These stereotypes are deeply embedded
About all this gender stereotyping…
“Harmful” gender stereotyping has helped fuel the UK mental health crisis afflicting the younger generation, an influential report has warned, adding that it is at the root of problems with body image and eating disorders, record male suicide rates as well as violence against women and girls.
And maybe the hot new fashion for claiming to be the other sex?
Stereotyped assumptions also “significantly limit” youngsters’ career choices, in turn contributing to the gender pay gap, according to the findings of an influential commission set up by the leading gender equality campaigning charity the Fawcett Society.
Warning that stereotyping persists in parenting, education and the commercial sector – notably toys, books and fashion – the commission is calling on the government to “take meaningful steps” to better support teachers and parents and challenge simplistic “pink and blue” labelling in the corporate sector.
Maybe, just maybe, people could manage to choose whatever toys and books and clothes they fancy without having to claim to be not the sex they were born.
Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: “Gender stereotyping is everywhere and causes serious, long-lasting harm – that’s the clear message from the research for the commission. From “boys will be boys” attitudes in nursery or school, to jobs for boys and jobs for girls views among some parents, these stereotypes are deeply embedded and they last a lifetime. We need to end the ‘princessification’ of girls and the toxification of boys.”
If there were less of that there would be less of a felt need to swap. If there were a lot less there would be a lot less.
Maybe – this is very utopian but hear me out – just maybe if there were less gender stereotyping there would no longer be a tv franchise titled “Real Housewives.”
The lack of insight of some people never fails to stun me. The same Guardian which would practically tar and feather someone for suggesting that woman is not a costume a man can wear can publish an article like this without seeing the contradiction.
Do you know to what extent a trans woman is a woman? To the precise extent that he acts like a female stereotype. That’s it. Drop the act for a moment and the womanyness blows away in the breeze. Does anyone else in society have as much invested in perpetuating gender stereotypes as those who depend on them to “exist?”
Papito: You nail it;. The visible “trans” representatives (admittedly an elite group) all exhibit very conservative approaches to presentation. They celebrate gender stereotypes.
So, in my opinion, this is absolute bullshit. “Gender stereotyping” hasn’t been the root of decades of male suicides or violence against women and girls. Decades? Centuries. Millenia. Men have been abusing women for that long, and it’s not because society frowns upon men wearing red strappy heel-shoes. I’ve never once thought that I should or could hit a woman because of my “gender”, but I will admit that in my youth I almost did hit a girlfriend, but it had nothing to do with gender–it had everything to do with my youth, inexperience, and likely testosterone. Thankfully, I refrained, and thankfully, I remember it to this day, to my shame. I remember still, how she shrank back, fearfully, and I hold that image in my memory as a lesson.
There needs to be an understanding that violence against women is not due to “gender stereotyping” or whatever new bullshit is popular. It’s biological, and yes, society encourages it. It doesn’t matter how many men put on dresses, they are still going to abuse women (and other men) at the same rates. We can maybe manage the society (Sweden has made some progress along those lines), but the biology will remain consistent. That latter fact is why we can never open women’s private spaces to men, no matter how many wigs they wear or hormones they gobble.
Well said.
James G,
I guess I had a different read on that than you did. I didn’t interpret it as “if we let men wear dresses, they won’t abuse women,” but rather “rigid stereotypes about what is ‘manly’ contribute to toxic masculinity and male fragility, both of which contribute to abusive behavior,” which does sort of ring true to me.
In other words, let’s stop teaching boys that being a man involves aggression and dominance, and that anyone who isn’t aggressive and dominant is therefore “not a real man.”
Screechy–
I didn’t see it that way at all. I read the bit about “gender stereotypes leading to abuse of women and girls” and immediately called bullshit on that. I agree with you that rigid stereotypes of men lead to male abuse, but that’s nowhere near the sum of the of the story, and that is what I called out. This is why I mentioned Sweden in my comment–the male stereotypes there are much reduced from what we experience here in the USA (most of my remaining family is Swedish and I have spent many summers there).
Your moment of pedantry for the day!
James G: To say something is the root is not equivalent to saying that something is at the root. The former identifies a singular efficient cause; the latter, a contributing efficient cause. What makes them “root” in either case is that they are ultimate rather than proximate causes. Why is this an important distinction in addition to semantic pedantry? Simple: there can be only one cause that is the root; there can be many causes that are at the root. Further, neither construction entails anything about what proportion of male suicides and violence against women and girls has resulted from gender stereotyping—other than that it has been a nonzero percentage.
Of course in TransWorld, “girls like dolls and boys like trucks” is just a fact, not a stereotype. Whereas (if I may use my nephew’s insightful words from approximately 10 years ago) “boys have willies and girls have foofies” is literal violence and erasure of trans lives.
Seeing what my stepkids went through, I have to report that gender stereotyping in pop culture is worse now than it was in my childhood. Steroidal warriors and sexualized ‘Lolita/princesses’ are everywhere. The normal range of ‘butchness/femmeness’ has been crushed.