Masculine or Feminine?

     Hello everyone! Another week has gone by and thus I return with what will hopefully be an entertaining and informative blog post! This week we touched on the topic of gender and gender typical behaviors. That can typically be a fairly touchy topic for some (and I personally hope to avoid that to some degree today), but I think its also a topic that is fairly popular in this day and age. Well, let's get right into it!

    We started our discussion in class this week by thinking of some typical gender traits for both males and females. Some typical things showed up on our list, like "aggressive" and "competitive" for males and "nurturing" and "emotionally expressive" for females. There were lots of other traits we came up with for each of course, but hopefully you get the idea. These traits are fairly general in nature (hence why we call them "typical" traits), and depending on our culture, we may associate other things to be typical between males and females as well. Some things that come to mind that might be seen as typical among males are sports or cars, while some things that might be culturally typical among girls are getting their nails done or or fashion. It can really be anything that comes to your mind when you think of males or females.

    As I was thinking about this, I had a few thoughts that I think would be interesting to discuss here. While we may have core typical traits for a given gender, I think we sometimes attach those traits to specific outward manifestations, like how if a man likes sports, he is competitive, and is therefore masculine or if a woman likes fashion she is detail oriented and is therefore feminine. We may have men show competitive traits ways other than sports, or women may show an orientation to detail in other ways but we may not consider them as masculine or feminine because they fail to show those traits in the typical ways. This led me to think, how often do we attribute masculinity or femininity to what someone does rather than what they actually are?

    While I don't think it is the main determining factor in what we consider masculine or feminine, I do think it has an effect on what we think. I can think times in my younger years when some boys were rejected or seen as feminine because they didn't play sports or didn't like to compete in that way, even though many of them showed masculine traits in other ways. Even in cases where males or females show atypical gender traits, that doesn't necessarily have to mean that we need to see them as feminine or masculine respectively. On the other hand, lots of gender atypical traits and their associated activities are more widely being accepted. It is fairly typical for girls to be competitive and to play sports and for young men to care about their style and be more detail oriented.

    Considering these things,  I think we need to be more careful with what we label feminine and masculine behavior because it affects how we treat and see others. How about you? What is considered gender typical or atypical  behavior in your culture? How are people who have that behavior viewed? I'm curious to see what you think! Let me know your thoughts down in the comments below!