A discussion I happen to see a lot, especially on the internet among social circles like Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe even Tumblr, are whether or not, and how men and women differentiate between each other. This is an interesting question, especially since a lot of people seem to believe that the two genders have separate types of brains, when in reality, they do not. Neuroscientist Professor Gina Rippon claims that the only reason that male and female brains seem to differ is because of the heavy influence of gender stereotyping and the direct affect that this has on men and women. So, basically, this would mean that social situations and development directly correlates to how we perceive the world and why some might come to the conclusion that the two genders are widely different.
Gender stereotypes can also actually be linked to why we see so many differences between men and women. For example, men are believed to typically be heavily involved in sports, or videogames, while women are usually thought to enjoy, or even romanticize the thought of children, raising a family, or even getting married.
There are those who believe, and I’ve seen this detailed many times over, that men and women are socialized differently. Socialized, as in, taught to act certain ways, taught to treat situations different and taught to analyze things pertaining to consequences. Other examples could be how parents seem to assign their children not only a definitive gender (harmful to those who are determined to be transgender), but even colors (blue, pink) and certain types of toys.
All of this, though, ignores that we’re all individuals with differing experiences. While you may have grown up in a generally safe environment with access to food and other quality of life type things, like your parents having the ability to maintain a roof over your head, another person may have grown up poor. Maybe their parents were abusive, maybe they dropped out of school and became homeless in their teens.
This is why it’s hard to assign certain socialization to people who exist in the real world, because no one person has the same experience as the next. Some experiences can be considered similar to one another, or there may be things that are typical to men and women, but this, by far, does not accurately depict a real difference between men and women.
Why?
Because all of these things are a social construct. Everything we say, do or experience is something created by our perception, or something that has been done to us by others (which also alters self and external perception). We made an entire language from scratch and we use these things called words. At a very early time in human history, we took certain body parts that individuals had and decided to assign a label to that, and then the same process repeated with skin color and such.
This is all related to the human need to organize and categorize things, in which our perception is focused, shaped and the idea that men and women are different in major ways is birthed. When in reality, we just experience things different according to social expectations.
