a sociopolitical framework.”

“Identification then becomes a process of imaginative wish fulfillment which can be, and is, criticized from at least two points of view. The moralists criticize it on the grounds that it is mere escapism, and in encouraging people to imagine a better existence for themselves discourages them from working to achieve it in reality. At the other end of the spectrum, the ideologists argue that identification is the process whereby the values of the dominant ideology are naturalized into the desires, almost the instincts, of the individual, and are thus endlessly reproduced and perpetuated.”