Hello! I wrote this for TOK, but I quite like my ideas here so I wanted to share it on my blog.
How
and why are gender biases and stereotypes affected by a person’s upbringing?
I find gender differences fascinating. People tend to
separate women and men. The extent to
which they do this differs from culture to culture, but it’s common for there
to be stereotypes assigned to the two different gender groups.
Here
are some of those stereotypes…
·
Women belong in the house.
·
Women must raise kids.
·
Men must go to work.
·
Men are strong.
·
Women are emotional.
·
Women are bad at sports.
·
Men are messy.
·
Women are clean.
·
Etc.
The origin of these is even more fascinating. A few years
back, I had read a comic book about the evolution of humankind and the history
of all their cultures and societies. This comic book, named The Cartoon
History of the Universe, written by Larry Gonick, had its own explanation
for the origin of sexism. It explains that when humans adapted to a sedentary
life, their cultural habits began to change. Men were tasked to do things that
required physical strength, like hunting, fishing and fighting. But women had
everything else in control. They were respected, because they gave birth to
kids and continued their race. Men did not realize that they had a part in
reproduction too. One day, a shepherd
man watching his sheep, realized that coitus had something to do with babies.
This led to the entire male population keeping their wives in their homes just
so they could know where the babies were coming from. And this was how sexism
began.
But this is sexism in history. How does sexism start… in a
person? It all depends on how the person grows: what they learn from school,
their families, and their environment. Sexism is just an opinion. But it is an
opinion with big effects on society.
The moment I wrote down the question I asked as the title, I
thought of my own childhood. My own parents had not taught me the rules of
being a girl, I had learned from my friends and people around me. Girls got to
wear skirts or pants for a school uniform, but boys did not have this choice.
Girls’ parents chose to dress them in pink and decorate their room with this
colour. It was like a label. If you had anything pink, you had to be a girl.
Why did we have to be labeled like an object? Why did boys wear blue? Why did
there have to be a difference?
This difference of colour was a small detail. Growing up,
our games were different too. Girls played house, they pretended to have babies
and cooked and did things their mothers did, while boys played video games and
threw action figures at each other. Why is it that girls play a game so
applicable to life? Were games supposed to prepare you for something? If so,
then as a girl who enjoys video games, I must be seriously prepared for an
apocalypse or must be a master of hand to hand combat, as well as being a
housewife.
I never really thought about gender roles, until my cousin
was born. Watching my little boy cousin grow, I got to experience what it felt
like to grow up as a boy. You were always reminded how to behave. “Boys don’t
cry.” “Boys are strong!” “Boys don’t play with Barbies.” “Boys don’t wear
pink.”
Now I can make connections between things. I’ll never truly
understand where sexism comes from, but this is my theory. Boys, being
constantly told to be strong, connect other things with strength. For example,
if they don’t cry when they fall, they must be strong. If they don’t wear girly
colours, they must be strong. If they play sports well, they must be strong.
And by coincidence, girls just happen to do all the things they classify as
‘weak’. So if someone is feminine, they must be weak. And this causes some of
them to think they must be better than girls, because they are strong.
Sexism is affected by language, reason, and emotion.
