Gender Roles
Gadzuko
Join Date: 2002-12-26 Member: 11556Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2002-12-26 Member: 11556Members, Constellation
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">I'm tired of reading about Iraq</div> As the topic description says... I think Iraq is being rather overanalyzed right now. It's happening, nothing we can do right now, and time will tell what's actually going on. I made this so I'd have something non-Iraqish to read. Now, moving on...
By "gender roles" I mean the traditional male/female roles of men going out and hunting/earning money to support the family while the women stay at home, clean house and make food. Now, I don't particularly suppport this, but I was just wondering if any of you guys (or gals <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> ) have noticed a lot of that sort of gender stereotyping in your country (wherever you may live). In the oh-so-enlightened US we like to think of ourselves as striving for equality all the time, but do other countries feel the same way?
By "gender roles" I mean the traditional male/female roles of men going out and hunting/earning money to support the family while the women stay at home, clean house and make food. Now, I don't particularly suppport this, but I was just wondering if any of you guys (or gals <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> ) have noticed a lot of that sort of gender stereotyping in your country (wherever you may live). In the oh-so-enlightened US we like to think of ourselves as striving for equality all the time, but do other countries feel the same way?
Comments
I think most men are lazy (I'm one of the laziest , else I wouldn't post there !) and don't want to "lower" themselves to do menial tasks , while women have a greater sense of responsability and accept doing anything when needed (I live alone in my flat and let you imagine the incredible disorder here)
I'm in psychology as I type so I just <b>had</b> to hope in here and spew my 2 cents
I personally think that gender roles are declining in the years, as a female firefighter and the man who stays @ home is becoming more and more prevelent
just like 1.1
change is a <b>good</b> thing
I want to be a stay at home father, when I have children one day. I enjoy cooking, doing the dishes, dancing by myself, playing on the computer, engaging my mind, body and soul. In my relationship with my girlfriend who I live with, she regularily pulls in more money from her work just because she is more socialable (read: charasmatic), as near as I can tell. She also has this uncanny ability to read my mind, but that may be my fault for being so honest with her and telling her the basic thoughts of the male mind that I have noticed. These basic thoughts seem to be territory, food, and sex. Those seem to govern men's actions towards other people, kind of deciding at what point they are willing to fight for, even die for something. Anyways, how this ties into things, is that on Vancouver Island here in BC, Canada, it seems the majority of women are in dominant positions over men, mostly thanks to the fact the women seem to have a better time getting gainful employment in our tourist, services, retail, institutional, and entertainment industries, where as the manufacturing, mining, fishing, lumber, and military industries have been in decline, with the exception of construction and security, which just seem to ebb and flow. Oddly enough, with women being most of the wage earners around here, business owners still seem to be dominantly male, but also interesting to note, those males seem to have had a good deal of wealth from their families to begin with. In social terms, this is where the golden rule saying "He (in this case, She) who has the gold, makes the rules" comes into play, and the women are more prevailantly in what used to be male dominant roles.
This became quite evident to me in a story my girlfriend related to me. She was helping a customer, a wife, over the phone at work, and the customer wanted a phone book name changed. My girlfriend put the name of the wife first then the husband's and then their last name. Upon telling the customer this, the woman exclaimed with some shock that my girlfriend had done this.
"Which do you usually put first, the man or womans name?" the customer exclaimed.
"The woman's, of course" my girlfriend replied non-chalantly.
"That's unheard of, we don't do things like that down here (In the USA)! Change it to the other way!" the customer demanded.
My girlfriend related to me that she found this to be very odd, that the woman's name always came first where she came from. That's saying something, isn't it? Which name comes first, the man's or the woman's, that it should cause such curious social reaction from that woman on the other end of the phone in another country. Why did it even matter? Just came across as a clear indicator of the roles reversing to me.
However, one simple hormone does make a massive difference in physiology and psychology. Men and women can be equals, and should be treated as such, they can't be the same. See each person as an individual and you're on to a winner.
The position of the reproductive organs doesn't say a thing about a person or his/her qualities and thus 'role'. End of the story as far as I'm concerned.