Social mores are those unwritten rules that dictate how we act in public. They are the things that irritate the general public, like when a person is walking on the “wrong side” of the sidewalk. No law governs which side a person should use, but society expects that one would use the same as what they would drive. If a person enters an elevator and faces the back rather than the front, not only will it make others uncomfortable, but it will be uncomfortable for that person as well. In a similar fashion, attempting to go against the socially expected behaviors for one’s gender is uncomfortable to the point of avoidance. Schmitt explains, “whatever the differences in men's and women's psyches—empathy, jealousy, cognitive abilities, mate preferences—many theories in psychology assume that they result primarily from direct gender socialization by parents, media, and societal institutions” (92). The way society expects the different genders to appropriate to current cultural standards and norms truly affects how people handle the stress in their lives.
It is no secret that women are expected to act a certain way, especially when handling stress. Country singer
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Furthermore, they were in a household with a father who dealt with stress through addiction to alcohol. The narrator did not view the mother’s death with the same level of stress as Sonny did, possibly in large part to not living at home by that time. Sonny however, dealt with the death of his mother much the way his father dealt with the death of his brother, substance abuse. The mother, a female, was greatly affected by both the death of her brother-in-law and the drinking of her husband, yet she handled the stress entirely differently. Like many, parenting did not cause Sonny to become an addict, but his gender and genes may have played a