Talk:Gender role/Archive 1

(Moved from Talk:Gender Role GGano 15:43, 4 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Flex Roles?

"... all gender roles became much more flexible"

I'm not sure this is true. Most of my female friends still feel they *have* to wear makeup. -- Tarquin 10:59 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)

Well they're certainly more flexible than they were, but obviously they're still a lot less flexible than they could be. Perhaps "much" is going too far?

I wonder. Maybe we perceive flexibility, but when it's tested we find there isn't much. Maybe it's just an impression, but most people who don't conform to their expected gender role don't just slightly deviate, they break right out. -- Tarquin 14:40 Jan 17, 2003 (UTC)

Do not confuse GR and GI

This page is seriously flawed, as it confuses gender role and gender identity. These are two different things. You can see this in Google's glossary matches: http://labs.google.com/glossary?q=gender+role and http://labs.google.com/glossary?q=gender+identity. (This comes from the discussion at Talk:Gender.) --GGano I fixed this Feb 21 2003. --GGano

Not really gender roles

I removed the following, which were listed as examples of gender roles, but really aren't:

• A "transsexual", who is a "man trapped in a woman's body" or a "woman trapped in a man's body" .
• A "gay man", who is homosexual. According to stereotypes, he has a good dress sense.

Transsexual is a gender identity issue, not a gender role issue. Homosexuality isn't really either.

I also removed several things from the See Also list. Hate crime, Patriarchy, and Psychology are only tangentially related. "Role Homogeneity" sounds like it would be relevant, but if you look at its page, it's not. I removed Transgender because it's already more-or-less covered by the Gender Identity link.

--GGano

There is an argument that sexuality is part of gender roles - see heteronormativity, for example. That said, I think you were probably right to remove that stuff. In the links, I think transgender and patriarchy should be kept, and probably psychology too. I'll edit appropriately... Martin

Strange Syntaxificationalism

The article looks OK but I have to comment one specific paragraph:

"Both since the center the 19. Century arising women's movement and political changes like the industrialization and in particular the world wars, which required it that women left the "traditional" place, led to strong changes of the possibilities within the sex roles; the female sex role was substantially more strongly liberalisiert than the male , so that today the range of the possibilities for women is substantially larger than for men."

"the range of the possibilities for women is substantially larger than for men" is a very striking generaliaztion, does it means that in all societies in the world there are more possibilities for woman. Any research supporting this?

"Also the scientific bases of the distribution of roles were ever more frequently disproved. And also the premise that it gives at all exactly two strictly from each other separate sexes, comes increasingly into the wanken, here is above all the transgender movement and the increasing perception from intersexuality to to be called. "

This is unintelligble for me, I suspect that again logical fallacies are involoved and some serious citing for related research is needed.

I will remove this whole paragraph unless a good explanation is given of what this paragraph about, and what relevant factual information it contains, cause I don't see any. -- Rotem Dan 19:55 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

According to user:Vkem, it is (new text from German wikipedia). Looks like machine translation - delete it. Martin 20:12 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Agree 100%! Paige 20:44 4 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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This text was added with the comment that it was intended to be "slightly more readable:"

• "Women's movement in 19. century and political changes like industrialization and in particular, the world wars, required that women left the "traditional place" in home. It led to strong changes of the possibilities within the sex roles; the female sex role was now substantially strongly liberal than male. That causes that today the range of possibilities and roles for women is comparable larger than for men."

I'm sorry to say that it was no more readable than the last version and is not NPOV, unless some one can provide factual evidence to prove any of this. (Please see masculism.) Thanks, Paige 19:06 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

This point of view seems to be true in North-Europe countries like Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway.

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What does "Women as on a hunter instructed breedingservicer inside" mean? What about "kaempferisch" and "compensatorily"? I assume these are translations that haven't been proofread.JPB

Metrosexual comment

Today metrosexualism is a rising direction among men, mostly because of many metrosexual celebrities.

Well, I'm not sure of the accuracy of this statement (celebrity-driven? I thought it was largely manufacturer-driven). In any case it would need to be rewritten to use more common and less ambiguous words - perhaps talking about increased sales of male moisteuriser. Martin 08:52 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Should GR and GI be merged?

Would a merge to gender role and identity be a good thing? When disambiguating gender I often have difficulty deciding whether to link here or to gender identity. Martin 12:00, 19 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I think this could be a good thing, but would have to be handled carefully. I think gender role and gender identity often do, and with good reason, overlap. But these terms are often used in different contexts by different people, and I don't think the terms can be used interchangably without misconstruing the point being made by the people who use these terms. In my experience, gender role is most often used by social scientists describing "normative" or "ideal" positions within a given society. I think "gender identity" is most often used by people who either do not identify with these socially normative or ideal roles -- or who are critical of the very idea of normative or ideal roles, and often in a political context (and, of course, used by social scientists who want to study such people, their political or social movements, and their critiques of their own society). I am sure there are others out there who could say more, and more nuanced things, about the sometimes subtle differences between these terms, or at least between the ways they have been used. Yes, I think a good article could include both, but only if it also gives a good account of these differences. Slrubenstein

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Slrubenstein said: "In my experience, gender role is most often used by social scientists describing "normative" or "ideal" positions within a given society." What do you mean by "position within society"?

Slrubenstein also said: "I think "gender identity" is most often used by people who either do not identify with these socially normative or ideal roles -- or who are critical of the very idea of normative or ideal roles, and often in a political context (and, of course, used by social scientists who want to study such people, their political or social movements, and their critiques of their own society)." By whom a term is used does not determine its meaning. The term started with a fairly clear meaning in the works of John Money, who invented the term to deal with situations where, e.g., an XY person has a feminized body and his XY status is not discovered until after he has learned all of the ways of doing things that are associated with XX individuals. His sex is male, but his gender is female. If someone is aware that despite their external male genitalia they think and feel like a woman, that may be due to their having XX chromosomal sex and perhaps a brain that was grown under female specifications (so to speak). Such a person will challenge his male gender before he knows enough about himself to challenge his alleged status as a member of the male sex. Naturally such a person would not easily acquiesce to being forced to live the life of a male human.