maia bittner

Gender Stereotypes Hurt Everyone

I’m Mad at You Because You’re an Idiot, Not Because I’m a Woman is being posted all over my Facebook newsfeed now. In it, Litsa Dremousis explains how when she became angry in response to men’s actions, the men attributed her anger as stemming from her emotional womanhood, and not due to the situation at hand. She rallies:

it’s time for more men to understand our behavior isn’t aberrant, and for more women not to feel “guilty” for not staying in the narrow range of traditionally accepted emotional responses

Though I agree with the article, I think it’s important to recognize that men are also limited in the emotions they feel they can exhibit. While women’s emotional responses, especially being sad, angry, and upset, are sometimes viewed as being caused by their gender, men live in fear of having their gender called into question if they exhibit the emotional responses that women are free to, like being loving and caring.

A thoughtful post by Clarisse Thorn on the subject references Precarious Manhood ^(PDF), a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2008. It reports on the sober state of being a man: 

Our findings suggest that real men experience their gender as a tenuous status that they may at any time lose and about which they readily experience anxiety and threat.

As a result, many people are reluctant to show their true emotions if they lie outside of the expected emotions of their gender. It becomes more important to them to focus on the stereotype by rejecting or reinforcing it. In either case, it harms the person by taking the focus away from their emotions. How sad is that, that our culture is so loathe to recognize nonconforming human emotions? Thorn writes: 

And if we can reject the Oppression Olympics for just one minute and stop thinking about who’s got it worse, it becomes clear that the advantages and drawbacks associated with being both male and female are intertwined. The two systems reinforce, and cannot function without, each other.