Sunday, October 3, 2010

Women and Men: Grey Areas

The Zits comic strip created the following in 2008:




Although the comic strips seems to exaggerate the differences between men and women, it is not so far from the gender ideologies that Americans have created.  No doubt, the words "male" and "female" impose pictures of each sex, however stereotypical, in our minds.  Men have physical strength and think simply, while women lack physical strength and think too much; husbands earn money while wives take care of the kids; men have better spatial recognition than women and are, thus, better drivers, and women have no sense of direction.

Are these just American beliefs and expectations or do all countries have these implicit definitions for genders?  At the core, this is a nature versus nurture argument.  A fairly recent gender theory proposes that gender is not bound by any universal ahistorical subjectives.  Anti-essentialist Foucault suggests that "[g]ender is historically and culturally specific, subject to radical discontinuities over time and across space" (291).  What if our ideas of gender were really just social constructions, subject to change and dependent on mass media and familial life?  It is my belief that the differences between men and women are not as black and white in the world as they seem to us in the West, and I would go so far to suggest that the terms "effeminacy" and "manliness" are simply a product of Western constructions of gender.

Barker, Chris.  Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice.  Los Angeles: Sage, 2008.  Print.
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In a famous 2007 Gap commercial, Patrick Wilson and Claire Danes dance to the Annie Get Your Gun tune "Anything You Can Do":

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