Essay on Can Gender Roles Be Challenged?

Can gender roles be challenged? Why must men and women have to be perceived in just one way? When I think of sexism, I think of the times that women have been made fun of and have been stereotyped. Whether if they were told to “get back into the kitchen” or to “make them a sandwich”, it’s pretty sad and degrading. But, it seems like they don’t seem to share the other side of sexism: men getting made fun of. Even though some people know what sexism is, most of us aren 't familiar with what it is and how it is used, especially toward men.
Sexism has been around for a really long time, but few probably know how it got people’s attention in the first place. Sexism is “prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, on the basis of sex.” (“Sexism”). The term was first used by a person named Pauline M. Leet in an essay he did called “Women and the Undergraduate”. In this essay, Leet compares sexism to racism. "When you argue…that since fewer women write good poetry this justifies their total exclusion, you are taking a position analogous to that of the racist, I might call you in this case a "sexist"… Both the racist and the sexist are acting as if all that has happened had never happened, and both of them are making decisions and coming to conclusions about someone’s value by referring to factors which are in both cases irrelevant." (“Sexism”). What he is saying there is that sexists are more worse than racists. Thus the term has been stamped into our society. Even though sexism has…