Summary Of Guys Suffer From Oppressive Gender Roles Too

In “Guys Suffer from Oppressive Gender Roles Too,” author Julie Zeilinger makes it clear that men’s actions, personalities, and identities are contrived based on society’s expectations. These expectations shove boys and men into a character-like attitude, preventing them from truly discovering themselves. With a society that decides to adhere to these gender roles, any sign of being different from the rest of the world tends to generate a negative reaction. Accepting and learning about gender roles is established at a young age, for anyone of that matter. Whether it be during school, through any form of media, or even from our own friends and family, gender roles are expectations that many boys and men tend to feel threatened by. Zeilinger

With the assigned gender roles comes a specific set of qualities that each gender must abide to, otherwise they would appear as “weird” or even “odd”. For men, these qualities would consist of being successful, wealthy, powerful, dominant, emotionless, and many more. Due to those being specifically men’s gender roles, women are not allowed to be anything closely related to those qualities. Therefore women would take on qualities that are opposite of men’s gender roles; weak, emotional, unsuccessful, subservient, and more. Keeping up with these gender roles can create some issues internally for both men and women. Zeilinger emphasizes that “ladies generally deal with this pressure internally, forcing ourselves to get excellent grades and taking out our issues on bodies” (pg. 539). And as for men, they tend to acquire a competitive nature against everyone, holding their chins up high and presenting themselves as the overall top dog. If restricting women from having similar qualities as men was not already annoying enough, according to Katz, “boys live in a world with its own Code of Conduct, a set of values of ruthless, unspoken, and unyielding rules” (par. 5). Falling under this code of conduct is that boys couldn’t be goody-goody, ask for assistance, or admit to their cause of wounds. These qualities are then expected upon girls and women, in any type of environment. They must behave according to their surroundings and do as is told. As well, appear weak and innocent when hurt or in need of help. It’s quite distressing to assume that all men and women are to abide to these types of gender roles in today’s modern society. Allowing society to dictate how a woman or man behaves is terrifying and I can assume that these negative gender roles will continue to enslave countless amounts of people due to the fear of discovering your true