Growing up as a boy in a patriarchal society is more difficult than it may seem. As I grew up in a traditional family with two working parents and an older sister, I occasionally grew envious of my sister’s freedom to adopt behaviors, hobbies, or clothing styles which are typically assigned to men, while at the same time, I was constantly pressured to eliminate any trace of characteristics that are typically assigned to women. I believe that my family and the other gendered structures I came in contact with, such as the school or the media, did a great job at constructing my gender identity as masculine. However, more recently, I have begun to understand the difference between my own inclinations, and the characteristics that I have been socialized to consider as part of my identity. I strongly believe that, although she was also pressured to adopt a feminine identity, my sister was allowed to be truer to her own self than I was and this explains why it is more confusing for me to step into adulthood and become a man, than it is for her to become a woman.
For most of my life, I did not realize the difference between sex and gender, and I took my masculinity for granted. Sex refers to biological characteristics which differentiate males and females according to their reproductive functions, while gender refers to the sum of socially constructed characteristics abut masculinity and femininity which form an important part of a person’s identity (Wood 20). However, for me, these two notions were one and the same thing for many years. I was a boy simply because I had certain characteristics which confirmed it. At first, I was a boy because I had short hair, I never wore skirts and I did not like pink. Then, I realized that I was a boy because I had different reproductive organs than girls. Even when my mother allowed my hair to grow over my ears, and when my sister had short hair for a couple of years, I could easily prove to anyone who doubted it, that I was a boy.
However, as I grew older, I found it more and more difficult to prove it, particularly to other boys. I found that in order to be a boy, and then a man, it was not enough to have male sexual organs. It also meant adopting a masculine attitude and being careful not to break the ‘rules’ of manhood. If I felt like crying, my father used to ask me, “are you a boy or a girl?”, and when I had the curiosity to put my hands on my sister’s dolls, my mother laughed and said, should I also bring you a skirt?” This was a strong lesson for me, and from then on, my only interest in my sister’s dolls were breaking them when she annoyed me, or ‘shooting’ them with my toy guns. In school, I needed to be tough, aggressive and athletic to prove my manhood to other boys. I quickly learnt to stay away from girls, although I was used to playing with my sister. With my sister, the games were about doing things together, but with other boys, most often, it was about competing against each other.
Therefore, I formed a strong masculine gender identity, being influenced by all those around me. Wood explains that gender identity is “a person’s own identification as male or female” (24), and in order to form this identity, I needed to construct my own sense of self in opposition to females. My best instructors in this respect were my parents. As I grew up, I moved apart from my mother and started to get closer to my father. When we came inside dirty from our expeditions around the neighborhood, my mother used to say on a resigned tone, “boys will be boys”, which made me feel proud of my bruises, or the dirt on my pants. I always associated those expeditions with masculinity, because by that time, my sister was old enough to prefer reading, listening to music, or going out with her friends, to spending time with our father. Also, when my mother and sister used to go shopping, I used to hide wherever I could, because I was terrified of going with them. To me, it was a feminine activity, which I hated. Of course, nobody told me that my sister used to hate it too, when she was my age. I thought that I hated it because I was a boy, and this is how my dislike of shopping became part of my self-constructed masculine identity.
My experiences as I grew up helped me to adopt the gender role that the society assigned to me. I have known for as long as I can remember that I am a boy, but what that meant for me changed over the years, from meaning almost nothing, to being almost everything. Researchers show that this is how societies typically teach children how to become adults who are perfectly integrated in the society, and to accept their gender roles. Wood shows that “a role is a set of expected behaviors and the values associated with them” (50). For example, my father always worked more hours than my mother, which seemed perfectly normal to me. Also, my mother also cooked dinner, and my father never knew where to find different items in the kitchen. When my father took the car to the auto repair shop, I was always asked if I wanted to come along.
This means that our identity does not necessarily mean who we really are, but rather, it means copying the person we identify with the most. Therefore, I only know what it means to be a man because I learned it from my father, teachers, and from the media. I do not know who I am in reality, because I did not have the chance to develop completely free from pressures. This seems to be explained Symbolic interactionism, which claims that we learn who we are by communicating with others, but we also learn where our place is in the society, based on this identity (Wood 50). It was difficult at times to uphold the high standards of masculinity that others imposed to me, but I was pushed to do so because otherwise, those around me became ironical, they expressed their disappointment, they doubted by gender identity, or they threatened to exclude me completely from the circle of ‘men’. It meant developing a protective attitude towards my sister and my mother, although when I was very young, they were the ones who protected me, and it meant going to the gym to grow my muscular mass and gain the shape of a real man. I therefore constantly felt the pressure to conform to my assigned gender role, and I defended my masculine identity with fierceness.
At the same time, while my sister was pressured to conform to her gender roles as well, I feel that she had more freedom to explore her preferences, and to form a more complex sense of gender identity. For example, although my mother expected her to become a ‘nice’ girl, they also allowed her to take karate lessons. My father was satisfied that she would be able to defend herself, but he did not pressure her to give up after she reached that point. In her circle of friends or at school, she did not receive negative feedback because of it, but on the contrary, people looked at her with admiration. In action movies also, she found enough female role models to look up to. However, because my sister went to karate lessons, I felt the pressure to choose an even more aggressive sport, so I dreamt of becoming a boxer, or a football player. In the same way, she used to borrow my clothes and she sometimes played with me with guns, but she did not appear masculine to my parents, or my friends.
My sister could express herself in more ways than I was allowed to, and this may be explained by the feminist movement which for a long time fought to give women the same rights as men. The fact that girls and women can break their assigned gender roles by becoming whoever they would like to become, including soldiers, or politicians is a great realization for them, but it leaves men uncertain of their own identity . This means that we feel the need to become even more aggressive, stronger, more ambitious, and more competitive. Perhaps my father works overtime so often because my mother works full time and I wanted to go to the gym to become more muscular because as other guys, I may feel that girls and women are becoming stronger themselves.
I do not agree with the aims of antifeminists, which discourage women from being independent or career oriented because this represents an attack on masculinity (Wood 92). On the contrary, I feel that, what the society needs is a movement which would promote men’s rights to explore their own options, to express their feelings, to cry if they feel like it, or to take on jobs, or activities that are usually associated with women. Many men would discover that they are aggressive by nature, or that they cannot cry no matter how hard they try, but some would maybe feel comfortable with it, if they are the crying type.
Therefore, I am the typical white heterosexual male, and I grew up in a traditional family, in which both parents conform to their assigned gender roles. I was socialized as a boy, and I fully adhere to the masculine ideology, being competitive, athletic and trying to appear strong and reliable. I feel the urge to protect the females around me and I try to avoid chores as much as I can, because that would make me look more like my mother, and less like my father who does not do chores. However, I feel that this may not be entirely who I am, or even that some of my beliefs are not reasonable. For example I feel protective towards my sister even though she knows karate and would probably beat me if she wanted to. These contradictions make me feel confused, and I think that the society needs to take another step further and redefine masculinity, as it happened to femininity.
Works Cited
Wood, Julia. Gendered Lives. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. 2014. Print.
