In your opinion: What is the purpose of establishing gender roles in our current
ID: 3485597 • Letter: I
Question
In your opinion: What is the purpose of establishing gender roles in our current 21st century community?
In 50 Great Myths of Human Sexuality, Myth 12 addresses the uneasiness people feel about homosexual couples raising children. Part of the reason people feel as if homosexual couples are not "appropriate" parents is because they do not model gender roles appropriately (an LGBT man is not considered as a real man, and the same for lesbians). Yet, at the same time, our community is trying to fight gender roles by telling parents to let their children choose the way they want to dress and what toys they want to play with. It seems controversial to me: trying not to impose gender roles but looking down at homosexual couples raising children because they don't demonstrate those gender roles "correctly".
Why might this happen? What is the purpose of gender roles and having parents that portray them? Is there a need for it, or do we use it to ensure a binary system (female and male)? Does it have to do with "making" heterosexual adults? I'm really confused on why society would teach kids about gender roles in their homes, but they also tell children not to abide to those gender roles (like play with whatever you want or dress in whatever way you want to).
Explanation / Answer
The purpose of establishing gender roles in the society is an ongoing phenomenon since centuries. Inculcating the understanding for gender roles and making children fit into them is something that we do implicitly in our everyday course of life. A homosexual couple on the other hand would not raise children while helping them relate to the ‘same sex parent’ as typically happens in heterosexual couples. This is overlapping with Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages wherein the child learns the appropriate gender role by following the same sex parent to make sense of how they operate. On the one hand, we tend to have children play with the toys of their choice by doing more and more awareness campaigns for parenting skills to be more modernised. The collective effort to fight the struggle against gender roles is lost when we reinforce the same through our mutual outcasting of homosexual couples. This reinforces the belief that gender roles play a pivotal role in shaping who we are and must govern the different aspects of our behaviour. Certain stereotypes comprise of the way one should dress to the kind of sports one should play. The reason women are probably considered as lacking muscle power is not because biologically they are the weaker sex, but primarily because of the conditioning & social messages she received perpetually while growing up. Young adolescents have fragile mindsets and are malleable enough to adapt themselves in accordance to the way we shape them. And so issues like body shaming are also taking a toll over, especially in case of women who end up having eating disorders as a culmination of this collective psychological distress to ‘fit in’. Personally, my belief is that this shouldn’t be the case and homosexual couples have the capability to raise independent thinkers who have the ability to discriminate between right and wrong, while using their own intellect. We are all instinctually considered to be possessing the conscience and so the children are likely to become independent mature thinkers who don’t need typical parenting to make sense of the world around them.