Gender Roles in Society Essay -- Gender Role Behaviors and Attitudes

Boys leave behind be boys, and girls volition be girls few of our cultural mythologies seem as natural as this one. But in this exploration of the sexual activity signals that traditionally tell what a boy or girl is supposed to boldness and act like, Aaron Devor shows how these signals argon not natural at all hardly instead are cultural constructs. While the classic cues of maleness competitive posture, self-confidence, a tough appearanceand the traditional signs of womanhoodgentleness, passivity, strong nurturing instinctsare often considered normal, Devor explains that they are by no means biological or psychological necessities. Indeed, he suggests, they can be richly mixed and varied, or to paraphrase the old Kinks song Lola, Boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Devor is dean of social sciences at the University of Victoria and author of Gender blend Confronting the Limits of Duality (1989), from which this selection is excerpted, and FTM Female-to-Male Trans end up uals in Society (1997). The clusters of social definitions used to target persons by gender are collectively known as femininity and masculinity. Masculine characteristics are used to identify persons as males, while fair(prenominal) ones are used as signifiers for femaleness. People use femininity or masculinity to claim and communicate their membership in their assigned, or chosen, sex or gender. Others recognize our sex or gender more on the basis of these characteristics than on the basis of sex characteristics, which are usually by and large covered by clothing in daily life.These two clusters of attributes are most commonly seen as mirror images of one another with masculinity usually characterized by dominance and aggression, and femininity by passivity and s... ...socially order hormonal instructions which specify that females give want to have children and will therefore find themselves relatively helpless and dependent on males for software documentation and protecti on. The schema claims that males are innately aggressive and competitive and therefore will dominate over females. The social hegemony of this ideology ensures that we are all brocaded to practice gender roles which will confirm this vision of the nature of the sexes. Fortunately, our homework to gender roles is neither complete nor uniform. As a result, it is possible to flush to multitudinous exceptions to, and variations on, these themes. Biological evidence is equivocal about the source of gender roles psychological androgyny is a widely accepted concept. It seems most seeming that gender roles are the result of systematic power imbalances based on gender discrimination.9