Gender Obsessed: Society's harmful fixation on the gender binary
Even before birth, the gender of a child is pondered, celebrated, and obsessed over.
The constant gendering of everything in a child’s life is expected by now, even though children do not understand society’s actual meaning of gender until age 7, according to childcare service Provider-Parent Partnerships.
However, children begin to stereotype their assigned gender at 2 years old, assimilating into the gender roles that are portrayed in the toys they play with, the media they watch, and the remarks and actions of their parents.
Toys are a huge part of the development of a gender identity, and their gendering is extraordinarily apparent, with most toys pushing children into concrete gender roles.
For example, toys marketed to young girls often push household duties, like taking care of children and cooking.
Meanwhile, toys created for boys often encourage physical activity, like sports equipment, or sometimes even violence, like fake guns.
This can actually be quite harmful to a child’s development.
According to a study held by Psychology professor Judith Elaine Blakemore, toys aimed at young girls focus on “physical attractiveness, nurturing, and domestic skill”, while toys that target boys are “violent, competitive, exciting, and somewhat dangerous.”
“We concluded that strongly gender-typed toys appear to be less supportive of optimal development than neutral or moderately gender-typed toys,” said Blakemore. “If you want to develop children’s physical, cognitive, academic, musical, and artistic skills, toys that are not strongly gender-typed are more likely to do this.”
Gender typed toys often reflect the popular belief that pink is for girls and blue is for boys.
However, until the 1940s, pink was associated with boys, and blue was associated with girls, according to Crash Course educator Hank Green.
Crash Course in an online educational tool that many teachers and students utilize.
“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls,” said an article published in Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department in 1918. “The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”
Many believe one of the reasons gendered colors changed was because Hitler used pink triangles to label homosexuals so as to “kill them more efficiently,” according to Green.
Basically, pink became an effeminate color partially because Hitler associated the color pink with homosexuals.
However, the socialization does not stop at early childhood.
A teenager’s idea of their gender identity is shaped by the entertainment found in films and on TV.
According to a study by psychology professor L. Monique Ward, “nearly every media portrayal, scene, and storyline conveys a message about “normative” and expected behaviors of women and men.”
Media, from commercials to award winning films, consistently push the harmful ideas that men are more dominant and strong while women are pretty and domestic.
Many portrayals of women depict them needing to be saved by men, and many sexualize them extremely.
This onslaught of stereotyping noticeably influences a teenager’s idea of gender normalcy, especially pertaining to a woman’s attractiveness and a man’s masculine behaviors.
This excessive assignment of gender roles in the media contributes to many problems.
“Female undergraduates exposed to stereotypical portrayals focusing on women’s domesticity expressed less interest in quantitative careers, performed less well on a math test, and avoided math test items in favor of verbal items more so than did female students without this exposure,” said Ward.
In addition, exposure to gendered media lead to body image issues in all genders, with women focusing on thinness and men focusing on muscle development.
This shows that restrictive gender roles in the media are leading to a constraining idea of what their gender means to students, which limits their career and educational opportunities and their comfort level in their body.
In addition, media portrayals of relationships between males and females perpetuates the myth of fundamental biological differences between genders, according to Psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde, PhD.
According to Hyde, very few actual differences between male and female behavior were shown in her study.
This myth not only contributes to the excessive gender roles found in society, but can limit communication between men and women because of the tendency to focus on the few differences rather than the many similarities.
Excessive gendering is all around us, and it is because of this that we must be cautious of what we are being told.
We should not let society’s idea of what gender means dictate how we interact with others and how we feel about ourselves.
Gender identity means something different to everyone, and it is up to us to figure out how we
relate to these gender roles.
Photo Credit: Sophie Adams
