You know a gender role is strict if people are scared of violating their role.
If you went to a young woman in a very conservative religious culture (like me when I was 17) and suggested to her things like:
*cutting her hair really short
*not having children
*not learning to cook/clean/sew
*becoming a pastor of her church
Originally posted by nitratediva
She would probably tell you you’re insane and there’s no way she would do that.
This is because, if she acts like this, she will have a harder time finding a mate. She’s been told all her life that men want a certain kind of woman, and if she is not that woman, she will die alone.
Whenever you see someone in a culture with a strong aversion to breaking their gender role - “I can’t have sex with a lot of men or I’ll be a slut!” then that is a sign that they are undergoing external pressure to behave that way in order to attract a mate - a reaction to “men want to have sex with younger, relatively inexperienced women”
So I don’t understand all of the comments about “fragile masculinity.”
If masculinity is fragile, then it’s because men have been told their whole lives that women want a certain kind of man, and if he is not that man, then he will die alone.
I don’t understand the mockery. It should be replaced with sympathy. If you wouldn’t mock a young conservative girl for having fragile femininity, then you shouldn’t mock a young man who’s scared of wearing a skirt. He’s not just afraid that wearing a skirt will make him look silly, he’s afraid that if he wears a skirt, women will ridicule him and never be attracted to him again. And sadly, a lot of the, time he’s not wrong.
If you still don’t feel sympathy for this, imagine being asked to do something that you believe will render you unattractive to your desired gender. “Come on, what’s so bad about a face full of rampant acne?” “Hey, why are you scared of 250 extra pounds? Is your body image really so fragile?”
It’s also interesting to note that women seem less afraid, in general, of violating their gender role than men are - which is why the concept of “fragile masculinity” is way more popular than “fragile femininity.” I also suspect that 100 years ago, this would not have been the case - that women’s gender roles would have been equally as strict as men’s (as evidenced by all those etiquette books on how to be a ‘proper woman’).
This seems to imply that more progress has been made into loosening women’s strict gender roles than has been made for men.
Why do you think this is?
It’s easier to loosen gender roles for women than for men because masculinity also circumscribes within it the span of all heroically admirable traits. Inner strength, ambition, risk-taking, decisiveness, independence, and command are all strongly coded masculine, and are also the traits that you see most often in the protagonists of any narrative.
The heroic feminine is far more limited- I can only right now think of empathy and emotional resilience (which differs from inner strength in that it is displayed primarily to loved ones rather than to outgroup). These heroic traits tend to be assigned to beloved, but auxiliary characters, which necessarily draw less admiration. Some might argue wisdom to be an example of heroic feminine, but I think wisdom isn’t strongly gendered either way- while the wise woman is an acceptable expression of femininity, there are still more wise men represented.
Moving from the conceptual to the practical, skills that are coded masculine are universally more respected than skills coded feminine. The oldest example of this is physical combat versus childcare. While you could argue that motherhood and childcare is well-venerated, it’s tiers below the glory found in violence. Even in the modern day, the humanities have become less valued as more women have moved into them, and STEM and entrepreneurship (which retain majority male population) are most respected. While being a doctor is respectable in the US, nations with majority female doctors respect and pay their doctors far less.
This extends even into personal interests- masculine-coded interests like sports and cars are treated as universal, or at least understandable and immune to critique in the mainstream. Meanwhile, feminine-coded interests such as fashion and makeup are seen as frivolous and vain.
I feel the relationship between disrespect towards women themselves and disrespect towards feminine-coded skills, traits, and interests is, like most such things, a feedback loop with no clearly identifiable start or end. But I do hold that misogyny is at the root of women being able to buck their gender roles more easily than men.
The trouble for a man staying in a female-dominated, or even gender-equal-population field, is that he cannot use it to demonstrate his masculinity. If something is done 90% by women, then it cannot be used to prove manliness to women - after all, how can it separate him from them when they could do the exact same thing themselves! (It might be the case that various LGBTQ women, don’t count for this psychologically/socially.)
My fear, not full-on belief, but fear, is that the reason things are this way is that a sufficiently large chunk of cis heterosexual women don’t actually want the situation to change, because their selection criteria are different from mens’.
My hope is that it’s going to collapse by women realizing that they can be attracted to men that break the traditional pattern, and eventually this will reach sufficient critical mass to collapse the culture’s self-reinforcing effect. A lot of the conditions that created the current culture’s norms aren’t holding anymore.
But since the level of nature vs nurture is unknown, I don’t see that as guaranteed. Transhumanism may ultimately render it irrelevant by the time it would normally take effect.