In the article “Learning to Be Gendered”, the author thinks that gender norms exist in the early stage of a human being’s life, which means when he or she is a baby, by the adults who interact with that baby. Babies at that point do not have any self-awareness because they have not developed a brain that can distinguish boys and girls. However, adults do have that brain, and they help babies to develop the same way of thinking in many different ways, such as what the author has mentioned in the article, buying different presents for girls and boys, and even earlier, when parents try to name their child, they distinguish the difference between boys and girls. They might not even realize that when they do that, baby learn from their parents. Based on the article, girls and boys play together before the age of three, after three, they play different games and different toys, because their parents and other adults have affected their brains. That is the author’s idea why gender norms exist, and I can pretty much agree with that. Parents are the best teachers of their babies, babies got the most effect from their parents. Babies are treated differently for their actions based on their genders. Generally, we tend to think boys would be more active when they are still babies, we expect girls to be smaller in size that would be a lot quiet. In terms of purposes, gender norms do have a lot negative effects in our society, they make us value differently based gender, they even make us judge differently even with the same action. We are divided by gender when we look for a job. But on the other hand, such purposes have existed long before we are born, in ancient times, males went out to hunt(work), and females stayed at home taking care of babies, even today, girls are physically less active than boys mostly. Therefore, it is really hard to determine whether is it good to have such purposes based on gender norms. But personally I do believe one thing, which is that we should not value differently based on gender norms.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
We are born to be gendered
In the article “Learning to Be Gendered”, the author thinks that gender norms exist in the early stage of a human being’s life, which means when he or she is a baby, by the adults who interact with that baby. Babies at that point do not have any self-awareness because they have not developed a brain that can distinguish boys and girls. However, adults do have that brain, and they help babies to develop the same way of thinking in many different ways, such as what the author has mentioned in the article, buying different presents for girls and boys, and even earlier, when parents try to name their child, they distinguish the difference between boys and girls. They might not even realize that when they do that, baby learn from their parents. Based on the article, girls and boys play together before the age of three, after three, they play different games and different toys, because their parents and other adults have affected their brains. That is the author’s idea why gender norms exist, and I can pretty much agree with that. Parents are the best teachers of their babies, babies got the most effect from their parents. Babies are treated differently for their actions based on their genders. Generally, we tend to think boys would be more active when they are still babies, we expect girls to be smaller in size that would be a lot quiet. In terms of purposes, gender norms do have a lot negative effects in our society, they make us value differently based gender, they even make us judge differently even with the same action. We are divided by gender when we look for a job. But on the other hand, such purposes have existed long before we are born, in ancient times, males went out to hunt(work), and females stayed at home taking care of babies, even today, girls are physically less active than boys mostly. Therefore, it is really hard to determine whether is it good to have such purposes based on gender norms. But personally I do believe one thing, which is that we should not value differently based on gender norms.
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I agree with what you had to say on not valuing others based on gender norms and how parents teach babies, but sometimes it is okay. Dressing your child up in a specific color as a child is okay mainly because we as a society have been doing this for a while, in fact on page 738: “In America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000) reports, blue was favored for girls and bright pink for boys.” That brief statement shows that placing a gender with a color is okay when they are young. The colors of our generation “pink and blue” will eventually change again to perhaps yellow and green or purple and red. Who knows? The colored clothing has nothing to do with a child’s personality or mind; it is just a symbol saying you are a baby boy or girl. As far as names go I have had a head football coach whose name was Stacey and believe me you did not want to mess with him. Names don’t matter as much as we may believe in fact my friends call me “Matty” and I don’t mind even when people say it sounds like a girls name, it is actually my twitter name. Gender norms are slowly dying off as we continue to grow as a people, because we as a whole don’t really pay much attention to what older people believe when were teens or emerging adults. Although we learn much about life from watching our parents we don’t really know who we really are until they let us fly.
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