Looking back on my life as a whole, I can see now that I did not have many influences that swayed me to seeing gender and sex as two very different categories as many do. I believe that media and religion is the strongest influence to the many people that believe women are meant for the kitchen and men are meant to never cry. Because I was not exposed to the media or religion a lot as a kid, I believe gender stereotypes have had less of an effect on me. When I got to the age that I was the most impressionable, my adolescence, I was involved in the parts of media that were aware of how society sees gender. Now, as an adult, I feel that I am aware of when the media and the news is being sexist. As a child I did not have a lot of interaction
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This lack of religious influence would continue throughout my entire life. My mom never enforced her own beliefs of God on me because she wanted me to develop my own beliefs, which is exactly what I did when I was old enough to make my own choices. When I entered junior high, I realized I had no definite religious beliefs and it shocked me to my core about how much I lacked any ideas about my own personal beliefs. For many years I grasped onto any ideas that made sense to me. For a while I believed in Taoism but only because I was exposed to it in my English class, but that didn’t last long. My largest influence for the beliefs I have to this day is a book series that I read all throughout junior high and high school. I worshipped these books and I still have a deep respect for them to this day. I found these books by being exposed to them through a TV show. The TV show was playing on ABC one night and I was hooked onto it right away because of its mystical and magical elements. I later found out that this series was based off of a book series called The Sword of Truth and knew I had to read it, knowing that there would be scenes and thoughts not portrayed in the TV series.
This lack of religious influence would continue throughout my entire life. My mom never enforced her own beliefs of God on me because she wanted me to develop my own beliefs, which is exactly what I did when I was old enough to make my own choices. When I entered junior high, I realized I had no definite religious beliefs and it shocked me to my core about how much I lacked any ideas about my own personal beliefs. For many years I grasped onto any ideas that made sense to me. For a while I believed in Taoism but only because I was exposed to it in my English class, but that didn’t last long. My largest influence for the beliefs I have to this day is a book series that I read all throughout junior high and high school. I worshipped these books and I still have a deep respect for them to this day. I found these books by being exposed to them through a TV show. The TV show was playing on ABC one night and I was hooked onto it right away because of its mystical and magical elements. I later found out that this series was based off of a book series called The Sword of Truth and knew I had to read it, knowing that there would be scenes and thoughts not portrayed in the TV series.