Sugar and spice and everything nice...that's what little girls are made of. Boys don't play with dolls. A woman's place is in the home. Nice guys finish last. Boys don't like smart girls. Boys will be boys. All of phrases are ubiquitous in our society. These are things that we have all heard, whether it be in the media, or from our peers, or even from our parents. And other these phrases have stemmed from our societal ideals of gender, and act as a way to keep these traditional gender values present in modern society.
As children, we are assigned our gender from even before birth. When parents find out the sex of their baby, they begin to buy things that are exclusively blue or pink. They buy either toy cars or dolls. They paint the nursery blue or pink. The idea of certain attributes, whether it be liking of a color or certain toy, belonging to a certain gender, is so engraved in our minds that I didn't even have to tell you which gender received which. You already knew. As I discussed in my last post, we are influenced from the second we are born by our families, and throughout the entirety of our lives by our peers and the media. All of these groups are what are called agents of socialization, and they act as a tool to teach us how we are supposed to be to be socially acceptable.
Our society teaches us that based on our sex, we must behave in a certain way, and keep ourselves within a certain box to be normal. I'll start with the girls. Agents of socialization teach girls that we have to have certain characteristics. We need to be pretty, dependent, nurturing, kind, easily controlled, affectionate, simple-minded, and willing to succumb to a man's will. Girls are taught that it is unattractive to be intelligent or strong-willed, and since our main goal in life should be to find a man that will take care of us, we cannot be this way. Now, obviously this idea of total females being sub-ordinates to men has lessoned, but these traditional female values are still rooted in our society. But, more importantly than anything else, girls are taught that we must be beautiful. We must fit this certain cookie-cutter outline of beauty, we must be thin and tall, and have perfect hair without styling it, and a perfect face without makeup. We must fit this outline of beauty to be considered attractive, and if we don't, we are less of a woman. This effect of the media on the self-esteem of girls is discussed in the movie Killing Us Softly 4, where ads are examined to show how women are edited and objectified, which leads to a huge effect on girls, causing them to view themselves as less. So, girls begin to put in hours of effort in order to achieve this effortless beauty. Girls grow up yearning to look like the models they see in ads, not knowing that those models don't even look like that. In a Dove ad we watched in class, we saw the process that goes into taking a normal woman and making her billboard ready. Being continuously exposed to these feelings of inadequacy cause girls to be exceptionally critical of themselves. In another Dove ad, it said "Amy can find 12 things wrong with her appearance. He can't find one." Girls are taught to be incredibly critical of themselves and others, while boys are not. This leads to the national epidemics of eating disorders and a influx in the number of cosmetic procedures done annually.
The effect of society on boys is almost opposite of that on girls. Boys are told that to be a real man, they need to be tough, smart, independent, strong, stoic, and dependable. Boys aren't allowed to show emotion, unless of course, that emotion is anger. Boys are raised watching movies and playing video games full of extreme violence and learn from it that in order to be a real man they need to be intimidating and controlling, and gain to ability to intimidate through violence, as was demonstrated in the movie Tough Guise. But, if there are any boys who do show sensitivity or don't wish to be violent, they are made fun of. They are called "gay" and a "fag." This "gay-baitng" is what causes boys to try and demonstrate their masculinity through extreme displays of violence, like school shootings, as discussed in the reading by Kimmel and Maher. Boys, specifically white, suburban boys, are the most likely to commit acts like school shooting because of history of "gay-baitng," and this constant blow to their masculinity causes them to eventually explode their feeling into this display of extreme masculinity through violence.
Now, I have just described gender by splitting this idea into two distinct groups, as is the norm in our society. In actuality, this is not how gender is at all, or sexuality. Americans tend to try and have two distinct groups, one being masculinity and heterosexuality, and the other being femininity and homosexuality. But in reality, these groups are just the two ends of a large spectrum of gender and sexuality. There are people who are gender queer, and don't find themselves fitting into either the groups of boys or girls, but somewhere in between. There are people who are bisexual or asexual, and people who are transgender or transsexual. There is a huge variety of gender and sexual identities in the world, even if society only wants to recognize two of them.
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