[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]LoRez wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
Gender is a role that people play, basically. Gender is measured in terms of appearance, behavior, clothing and that sort of thing. It’s kind of like saying it’s the sex we are inside our brain. My point is that we are born this way. You and I were born with male sex characteristics and into a male gender role. Most people are born into the gender role that corresponds with their sex, even homosexuals for the most part (aside from their sexual preference, of course). We always feel comfortable being masculine.
Of course we learn from the examples our father set, but we all kind of come to our own determination about HOW masculine we behave, because we don’t all mirror our fathers’ masculinity, and that is an integral part of who we are. People can’t really demand a different level of masculinity from us one way or the other because that’s an inherent part of what makes us US.[/quote]
Something of a related note, but I don’t really have the ability to eloquently explain it.
I’ve had some of my own internal conflicts trying to make sense of some of my own skills/interests within the context of traditional gender roles. I’ve always had more of an artistic bent, so interior design, gardening, landscape design are things I’ve been interested in and enjoyed. (Along with many many other things.) I also spent some time this past year to teach myself how to sew, and I bought myself a good sewing machine. For that matter, if my girlfriend needs her pants hemmed, or something tailored, she comes to me.
I don’t really have a problem with these – I mean, they are interests and skills, and a part of who I am – but because of how they’re perceived by society I had to basically persuade myself that it’s “ok” for me to be like that. They’re definitely things that are perceived as being feminine. For the most part, I’ve rationalized it as “the best in those particular fields happen to have traditionally been men, and it’s only this modern outlook that makes it seem feminine”. That, and “as an adult, it’s ok to acquire skills, no matter what they are”. But even so, it still makes me feel a tad awkward.
There’s a traditional gender role that I perceive that basically says “men don’t sew”, “gardening is for women”, “interior design is for women and gay men”.
Granted, it doesn’t change the fact that I also fit many parts of the masculine gender role.
(As an aside, even the fact that I noticed that the guy’s nails, lipstick and stitching were coordinated is not very… masculine)[/quote]
Furthermore, there’s nothing wrong with quilting or sewing or whatever.
You know who I think was a pretty masculine guy in a classic sense of the word? James jesus Angleton, father of counter-intelligence in the CIA. Now, the guy was most likely clinically paranoid, but he was also a man’s man. He was an avid fly-fisher, he also tied all his own flies, his capacity for alcohol and food was literally on par with Hunter S. Thompson, he was a ladies man in his youth, he was an intellectual and he fucking hunted spies in the middle of the Cold War for several decades.
But you know what his other hobbies were? Poetry and cultivating orchids. This guy was such a patient, devoted person who could extrapolate the wildest theories about the KGB from literally thousands of seemingly innocuous pieces of information (all of which he kept in head), that he spent more than a decade raising his own, unique variety of orchid that would have been registered in some international orchid registry except that he refused because he didn’t want his name published ANYwhere due to the secretive nature of his work. This guy was the most secretive, reclusive, mysterious person in a world of people whose lives depend on being just that.[/quote]
So, as long as there’s a mental disorder involved, crossing gender barriers is ok? Lol.
That was pretty interesting, I’d actually never heard of him. I know Churchill had his fondness for gardening too.
Sometimes I wonder where we ended up with this masculine/feminine dichotomy of skills, since a study of history shows that most of the things currently considered feminine – at some time or another – were also considered masculine. Or even just among different cultures in modern time. Indian men and their taste in jewelry. Russian men and their taste in classical music and dance. The Scots and their kilts 
Of course, FWIW, I bought the sewing machine to make a canvas tent, since I got tired of sewing the thing by hand. It wasn’t until later that I decided I might as well learn how to use it for other things.[/quote]
The current form of gender roles has most of its roots in the shift in the nature of the household during the Industrial Revolution. Women went to work, but during the Victorian Era things shifted to the point where women were expected to be at home doing all the domestic stuff while men were at work. Women were relegated to the private sphere, men the public sphere.
Women were expected to be domestic and dainty and all that fluff as part of projecting this image that the home was a safe refuge from the harsh realities of factory life and that sort of thing. Since poor women were still forced to work in many cases out of necessity, this sharp contrast in gender roles was much more prevalent at the middle-class and upper-class levels.
There’s obviously much more to it than that, but the genesis of modern gender roles can be traced back to this time when a woman’s role in the household made a fundamental change. Prior to this, and in the earlier stages of the Industrial Revolution, women and men both worked to sustain the family and a delineation between roles was much more blurred.
So that is where the notion that “domestic” activities such as cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, gardening, sewing and that sort of thing are feminine comes from.
