4th Post! Gender Roles and Tendencies

💗Hey there friends!💙

It's been a very interesting week full of pondering and discussion around the role of gender and how that makes males and females different, especially within the context of family. I think sometimes we attribute these traits and behaviors to who your mom, sister, brother, or dad just is, but most people follow those certain patterns of gender roles just in their nature. This nature is theorized to be caused by so many things. Some people believe it is evolutionary in that the man used to hunt, and the woman would care and nurture.  

In my own experience growing up and even now my family is a great example of male and female gender roles. My mom does not work anymore, and my dad works to provide for our family.  My mom stays home and takes care of the kids and all other domestic duties such as cooking and cleaning. 

I am a religious person, so I truly believe this to not be a coincidence. I believe God created man AND woman in His image, but also with their own divine power and responsibility. Men and women each have distinct roles to take on, but one thing to understand is that these roles do not have to be taken on in a cookie cutter manner. You can be an androgynous man who still provides, protects, and presides over his family. And you can be an androgynous woman who still nurtures and cares, it may just look a little different.  

I have seen aspects of this in my own life. I grew up pretty close to the definition of a tom boy by nurture not nature. I grew up with two brothers and an older sister. My older sister is ten years older than me, so she did not live at home. This made it feel like it was just me and my brothers a lot. Because of this, most of my time was spent with them. A lot of my hobbies, personality traits, and behaviors were very boy-like, just because that is all that I was surrounded by. It was not necessarily that I was not interested in girly things or activities, I loved barbies and dress up and all of that sort of stuff. It came down to, did I want someone to play with? Yes? Then It’s going to be something having to do with sports, video games, mud or some form of competition.  

In fact, I remember a lot of my summers as a child were spent filling our garden box with hose water to make mud. Then we pretended it was a construction zone and drove our tiny toy cars around for hours. Was there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. Well, maybe my mom didn’t like her garden box getting destroyed. But I do think that there is no harm in a girl having more boy associated hobbies. But as I mentioned before, in my case I developed these traits from nurture or my environment. But what about if it is by nature? What if a boy wants to do girly things and they have all brothers? And why does this happen? As I mentioned previously there are many theories as to why there are gender roles in the first place but what about theories for the outliers? I personally have no idea why this would occur genetically outside of the context of nurture.  Then there are also the theories for why homosexuality or same sex attraction occurs. Or rather theories into what patterns can be found or predictors of a person being attracted to the same sex.  And this discussion could be pages and pages long, but for now, keep researching my friends.

Chloe