Gender Stereotypes Rant

Edit: Apologies for some of my immaturity in this rant, particularly during the first half. I had it brought to my attention that I let my emotions get the better of me, and that I made judgements in the opening that were too subjective and defensive. I'm not editing the content of the post, as I believe it is important that I leave up examples of where I've done things wrong, so that I may learn to avoid it in the future, when I will hopefully be studying this as a professional.

Hello, and welcome to another one of my rants.  XD

Two things today prompted me to rant a bit.  First off, I was talking to a fellow bigender today, and we briefly brought up the subject of gender stereotypes.  Secondly, I was browsing Youtube, and found a Beyonce video entitled, "If I Were a Boy"

Video HERE


As those who know me would probably expect, the title intrigued me.  I don't really care for Beyonce one way or the other (don't love her, don't hate her) but the beginning of the video had me surprised.  She sang about what she would do if she were a boy.  She said that she would know how to treat a woman, and swore that she would be a better man.  In the background, as if to cement that this song was different, and wasn't another one of those, "You're a boy.  You're a cheating bastard and you don't understand how we girls feel," it broke stereotypes by showing Beyonce, playing the part of a police officer (a stereotypically male job), cheating on her boyfriend with one of her coworkers.  I thought to myself, YES!

And then it changed.  Everything switched, and the boy was shown to be the one cheating.  The lyrics changed from "If I were a boy" to "But you're just a boy."

Well, fuck.  Way to fuck me up the ass, Beyonce, trick me into thinking you'd done something different, and then throw it all down the drain in an instant by turning it into another "Boys suck" song.

For once, I'd like to see a song that switched things around.  Imagine, if you will:

She shows her man going off to work.  From the moment he steps into the car with his partner, there's chemistry between them.  Beyonce sings in the background about how she'd do it better if she were him.  To everyone, it seems normal.  It seems to be a song wishing that boys understood the plights of their female counterparts.

Then the switch hits.  Suddenly, it's the boy who's the victim.  Instead of blaming the cheating on his innate evil masculinity, you see that girls can be just as guilty.  Instead of pleading for her man to be more faithful, she's pleading for herself to follow in the footsteps of the faithful boyfriend who waited at home for her.  That, instead of her being the one to teach her man how it's done, she learns to "be a better man" because of him.

Now, before I go on, fact:  Men ARE more likely to cheat than women.  It's an evolutionary device to keep men "spreading their seed" to as many women as possible to continue the species, while women are less likely to cheat, because they have motherly instincts that make them more likely to form attachments, and seek out a guy who will care for their children.

This does not, however, mean that all guys are cheating asses, and all girls are faithful housewives. More and more, the line is being blurred between masculine and feminine. As we grow out of our primal evolutionary stages and develop as a species that forms relationships that go deeper than instinct, things change. You have women who go out and party for the sake of sex. You have men who stay at home to raise children.

So this brings up the real question: How many stereotypes are truths, and how many are merely cultural misgivings? How many of them are true for most and not all, and how many of them are beginning to lose their importance or their accuracy as time goes on?

When I first started studying gender, I set out to prove that men and women weren't different, except for a couple of body parts. I set to prove that all behavioural differences were borne from society. I held the view that gender stereotypes were nurture, rather than nature.

At that time, I identified (slightly inaccurately) as an androgyne. As I defined the word "androgyne" in this post, it means one who doesn't feel relation to one gender or the other, and rather one who lies somewhere in between. As an androgyne, gender stereotypes hold no power. You cease to be male or female.

However, one of the things that tipped me off about being a bigender (discussed in the previous article) rather than androgyne was that there were times I definitely "felt male" or "felt female". Though I tried to retain a sense of neutrality, and tried not to heed societal views of male and female, there was no way I could do it. After all, how can I "feel" male if the only difference is a penis, and a different balance of hormones?

What, essentially, makes a man, or makes a woman?

I come across this problem a lot, and it will probably be one of the largest obstacles I'll face in studying gender and sexuality. For instance, it came up when I first tried to make a GISD (Gender Identity Spectrum Diagram) for a friend of mine, and realised I didn't know how to judge how far she leaned each way, because I didn't know how to define what was masculine or feminine.

By biggest fear with this, like I had with the classifications, is to force a system that will, like is the case with our perceptions of gender now, that only works for a small percentage, but it accepted as the norm. Thus, I would rather make a simplified system based on a few common traits and that could evolve with society, than to make an overly-specific system to try and define a broad range of people.

I would thus prefer to define based on tendencies that can be backed up by science and evolution than to define based on cultural tendencies. Are there other things beside hormones and genitalia that are constant for all single-sex, cisgendered males and females? For example, are there natural body language actions that males do that females don't, perhaps BECAUSE of genitalia or hormones? Do people who cross gender borders also do these, subconsciously? Moreover, do these things actually cross over in transgendered, androgynous, bigendered, or intersex people?

The final question is this: What if there aren't any behavioural norms? What if the differences are merely physical? Then what is it that makes me bigendered, an androgynous person androgynous, a transgendered person transgendered, etc? Is there a physical difference between me and the women around me?

Any discussion here would be very much appreciated. (Also, if we discuss, would anyone mind if I collected the discussions and put them in their own blog entry?)