The differences and relationships between gender roles

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        In our society today, men and women perform distinctly different roles which are based on nothing more than their biological gender.  Although these roles do not hold true for each individual, the majority of people live out their lives in accordance with these extremely pervasive roles.  Society tends to assign classes of social roles to “male” individuals and classes of social roles to “female” individuals (as society perceives their sexes).  These gender roles limit what both males and females can and can not do.  Gender roles enslave individuals and force them to be what others want them to be.  They are perpetuated and reinforced by the mass media and society in general many ways, some which are obvious and others which are more subtle.  In many societies, there is a strong tendency to exaggerate these gender roles, and it seems to frequently jump from a valid observation to a false conclusion.  Individuals within the culture are expected to conform to these “norms” and are socialized in manners which constantly reinforce the beliefs and behaviors which are prescribed and presupposed for them.  We live in a sexually repressive society, but in order to break out of these binds, people must define their sexuality on their own terms, and not be manipulated and dominated by cultural “norms” of beauty, desirability and behavior.      

Gender role is a social construction of a particular cultural group’s expectation of another person’s behaviors, attitudes, values and beliefs based on their perceived biological sex.  Biological factors have strong impacts on occupations that are judged by a society to be appropriate for men and for women.  The problem is biological sex is also a social construct, since doctors deciding whether to call a child a boy or a girl is primarily cultural, not biological.  There are four ways to be determined as being “male,” “female,” or both: the first is genitalia, females are determined by their clitoris and males by their penis; the second is gonads, females have ovaries and males have testes; third is their chromosomal sex (the 23rd pair), females have XX and males have XY; and the fourth determining factor is hormones, females have estrogen and males have androgen.  

The sex of a child is literally created. In the case of intersexuality, doctors remove body parts and use plastic surgery to create “appropriate” genitalia.  Societal beliefs are reinforced by medical tradition of rendering intersexual births invisible, to make the child more socially “suitable.”  Intersexuals are seen as being deviations from the “norm” and seen as people “who need to be ‘fixed’ in order to preserve a two-gender system, are also studied to prove how ‘natural’ the system is to begin with” (Fausto-Sterling, p. 74).  Even though intersexual births occur with high frequency, medical technology attempts to render bodies male or female to insist they are either male or female are prevalent, rather than having the individual admit the social nature of their ideas about sexual differences.  

In many cases with intersexual children who have surgical operations to be male, it is not how his sex organ can function, but rather used only to define the body as male, since “most intersexual males are infertile, so what counts especially is how the penis functions in social interaction- whether it ‘looks right’ to other boys, whether it can ‘perform satisfactorily’ in intercourse” (Fausto-Sterling, p. 58).  Even Carl Linnaeus, a botanist of the eighteenth century, classified plants by their reproductive organs, but “his system did not capture fundamental sexual functions.  Rather it focused on purely morphological features- (that is, the number and mode of union)- exactly those characteristics of male and female organs least important for sexual function” (Schiebinger, p. 17).  It is more about what society deems appropriate in defining gender rather than the actual function of the organ.  The general assumption was that there should only be two sexes; male or female, which would be basically determined by their genitals and sexual organs.  Yet gender and gender identity is far more complex than merely the description of a person’s genitalia.  

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Generally, when a child is born intersexually, doctors assure the parents that they will be able to “identify the ‘true’ sex that lies underneath the surface confusion.  Once they do, their hormonal and surgical treatments can complete nature’s intention” (Fausto-Sterling, p. 50); they claimed that although biological factors influence the course of human sexuality, social learning is much more powerful and effective.  Therefore, doctors insist that early genital surgery is imperative because “our conceptions of nature of gender difference shape, even as they reflect the ways we structure our social system and polity; they also shape and reflect our understanding ...

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