Katie Kenney

All around the world, people are told to act a certain way and do certain things just because of their gender. Boys are told to like sports from a very young age. Little girls are only given dolls to play with. In middle school and high school, if you don’t live up to what your gender is supposed to be you get bullied and made fun of. If girls are “too involved” in sports, sometimes they aren’t let into certain social groups. If a boy wears a pink shirt to school, he is ridiculed for his choice of fashion. As people get to adulthood, the roles placed on them increase in responsibilities. Men are shamed if they are stay-at-home dads and don’t bring in the main income. Women are treated differently if they can’t cook well for their family.

This greatly affects how many see themselves. People can get hurt emotionally, even physically, because of the roles associated with their sex. For some, it comes to hurting themselves and even suicide because they feel like they don’t fit in. This obviously isn’t a good thing. However, many people don’t see how this hurts anyone. They don’t understand how it can’t be a good thing to have standards to live up to. Well, there are many reasons why.

First, gender roles influence everything a person does almost immediately from birth. If a couple is told they are going to have a baby boy they most likely will incorporate the color blue somewhere, whether it be the clothes, the crib sheets, or the walls. If a couple is told they are going to have a baby girl, then they most likely will incorporate the color pink in the baby’s life. What do colors have to do with a person’s life that makes them so important? Why are they gendered? The only time colors should have genders is in foreign languages we learn, and that’s just so we know how to put them into sentences.

Now as children grow up, gender roles can cause them to act certain ways. If every girl grows up playing with dolls and is told to not get rough with her brother just because she’s a girl, she will think she can’t be rough and loud but has to be gentle and quiet. Girls will grow up thinking they have to stay silent all of the time, because if they get loud or fight for what they think is right they will be unladylike. If they play multiple sports and get really physical then they will be equated to a man for the sole reason she played rough. Women should be able to play rough or play hard without being told those things are characteristics of men.

If a boy grows up and is told to not play with a baby doll because it’s a girl’s toy, then he will live in fear of being associated with typically female things. What is so bad about a little boy, who may be a father in the future, to play with a baby doll and take care of it? There shouldn’t be anything wrong with being kind and caring, yet many men are shamed if they show those signs because those characteristics are typically associated with women. Men are told not to cry because it makes them “less of a man.” They should not have to be scared to show their emotions, yet most men are.

Because gender roles still exist, it can be hard for women to have jobs known as important and big. Not a single woman has ever been president even though forty-three people have sworn into office, six of them with the name “James,” four of them with the name “John,” and four of them with the name “William.” No rule or law says a woman can’t be president. However, being president is almost always seen as a male’s job. Now Hillary Clinton seems to be trying to change that, but I don’t think it will change anytime soon. It has been imprinted in our minds the president is supposed to be a man, just like a person who runs a big company is supposed to be a man.

In the world of business, more men named “John” own and run big companies than all women; all of them. Also, more men with the name “David” run big companies than all women. If there isn’t something wrong with that then I don’t know what else could be. A woman should be able to run a business just as easily as a man can. Women should be seen as capable of being in a big-time work position instead of the secretary standing in the background looking pretty.

A big problem with gender roles is how people see themselves. There are many standards for men and women to live up to. People mainly see the standards of women because they seem to be shown more in our society through magazines, billboards, and other advertisements on TV and other places. There are still standards men feel like they need to live up to, but they are subtler than women’s. On every magazine cover, there are pictures of shirtless men, who are insanely in shape, used to entice women daily. The people who take these pictures and put them everywhere are giving every man the idea he needs to look like that to get a woman to like him. They are shown these pictures of men with six-pack abs and freakishly muscular arms with captions that say something along the lines of women wanting them and pictures of men who don’t work out every day, all day with captions of people being disgusted by the way they look. No one should be ashamed of how they look and publishing companies are completely ignoring that and blowing the egos of fit men up and lowering the self-esteem of the men who aren’t necessarily in shape. Also, because men supposedly are not allowed to talk about how they feel, especially if they feel inadequate, almost every man and boy stays silent in their struggles with seeing their worth.

Now as I said before, women also have standards they feel they need to meet. A lot of magazines today show pictures of women wearing revealing clothing with completely flat stomachs and beautifully clear faces. As women and young girls see these covers everywhere, from stands in a clothing store to the racks in an aisle at the grocery store check-out, they just assume everyone is supposed to look like that and are discouraged when they look in a mirror and realize they don’t. Young girls don’t know the girl on the cover has been photoshopped to an unbelievable extent, they think the woman really looks flawless. They don’t understand almost no one goes through life without at least one pimple and uneven skin. They don’t understand it isn’t completely healthy to aim for and obtain a perfectly flat stomach.

There are many misconceptions with how the “perfect body” looks. Let me tell you something: there is no such thing as a perfect body. What?! Yeah, no such thing can be obtained. People are all made differently with different body types, different looks, and different thinking processes. Nobody is the same so there is no way everyone can look the same, but our society has put it inside our minds we can and should look exactly alike. Every girl wants to have the perfect body that is fit and beautiful. But, we have been trained only to see beauty in what is perfect in societal terms and that leaves out every human being who hasn’t been altered by a computer tool. No one seems to get that anymore. The people we see in magazines aren’t us, and we can’t live up to them. We shouldn’t have to. Women should not feel like they need to look a certain way to be desirable and wanted. Women shouldn’t have to feel like they need to wear makeup to look pretty and buy expensive clothes to look cute, yet many women feel like they do need to. They feel like need to look a certain way to be accepted by others.

Going along with the societal standards of everyone’s bodies, people feel like they need to dress a certain way. Often girls feel like they can’t wear baggy sweatpants and large t-shirts because it isn’t feminine enough for everyone else. Sometimes boys feel like they can’t wear pink or certain shades of purple because they are too girly and not masculine enough for them to be accepted. Girls are told to show off what they got because people need to know they have a nice figure. Boys are told to wear tight shirts that show off their abs if they are fit and to just generally not wear clothes that make you think of women. This just shows men are told not to be like women, not to show characteristics typically feminine. This also shows women are told not to be seen as masculine because it means they aren’t acting the way they are told to. There is so much fear of the opposite sexes being somewhat similar to the other, and I don’t understand why. We were both created by God with the same purpose: to glorify Him and preach His word, so there should be no trouble in being a little bit like the opposite gender.

There are always problems when diagnosing someone with a mental disorder. There are multiple questions you need to answer before you can know what is wrong with them, and sometimes some questions are answered incorrectly, looked over, or misunderstood. It is hard to fully understand what is going on in another person’s mind, but people have done enough research and experiments to understand a part of the human brain and the emotions it makes people feel. However, many people live their lives with mental disorders because no one was able to understand what was going on with them inside their heads.

Many people are not diagnosed with certain disorders because they are acting the way society says they should be based on their gender. ADHD can go undetected in men because some symptoms of it are aggression, impulsive actions, lack of restraint, and many other things associated with how the typical male acts. It is not new for autism to go unnoticed in women because some symptoms are poor eye contact, inappropriate social interaction, and a repetition of speech that all seem like things people who feel like they need to act certain way do. Women are often told to look and act a certain way in social situations so they often are nervous and act similarly to the symptoms of autism. It is unspeakably awful someone is denied the knowledge of having a disorder and the help she needs just because she seems the stereotypical version of her gender. Some boy can go through his entire life overwhelmed by his constant anger and his inability to focus and never know he could’ve gotten help.

Sixty-four years: that’s how long it took for white women to vote after all white men were enabled to. That doesn’t even account for all women of color who had to wait for a longer time to vote, some longer than others. Other rights have been withheld from women even though men were allowed to have them. Women had, and still have, an entirely different set of rules to follow than men. They are often seen as less than men. Women’s opinions can be seen as unimportant or useless just because they are made by women. They are told what they are saying shouldn’t be taken seriously because the emotions they have are clouding their thoughts and making them say things they don’t really mean. Therefore, their voices were unwanted and ignored completely for an exceptionally long time.

Women go through life being told their emotions are invalid. They are told what they’re feeling isn’t real and it is all an illusion they made up in their pretty little head for some attention. Either that, or they are told their raging hormones made them believe what they are feeling is real when it is all just a figment of their imaginations. Many women stop talking about how they feel because of this. Telling themselves they are making everything up, girls think nothing they feel is real. When no one accepts what you think, speak, or feel, what are you supposed to do? How can you continue to be happy in conversations where everyone grinds your opinions to a fine dust? It’s hard to do that, no matter who you are, and it shouldn’t be a normal thing that happens every day to people all the time.

I dealt with how men can be scared to share their emotions earlier and I will again. Men are told to stay emotionless. They are told to have a hard façade and to not let anyone into their minds. Men bottle up all of their emotions because they are so often bullied and shamed for showing some feeling every once in a while. If they are in a rough patch of their lives, they feel like they can’t go to anyone and talk about it. Everyone should be able to talk to someone about the hurt they are feeling and other emotions they have. People should be able to talk to people if they don’t know what is happening inside their minds. But a lot of people don’t. And that is all because of the stereotypes given to them.

Frequently gender roles are forgotten and overlooked. Other times they are neglected because if they were paid attention to, then whatever the person was saying or doing would not seem proficient. At certain times, I guess it is okay, but when it makes people, who want to be themselves and not care about what the social norm is, feel bad, it is obviously not good. When people are scared to share how they feel it is not beneficial. These gender roles aren’t helping anyone. They aren’t making people joyous. They are trying to confine people in boxes that are uncomfortable and impossible to be cheerful in. They try to make people act a certain way because it’s what they believe is right. But they don’t care about all of the self-esteems they have caused to fall so low they will never be lifted all the way back up again or the people who feel like they don’t and never will fit in somewhere. They don’t care and don’t seem to matter, but they absolutely do.

Bibliography

Christina, Greta. “5 Stupid, Unfair, and Sexist Things Expected of Men.” AlterNet, 24 July 2010. Web. 29 August 2016.

“Victims of Sexual Violence: Statistics.” Rainn, 2016. Web. 25 August 2016.

Wolfers, Justin. “Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John.” New York Times Company, 02 March 2015. Web. 29 August 2016.