Gender

What is gender? It is something everyone has, but rarely thinks about. They know they are either a man or a woman and simply take it for granted. We behave in masculine or feminine ways that have become habitual to us through our lives, so that we give our behavior no thought, we think of it as being natural to us. Yet whenever we meet someone, the first thing we note is whether that person is a man or a woman. It predicts the way the interaction between us will occur. Some people believe that this behavior is instinctive and predicted by our biology and our genes, others assert that we learn to behave in the way that we do. Based on “The He Hormone” by Andrew Sullivan and “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” by Katha Pollitt, I intend to prove that our gender roles are not biologically assigned but are influenced by our society, and it is possible to break out of or move beyond those stereotypical roles through the reformation of our past conceptions of genders based on our moder...