Why is the following true?
At the beginning of American society, women were to be viewed as a symbol of innocence and perfect silence. They were to cook the food their husbands caught while he was out hunting all day. They were suppose to clean while their husbands were out getting firewood. They were suppose to take care of the kids while their husband was working in the yard. It was a beautiful system for the time period, but the time period has evolved where the view of that system hasn’t had a full chance.
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When America began to form its own and new society, men were the ones that got to choose what was acceptable and what wasn’t. Being that they were the ones in charge, of course no one would question them when they did things moralistically wrong to their wives (beat them, cheat on them, etc.), causing now, for that same gentle and innocent view of women to still be stuck to them. And, when they step out of that view, they get shamed upon. However, would this system be different now if woman would have had a say? Your immediate response is probably “yes." But, let’s think about this.
Standards For Men
Believe it or not, the views of what a man should be is as strict as the view set out for women. It’s just not a bad view for the men that are heard in society. Where women are viewed as this innocent and quiet symbol of beauty, men are viewed as this rough, tough, and strong symbol for society. And anything less than that is viewed as taboo as well.
For most of my life, I grew up without father figure. My mom raised me as a single mom for most of the time. So, it’s just natural that I’d pick up habits and traits directly from her that it was uncommon for guys to have. As I grew up, I dropped a lot of them and am a lot more masculine than I was a kid. However, that didn’t help me in grade school. I would get picked on and called “gay” as if it was an insult before I was even old enough to understand if I was or not.
To go with that, another thing that society get’s messed up is that being gay wouldn’t make me act less masculine. Just simply being more feminine would make me seem act less masculine. There are masculine gay men and feminine straight men, and their is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Androgyny … Is this our solution?
Taking Psychology 101 allowed me to learn a little more about the mind and how it correlates to viewing someone a more “feminine” and more “masculine." It, also helped me understand how we place men and women in these different categories because it’s what we expect of them. However, did you know that masculine and feminine aren’t the only categories? There is one that isn’t really mentioned called “androgyny." It’s when someone has both masculine and feminine characteristics. Even though I am more masculine now than I was when I was a kid, it turns out that I am actually androgynous. I have almost equal amounts of masculine, feminine, and neutral (another one of the categories not mentioned a lot) traits that make up my personality. Even though society doesn’t really accept it, I have learned to do the accepting for myself.
I know my subtitle could be misleading, but a good point lies behind. Psychology, also, taught me that no one person is one hundred percent one category. We all have characteristics from all four. Meaning, if you think about it, makes us all a little androgynous. If we as members of society could learn to give people a clean slate and view all people as neither opposite end of any set of categories, things would be a lot easier. If we could start at a middle category and let a person move up or down the scale on their own, we’d have a better understanding of people as individuals rather than as a whole sex or gender. In my opinion, it could possibly unglue gentle and innocent from women and rough and tough from men.
-Samuel Brown
