My Perspective On Gender Issues

I was raised in a very stereotypical nuclear family. A mother, father, sister, and a dog. Along with this, there are also many other aspects of my life that affect my perspective on gender issues. I believe it is extremely important know your standpoints and to be able to identify the places where you are privileged. In the textbook, the authors start the into by giving a little demographic information about themselves. This is a perfect example of why understand how your standpoints affect your opinions. Without understanding this information, we lack the ability to interpret a deeper meaning behind the text. In the textbook, there is also a sentence that I believe is very important for talking about gender origins and how they affect our …show more content…
Every piece of my identity plays a different role in how I view gender and gendered issues. For starters, I was lucky enough to grow up in a time where women were beginning to be treated as equals. In a small town, it doesn’t matter if your doctor is a female or your babysitter is male. If someone is getting the job done, it is sufficient. I also have other privileges that affect my stance on gender issues. I am middle class, so it is harder for me to understand gender issues that people in lower classes face. Because I grew up in a small town, I have experience less diversity and can sometimes be closed minded on certain topics. Overall, I work very hard to make sure my standpoints do not blur the importance of the issue, and even allow me to think more in depth on the topics because of my outside view of the …show more content…
My sister and I were raised in a household without gender norms. One interaction I can remember involves the friends that I had. My entire life I have preferred to be in a friend group mostly filled by boys. I was repeatedly reminded of my gender when face with statements such as, “they boys are going to play outside, do you want to help clean up?” or “you can’t play baseball because that’s a boy’s sport.” Reflecting on this, I do believe that it did cause me to take a step back and become a more feminine version of myself, because that was the expectation of my gender was. More recently, an interaction with someone who communicated expectations for my gender was with my boyfriend. We were discussing making new friends and the friends that we already have. As I stated earlier, I am more comfortable with a male dominated friend group. In this conversation, my boyfriend stated that because I am a woman, it should be much easier for me to make friends with other women. This is not a type of expectation that is very mainstream, and I was very puzzled by this assumption. Our society assumes that because of our similar gender expression, we should be able to easily interact and form relationships. This also plays into the expectations that men and women do not have enough in common or have too many different expectations to relate on a friendship