Gender Roles Essay Example
For as long as history has been recorded, men and women were two distinct groups of people. As time has passed different reasons for upholding these gender standards have come and gone but they have always more or less remained the same. Due to the apparent physical differences between gender, preconceptions of gender based on my upbringing, personal experience, and challenges to these ideas from others, I think there are certainly undeniable differences between genders on average that determine roles people fit into. However, a lot of these roles are artificial constructs that have been passed down from generation to generation.
Oftentimes gender roles are portrayed as entirely based on a person’s sex, or alternatively, that there is no natural difference in the different genders’ large-scale behaviors and preferences. But I think it’s fair to say that neither extreme is correct. Usually, males are stronger and taller than women, meaning they would usually be a better fit for making up almost the entirety of manual labor. Meanwhile, females are the ones who actually have babies, and normally they have a stronger emotional attachment towards their babies, which lead people to suggest that mothers should be the ones who are meant to care for children. I have seen this idea pushed on me and when I was younger, I believed this, although I couldn’t explain why exactly I believed it back then. Going to any playground or classroom I was definitely not considered super normal because I was a man but wasn’t the strongest or that sporty and that was a bad thing. I think this, combined with peoples’ preconceived notions of what they and others should do with their life based on their gender do explain the differences that we can observe in gender.
In the past I thought that because these genetic trends in peoples’ sexes and genders existed, that people should choose to fall in line with these roles because it would be unnatural and somehow wrong to go against this. However, after reading “The myth of Mental Illness” By Thomas Szasz, my mindset has definitely changed. While these facts of body structure might explain the difference, we see. I think there should be no expectation by society for a person to fall in line with a specific role in life for a few reasons. Just one is that it is entirely a person’s preference if someone wants to live their life in a certain way, should society not stop them, especially if they are able to provide for themselves and not make anyone else worse off.
In summary, I don’t think the idea that men and women should have roles assigned to them should exist at all. There’s no need for it, people can naturally sort themselves into what they prefer to be and the world is better off because of that. The idea that sex might influence people’s behaviors doesn’t actually change whether or not someone should align with the normal behavior of a group. If the rest of the world ran by my conception of gender roles then people would not be forced by systems of government, schooling, religion, or family to fill in roles that they don’t want to.
