Valeria Espinoza Ruiz
March 19, 2020
Quickwrite 1
I liked the questions from the presentation. I feel like I would like to write here my answers
to those questions because I believe that they are important to how some of us are starting to
be more conscious about how gender roles affect us as humans.
I don’t think too much about gender I don’t like etiquettes for myself, but I respects other
decisions on identifying themselves with, for example, one of the classifications that we saw
in the presentation.
But when society starts to take these roles really seriously and starts expecting certain
attitudes from people that’s when it becomes difficult. For example, as women, there are
many expectations for us, and sometimes these expectations are contradictory. Many of these
beliefs are disappearing, but in countries like Mexico women are still being oppressed. I think
that those expectations are the most difficult thing about being a woman: be feminine, don’t
dress like this, don’t dress like that, you’re to masculine, you should like boys not girls, you
should date more, you should not date too many men, why don’t you use make up?, why do
you use too much make up?. I believe that one of the most difficult things about being a
woman is all of the judgement directed towards us.
Whereas, in the case of men I believe that many of them are repressed, I feel like society has
certain expectations for them and when a man shows sensibility or something as human as
emotions, they consider them weak, weird or different. We’ve all listened to older men say
to our brothers or cousins: boys don’t cry, boys don’t like pink, you’re a boy play with cars
not dolls. I feel like, as women, they are expected to follow a role that doesn’t allow them to
fully be who they truly are. They are expected to follow certain behaviors and they are
expected to fit in a box and not to stand out.
And many of these problems come because of how institutions, media, society and even our
own families pressure us to behave in a certain way just because we are girls or boys.
I feel like media plays a big role on shaping gender roles, when we are constantly being
exposed to someone else’s beliefs in a topic, consciously or unconsciously we are affected
by them. The biggest proof of that is our grandparents and even some of our parents, and
how they have these ideologies that you should identify either as a boy or a girl.
The good thing is that nowadays, media and creators are being more conscious about these
topics. So, while there is still books, tv shows, movies, etc., that only stick to representing
two genders, there is also a lot of media that is being more diverse and they are starting to
give us characters that 10 years ago wouldn’t be represented in a tv show or book. As for
movies I believe that there is still some lack of representation.
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