gender wheeee
blah blah uni is kicking my ass. We had an interesting discussion today about gender roles, and I might have expressed the problems I had, because I wasn't a traditional "girl" playing with dolls and not trucks or whatever, and how that affected me going into primary school. It was strange that the people most sexist against women WERE the women. It made me vaugely pissy for a bit there, but I got over that fairly quickly. La la la lame. Gender bias annoys the shit out of me. It always has and I'm pretty sure it always will, and there's not much I can do about that.
I think it's just that the glass ceiling there is not shattered because we perpetuate the whole thing. The genders? Not that different. Girls don't HAVE to play with dolls, and boys ARE allowed to cry. it's not the end of the world if someone's gay, straight, bi, a-sexual, pansexual or just plain queer. Gender shouldn't matter, although it does. I just can't fathom why. Since when has who someone liked meant that they don't have an opinion? Or what equipment they had below the belt meant that they were somehow less of a person? The whole thing just irritates the absolute shit out of me.
My brother and I didn't grow up with taditional gender roles, really. My brother's a good kid, even though he shits me off something chronic sometimes. We played with lego and cars and trucks and dolls together, and watched whatever movie we felt like watching at the time and it didn't matter that he was a boy and I was a girl. It didn't matter that we were being raised by a single mum because we all had each other.
Mum talks to me about it, occasionally. Some of the things she had to go through nobody should go through alone. But she was telling me that we used to go to resturants (I remember it well and it's one of my favourite memories) and apparently Mattie and I would scour the newspapers and the news and magazines and things to find stuff to talk to mum about, so she wouldn't have to be bored. (of course, then she'd give us ten dollars each and we'd fuck off to timezone and play games for a bit, but we WERE kids) Her friends used to ask her how she could stand to hang out with her kids so often, but for a long time we were all each other had and it's important. But as a girl, I wasn't discouraged from following certain careers (Mum did put her foot down about me becoming Indiana Jones, though) and I wasn't made to feel like I was less than my brother because he had a penis and I didn't.
So no, I don't get it. I think it's stupid and I think people who ascribe to the idea that someone is less than someone else because they've got a cock or a vagina are idiots.
I will admit that there are physical differences, and mental differences that aren't the result of gender moulding, but come -on-. Seriously.
[/rant]
I think it's just that the glass ceiling there is not shattered because we perpetuate the whole thing. The genders? Not that different. Girls don't HAVE to play with dolls, and boys ARE allowed to cry. it's not the end of the world if someone's gay, straight, bi, a-sexual, pansexual or just plain queer. Gender shouldn't matter, although it does. I just can't fathom why. Since when has who someone liked meant that they don't have an opinion? Or what equipment they had below the belt meant that they were somehow less of a person? The whole thing just irritates the absolute shit out of me.
My brother and I didn't grow up with taditional gender roles, really. My brother's a good kid, even though he shits me off something chronic sometimes. We played with lego and cars and trucks and dolls together, and watched whatever movie we felt like watching at the time and it didn't matter that he was a boy and I was a girl. It didn't matter that we were being raised by a single mum because we all had each other.
Mum talks to me about it, occasionally. Some of the things she had to go through nobody should go through alone. But she was telling me that we used to go to resturants (I remember it well and it's one of my favourite memories) and apparently Mattie and I would scour the newspapers and the news and magazines and things to find stuff to talk to mum about, so she wouldn't have to be bored. (of course, then she'd give us ten dollars each and we'd fuck off to timezone and play games for a bit, but we WERE kids) Her friends used to ask her how she could stand to hang out with her kids so often, but for a long time we were all each other had and it's important. But as a girl, I wasn't discouraged from following certain careers (Mum did put her foot down about me becoming Indiana Jones, though) and I wasn't made to feel like I was less than my brother because he had a penis and I didn't.
So no, I don't get it. I think it's stupid and I think people who ascribe to the idea that someone is less than someone else because they've got a cock or a vagina are idiots.
I will admit that there are physical differences, and mental differences that aren't the result of gender moulding, but come -on-. Seriously.
[/rant]