Essay On Gender Images

Superior Essays
There are many possible things that people could learn in a single lifetime; be it how to fly an airplane, learning a new language, planting a garden, proper etiquette when dining with the Queen, how to raise a bear cub, navigating the trials of marriage, running for President, or becoming an Olympic athlete. Despite all of these things being goals that some people may have, most people neglect to see that while we grow up, and while we mature into adults, that we are constantly learning the art of becoming our designated gender. That is, how to be a male or how to be a female.
We learn to become our gender through parents, peers, religions, television, the internet, and even the advertisements that are thrown in our faces each and every day.
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Thinking that it’s natural isn’t even natural thinking. A close examination of other cultures will show that other societies wouldn’t even recognize the gender roles that we are taught to believe come with being born male or female. There are cultures in which the power imbalance doesn’t exist and if it does, it can exist the other way with women being seen as the powerful and dominant sex. These images are not natural, they only show the photographer’s idea about gender roles and where men belong and where women belong. A natural image would show diversity, strong men and strong women, soft men and soft women, powerful men and powerful women, beautiful men and beautiful women, athletic men and athletic women. Instead, these images are: men are strong, powerful, and athletic and women are soft and beautiful. I will never apologize for thinking that that is simply too narrow of a box to try and shove a person into. There are masculinities and femininities, people become their gender through so many means and it’s not natural for a woman to only want to be a woman sexually. People are unique and as such, they fit into many different roles. That is what is natural, people being people. That is the way it should

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