I just spent the last three days driving in the car with my older brother from his former home in Salt Lake City back to our mom's house in Baltimore. At some point we were talking about relationships, and he brought up that he's come to find through his recent experiences that men and women are just very different. I told him that I came to find the exact opposite and realized that men and women are the exact same and that people are just different. Oddly enough, I actually didn't have to make much more of an argument after that for him to agree with me. Still, it got me thinking about the classic gender vs. sex argument.
The very basic distinctions between men and women are mostly biological, aka your sex. But for most of us our gender is planned out before we are even out of the womb. Why else are so eager to find out the sex of the baby? We are socialized to death about who we should be and what we should act like as young boys and girls before we can even slightly comprehend it. I guess that's why we ended up just narrowing down to the opposite sex having cooties when we were little.
Going through the toy aisles in Target make me so uneasy as an adult, because I can see these awful projections of gender on to children screaming out. You can spot aisles intended for little girls because it's covered enough bright pink products to make you nauseous from one walk through. It's mostly dolls or some other kind of crap that place an unnecessary amount of importance on our looks. There seems to be this idea that girls need to ridiculously skinny with long flowing hair, preferably white with blond hair and blue eyes, but these days the token minority is acceptable so long as our only distinguishing features are skin, hair and eye color. Meanwhile boys toys are completely the opposite. Most of them aren't even based on human male "action figures"-clearly not dolls as you can't change their clothes.
I get that in this grand free country of ours, the easiest way of keeping women oppressed and consumer driven is by feeding us an virtually unattainable standard of beauty. This way, we keep ourselves fixated enough on attracting men and tearing each other apart, so we never really fulfill our true purposes and passions. But now that times have changed and we legally be oppressed anymore, isn't time for gender socialization to change too?
Wouldn't it be easier, not to sound cliche but, if we all just got along? Little boys and girls could play with the same toys or toys that they're actually interested in without being outcasted. We could learn and discover what we really want from life at a younger age without worrying about what's expected from us. We could learn to interact with the opposite sex so that we're actually comfortable enough when we reach those awkward teen years to just be ourselves. Relationships and marriages would probably last a lot longer too if we were more comfortable with ourselves and less concerned with attracting others.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I wish our consumer driven society would give us a chance as people not as men and women. We should all know from day one that it's not about appearances, without our toys and the media screaming the contrary. We should all be given a fair at doing what we loved to do without being told we're weird, or even worse, to add to the still widespread acceptability of homophobia, gay.
