Gender roles and romantic relationships: new cultural values based on the desire for a utopia

New technology is often believed to lead to a utopia in which people can escape social constraints and traditional cultural values to (re)construct alternative gender roles in forming romantic relationships. If this utopia could be created in real life, women who live in a masculine culture might be able to transform traditional patriarchal culture. In this study, social exchange theory (SET) is adopted and interpretive research is applied to analyze the data collected through in-depth interviews to examine the utopian vision of an empowering online dating game for women, which reverses the traditional Taiwanese gender roles that men adopt in real life when they court women. Forty participants were involved in the study. The results indicated that pre-formulated offline gender roles and cultural values governed most participants’ online social exchanges and interactions, although a few participants changed and transferred their behaviors from online (i.e. utopia) to offline (i.e. real life) contexts. The findings of this study suggest that the function of any utopian vision rests on hope and the desire for a better future by inspiring creativity, innovation, and change in the present.