darkoshi | Entries tagged with stereotypes

Thought Experiment:

What if "men" were physically female, and "women" were physically male?

The "men", being female, would be the ones who got pregnant, but the male "women" would be the ones who spent more time with the children after their birth. The male women (the mothers) would be seen as the more nurturing parent.
Female fathers and male mothers.

The heterosexual female men would be sexually attracted to the women's flat chests and nipples - those would be considered sexy and a major turn on, whereas the men's breasts would be considered plain/utilitarian. The women's dicks and balls would also be considered sexy and a turn on for the men.

It would be considered nudity to display a woman's bare (often hairy) flat chest,
but it wouldn't be considered nudity for men to go topless and to display their breasts.

The accepted fashion for the male women would include colorful flowery dresses, skirts, jewelry and make-up. The women could also choose to wear pants and t-shirts, or most any other item.

The accepted fashion for the female men would include pants, suits and ties, shorts and t-shirts. Men's fashion choices would be much more limited than the women's, and any overstepping of the fashion rules would be met by ridicule, shock, hostility, and/or suspicion of homosexuality. However, most men wouldn't even think of overstepping the rules, due to how well those rules had been impressed upon them as they were growing up. They've been taught to think that they would look silly, ugly, or not "manly" in women's clothing.

The female men might have a higher sex drive in general than the women, and there would be a lot of sexually suggestive entertainment and porn produced which was geared towards the females.
There would be cultural/social expectations for the male women to remain chaste and to not have a lot of sexual partners. It would be more socially acceptable and expected for the female men to sleep around, than the male women.

The female men would be seen as strong and tough, even though they are on average physically smaller than the other sex. Culturally, it seems natural for them to be the ones who get pregnant and go through the hardships of childbirth, since they are the stronger sex.
The male women would be seen as physically and emotionally weaker, as well as more social and chatty.

The female men would tend to be more aggressive than the male women, and in groups, these men would tend to be loud and boasting. There would be stereotypes that the female men loved sports, hunting, drinking beer, and sex. There would be other stereotypes that the female men were more likely to be geeky and into computers and video games, than the male women.

The main characters of most movies would be female, and it would be relatively rare to have more than single male character in a movie, and even then the males' main role would be sexual and/or as a crime victim for the female to "save".

There would be stereotypes that the male women tend to care about fashion, romance, and touchy-feely type stuff. There would be stereotypes of them being sly, deceptive, and manipulative, as well as stereotypes of them being less intelligent than the females.

Some of the stereotypes might even supposedly be based on measurable average differences between the sexes.

In the past, many of the male women would have been stay-at-home moms, although nowadays most of them are in the workplace, even though they don't earn on average as much as the men.

The male women would be more likely to be victims of domestic violence.
The male women would have a high likelihood of being sexually assaulted during their lifetimes, yet society would often blame them for the assaults, while the female perpetrators would rarely be prosecuted or convicted.

There would be female gay men who were attracted to other females.
There would be male lesbian women who were attracted to other males.
There would be transgendered people who were born physically male, but felt more like a man than a woman.
There would be transgendered people who were born physically female, but felt more like a woman than a man.
These groups would face a lot of hatred, intolerance, and discrimination from much of society.

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In a world/society like that, given your current sex, where would you feel you fit in, gender-wise?

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I think I would feel in-between, as I do in this world/society. I wouldn't particularly identify with either gender. I still would prefer to have a flat chest and not menstruate and all that... although in terms of getting surgery, the transition from being able to go topless in public to having to cover up would be a nuisance.

I was thinking about this post which discussed someone's child pointing to his pajamas and saying that he didn't like the color pink in them, because other people had told him that boys don't like pink. The parent responded in what seemed a quite good way.

But it made me think about what are good ways of discussing the topic of gender-based rules with children? It isn't necessarily wrong for a boy or a girl to want to fit in with other boys or other girls, and to do so by following society's rules for their gender. But it would be good to explain to the child that those "rules" are not "facts", and that not everyone agrees on the rules, and that everyone is free to choose to follow the rules or to go their own path, without it indicating that anything is wrong with them.

Suppose that there is a group of people that you esteem and relate to, and you feel that you belong to that group, and you want the other members of the group to accept and admire you as one of them. If the majority of the other members of the group indicate that there are certain things that they as a group like or dislike, aren't you (subconsciously?)(especially when you are a child?) likely to adopt those same likes and dislikes yourself, unless your own prior opinion of something was much stronger than your desire to be part of the group?

It must be subconscious, because I can't think of any situation where I as a child consciously decided to change my likes/dislikes, based on what other people liked/disliked. But if someone you admire expresses an opinion, it colors your own views; your admiration causes you to esteem the other person's opinions, and makes you more likely to adopt them as your own.

Aren't gender-based rules themselves silly and arbitrary? But if there were no rules, could there be groups? If there were no separate social rules and expectations for girls and boys, and if boys and girls were only distinguished by their anatomy, would there be any reason for a child to identify strongly with belonging to the group of boys versus the group of girls? Or would boy/girl-ness be like one's eye-color? I don't think that most people identify more strongly with people of the same eye-color than with people of other eye-colors. It is simply a physical attribute, not a group identity.

But gender is not simply a physical attribute; children do tend to form group identities based on sex/gender. Why does this happen... Is it mainly due to positive and negative feedback that children receive in their early years? Boys are mocked and ridiculed by other boys and admonished by some adults, when they don't follow the rules for being a boy. They are accepted and praised when they do follow the rules. This teaches them what the rules are. Observation of other people also teaches them rules. Or does the group identity (gender) mainly come about because the child relates more to people of a certain sex? Do the boys actually tend to prefer playing with toy trucks more than with dolls, and do the girls tend to prefer the dolls, and is that how the group identities form? And then, when they find out that the other truck-playing or doll-playing kids prefer orange soda to grape soda, does it affect their own soda preferences? It may be a combination of both relating to a group and getting the positive/negative feedback.

People who relate to a group but who aren't accepted by that group have difficulties. If you are a boy who likes the color pink and who likes to wear dresses, you may not be accepted by other boys or by other girls. You may get a lot of flak from both kids and adults. If you relate to the boys, you may decide to stop wearing pink and to stop wearing dresses, so that the other boys will accept you and so that you'll get positive instead of negative feedback. If you relate to the girls... in today's culture, you'll probably have a hard time no matter what you do.

In addition to gender, there are some other group associations/identities that are also taught from birth - religions, cultures, national identity. But other group associations tend to be chosen by the individual. If you enjoy playing sports, you may identify with other sports-playing people. If you enjoy learning about science, you may identify with other people interested in science. By then you are usually older and less influenced by other people's opinions. But you may still be subconsciously influenced.

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So, back to the youngsters. What can one say to them about gender-based rules?

"It's not true that boys don't like pink. There are some boys that do and some that don't.

People who say that boys don't like certain things, or that girls don't like certain things, or that boys are one way and girls another, are just saying what other people have always told them. But those things aren't true for everyone. They're only true for some boys and some girls, not for all of them. People who say things like that are trying to get you to follow *rules*. They have rules in their mind about how boys should be and about how girls should be. But there aren't any true rules. You can choose to be however you want to be - you can choose your own rules for yourself. You'll still be just as much a boy or a girl as you were before."

Something personally objectionable that I sometimes notice myself doing, is that when I'm reading an email or a post by someone who has said they are female, or who has a feminine name, is that the "voice" I hear in my head while reading their words is high-pitched and sort of squeaky. Whereas if someone has said they are male, or if they have a masculine name, then the voice I hear is lower-pitched and not squeaky.

If someone has said they are FTM, sometimes that will change the voice I hear to a lower pitch, but not always. If sometime has said they are MTF, I may hear a slightly higher pitched voice, but it is usually not squeaky.

In real life, females have a wide range of voices - some have lower pitched voices, and some higher. Males have a wide range of voices too, and even some males have squeaky voices. Some people talk faster, and some slower, regardless of their sex.

A squeaky fast-talking voice to me implies excitability and non-calmness, and seems somehow less wise than a lower-pitched slower-talking voice. When hearing someone talk in person, my perception of them is also biased based on their voice, but at least it is biased based on their "real" voice, not an imaginary one I have made up for them.

By hearing the "voices" that I hear in my mind, my perception of a person and my interpretation of they write is already biased from the outset, based solely on my assumption of their physical sex.

Current Mood: summery

I don't only have mental templates for "man" and "woman", but also for other categories and/or subcategories such as "transsexual man", "transsexual woman", "lesbian", "butch lesbian", "femme lesbian", "gay man", "male androgyne", "female androgyne", etc. I think these must not be as deeply ingrained in me as the basic "man"/"woman" templates, as they must have been formed much later in my life, but they exist too. An exception might be the "androgyne" categories... in a lot of children's stories and shows I read and watched when I was a kid, I think I perceived many of the characters to be androgynous or masculine/androgynous. For example, animal and other non-human characters and children protagonists. Even girl characters in books were often rather non-girlish or at least non-womanish to me. And that is how I perceive my own gender most of the time, as androgyne... default... not-otherwise-specified.

For people I come across online, if their online name is non-gendered and if they haven't given any clues as to their sex and gender, I tend to perceive them as neutral-masculine until I get other clues, or if I consciously think about it, I try thinking of them as a male/man and then as a woman/female or maybe even some of the other above categories, wondering which way is "right" until my curiosity is answered.

But for people I meet in real life, I generally perceive them based on my "man"/"woman" mental templates.. the other ones listed above I can only apply once I've found out the person is actually in one of those categories. I don't ever look at someone and think they are gay or transgendered; at most I may curiously wonder whether they are or not, and in what way.

If you are born a male, people accept you as a boy and a man, and if you are born a female, people accept you as a girl and a woman. You may not be accepted by everyone as a "good example" or as an epitome of manhood or womanhood, nor as an attractive specimen of one, but generally, you are accepted as a man/woman simply based on your birth sex, regardless of your personality, appearance, and actions.

People perceive your gender based on their belief about your physical sex, which is mainly based on your physical appearance, but also on things such as your name and on what gender other people have ascribed to you. Perception and acceptance go hand in hand. If you are perceived to be male, you are accepted as a man, and if you are perceived to be female, you are accepted as a woman; at least, until those perceptions are brought into question. When someone is perceived as one sex, but then discovered to be another sex, people generally change their idea of that person from being a man or woman to vice-versa. This mental shift isn't something as simple as "Oh, I thought he had green eyes but they are actually blue"... it's a radical shift in perception of the person.

When a transsexual person has a sex-change, it is just a physical change; a change in appearance. Their personality remains basically the same. If they had been born their target sex instead of having had surgery and hormones to achieve it, they would have been accepted as that gender by general society. Yet, the fact that they had to change their body causes some people not to accept them as their stated gender. These people think there is something inherent in one's birth sex which makes one a man or woman, and that this cannot be changed even when the body is changed, or even when the person claims that their gender never matched their physical sex.

In this book I am reading, it sounds like the mother, when first coming to terms with her child being transsexual and having a sex-change operation, could not understand that her child was still the same person he had always been. To her, he had previously been a woman, and was now becoming a man, and to her, men and women are different, and so therefore he was becoming someone different than he had been before. This bothered her, because she felt she was losing the child she had known, when really the child was just going through a physical transformation.

People have subconscious preconceptions about what men are usually like and what women are usually like. Perhaps these preconceptions may change slightly over one's lifetime, influenced by the people one interacts with and the things one experiences. But once these subconscious preconceptions are formed in early childhood, they are the mental templates which the mind uses when thinking about actual people. The less well-known the actual person is, the more these templates are used to "fill in the missing picture" about that person in one's mind. As one interacts more with an actual person, that person may no longer fit cleanly within one's mental template for that gender, but that template still somehow affects how one thinks about the person.

Given two people, one who appears male and one who appears female, both with the exact some personality and mannerisms, I would still perceive them differently not just based on their appearance, but also on my mental gender templates. I am most definitely not immune to these kinds of preconceptions. And shifting the gender template I use for someone is not an easy task for me either. The more a transgendered person's physical appearance resembles their "target" sex/gender, the easier that mental shift is for me. This is why transgender people like being able to pass... it makes it easier for other people to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

Perhaps some of those gender preconceptions are valid... a man who is soft-spoken, kind and gentle probably would still have had a very different life than a woman who is soft-spoken, kind and gentle... but not necessarily.

It is hard to figure out what one's gender pre/conceptions are... they are like mental flavors, as I've written before. Not necessarily any kind of hard and fast beliefs about what a man must be like, or what a woman must be like, but... flavors... fuzzy fill-in-the-blank-nesses, and if there are no blanks, then surround-perception-of-person-with-this-flavor-ness.

And what is the correlation between perceived gender and sexual attraction? Why is it that I can feel sexual attraction to some people whom I perceive to be a "man" or a "non-woman", whereas I feel like I couldn't feel sexual attraction to a "woman"? Is my mental template for "woman" only composed of things I am not sexually attracted to?

Gender is a flavor in the mind.

When I read a story containing male pronouns, the story has a different mental flavor than it does with the pronouns changed to female ones. Even though the content of the sentences is the same, they taste different.

He had an interesting day. In the morning, a friend gave him a most unexpected gift, and he spent the rest of the day pondering it.

She had an interesting day. In the morning, a friend gave her a most unexpected gift, and she spent the rest of the day pondering it.

In this case, the female pronouns feel more... light and fruity. The male ones feel more straight-forward and drab. Depending on the actual story, the different pronouns would probably engender other tastes in my mind.

If it were just a matter of light-and-fruity versus straight-forward-and-drab, I might prefer light-and-fruity. But gender flavors are much more complex than that, and can be situational too. Age also factors into it. "Old woman" is a different flavor than "lady" or "girl", and "old man" is a different flavor than "gentleman" or "boy", etc.

When I think of how my own gender tastes, it doesn't taste solely male or female to me. Sometimes it feels more like one or the other; most of the time it is tasteless. When I think about how I taste to other people (how they perceive my gender), I don't want them to taste me as female or male, because I don't feel either or those is my flavor. I want them to perceive my flavor, as the same flavor I taste of myself.

And yet, everyone has their own tastes. Other people's tastes are different than mine. How they perceive male and female flavors is no doubt somewhat different than how I perceive them.

Based on someone's perceived sex, you assign a flavor to them in your own mind. That person's flavor to you will eventually be modified and enhanced based on your other perceptions of them, but that stereotypical gender-flavor will usually still be there, giving them a different underlying/overlying/fringe flavor than if you perceived them as a different sex, even if everything else about them remained the same.

When you are told, or led to believe, that something is strawberry-flavored, even when it isn't, that changes your perception of its flavor somewhat. If you are given a dish of pink vanilla ice cream, it will taste differently than yellow vanilla ice cream does, based on your experiences of pink strawberry ice-cream. Even when you *know* that it is vanilla ice-cream, it still tastes somewhat different. The flavor isn't just based on the actual taste, it is also based on the appearance, and your own stereotypes based on that appearance.

It is difficult to override the flavors your mind assigns to other people based on their perceived sex, even when you want to do so.

Even when I look in the mirror at myself, my mind sometimes assigns a flavor to me, which does not coincide with the flavor I *feel*.
Even when I think about myself, my mind sometimes assigns a flavor to me, which does not match the flavor I *prefer*.... I feel I taste better with a different flavor... I like myself more when I taste myself as a certain flavor.

It bothers me when someone cheerfully says "It's a BOY!" or "It's a GIRL!" about their new baby, after finding out its sex. Nowadays this is happening even months before the baby is born.

I feel like it wouldn't be good for me to say anything, though. For one thing, I feel like it would be bad luck for me to talk about a baby before it is born. Like counting chickens before they've hatched.

For another thing, it doesn't seem right for me to intrude upon someone else's happiness by interjecting my own viewpoint on the matter. They are just sharing their joy; it wouldn't be polite to start debating them about gender and stereotypes. And most likely, their baby boy or baby girl will end up being a typical boy or a typical girl, anyway.

But, still. Surely the sex-determination methods used on unborn babies aren't so accurate that there aren't occasional mistakes even in that part. And what about intersexed babies? You never hear anyone cheerfully say, "It's an INTERSEXED BABY!"

Just that one word, "boy", or "girl", can change your whole picture of a yet-to-be-born child. It happens even for me; just because I am more aware of the gender-stereotypes doesn't make me immune to them either.

"Boy" brings up visions of a little child with a boy's haircut and wearing blue and black boy's clothing. It brings up visions of the child wearing a baseball-cap, and playing sports and videogames, and pushing and shoving other little kids. And of the child growing up into a sullen aloof teenage boy who hangs around with other teenage boys.

"Girl" brings up visions of a little child with long hair wearing pink and purple girl's clothing. And of the child playing with soap bubbles and dolls. And of the child growing up into an teenager who thinks it is important to wear make-up, and who spends a lot of time chatting on her cell-phone with her friends and worrying about what to wear.

It seems so unfair to limit a child's future like that, even if just in your mind. To put them into a box.

It seems so unfair that just because you have one set of genes, that you end up being dressed in one style of clothing and not another. That you end up being cajoled into having a certain style of haircut and not another. That you end up being taught that pink and purple are good colors for you, or bad colors. That friends and relatives end up buying you certain types of toys as presents, and not other kinds of toys. That you end up being grouped together with other children who have the same sex-gene you have, and that you're expected to spend most of your playtime with those children. That you're expected to be rough and tough, or sensitive and caring. And that you're generally expected to eventually start feeling romantic attraction to the other sex. That you're expected to grow up and get a good job with which you'll be able to provide for your family, or you're expected to grow up, and to want to get married and have children, and to nurturingly raise those children.

All that, just because of one little word.

Why do people think it is so wonderful to find out their baby's sex, and to be able to put it into a box like that, and to limit their own expectations of how the child will turn out to be?

I suppose most people don't see it as a limiting thing... before knowing the baby's sex, they are faced with limitless possibilities, and therefore can safely envision nothing about their future child. Finding out the baby's sex allows them to envision something; it gives them something to believe and to look forward to about the child, even if it doesn't turn out to be true.