Gender Roles
The following reflects quite a few of my opinions on feminism, gender roles, and gender equality in our society, and also touches on some of the deeper issues beneath them. It comes from a discussion I've had recently at school with T.O.F.U. (Thinkers of Fantasies Unthought), a club that a friend and I started last year in an attempt to attract together the creatively minded people in our school and have some neat free discussion and artistic expression. It's a really great club, although digging up members in my academically obsessed school has been dissappointingly difficult. Anyway, we recently had a whole discussion about gender roles. Some of the points that came up were:
There are other things going on as well that I hadn't the time to touch on. If you notice anything blatantly missing or would like to discuss any of the above, please e-mail me at dragonfyre52@hotmail.com Just know that you are by contacting me giving me license to send you e-mails as long an full of run-on sentences as the above, which started out as an e-mail to one of the people who has gotten herself hopelessly entangled on discussing the trends of society with me... Heh heh heh...
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~October~
We had the whole feminist movement to free the rights of women so that they were acceptable not only in a traditionally "female" sphere but anywhere they wanted to be. But there were several problems with this movement. First of all, there was not an accompanying movement to give men equal rights to women, so that while now women are acceptable in the workplace or the home, men are still largely expected to be the primary breadwinner. The unfortunate side effect of this failure is that if the woman wants to have a career and the couple wants to have children, there is noone home and the children are sent packing off to day care starting early in the morning on into the late evening, so that they hardly see their real parents, which has some scary psychological effects which we are perhaps seeing the first results of with the proliferation of school shootings. This problem is made worse by the constant need in society today for more and more possessions, so that it is now considered necessary to have at least two cars in a household, which forces both parents to work so they can afford them, and then there's the drive to send the darling children off once more once they're old enough into expensive prep schools to ensure that they're "competitive" in the race to go to the ideal college, but at this point I veer dangerously close to a whole nother rant of mine, which I'll avoid for the moment. This failure to try to equalize the rights of all people, and not just women, has also rather doomed the feminist movement itself, because when we realize the damage sending the kids off to day care every day causes, it will become necessary for women, because men certainly can't respectably be "just housewives," to return to their role as caretaker of the home.
There are many pressures put on boys to fit into the traditional stereotype of masculine behavior. This happens in sports, as you pointed out, as well as in general behavior. Boys who read too much, show sensitivity or good manners, are artistic, or violate any of the other stereotypical and, in my opinion, rather annoying qualities which are defined as manly are accused of being either "girly" (a sadly terrible insult) or gay. This is even enforced by some women who have become brainwashed by society's conventions and restrictions, so that guys think it is more attractive to be rude and chauvenistic than kind and chivalrous.
But this does not mean that it is only males who are restricted by societal conventions. Girls are also taught the importance of being "feminine," which all too often translates into either passivity, vanity, or cattiness. Of course some people manage to escape these stereotypes, like any others, and the female stereotypes are becoming less restricting than the masculine ones, but there are still girls who think their time is better spent putting on makeup than listening in class, and it is a simple fact that girls' math scores decline quite a bit in comparison with boys' once they hit high school, and I don't bet it's because the girls are getting stupider.
