You Go, I Will Be Okay
After reading Brannock’s article ‘Rapunzel, barbie or action man? Learning the lessons of gender’, many issues came to mind. Firstly, who really cares where someone sits on the masculinity spectrum, as long as they are there and happy with the place they hold.
Today’s media and culture tell us we can do anything if we work for it, irrespective of gender - and this is echoed in classrooms across the World, but is it necessarily the case? The opportunities to become leaders in our professional lives increase almost daily, especially for women. Women are not facing as nearly as many troubles gaining, and holding those authoritative positions as they did some decades earlier, however there is still a lot of work to be done to seek true equality in that respect. And in many jobs, this means becoming a leader of men. Unfortunately, the chance to become anything has some females trying to be everything. Females are forever driving themselves crazy meeting preconceived ideals and limitations.
Women in particular are killing themselves in pursuit of the perfect life – striving to find the perfect man, be the perfect wife, mother and a leader of men at work, who never misses a P&C meeting, on her way home from a long day at some amazing job, who stops at the store for the ingredients to prepare a gourmet meal, in between running Billy to soccer practice and Jane to ballet, after a quick moment at the salon where our perfect hair was touched up to match the flawless complexion and toned athletic body society says they must maintain. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I can sense the scales being hugely outweighed.
There is a paradox between the roles we are all conditioned to play as children: girls could be wives, mothers, nurses and hairdressers; while boys could become action heroes, sports stars and heroic soldiers. This conditioning is virtually the opposite to the reality we encounter as adults in our diverse, politically fluid, high speed society happenings.
Whatever happened to being the best person you could possibly be? How can one word deter us from fulfilling our dreams? This inequality is an atrocious example of how far we still have as a society to evolve. We have come so far, yet still have so far to go. Right now our society still supports the suppression of women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities. It’s times like these I feel ashamed to be a member of such a society.
