[culturehandy]

I pitched this in the Community Forum and it was well recieved.

This thread is all about the politics and cross cultural and societal views on gender.

I started thinking increasingly about gender when the media frenzy about Caster Semenya emerged. It is my opinion that the only reason people questioned Ms. Semenya's gender is because she appeared to be "masculine". That is, she looked masculine according to the ideas of society at large. Had she had softer, more "feminine" features, questions of her gender would not have come up.

So, what is gender? We know that there is sex, your biological sex, but gender is a social construct.

[angie_21]

GT, thanks for laying out those ideas and definitions for us! It's definitely a good thing to have at the start of a discussion like this, and also for all of us to be more informed if we're ever trying to discuss these issue with the outside, non-feminist world.

koffeewitch, I have a very tenuous, conflicting set of beliefs about the stuff you and J brought up. I've also felt strongly about these things cine I was very young, but was lucky to be surrounded by many positive influences. It's confusing though - despite having a very politically progressive, left-minded family in most ways, in others not so much. Even though my mom worked most of the time I was growing up, most of my aunts stayed home and raised children as their "careers." I stumbled more than once on my dad's porn collection, and found out after I moved out that he also goes to strip clubs. Yikes, I'm so morally against that! Also, gross, ew, no one wants to know that about family! But my dad is extremely respectful of women in every other aspect. I guess I've learned to create separate categories of feminism for myself, one in terms of career and intelligence (emotional), the other in terms of sex (physical). They shouldn't have to be two different categories, but somehow our society has created this dual identity for women, now we're supposed to be intelligent and support ourselves financially, while still being sexy, pretty, and take care of our men. At least, those are the expectations I feel, and that I put upon myself.

I do think that gender stereotypes hurt everyone. Not only do men get stuck having to hold back they emotions and get subjected to being conscripted and expected to carry the financial burdens of their families, they lose out on their relationships with women, because the women in their lives feel they have to hide their true identities behind a mask of what's "nice" and "feminine."

I think some people react to femininsm so strongly because they somehow feel we want to force all women to be manly, all men to be ladylike. But that's not it at all - some of us would prefer to express some of our more so-called masculine qualities, others more feminine, but in the end we should just be allowed to express ourselves!