uh... why do we still have gender roles? (angry rant with questions)

When looking for a reason as to why an issue hasn't been taken care of. Just look for who or what would gain from it.

Who would gain from gender roles ? "Men". Let me explain.

Who holds most power on Earth ? Men. Whose gender is said to be the strongest, the smartest and most fit to have power ? Men.

Now imagine if gender roles were to be abolished, those aiming for the power would have to face twice as much concurrence and would have to do things that were considered as women's. Like looking after kids etc...
How do you keep the power ? By eliminating your opponents.

Now on a day to day basis, men feel stronger than women. They take pride in being men, so much that it's considered good manners to assist a woman and to pay for here. Thus, men will pay twice as much each time they are with a woman and women will be able to spend their money trying to fit what's expected of them (make up, clothes etc...). (I'm not saying that being a man isn't pressuring though, but most take pride in this pressure)

(In our civilisation) It has been established ever since Adam and Eve (in the books, not in real life) that women were weaker than men, even more since Eve has been created -after animals- from Adam's side. It's been like that for a while.

Now, if things were to change about this matter... Why would people stop there and not change other things that are considered unfair ? They would realize that the world ain't all fun and justice, thus the ones holding the power would lose their legitimacy... And they don't want it to happen.

What I've said is pretty simplified and direct though, that's only the part that we can see. I could go on for a while as to why those holding the power wouldn't want gender roles to disappear...

 

Gender roles are not necessary. I do believe that we need a balance of feminine and masculine characteristics but any gender can provide those traits. You should be allowed to wear whatever you feel comfortable in. For goodness sake hipsters wear whatever mess they trip over on in the morning so why shouldn't you be allowed to wear clothing not specifically designated to your assigned gender.

 

lol one of my friends is the biggest hipster in north carolina and I know he'd agree with you

 

It's seen as 'weak' for men to do anything associated with women. We still live in that kind of society, unfortunately.

 

Men need feminism too.

 

Very much so.

 

Why? Well, why do we still have people that write laws to discriminate us? Why are there countries that persecute LGBT people? Why does many of us have to die to satisfy tradition of eons past?

It is just laziness. The kind of laziness where one does not want to go away from a comfortable place. It is the mental laziness of people who simply refuse to educate themselves, the emotional laziness of people whose hearts can't even be moved at the deaths of our children, the ethical laziness who doesn't even justify their hateful acts on their own, instead hiding behind a book claiming they are speaking for God.

As long as we still have this kind of apathy in people, it won't change anytime soon.

 

Again with blaming everything on men. Men are evil. Men have the most power so everything that is wrong with the world is their fault. We hold secret meetings and discuss how we can oppress women. Once women actually are equal, it will be nice that people can stop blaming men for everything and see that the world still is a hellhole.

Anyways, we have gender roles because people, men and women, like it. It's that simple.

 

It's not about blaming men and misandry. The facts are that men hold the most power and have created these gender roles. By making a joke about "secret meetings" it is very insulting towards women who are factually unequal in pay, status and representation. There are more male CEO's named John than there are women CEO's in total.

 

more like...: we have gender roles because the spanish inquisition said so, aka - because religion 0_0.

 

Exactly.

It's not about blaming men, It's because we live in a patriarchal society that overvalues men (that BEHAVE how men are "supposed" to) and masculinity. It has nothing to do with individual men and women. Women also promote the same bullshit, and It's because they live in a society that is patriarchal; thus they can also be misogynists and feminine men-shamers.

Same as if, we lived in a society where women controlled the world and the government, you'd have women that do not agree with men or masculine women being oppressed, and you'd have men that want to shame men/masculine women. Because of the societal beliefs.

 

Just because women are underrepresented doesn't mean that they are being oppressed. It could simply be that more men are CEO material than women are.

 

What makes someone CEO material?

 

When we talk about gender roles we tend to focus down exactly how and why gender roles may or may not be a 'social construct' without giving much consideration to the wider mechanics. I do believe much of our gender roles are genetic and the issue arises from the fact that our society has developed much faster than our genes can.

Now many people say they don't care for appearances and that they find someones personality more important - while as social beings a personality is heavily factored in to our relationships - is almost always nonsense until said person faces that scenario for themselves. It's why someone with a BMI of 35 is 260% more likely to be single for 5+ years than someone with a BMI of 25! Why is this? Survival of the fittest, when a girl is looking for a partner she instinctively turns down the fat person as genetically we are trained that this is someone more likely to have health problems which may be passed onto an offspring than a 'normal' skinny person, the same concept applies to someone with one arm noticeably bigger than the other, someone with a really small head and so on. And it's because of this we see woman as weaker, generally speaking they are, like it or not. If we didn't have this inherent idea that woman are weaker then men would not have protected them many 100s of years ago and our species would have dies out (or turned gay XD). While we don't live in forests now and machines do much of the heavy work and a woman can operate a machine just as well, we have arrived at this advanced stage much, much quicker than our genes can evolve. Also for the fact that any species can find itself thrown back, for all we know in 400 years (which isn't very long in evolutionary terms) we may face an apocalypse which could land us right back at 3000BC where we needed our inherent gender roles.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/upshot/fewer-women-run-big-companies-than-men-named-john.html?_r=0

Why only 14% of top execs are women - Mar. 24, 2015

The glass ceiling is still very, very real.

When it comes to gender roles in modern society, many of them are unneeded.

 

I think gender roles are somewhat based on something that I believed as a teenager was completely true and that is natural selection and survival of the fittest. So all the men who are feminine are considered weaker than the men who are masculine, therefore the men control everything and the gender role is created as men being strong and tough as they control most things. (Austin in relation to your point, we are not blaming men here, we are actually blaming the way the world looks at this natural selection and survival of the fittest). I certainly agree with Foz with his opinion as without the gender roles in the period before civilization, the human race would probably be dead as the men would not have been strong and tough and been able to protect the women, children and feminine men of their tribe.

 

See, I'm not entirely sure I agree with the implication that this is a conspiracy, per se. At least not consciously that way. The bigger issue is that we've got ingrained behavior in both sexes that there are expectations of themselves and others. If you don't "police" yourself, someone else will. And it won't always be those in power, and it isn't always on a conscious level.

The irony here though, is that while a society that places the sexes on different tiers of hierarchy does create a level of privilege not afforded the sexes deemed "unworthy", the hierarchal power structure also does a good job of retaining a lot of power within a select few, and then abusing everyone underneath them.

I'd wager that many men would gain from breaking down gender barriers. Just not the ones at the top. And I'm not sure many women who have managed to break through the glass ceiling would be as willing to relinquish their power or influence in the name of more equality between those at the top and the bottom, either.

One way this plays out historically for men though, is the concept of disposability. Need to fight a war? Well, you've got folks to feed to the meat #######. Did someone wind up on the streets due to a lack of jobs? Well, they must not be worth anything if they couldn't make it, that freeloader. The treatment of labor in general as "resources" to be managed, etc. etc. Add to that the musical chairs behavior of our economic system, where there are always fewer chairs at the table than there are people, and you get all sorts of "fun". And I'll note I'm intentionally trying to avoid comparisons to women here, although there are expectations that in the case when you can save a limited number of lives, men get to wait at the end of the line behind the women and children, especially if they aren't in a position of power among other men.

Anyhow, what I'm mostly trying to get here is that the idea that men as a class benefit from gender roles oversimplifies the complexities here. From a certain angle, it is totally true that men as a class benefit from the current setup. But many still benefit from tearing down gender roles compared to where they are at today. But the issue is that many of those don't get why it would be a benefit, or see it as a detriment (e.g. MRA's claiming sissification), based on... you guessed it, current gender norms.

---------- Post added 25th Mar 2015 at 06:05 PM ----------

This thought concerns me. The issue I take with it is that we somehow aren't influenced during development by our environment. We learn through example and demonstration very quickly, and very young. We get ingrained with ideas, both helpful, and unhelpful. Many of them we simply take for granted.

It is this mechanism that allows culture to be varied across the globe, is the reason for the plethora of religions, and even is the mechanism that allows society and culture to evolve over the course of generations. I'd say this sort of mechanism of change for humans is more important than biological evolution right now.

I don't think even CEOs know the answer to this one. :lol:

 

We evolved into gender roles, at this point they are just tradition. We have gender roles because there are people that don't want to change tradition. Also if a lot of people can't understand something on a personal level they chose to ignore it or pretend that it doesn't exist, so if someone is comfortable with their gender and everyone they are close to is comfortable with their gender then they are more likely to say things like people chose how they are or something along those lines. The people that stand up for "gender equality" (like many modern feminists such as Anita Sarkisian, and MRA's) are often just as bad too because they only tackle one side of the problem. Gender roles aren't going to go away anytime soon in my opinion, we just have to hang around people that understand us. I think things will slowly start to get better as more people stop conforming to gender roles and we begin to have a stronger and stronger voice but it's a long ways to go before no one is discriminated against for changing the gender they were assigned at birth. There are still people alive today that think people of different races shouldn't date, so, ignorance will be a factor for a long time unfortunately.

 

To some extent you are right most men like the position of power that society puts them in; they like to lead and dominate women, and many straight women like being dominated and controlled by men. Why do you think that Fifty Shades of Grey is so popular? Some other straight women are making it known that they don't appreciate having a man tell them what to do and have joined the feminist movement. But still these women generally like being catered to, they like it when a man pays for their dinner or engages in acts of chivalry like holding the door for a lady. I have brought homemade treats to women that I like and even made a hand-crafted card once, still I have never had a girlfriend. Straight women generally don't like feminine men and straight men don't like women to be "manlier" than they are. I am an exception. I used to think that I might be transgender, but I have no physical dysphoria. Sometimes I think, "If only I were transgender, then I could date butch lesbians." Still I am confident that I will find someone who is right for me someday, maybe a bisexual woman who is used to being butch for her girlfriends will take a liking to me. You see, there are some people whose gender identity does not match their gender expression and these are the people who are most hurt by imposing gender roles on everyone. Ultimately it is my belief that just because most people like and conform to gender roles that doesn't mean that everyone has to. Just like how because most people are straight, not everyone has to be.

Wow, I ranted so much! I just couldn't hold back my feelings on this subject.